US Presidency
1984

There are tasks that government legitimately should enforce and tasks that government performs well, and you've named some of them. Crime has come down the last 2 years, for the first time in many, many decades that it has come down, or since we've kept records, 2 consecutive years, and last year it came down the biggest drop in crime that we've had. I think that we've had something to do with that, just as we have with the drug problem nationwide. The environment? Yes, I feel as strongly as anyone about the preservation of the environment. When we took office, we found that the national parks were so dirty and contained so many hazards, lack of safety features, that we stopped buying additional park land until we had rectified this with what was to be a 5-year program, but it's just about finished already, a billion dollars. And now we're going back to budgeting for additional lands for our parks. We have added millions of acres to the wilderness lands, to the game refuges.