(APPLAUSE)
And Lynne has known me since I was 14, but she wouldn't go out with me until I was 17 years old.
(LAUGHTER)
But I often tell people that we have a marriage that was the direct result of Dwight Eisenhower's election victory in 1952. In 1952, I living in Lincoln, Nebraska with my folks -- just a youngster. Dad worked for the Soil Conservation Service. Eisenhower got elected, he came in and reorganized the Agriculture Department, Dad got transferred to Casper, Wyoming. And that's where I met Lynne, and we grew up together, and went to high school together, and just last Sunday -- a week ago Sunday, celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary.
(APPLAUSE)
I explained to a group the other night that if it hadn't been for Dwight Eisenhower's tremendous victory in 1952, Lynne would have married somebody else. She said, right, and now he'd be Vice President of the United States.
(Laughter and applause.)
They always laugh.
(LAUGHTER)
They know it's true.
But we're delighted to be here this morning, to be back in Iowa. We were out in Clear Lake yesterday. Before that, we were up in Minnesota yesterday morning at the Minnesota State Fair. Later on today, we'll be in New Hampshire. We've now got about eight weeks -- I guess, eight weeks from today will be the election where we're going to make a very, very important decision for the nation, for the future of our country, and, indeed, for the kind of world that our children and grandchildren are going to inherit.
And as long as I've been involved in politics, and this was my eighth Republican Convention I attended this year. But I don't think -- I can't recall a time when I ever felt that the decisions we're going are as momentous as they are this time around, that there are periods in our history when things go along swimmingly. Our basic policies are in place, and elections basically are sort of an affirmation of continuity in a sense. And there are other times when circumstances have changed enough in the world that we really need to sit down and make some fundamental decisions about the direction the country is headed in, where we're faced with fundamental choices. And I think this is one of those latter kinds of periods.
What I'd like to do this morning is talk about a couple of basic areas, policy areas that I think are important. And they're reflected by the changes that we've all seen over the last few years, and then throw it open to questions so we have an opportunity to respond to your concerns and hear from you what you'd like to talk about, try to answer as many of your questions as we can during the time allotted.
It's hard -- when I think back to last four years, I signed on with the President just about four years ago at our Republican Convention in Philadelphia. He asked me to be his running mate about 10 days before the convention. And then we announced it then, so that was I guess, mid August of last year.
There wasn't any way then we could have anticipated what was about to happen, of course, on 9/11. And 9/11, in effect, has changed a lot of what we do as a nation, both in terms of how we think about defending ourselves, what the threat is, and how we deal with national security issues, but it has had a big impact here domestically, as well, too, because I think it has been at the heart of what we've had to deal with economically.
When the President and I took the oath of office, we were sliding into recession. The stock market had peaked in March of 2000, before we got there. And by the beginning of January of 2001, we were into a recession. And of course, a few months later then we got hit with 9/11, and that was a major additional blow to the economy. We lost a million jobs within a few weeks after the 9/11 attack because of the damage that that did to our tourism and travel industry, and airline industry and so forth.
So we've have to deal with that set of domestic circumstances at the same time that we've been forced to respond from a national security standpoint to the military requirements. There are operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, what we've had to do to harden the target here at home, money we've had to spend on homeland security. It's been an interesting period of problems that we did not anticipate -- nobody could have anticipated -- when we were sworn in.
But on the economic front, I think what has been absolutely crucial was the fundamental decision that the President made, and that was the call that Lynne touched upon that he made with respect that the key to our economic recovery was allowing the American taxpayers to keep more of their own money, rather than siphoning it off to Washington.
(APPLAUSE)
The tax cuts that were implemented in 2001, 2002, 2003 have been absolutely vital in terms of what we did with respect to income taxes, in particular. Everybody in America who pays income taxes got some relief on the income tax front. We cut rates across the board. We created the new 10 percent brackets that helped folks at the lower end of the spectrum. We doubled the child credit which had a huge impact on families. We reduced the marriage penalty. We quadrupled the amount that a small business could expense in terms of investing in new equipment, or trucks to be able to expand their business, a whole series of steps that were embodied in those tax changes that we put on the books that have been vital, we believe, in terms of getting the economy up and running again.
We've added over the course of the last year now about 1.7 million new jobs. We've still got a long way to go out there, but our unemployment rate now is down to 5.4 percent nationally. It's about 4.4 percent here in Iowa. We've still got areas of softness out there in the economy. We recognize that. We're committed to the proposition that we want to make certain that everybody in America who wants to work can find a job, and that's at the heart of the overall thrust of our policies.
But having taken those steps that we believe got the economy back on the right track and have seen us through the recession, we've begun to see the resumption now of economic growth in fairly significant ways. And it's beginning to help reduce the deficit. But the keys to reducing the deficit really is twofold -- on the one hand, spending restraint, which we need to pursue with respect to the federal budget; but also stimulating enough economic growth so that we generate enough revenue so we begin to close the deficit. Some may have noticed just within the last day here, the Congressional Budget Office has now announced new estimates for the federal deficit going forward. And they have reduced their estimate for the deficit by -- I believe about $56 billion for the year we're now in. That's a direct result of economic growth that came about as a result of the tax changes that the President put through, and the Congress supported.
I might add Chuck Grassley had a great deal to do with that in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. He's been our key ally on Capitol Hill in terms of getting those positions, those policies in place. And he deserves a lot of credit for what we did in the Congress.
(APPLAUSE)
Going forward now, if we're going to achieve the full potential of the American economy, we've got to make certain that the United States is the best place in the world to do business, because after all, that's what it is all about --whether you're in agriculture, or manufacturing, or business.
(Applause)
And there shouldn't be a divide here between business and labor. This is not a zero-sum game. We all benefit. The entrepreneur, as well as the worker; the small businessman and the people he hires all benefit when our economy prospers, and when the system works the way it's supposed to work, to its maximum potential.
And the agenda for the future very much involves a series of policies that we need to aggressively address if we're going to be successful, and that the President talked about the other night at the convention in New York. It includes taking those tax changes that we made and making them permanent. Because they aren't permanent now. The way the law works, we need to go back and do that.
