Governor Eric Greitens 2018 State of the State

Thank you, Lieutenant Governor Parson; Speaker Richardson and the members of the Missouri House; President Pro Tem Richard and members of the Missouri Senate; Chief Justice Fischer and judges of the Supreme Court; State officials; Members of the Cabinet; Our First Lady, and my wife, Sheena Greitens.

We have many honored guests here tonight. One who is particularly special to me is my kindergarten teacher, Anne Richardson, who is here.

I was in Mrs. Richardson’s Kindergarten class at McKelvey Elementary, and it was at McKelvey Elementary that I first heard the story of a boy from the town of Diamond, Missouri.

He was born over a century ago, and he was born a slave. When he was a baby, he and his mother were kidnapped. He never saw his mother again, but by God’s grace, he found a loving home, and a new family that raised him as their own.

Now, at the time, no school in town would admit a black student, so his parents taught him how to read and to write. When he was older, they sent him to Neosho, about 10 miles down the road, where there was a school that opened its doors to him. He worked hard, and he did well. So well, in fact, that he was admitted to an agricultural college.

This was a tough time for American farmers. Their land was losing its richness, and no one could figure out a fix. The young man from Diamond invented new ways to grow crops. He traveled the country fixing farms, sometimes one-by-one, helping rural communities grow strong and feed more people. By some reports, he is the man who rescued American agriculture.

When George Washington Carver was born, he was considered, by many, to be property on a plantation. He became, an American hero, a friend of Presidents, a counselor to everyone from the Secretary of Agriculture to Mahatma Gandhi. His face was on postage stamps, and his name on a Navy submarine. He was, and he remains, one of us: a Missourian. His story is our story.

George Washington Carver passed away 75 years ago this month. As we begin our work, in this time and this place, we should celebrate his life. We should remember where he started and how far he went. We Missourians know that the contributions that have counted most have often come from people who were, at one time, counted out.

I was sent here, and I believe that many of you were sent here, not to work for the connected or the comfortable, but for those who have felt counted out and forgotten. They are strong and proud, and while they may not have pull or power or privilege, they do have enormous potential. To those Missourians, I have a simple message: We have been and we will fight for you every single day.

We promised we’d fight for your jobs, and we are. The most important thing we can do for Missouri families is to make it easier for those without jobs to find them and make sure that those who have jobs keep them. Over the past year, we have devoted the energy and attention of our office to putting Missourians back to work.

Here are the results: Today, Missouri has the lowest unemployment rate it’s had in 17 years. Since last March, we have outpaced the nation in job growth, and in the past year, Missouri moved up nine spots in the rankings of the best states in the country to do business. There are more manufacturing jobs in our state than there were a year ago. We’re putting a steel mill in Sedalia, Missouri, and we are competing for more steel mills and other plants around the state.

We are bringing good quality jobs back to Missouri. Now, we haven’t fixed in one year what was broken over the course of many decades, and many Missourians still struggle. We have a lot of work left to do, but tonight, we can say: there are more jobs in Missouri than ever before, people are going back to work, and we are moving Missouri in a new and better direction.

Some of the people who need us most, who are counting on us, are the children in the Missouri foster care system, all 13,000 of them. We live in a compassionate state: there are thousands of loving families in Missouri who have opened their homes and their hearts to foster children. In fact, some foster and adoptive families are with us in the balconies this evening. Please join me in recognizing them.

A year ago, if a child in foster care needed a copy of their own birth certificate to apply for a driver’s license or to get a job, they had to pay for it out of their own pocket. Today, we can proudly say they can get that birth certificate without having to give the government their money.

A year ago, a child entering our foster system may not have known their rights. This is an issue that many of you have cared about for a long time and worked on for a long time. And I was proud to join with you to sign into law a “Foster Care Bill of Rights.”

Last month, Missouri officially joined the National Electronic Interstate Compact Enterprise to make adoption easier across state lines. I want to give a special thank you for her hard work on this issue to the First Lady of the State of Missouri, my wife, Sheena Greitens.

Our team has been working with members of this body on twenty legislative initiatives to help children in need. Some of these initiatives will help reform and improve Missouri’s adoption system, so we can get children into safe, stable, and loving homes faster. Another would help foster children get access to bank accounts, so they can save their money. Together, these twenty legislative initiatives will make a meaningful difference in the lives of the children of the state of Missouri.

As many of you know, before I joined the military, I worked with children in some of the world’s most difficult places. I worked with children who’d lost their homes. Kids who had lost limbs to landmines. Children who’d lost their parents to violence. That work taught me that the damage done to children, too often, leads people to look at them as only damaged children. People see their problems and pain, but they miss their courage. They see their scars. They don’t see their strength.

Every child in the Missouri foster care system has seen more than their fair share of hardship. We need to see in them their God-given potential, and we need to do everything in our power to help them to fulfill it.

Tonight, I want to ask the members of this body to do something straightforward: Put politics on hold. Set any differences you may have with one another, or with me, to the side. These are children. These are kids. There are 13,000 of them. We must love them and care for them as if they were our own, because, in law and spirit, they are. Tonight, let’s join together, and pledge to get this work done for the kids who need us most.

One of the most important things we can do for those kids, and for their families, and for families throughout Missouri, is to continue to bring more good jobs back to our state.

For Missouri to prosper, we need to get government off our backs. When we came into office, we looked at the burden of regulations and red tape on our farms, ranches, businesses, homes, neighborhoods, and communities. We had almost 7,000 regulations and 112,000 regulatory requirements on the books, adding up to more than seven million words in total. Here’s how bad things got in Missouri: Since 2002, regulatory requirements in our state grew at a faster—yes, a faster—rate than the regulations imposed on us by bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

In Missouri, there was a regulation on the books that forced some small businesses to install and pay for a land line phone, even if they didn’t want it and didn’t use it. If you haul milk for a living, the government requires you to do a training. Now, it’s a training that could be done online, on your own time, but because of outdated regulations, you’ve got to go to a meeting set up by the government to do it.

Regulations like these that waste money, waste time, are outdated and irrelevant had been building up for too long, like plaque in the arteries of Missouri’s economy. These regulations cost Missourians money. They raise the prices of the things we buy. They slow down our mills, our farms, our factories, our shops. And they make government more bloated and more burdensome.

Because of this, we launched the most aggressive, most thorough, most ambitious effort to roll back unnecessary regulations in the United States. By taking a strong, thoughtful, conservative approach to government, we can tell you tonight that we are taking nearly one out of every three regulatory requirements in the state of Missouri—that’s 33,000 regulatory requirements—off the books for good.

Missouri has become a leader. In fact, other states have modeled their regulatory reforms on what we are doing to increase liberty and prosperity in the state of Missouri. My team and I will continue to eliminate regulations that are unproductive and unnecessary, and, when we need legislation to roll back regulations, we will work with you.

But there is more we need to do to grow jobs in our state. Some of these we’ve talked about before: Making sure that we have the right laws on the books to be fair to family businesses, and making strategic investments in education, infrastructure, and workforce development. Yet one of the best investments we can make in Missouri, is also one of the most straightforward: cut taxes and put money back into the pockets of the people of Missouri.

Last year, we faced a choice: we could cut spending or raise taxes. I’m proud to say that we cut spending, and we did not raise taxes on the citizens of Missouri a single nickel.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK