Muscatine, Iowa Remarks on Arrival at the City.

Don't we live in a great country? [Applause] Good music, beautiful rivers, lovely women, rich land, democracy, freedom, unity—we've got a lot to be thankful for.

This last 3 or 4 days has been as nice as anything we've ever done in our lives, because we have seen some of the most beautiful country in the world, we've met a lot of wonderful people, both on the river in boats and on the shore, who've come out to see us, and we are deeply grateful for the hospitality and the friendship and the welcome that the people in the Midwest have given us. We thank you, very, very much.

Thank you. Is anybody here from Muscatine? [Applause]

I'd like to say just a couple of things to you—and we don't have much time to stay, but Rosalynn is going to go down one side and I'll go down the other, and Amy in the middle, and we'll kind of shake hands with as many folks as we can reach after I say a few words.

Don't leave. Don't leave. We're not going to go far down the fence. So don't leave. You have to hear a speech first. [Laughter]

Tomorrow we're going to have, in Burlington, Iowa, a townhall meeting, and there will be several hundred people there who will ask me questions, I guess for about an hour, and I imagine it'll be broadcast and telecast so you can watch and hear it. And we'll be talking about some very serious questions and issues that affect a President of a great nation.

We'll be talking about agriculture and how farmers can be made more productive, how farm income can go up, how exports of farm products can reach an all-time high year after year after year-how the quality of our land has given us a great strategic advantage to be used for peaceful influence around the world. We'll be talking about adequate farm prices, and we'll be talking about controlling inflation, and we'll also be talking about peace.

I'm very grateful that since I've been in office not a single young American has had to endanger his or her lives in any sort of combat overseas. And I want to keep it that way.

And we'll also be talking about the control of nuclear weapons. I'm determined that as long as I'm in the White House we'll do everything we possibly can to control and eventually to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. That's my ultimate goal.

As you know, we now have before the U.S. Senate the SALT II treaty, which has been negotiated over 6 years under three different Presidents to put new and expanded controls over nuclear weapons. That's one of the important issues that the Senate must address this year. And I need your influence in the Congress to make sure we take this major stride forward toward peace, toward enhancing our own Nation's security, and toward controlling nuclear weapons.

The other issue is equally as important for us economically, and that is the handling of another threat to our Nation's security—that is energy. We have become too dependent on the importing of oil from foreign countries. We now import about one-half all the oil we use. We not only import enormous quantities of oil, but we import inflation and we import unemployment.

We've made some progress the last 2¼ years, but we still have a long way to go.

What I've asked the Congress to do-and here, again, I need your help—is to pass a windfall profits tax on the oil companies, to give us the financial resources to conserve energy, to have more efficient vehicles, to help people weatherize their homes, to expand our production of oil, gas, coal, geothermal supplies, solar energy which is really a great need for our country and. of course, in Illinois. and in Iowa we want to produce gasohol as well.

We need a better transportation system. We need to help the low- and middle-income families to pay for the increasing cost of energy put on us by the OPEC oil nations in the Mideast. None of this will be possible unless we have the windfall profits tax passed by the Congress this year.

I hope you'll help me with this issue before Congress.

The other thing that we can do, of course, in addition to producing more energy in our own country, is to save energy, to eliminate waste, to conserve every way we can. This cannot be done by the government, by the Federal, State, or local governments. It can only be done when millions of Americans individually resolve that you will help to save energy.

There are many dozens of ways that you can do it—in your transportation, on your jobs, in your homes, in your living habits. Figure out every way that you use energy of any kind and see if you can't save energy in the future.

So, saving energy and producing more energy in our own Nation will help to eliminate this threat to our own Nation's security, because we are too dependent on foreign oil.

The last thing I want to say is don't ever forget, any of you, that we do live in a country where we've been blessed by God with almost every possible human need and every human advantage. We do have rich land. We do have freedom. We have a good free enterprise system. We've got a democracy. We can be individuals. We can argue and debate. We can make our own voices heard. We can be different if we choose. But when a threat comes, Americans have always united.

Lately, we have not been united. We've not had as much confidence as we ought to in the strength of our country. We've got the strongest nation on Earth economically, politically, and militarily. And I want to be sure that if you will cooperate with me in solving these problems of peace and energy, then we will make the greatest nation on Earth, the United States of America, even greater in the future.

Will you help me with that? [Applause] Thank you very much.

And now we'll come down and shake hands as long as we can. Thank you very much.