The business of our nation goes forward. These United States are 【A1】________with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst【A2】________inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling 【A3】________and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the 【A4】________of millions of our people.

Idle industries have cast workers 【A5】________unemployment, causing human misery and personal indignity. Those who do work are denied a 【A6】________return for their labor by a tax system 【A7】________penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity.

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept 【A8】________with public spending. For decades, we have 【A9】________deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the 【A10】________convenience of the present. To【A11】________this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a 【A12】________period of time. Why,then, should we think that collectively, as a 【A13】________, we are not bound by that same limitation?

We must act 【A14】________in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding—we are going to【A15】________to act, beginning today.

The economic ills we suffer have come upon us 【A16】________several decades. They will not go away in days,【A17】________, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we, 【A18】________Americans, have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do 【A19】________needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.

In this present crisis, government is not the 【A20】________to our problem.

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