But I think even more importantly, is the thrust of our campaign. Which is contained in the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. Itıs right here in the Tenth Amendment, the Constitution. Itıs not something I dreamed up, or the national committee dreamed u p. It's been around over two hundred years. Not a radical idea. Our founding fathers are fairly non-partisan. What did they have to say? They said the power is not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to they states , or reserved to the states, respectively or to the people. That means that a long time ago, somebody was wise enough to understand, there ought to be something in there, some declar-declaratory statement that said the government, the central government should never become too big and too powerful. And we've seen it happen. And the government does a lot of good things, don't misunderstand me. But for the last twenty to thirty years you could see the shift. More and more power going to the federal gov ernment. So what do you want to do about it, talk about it? No. We're going to act. We're going to act with Governor Merrill. We're going to send welfare back to New Hampshire. We're going to let Governor Merrill and the legislator decide the param eters of welfare. And you know what that hap--what, what that saves over s-fifty states in the next seven years? Sixty billion dollars and the people who need welfare are going to be a lot better off. Nobody's going to go without food or medical treatm ent as long as Governor Merrill, or any Governor of New Hampshire is around. Send it back to the states. That's what the Constitution said and the same with Medicaid. Medicaid's a very important program to a lot of people and we want to preserve it, we want to strengthen it. We also want to send it back to the states. Power back to the people, back to the states. And certainly in New Hampshire you know who your state legislator is. You can find your state legislator. You know where they shop, wher e they take their cleaning. You're a lot closer, get government closer to the people as you do in New Hampshire. And we can save eighty-five billion dollars on Medicaid. That's two programs where you save about a hundred and fifty billion dollars. An d the late Senator Dirksen used to say, you know, a billion here and a billion there, soon adds up to real money (laughter). Well this is real money and it's your money and we can save that real money and send it back to the tax payers (applause).
Now President Clinton said if we did that with Medicaid there'd be a race to the bottom in all these states, I don't think so. We have outstanding governors. Some Republicans, and some are Democrats. And we have outstanding state legislators, and some are Republicans and some are Democrats. But they all understand how important these programs are. And I think that local solutions for local problems are much, much better than federal solutions for local problems. And first thing we did this year was to say in Senate Bill #1, which was passed and signed by the President, that you can't send the states a mandate. You can't tell Governor Merrill, you go to spend a hundred million dollars and not send the money and make him go out and raise the taxes. Or you can't tell the mayor you've got to spend X dollars, make you go out and raise the taxes. We think that's a big step in the right direction.