And growth, Mr. Chairman, is what America is all about. America is an idea based on growth, where successive generations have invested their energy and human capital, no less than their savings, in hopes of material and social progress. And through economic growth, America has achieved a high degree of fairness for individuals. Indeed, any lack of growth by specific groups within our American society is taken as an immediate signal of a lack of fairness. Nations have burned their ideological textbooks and are studying American institutions, beginning with the economic institution that is the individual.
Growth is achieved through investment of human and fiscal capital in productive enterprise.
Such investment will continue only if the government forebears confiscating the savings of individuals and businesses in order to pay the compounding liabilities of unreformed entitlement programs. Entitlement programs threaten our economic well-being collectively, and threaten the fairness to all of us as individuals. The significant attention by the NAM to the critical need to reform our entitlement programs indicates the relative importance we accord the issue. Even more than issues affecting trade, regulatory reform or tax policy, the NAM has identified reform of the entitlement programs as the issue most important to economic growth for American business and economic independence for individuals. In recent weeks, Congress and the White House have shown increased awareness of the need to address Medicare more broadly.