The Joint Chiefs recently told the President and the Congress that our military readiness is deterioriating, even as we commit our troops to more places around the globe. We must ensure that our men and women in uniform, who voluntarily put themselves in harm's way, have all the protection from undue risk that we can provide for them. As the last defender of freedom in an increasingly unstable world, the United States military must be strong and well prepared. This budget agreement also sets a new precedent in education policy. We have laid the groundwork this year to continue moving power out of the hands of Washington bureaucrats and into the hands of parents and teachers.
Local control is crucial to ensuring that children everywhere have the best public schools possible.
Teachers, principals and local school boards know better than Washington how to meet the students' needs. In 1995, when we set out to balance the budget, we predicted that eliminating the deficit would bring down interest rates by 2 percentage points. We now have lower interest rates than we've seen in years. Millions of families have refinanced mortgages or bought first homes, and have money left over to save for their future. Our fiscal restraint, and the economic stability it created, has insulated our economy from the uncertainty sweeping the world.