Reagan Hails `Great American Comeback'

WASHINGTON--President Reagan, in his State of the Union address last night, said the family and the community were responsible for what he called a "Great American Comeback."

"Despite the pressures of the our modern world, family and community remain the moral core of our society, guardians of our values and hopes for the future," Reagan said before the joint session of Congress. "Family and community are the costars of this great American comeback."

Reporting the state of the union "stronger than a year ago and growing stronger each day," Reagan reminded the Congress and a national television audience, "It wasn't long ago that we looked out on a different land: locked factory gates and long gasoline lines, intolerable prices and interest rates turning the greatest country on Earth into a land of broken dreams."

"The American people brought us back," Reagan said, "with quiet courage and common sense, with undying faith that in this nation under God the future will be ours, for the future belongs to the free."

In the address, which was delayed a week by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Reagan told Congress that "private values must always be at the heart of public policies."

Reagan said he wanted to "redefine government's role: not to control, not to command, not to contain us; but to help in times of need; above all, to create a ladder of opportunity to full employment so all Americans can climb toward economic power and justice on their own."

Replying to repeated calls by some in Congress to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit, Reagan said, "I'm sorry, they're asking the wrong people to tighten their belts. It's time we reduced the federal budget and left the family budget alone."

The President outlined his agenda for the coming year along lines designed to strengthen family and community bonds.

"After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful," Reagan said. "But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss: the sinful waste of human spirit and potential."

Reagan set no specific guidelines for reform other than to acknowledge government's responsibility to "provide shelter and nourishment for those who cannot provide for themselves." He also ordered his Domestic Policy Council to report by Dec. 1 with "a strategy for immediate action to meet the financial, educational, social and safety concerns of poor families."

But he said, "We must revise or replace programs enacted in the name of compassion that degrade the moral worth of work, encourage family breakups and drive communities into a bleak and heartless dependency."

A longtime opponent of comprehensive national health insurance, Reagan urged creation of a new program to protect people who are vulnerable to being wiped out financially by the costs of serious illness.

He ordered Secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Otis Bowen to report by year's end with recommendations on how the public and private sectors can work together to overcome the problems of affordable insurance for those whose life savings would otherwise be threatened when catastrophic illness strikes."

In a third initiative, Reagan directed Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III to consider calling a world monetary conference to discuss whether to alter the free-market system of setting currency values.