This balanced budget includes the largest anti-drug effort ever—­to stop drugs at their source; punish those who push them; and teach our young people that drugs are wrong, drugs are illegal, and drugs will kill them.  I hope you will support it.

Our growing economy has helped to revive poor urban and rural neighborhoods, but we must do more to empower them to create the conditions in which all families can flourish and to create jobs through investment by business and loans by banks.

We should double the number of empowerment zones.  They’ve already brought so much hope to communities like Detroit, where the unemployment rate has been cut in half in four years.  We should restore contaminated urban land and buildings to constructive use.  We should expand the network of community development banks.

And together, we must pledge tonight that we will use this empowerment approach, including private sector tax incentives, to renew our capital city so that Washington is a great place to work and live—­and once again the proud face America shows the world!

We must protect our environment in every community.  In the last four years, we cleaned up 250 toxic waste sites, as many as in the previous 12.  Now we should clean up 500 more so that our children grow up next to parks, not poison.  I urge to pass my proposal to make big polluters live by a simple rule:  If you pollute our environment, you should pay to clean it up.

In the last four years, we strengthened our nation’s safe food and clean drinking water laws; we protected some of America’s rarest, most beautiful land in Utah’s Red Rocks region; created three new national parks in the California desert; and began to restore the Florida Everglades.

Now we must be as vigilant with our rivers as we are with our lands.  Tonight I announce that this year I will designate 10 American Heritage Rivers to help communities alongside them revitalize their waterfronts and clean up pollution in the rivers, proving once again that we can grow the economy as we protect the environment.

We must also protect our global environment, working to ban the worst toxic chemicals and to reduce the greenhouse gases that challenge our health even as they change our climate.

Now, we all know that in all of our communities some of our children simply don’t have what they need to grow and learn in their own homes or schools or neighborhoods.  And that means the rest of us must do more, for they are our children, too.  That’s why President Bush, General Colin Powell, former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros will join the vice president and me to lead the President’s Summit of Service in Philadelphia in April.

Our national service program, AmeriCorps, has already helped 70,000 young people to work their way through college as they serve America.  Now we intend to mobilize millions of Americans to serve in thousands of ways.  Citizen service is an American responsibility which all Americans should embrace.  And I ask your support for that endeavor.