Two hundred and eleven years after the ratification of the Constitution, the government is still nothing more and nothing less than all of us. And the evidence of what we can accomplish collectively and only collectively is all around us. The most obvious example today is this school itself, and the state university systems that were created by the federal government to finance and bolster schools like this one. At the national level, the most obvious examples are Social Security and Medicare programs that have practically wiped out poverty among elderly Americans and, programs that, if we do our job in Washington, will be available to help the Class of 2000 as well. And let me point out that the important thing to understand about Social Security and Medicare in this context is that they are programs in which society as a whole works together.
Current workers fund current retirees.
People get back more money from the system than they pay in. The less wealthy get more help relative to the payments they've made than do the wealthy. These are programs that work only if we work together. And they are programs that, while very difficult to pass initially, would be even more difficult to create today precisely because our ability to have a thorough, civil, public conversation has been compromised. New information technology, which will probably be the defining feature of the 21st Century, may make that problem either better or worse.