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The president in July 2011 expressed openness to entitlement reforms such as adjusting the measure of inflation used to determine payouts and even reducing benefits for wealthier seniors. But he stressed that any reforms should not affect existing retirees and that the program should remain in place for future generations.
The White House has also made clear that Obama opposes significant reductions in benefits, as well as any efforts to privatize the program, saying on the White House Web site that he “rejects the notion that the future of hard-working Americans should be left to the fluctuations of financial markets.”
Obama has continuously pushed for legislation that would require employers to offer automatic individual retirement accounts if they do not provide other retirement plans. He promised to enact such legislation during the 2008 election, but it has failed to materialize during his presidency.
The president has also proposed allowing workers to save a portion or all of their tax refunds for retirement and convert unused vacation time into such savings.
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Obama on Social SecurityObama's Statements (248)
So I hear her opponent is calling himself an independent. Well, you've got to look under the hood -- because what you learn makes you wonder. Now, as a legislator, he voted with the Republicans 96 percent of the time -- 96 percent of the time. It's hard to suggest that he's going to be significantly independent from the Republican agenda. When you listen closely to what he’s been saying, it’s very clear that he’s going to do exactly the same thing in Washington.
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We've also seen a rise of a popular culture that doesn't exactly celebrate diligence and self-discipline, but instead sends a message that you can be rich and famous without doing any work; that your ticket to success is only through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star. And many young people don't have anyone in their lives to counteract that message -- to tell them that gratification that comes instantaneously usually disappears just as quickly, and that real success in life comes from commitment and persistence, effort, hard work.
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But here's the thing -- and I'm talking specifically to the young people who are here today -- in the end, we can start all kinds of mentoring programs and give you guys all the mentors in the world, but it won't make much of a difference unless you do your parts as well. That's the thing about mentoring -- it's a two-way street.
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The answer is yes. I want everybody to understand, we made -- and this was the help -- with the help of the members of Congress who are here -- made an enormous investment in higher education, making sure that young people could afford to go to great institutions like this. So we significantly increased the level of each Pell Grant, and we also put more money so that we could have more Pell Grants.
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Q Thank you. I'm very concerned about Social Security. I think there's a few here who are probably living on that or supplementing that. I understand that Congress has given themselves a raise but has denied us COLA for possibly the next three years. At the time of the H1N1 thing, people over 65 were not given the right to have the shot. For some reason or other this health care crisis was left on our senior backs. What can we do about this?
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First is how do we make sure that Social Security is sustainable over the long term. Social Security is one of our entitlement programs that for now is stable, but will not be if we don't make some changes. Now, here's the good news. Compared to Medicare, Social Security is actually in reasonably good shape, and with some relatively small adjustments, you can have that solvent for a long time. So Social Security is going to be there. I know a lot of people are concerned about it. Social Security we can fix.
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Now, in terms of the COLA, the formula -- COLA stands for Cost of Living Allowance, so it's put in place to make sure that Social Security is keeping up with inflation. Here's the problem. This past year, because of the severity of the recession, we didn't have inflation; we actually had deflation. So prices actually fell last year. As a consequence, technically, seniors were not eligible for a Cost of Living Adjustment, to have it go up because prices did not go up in the aggregate. That doesn't mean that individual folks weren't being pinched by higher heating prices or what have you, but on average prices went down.
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Now, by the way, let me just do a little PSA here. Anybody who has not gotten a H1N1 shot, along with their seasonal flu, I would still advise you to get it, because historically there are two waves of this. Particularly make sure your kids have gotten it, because there have been a significantly higher number of children killed under H1 -- who get H1N1 than those who just get the seasonal flu. It's still a small fraction, I don't want to make everybody afraid. But it's just -- it's a little more serious than the normal seasonal flu.
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You asked about Social Security. Let me talk about Medicare. Medicare will be broke in eight years if we do nothing. Right now we give -- we give about $17 billion in subsidies to insurance companies through the Medicare system -- your tax dollars. But when we tried to eliminate them, suddenly there were ads on TV -- "Oh, Obama is trying to cut Medicare." I get all these seniors writing letters: "Why are you trying to cut my Medicare benefits?" I'm not trying to cut your Medicare benefits. I'm trying to stop paying these insurance companies all this money so I can give you a more stable program.
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So next month, the Middle Class Task Force is going to deliver its final report -- not final, its year-end report to the President. And this afternoon, we're spotlighting some of the items in that report that the President is going to be including in the upcoming budget. And these include, first of all, an expansion of the child tax credit. Since 2000, child care costs have grown significantly faster than inflation and twice as fast -- twice as fast as the median income of families with children. And that's why we're asking Congress to nearly double the credit for middle class families with incomes up to $85,000 and increase the credit for nearly every family making under $115,000.
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The fourth thing is we're going to be strengthening the income-based repayment program for student loans -- fancy way of saying a lot of kids and families graduate with significant loan responsibility and literally -- literally are left with very few options. They've got to go out and get the highest-paying job they can, maybe in an area they had no intention of working in, just to pay back the loan.
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Now, even after paying for what we spent on my watch, we'll still face the massive deficit we had when I took office. More importantly, the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will continue to skyrocket. That's why I've called for a bipartisan fiscal commission, modeled on a proposal by Republican Judd Gregg and Democrat Kent Conrad. This can't be one of those Washington gimmicks that lets us pretend we solved a problem. The commission will have to provide a specific set of solutions by a certain deadline.
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Look, as I said last night, my belief is, is that a basic principle in our Constitution is that if you're obeying the law, if you're following the rules, that you should be treated the same, regardless of who you are. I think that principle applies to gay and lesbian couples. So at the federal level, one of the things that we're trying to do is to make sure that partnerships are recognized for purposes of benefits so that hospital visitation, for example, is something that is permitted; that Social Security benefits or pension benefits or others, that same-sex couples are recognized in all those circumstances.
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Now, the reason that I'm not proposing the discretionary freeze take into effect this year -- we prepared a budget for 2010, it's now going forward -- is, again, I am just listening to the consensus among people who know the economy best. And what they will say is that if you either increase taxes or significantly lowered spending when the economy remains somewhat fragile, that that would have a destimulative effect and potentially you'd see a lot of folks losing business, more folks potentially losing jobs. That would be a mistake when the economy has not fully taken off. That's why I've proposed to do it for the next fiscal year. So that's point number two.
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CONGRESSMAN PRICE: , multiple times, from your administration, there have come statements that Republicans have no ideas and no solutions. In spite of the fact that we've offered, as demonstrated today, positive solutions to all of the challenges we face, including energy and the economy and health care, specifically in the area of health care -- this bill, H.R.3400, that has more co-sponsors than any health care bill in the House, is a bill that would provide health coverage for all Americans; would correct the significant insurance challenges of affordability and preexisting; would solve the lawsuit abuse issue, which isn't addressed significantly in the other proposals that went through the House and the Senate; would write into law that medical decisions are made between patients and families and doctors; and does all of that without raising taxes by a penny.
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It's not enough if you say, for example, that we've offered a health care plan and I look up -- this is just under the section that you've just provided me, or the book that you just provided me -- summary of GOP health care reform bill: The GOP plan will lower health care premiums for American families and small businesses, addressing America's number-one priority for health reform. I mean, that's an idea that we all embrace. But specifically it's got to work. I mean, there's got to be a mechanism in these plans that I can go to an independent health care expert and say, is this something that will actually work, or is it boilerplate?
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If I'm told, for example, that the solution to dealing with health care costs is tort reform, something that I've said I am willing to work with you on, but the CBO or other experts say to me, at best, this could reduce health care costs relative to where they're growing by a couple of percentage points, or save $5 billion a year, that's what we can score it at, and it will not bend the cost curve long term or reduce premiums significantly -- then you can't make the claim that that's the only thing that we have to do. If we're going to do multi-state insurance so that people can go across state lines, I've got to be able to go to an independent health care expert, Republican or Democrat, who can tell me that this won't result in cherry-picking of the healthiest going to some and the least healthy being worse off.
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The major driver of our long-term liabilities, everybody here knows, is Medicare and Medicaid and our health care spending. Nothing comes close. Social Security we could probably fix the same way Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan sat down together and they could figure something out. That is manageable. Medicare and Medicaid -- massive problem down the road. That's where -- that's going to be what our children have to worry about.
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And so the question is, at what point can we have a serious conversation about Medicare and its long-term liability, or a serious question about -- a serious conversation about Social Security, or a serious conversation about budget and debt in which we're not simply trying to position ourselves politically. That's what I'm committed to doing. We won't agree all the time in getting it done, but I'm committed to doing it.
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Sometimes it requires government investment. That's why we laid railroads and highways to spur commerce and industry and stitch this nation together. Sometimes it means making sure that there's a safety net. That's why we created Social Security while putting in place financial safeguards like the FDIC in the wake of the economic dislocations of the 1930s.
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And that's why we're buying up vacant homes and converting them into affordable housing -- creating jobs, stemming our housing crisis, growing the local economy. That's why last year, we put a tax credit worth thousands of dollars into the pocket of 1.4 million Americans to help them buy their first home -- first-time homebuyers credit. That's why we're offering over one million struggling homeowners lower monthly payments through our loan modification initiative.
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I don't know where else to turn. I don't know who else to talk to about the problem. I've written you letters. I've written letters to many of the senators here in Las Vegas. I've talked to the doctors. I've done everything I know how to do. But I am a widow with a special needs child. I have lived in the house that I live in for 19 years. My house is in foreclosure. I have disability insurance. I have Social Security disability. That disability tells me, your insurance is not accepted here. I can't get the medical help that I need to get better.
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Q Well, my question is about Social Security. Now, I know there are a lot of myths out there, and I know you can dispel them. I saw an interview on "Meet The Press" with Alan Greenspan, who, as you know, was on the Social Security Commission in the '80s. And Tim Russert asked him specifically, what about the crisis in Social Security? Alan Greenspan's response was, there is no crisis in Social Security; it's a payroll tax issue. Can you comment on that?
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Yes. Here’s the situation with Social Security. It is actually true that Social Security is not in crisis the way our health care system is in crisis. I mean, when you think about the big entitlement programs, you've got Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. These are the big programs that take up a huge portion of the federal budget. Social Security is in the best shape of any of these, because basically the cost of Social Security will just go up with ordinary inflation, whereas health care costs are going up much faster than inflation.
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It is true that if we continue on the current path with Social Security, if we did nothing on Social Security, that at a certain point, in maybe 20 years or so, what would happen is that you start seeing less money coming into the payroll tax, because the population is getting older so you've got fewer workers, and more people are collecting Social Security so more money is going out, and so the trust fund starts dropping.
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And if we did nothing, then somewhere around 2040 what would happen would be a lot of the young people who would start collecting Social Security around then would find that they only got 75 cents on every dollar that they thought they were going to get. Everybody with me so far?
All right. So slowly we're running out of money.
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But the fixes that are required for Social Security are not huge, the way they are with Medicare. Medicare, that is a real problem. If we don't get a handle on it, it will bankrupt us. With Social Security, we could make adjustments to the payroll tax. For example -- I'll just give you one example -- right now, your Social Security -- your payroll tax is capped at $109,000. So what that means is, is that -- how many people -- I don't mean to pry into your business, but how many people here make less than $109,000 every year? All right, this is a pretty rich audience -- a lot of people kept their hands down. I'm impressed.
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And one of the things that everyone, even the critics, now acknowledge is that the Recovery Act played a significant part in the growth of the GDP. The first quarter of last year the economy shrunk by over 6 percent -- 6.4 percent. Last quarter, a year later, it actually grew almost 6 percent -- 5.7 [percent]. But we all know a lot of people are still hurting. I mean, I've traveled into now 65 cities, I think it is, in your states and a lot of people are still hurting. Employment is lagging, and it's going to be -- it's a real scramble for a lot of people.
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So there's some real -- there's some real hope that we're going to be able to generate significant, new projects. I know in the far West we're having some trouble about getting some of this off the ground and transmission and the rest. But you all have worked with us, you've given us great insight as to where the biggest problems are. We're trying to work through them, but we can't do it without you.
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And finally, government has also provided a social safety net to guarantee a basic level of security for all our citizens. Now, this last role has been obviously a source of great controversy over the last several decades. But I think most Americans and most business leaders would agree that programs like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and unemployment insurance haven't just saved millions from poverty, they've helped secure broad-based consensus that is so critical to a functioning market economy.
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With new technology, we're creating a single electronic medical record for our men and women in uniform that will follow them from the day they enlist until the day that they are laid to rest. We're cutting down the time it takes to get a patent approved by cutting out unnecessary paperwork and modernizing the process. And my Secretary of Commerce, Gary Locke, is here today, and is doing an outstanding job leading that effort. We're working to give people the chance to go online and book an appointment at the Social Security office or check the status of their citizenship application –- services countless businesses already provide. Government should be doing the same.
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That's why, in the State of the Union, I set a goal of doubling our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support 2 million jobs. And to help me meet this goal, Gary Locke recently announced that we're launching a National Export Initiative where the federal government will significantly ramp up its advocacy on behalf of U.S. exporters. We're substantially expanding the trade financing available to exporters, including small and medium-sized companies. And while always keeping our security needs in mind, we're going to reform our export controls to eliminate unnecessary barriers. So some of the sectors where we have a huge competitive advantage in high-tech areas, we're going to be able to send more of those products to markets overseas. And we're going to pursue a more strategic and aggressive effort to open up new markets for our goods.
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But to truly transition to a clean energy economy, I’ve also said that we need to put a price on carbon pollution. Many businesses have embraced this approach -- including some who are represented here today. Still, I am sympathetic to those companies that face significant potential transition costs, and I want to work with this organization and others like this to help with those costs and to get our policies right.
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We’ve also incorporated almost every serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising costs of health care. As a result, our proposal would reduce the deficit by as much as a trillion dollars over the next decades, and would directly affect your bottom lines -- each and every one of you who are already providing insurance to your employees -- by a significant amount.
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And tomorrow, I look forward to a good exchange of ideas at the Blair House with some of the legislative leaders. And I hope everyone comes with a shared desire to solve this challenge, not just score political points. And I hope the roundtable supports our efforts to finally pass reform that works for the American people and for American businesses.
Now, one of benefits of health care reform is that by bringing down the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, it would significantly reduce our deficit. And I know this is an issue of great concern to many of you. My OMB Director, Peter Orszag, will be here soon to give you the scary numbers. I promise you this is on my mind each and every day.
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Now, a number of you have made the point that we shouldn’t discourage anyone from keeping headquarters and operations in America and that we have to balance your needs to compete overseas. I'm sympathetic to that. And after listening to you, we’ve made some modifications to our proposal. But as President of the United States, my interest is to reward –- or at least not disadvantage –- companies who are creating more jobs and doing more business within the borders of this country. That’s not anti-business; it’s pro-America. And I don’t apologize for it.
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I said at the State of the Union, and I'll repeat, I didn't take this on because I thought it was good politics. This is such a complicated issue that it's inevitably going to be contentious. But what I'm hoping to accomplish today is for everybody to focus not just on where we differ, but focus on where we agree because there actually is some significant agreement on a host of issues.
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So this bill is not only about the health security of America. It's about jobs. In its life it will create 4 million jobs -- 400,000 jobs almost immediately; jobs, again, in the health care industry, but in the entrepreneurial world as well. You, , with your leadership we passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act last January and got a running start on some of the technology and scientific advancements in this by the investments in biomedical research, health IT -- health information technology -- a running start by your signing the SCHIP, the children's health bill, insuring 11 million children. You had a running start on expanding access, and not only that, but doing it in a way that is of the future.
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So the bill on the floor that my friend Lamar is lamenting here has significant input from the Republicans. So let's look at the facts a little bit more because they can be stubborn, you know? Harvard just completed a study that shows 45,000 Americans die every year because they don't have health insurance -- almost 1,000 a week in America. In 2008, about 750,000 bankruptcies were filed. About 70 percent of those bankruptcies were filed because of health care costs. Eighty percent of the people that filed for bankruptcy because of health care costs had health insurance. America is the only country in the world where if you get sick or hurt, you're going to have to file bankruptcy -- 750,000 bankruptcies in 2008.
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And then, after 2014, when the bill fully comes into play, you have a very different approach there. And what you do is establish a preexisting condition and link it with the individual mandate. And the American people have told us they don't want to be forced to buy health insurance that they don't want and they can't afford. And this is a significant issue across the country. And the American people are telling us that -- that the individual -- the mandates, the requirements to buy insurance are something that they want us to scrap and start over on. And that's why you're seeing state legislatures around the country passing resolutions saying our citizens are going to have a choice on whether they buy health care. They're going to have a choice on the kind of coverage they want to have.
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So, again, I think it's clear that the American people have rejected the bills that have gone through so far because they see increases in premiums for families, they see that it raises taxes significantly on families, and raids Medicare to create a new entitlement. This doesn't really bring down the cost; this is really not the answer.
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And the second point I'd make is, this probably has an echo -- this is slightly off point, but this debate about the philosophic differences echo the debate that probably took place in the mid-'30s on Social Security -- it was mandated. And it was mandated because everybody knew you couldn't get insurance unless everybody was in the pool. And they knew if only some people were in the pool, what would happen is a lot of people when they got old we would take care of them anyway and you'd have to pay for them.
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Again, we can argue on the margins, but the fact is it's not just CBO that said this -- you had the Business Roundtable/Hewitt study that shows that the Senate plan slows growth by 15 to 20 percent and that business costs per employee by the year 2019 would be $3,000 less per employee. Again, it may be wrong -- it may be wrong-exact amount, it may be $3,800, it may be $2,200 -- but it cuts costs. And so it seems to me that there is -- and I might add, that in the process here, it wasn't part of the -- specifically part of a long-term debt debate, but, you know, as has been pointed out here, we're not cutting Medicare benefits in this; we're trying to eliminate the third of the problem that's a waste.
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It does a couple of other things. It takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and counts them as offsets, but that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits. It takes $72 billion and claims money from the CLASS Act -- that's the long-term care insurance program. It takes the money from premiums that are designed for that benefit and instead counts them as offsets. The Senate Budget Committee chairman said that this is a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
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First thing is we've just talked -- we've heard from the two budget directors about our fiscal condition. We have Medicare that's going broke. We have Social Security that's going broke. We have Medicaid that is bankrupting not only the federal government, but all the states. And yet, here we are having a conversation about creating a new entitlement program that will bankrupt our country. And it will bankrupt our country. It's not that we can't do health insurance reform to help bring down costs, to help save the system. This bill -- this 2,700-page bill will bankrupt our country.
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Let me just -- there’s one thing I've got to -- there are a number of issues, as usual, that I've got significant difference with. I'm just am curious. Would you be satisfied if every member of Congress just had catastrophic care? Do you think we’d be better health care purchasers? I mean, is that a change that we should make?
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And rest assured, I can assure you that they won't be concerned with how big the bill was. I have no clue as to how big the Social Security bill was, how large, how many pages was in the Medicare bill. And I don't really think that someone sick in the emergency room is concerned about the size of the bill that we are trying to help them with.
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So this will take courage to do. Social Security was hard. Medicare was hard. Health care reform for all Americans -- insurance reform is hard. But we will get it done. And as we leave this debate I think that many of the differences that we have are complicated and they're legitimate. They're differences of opinion about the role of government and the rest. But I think it's really clear in one point that the American people understand very clearly, they understand that there should be an end to discrimination on the basis of preexisting conditions. The proposals that we have put forth end discrimination on the basis of preexisting conditions; the Republican bill does not.
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An interesting thing happened a couple of weeks ago, and that is a report came out that for the first time it turns out that more Americans are now getting their health care coverage from government than those that are getting it from the private sector. And you know what, that's without a bill from the Democrats or from President Obama. Has nothing to do with "Obamacare." It has to do with the fact that employers are shedding employees from health care plans. And more and more, folks, if they can, are trying to get into the Social Security system and the Medicare system earlier through disability or what have you, so that they can get some help.
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We can’t forget why we’re here. We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else’s business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11. Thousands of our fellow countrymen and women were killed. And this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership. Plots against our homeland, plots against our allies, plots against the Afghan and Pakistani people are taking place as we speak right here. And if this region slides backwards, if the Taliban retakes this country and al Qaeda can operate with impunity, then more American lives will be at stake. The Afghan people will lose their chance at progress and prosperity. And the world will be significantly less secure.
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We’ll make a significant new investment in community health centers all across America that can provide high-quality primary care to people who need it most. And we’ll strengthen efforts to combat waste and fraud and abuse, to make sure your dollars aren’t lining the pockets of insurance companies when they should be making your health care better.
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The reforms in this bill are significant, but they’re just part of a broader effort to strengthen our entire higher education system. We’re putting college tuition tax credits in the pockets of millions of students from working families to help them pay for college. We’ve taken steps to simplify the federal college assistance form -– called the FAFSA -– because it shouldn’t take a PhD to apply for financial aid. And we’re helping ensure that America’s high school graduates are ready for college. All of this is paid for. We’re redirecting money that was poorly spent to make sure we’re making investments in our future.
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To address climate change, we agreed that all nations aligned with the Copenhagen accord must meet their responsibilities. And I would note that President Sarkozy’s leadership has resulted in significant new resources to address deforestation around the world. Upcoming meetings at the United Nations and the Major Economies Forum will be an opportunity for nations to follow up their Copenhagen commitments with specific and concrete actions that reduce emissions.
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And it’s important to note, I think, for those of you who don't know Secretary Gates, this is somebody who has actually taken on the military and weapons systems establishment and initiated some very significant procurement reforms that nobody ever thought would happen here in Washington. So he’s somebody who’s willing to call it like it is and make difficult decisions, and he will do so in this situation as well.
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But you’re here and I’m here because we’ve got more work to do. Until this progress is felt not just on Wall Street but on Main Street we cannot be satisfied. Until the millions of our neighbors who are looking for work can find a job, and wages are growing at a meaningful pace, we may be able to claim a technical recovery -- but we will not have truly recovered. And even as we seek to revive this economy, it’s also incumbent on us to rebuild it stronger than before. We don’t want an economy that has the same weaknesses that led to this crisis. And that means addressing some of the underlying problems that led to this turmoil and devastation in the first place.
Now, one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we’ve known in generations -- at least since the ’30s. And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility -- from Wall Street all the way to Washington -- that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression.
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Now, here’s the good news: A comprehensive plan to achieve these reforms has already passed the House of Representatives. A Senate version is currently being debated, drawing on ideas from Democrats and Republicans. Both bills represent significant improvement on the flawed rules that we have in place today, despite the furious effort of industry lobbyists to shape this legislation to their special interests.
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And for those of you in the financial sector I'm sure that some of these lobbyists work for you and they’re doing what they are being paid to do. But I’m here today specifically -- when I speak to the titans of industry here -- because I want to urge you to join us, instead of fighting us in this effort. I’m here because I believe that these reforms are, in the end, not only in the best interest of our country, but in the best interest of the financial sector. And I’m here to explain what reform will look like, and why it matters.
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So ever since I was campaigning here in Iowa, I’ve been saying the same thing. What I want is a system in which we secure our borders -- and by the way, this administration has made significant progress securing our borders -- we start cracking down on companies that are purposely hiring undocumented workers to undercut the wages of U.S. workers -- because the truth is as long as there are employers who want to exploit undocumented workers, pay them lower wages, no benefits, no overtime, et cetera, people are going to continue to come. I mean, we can try to build as many fences as we want at the border, but the fact is if folks are making $2 a day back home, and they can make $10 an hour here, they’re going to come here -- unless we make sure that employers are doing what’s lawful. So we’ve got to take that seriously.
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But I inherited a structural deficit that is going to get worse in the years to come because our population is getting older, health care costs have been going up faster than inflation, more people are on Social Security, more people are on Medicare, and we’ve had two wars that we’ve been fighting. If you combine all that plus the interest on that debt, if we don’t bring it under control we really are going to be burdening the next generation in a way that’s not acceptable.
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But all these steps, while significant, are simply not enough. For even as we rein in waste and ask that Congress account for every dollar it spends, this alone will not make up for the years in which those in Washington refused to make hard choices and live within their means. And it will not make up for the chronic failure to level with the American people about the cost of the services that they value.
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We’ve talked about doing this for decades, and we’ve made significant strides over the last year when it comes to investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency. The House of Representatives has already passed a bill that would finally jumpstart a permanent transition to a clean energy economy, and there is currently a plan in the Senate –- a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans –- that would achieve the same goal.
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What is true is that when it comes to stopping the leak down below, the federal government does not possess superior technology to BP. This is something, by the way -- going back to my involvement -- two or three days after this happened, we had a meeting down in the Situation Room in which I specifically asked Bob Gates and Mike Mullen what assets do we have that could potentially help that BP or other oil companies around the world do not have. We do not have superior technology when it comes to dealing with this particular crisis.
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We just concluded some excellent discussions —- discussions that would have been unlikely just 17 months ago. As we’ve both said before, when I came into office, the relationship between the United States and Russia had drifted —- perhaps to its lowest point since the Cold War. There was too much mistrust and too little real work on issues of common concern. That did not serve the interests of either country or the world. Indeed, I firmly believe that America’s most significant national security interests and priorities could be advanced most effectively through cooperation, not an adversarial relationship, with Russia.
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Q My question to the President of the United States -- you just mentioned that you discussed the issue of Russia joining the WTO during your talks. But I must admit that promises to facilitate Russia’s entry has been heard by the Russian delegation for a decade. Could you more specifically name the time frame when you’re referring to finalizing the process in near future?
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In terms of time frame, let me give you a sense of perspective from our U.S. Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, who has been in close contact in negotiations with his counterparts on the Russian side. The way he described it is that 90-95 percent of the issues have now been resolved. Now, the remaining 5 to 10 percent are difficult issues and are going to require some significant work. But that should give you some sense that a lot of work has already been done even in the last few months that makes an enormous difference.
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At the same time, we are all seated and back in Moscow, we were standing with Presidents. So it is easier to work. And this isn’t a significant difference, but speaking in serious term, during this year, we have changed a lot. The world economy has changed. And we were working very hard in order to improve the situation in our national economy in order to re-launch failed mechanisms in international economy. And certain persons present here just worked to save their businesses. In general, we managed to do so, although we did have problems.
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Now, there are going to be some countries -- Greece being the most obvious example -- that have to act immediately because they’re facing a sovereign debt crisis. There are going to be other countries where the issue really has to do with how do we start putting in place some plans that are credible for deficit reduction, even though they don’t kick in significantly in this first year.
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Look, I’d have to look at the transcript, but let me just make sure that I’m absolutely clear here. Number one, China has determined that it is in its own interests, its own sovereign interests, to move back towards a path of flexible exchange rates. We think that is a very positive thing. We think in part it is a positive thing because a undervalued RMB has given China a significant trading advantage, and we have been very clear to them that we don’t consider that acceptable or consistent with the principles of balanced and sustainable growth that were discussed in Pittsburgh and that all G20 countries signed on to.
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Even if -- the financial crisis made it much worse, but even if we had not gone through this financial crisis, we’d still have to be dealing with these long-term deficit problems. They have to do with Medicaid; they have to do with Medicare; they have to do with Social Security. They have to do with a series of structural problems that are not unique to America. Some of it has to do with an aging population. And we’ve got to look at a tax system that is messy and unfair in a whole range of ways.
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And I told the President that it is very important to further enhance the partnership and our alliance, and at the same time, in order to pursue that goal, it is important for the Japanese public themselves to think really about the significance of our alliance, and for them to think about the decisions for the future of our alliance.
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In Washington, nearly a decade of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires led to little more than sluggish growth, a shrinking middle class, your paychecks flat-lined. Wages and incomes did not go up. Even when the economy was growing, it wasn’t growing for you. And for all the party’s moralizing about fiscal discipline, because it is true that part of what we inherited is a real significant problem in terms of spending at the federal level, the economic policies they put in place turned a $237 billion surplus into a $1.3 trillion deficit.
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But if you think about the history of this country, we’ve always recognized that there are times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn’t do and what corporations would not do. That’s how we have railroads and highways and public schools and police forces. That’s how we’ve made possible scientific research that led to the medical breakthroughs and technological wonders that all of us take for granted now. That’s why we have Social Security and a minimum wage and laws to protect the food we eat and the water we drink and the air we breathe. That’s why we have rules to ensure that mines are safe and that oil companies pay for the spills that they cause.
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And there have always been those who said no to these policies and these ideas. I mean, you look back on the history books. There were people who said that Social Security was socialism, said that Medicare was a government takeover. There were automakers who said that installing seat belts was unnecessary, unaffordable, and would ruin the auto industry. There were skeptics who thought that cleaning our water and our air would bankrupt our economy. Right here in Wisconsin -- if you look at the lake now and look at the lake, what it was like 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And there were people who said, well, there’s nothing we can do about all the sludge and drudge and whatever is going on in there.
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Our big problem is not the emergency steps we took last year. Our big problem is the fact that when you add in what’s happening with Medicare, what’s happening with Social Security, the population is aging -- when you add all those things in, if we don't change how we do business medium and long term, then that's going to be our big problem.
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PRIME MINISTER CAMERON: It is something that we discussed in our meeting. I mean, clearly there’s a discussion going on between the British and the Americans about this, and I don't want to prejudice those discussions. We completely understand that Gary McKinnon stands accused of a very important and significant crime in terms of hacking into vital databases. And nobody denies that that is an important crime that has to be considered. But I have had conversations with the U.S. ambassador, as well as raising it today with the President, about this issue, and I hope a way through can be found.
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We’re creating a single electronic medical record for our men and women in uniform that will follow them from the day they enlist until the day that they are laid to rest. We’re revamping our Social Security and citizenship processes so that folks can book appointments and check the status of their applications online. We’ve created mobile apps that provide everything from disaster assistance to product safety information to the latest wait times for security lines at your local airport.
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Now, all of this hasn’t been easy. The recession has meant that folks are spending less. It means that small businesses have had a tougher time getting credit and getting loans. And that’s why when I took office, we put in place an economic plan specifically to help small businesses. And we were guided by a simple idea: Government can’t guarantee success, but it can knock down barriers that keep entrepreneurs from opening or expanding. For example, the lack of affordable credit -- that’s something the government can do something about. Government can’t replace the millions of jobs that we lost in the recession, but it can create the conditions for small businesses to hire more people through steps like tax breaks.
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And I was just talking to Dave, who does the right thing by his employees and is providing health insurance -- they actually are not paying a significant share for that health insurance. Dave and Carl are doing the right thing by those workers. He’s now going to be eligible to potentially get up to 35 percent tax relief on those -- premium that he’s paying, and that could make, obviously, an enormous difference in terms of his bottom line and may mean that he can hire some additional workers.
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We also know that as significant as these reforms are, there’s going to be one more ingredient to really make a difference: parents are going to have to get more involved in their children’s education. Now, in the past, even that statement has sparked controversy. Folks say, well, why are you talking about parents? Parents need help, too. I know that. Parents need jobs. They need housing. They need -- in some cases -- social services. They may have substance abuse problems. We’re working on all those fronts.
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So ultimately, it’s not just the federal government’s relationship with tribal governments that compels us to act, it’s not just our obligations under treaty and under law, but it’s also our values as a nation that are at stake. And that’s why earlier this year, after extensive consultations with tribal leaders, Attorney General Holder announced significant reforms to increase prosecutions of crimes committed in Indian Country. He hired more Assistant U.S. Attorneys and more victim-witness specialists. And he even created a position for a National Indian Country Training Coordinator who will work with prosecutors and law enforcement officers throughout Indian Country.
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So these are significant measures that will empower tribal nations and make a real difference in people’s lives. Because as I said during our tribal conference, I have no interest in just paying lip service to the problems we face. I know that too often, this community has heard grand promises from Washington that turned out to be little more than empty words. And I pledged to you then that if you gave me a chance, this time it would be different. I told you I was committed to moving forward and forging a new and better future together in every aspect of our government-to-government relationship.
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And Joe, Rhonda and I were just talking about the challenges that they’ve had to go through when Rhonda got laid off -- and, by the way, also lost her health insurance in the process, at a time when her son was going through some significant medical needs. So, in addition to trying to stop the crisis, what we also wanted to do was make sure that we were helping people get back on their feet. So something that I'm very pleased with is that Rhonda was able to use the provisions that we passed to help her get COBRA so that she had health insurance, could keep her health insurance, at a time when the family was very much in need. And millions of people across the country have been able to keep their health insurance.
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Well, thank you. Here’s how specifically health reform should help your brother. Number one, it gives an incentive to his employer to provide health insurance -- because one of the key components of health care reform was providing employers a 35 percent tax break on the premiums they pay for their employees, all right? So basically it’s cutting his potential costs -- the employer’s potential costs for providing your brother with health insurance, it’s cutting it by a third. That's step number one.
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Q , I'm concerned about the furor lately that's been -- it’s similar to what’s happened in the past but it’s reemerging, mostly from the Republican Party, but some Democrats -- that Social Security needs to be privatized because it’s losing money, and we're all going to -- and it’s going to go broke, and that sort of thing. How would you comment on that?
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I have been adamant in saying that Social Security should not be privatized and it will not be privatized as long as I'm President. And here’s the reason. I was opposed to it before the financial crisis. And what I said was the purpose of Social Security is to have that floor, that solid -- rock-solid security, so that no matter what else happens you’ve always got some income to support you in your retirement. And I've got no problem with people investing in their 401(k)s, and we want to encourage people to invest in private savings accounts. But Social Security has to be separate from that.
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Now, imagine if Social Security, if a portion of that had been in the stock market back in 2006 and 2007. I mean, you saw what happened with your 401(k)s -- you lost 20, 30, 40 percent of it. Now, we've recovered -- in part because of the policies that we put into place to stabilize the situation, the stock market has recovered 60-70 percent of its value from its peak. But if you were really in need last year or the year before, and suddenly you see your assets drop by 40 percent, and that's all you're relying on, it would have been a disaster.
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So here’s the thing. Social Security is not in crisis. What is happening is, is that the population is getting older, which means we've got more retirees per worker than we used to. We're going to have to make some modest adjustments in order to strengthen it. There are some fairly modest changes that could be made without resorting to any newfangled schemes that would continue Social Security for another 75 years, where everybody would get the benefits that they deserve. And what we've done is we've created a fiscal commission of Democrats and Republicans to come up with what would be the best combination to help stabilize Social Security for not just this generation, but the next generation.
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So that's just a small change. It’s voluntary, but that in and of itself could end up boosting savings rates significantly. So there are a bunch of ways that we can do -- make sure that retirement is more secure. But we’ve got to make sure that Social Security is there not just for this generation but for the next one. Okay?
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Q , sir, I was born and raised in a good blue-collar town in Toledo, Ohio. I grew up in a union family and I work now for a significant number of pension assets in the labor union market with an investment firm. I think the question I have that most bothers me is what’s important to my people out there that I talk to, and those two things are, the first, what’s going to happen with their pensions, especially those, as you know, in the red and the yellow. The PPA has not exactly been that favorable to them. And the PBGC is not a very good option. My father had to take early retirement. He’s not receiving the maximum amount after decades of hard work and service that he had anticipated.
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In addition to that, the fire act has provided safer equipment for us. We -- don't want to sound cliché, but I’m just your average Joe. But what we do as firefighters, we want to make a significant difference to our citizens here in our community, as well as our lives. That SAFER Act and that fire act has provided us significant equipment -- money, funding rather for significant equipment -- face pieces, self-contained breathing apparatus, things of those nature. So we come to say how proud we are to be able to afford that opportunity to secure our firefighters.
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Well, it’s a great question. And let me talk about Medicare generally. Medicare I think is one of the cornerstones of our social safety net. The basic idea is, you’ve been working all your life, you retire; just like you’ve got Social Security that you can count on, you’ve also got health care that you can count on and you’re not going to go bankrupt just because you get sick.
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But in the same way that Social Security has to be tweaked because the population is getting older, we’ve got to refresh and renew Medicare to make sure that it’s going to be there for the next generation, as well. And the key problems are not just that more people as they retire are going to be part of Medicare. The big problem is just health care inflation generally. The costs of health care keep on skyrocketing.
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Well, no, it’s actually all of our problem, because part of the reason we had this financial crisis was because people did not always understand the financial instruments that they were purchasing. A lot of these subprime loans that were being given out, a lot of these no-interest -- you can buy your house, you don’t put any money down, you don’t pay any interest, you got this beautiful house -- and naturally people were thinking, well, this sounds great. But what they weren’t looking at was, okay, there’s a balloon payment five years down. This is only going to work if your housing -- the value of your house keeps on appreciating. And if it stops appreciating, suddenly it’s not going to work anymore. People hadn’t thought through all those ramifications. And that had an effect on the whole system.
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If we do that -- if we understand what’s at stake, and we step up to the plate and we realize that change is not a spectator sport and that no, it won’t come easy and you’re not going to get it all in one fell swoop, and you won’t even then get a hundred percent; if you remember that every bit of progress we’ve made from emancipation to women’s suffrage to civil rights to Social Security to Medicare -- each and every one of those steps were laborious and difficult, and there were people who were trying to block that progress and people who were saying that’s socialism and people who were saying this was undermining the country -- every step of the way -- there were people who were fighting it. But people didn’t lose heart. Instead, people stood up and they said, you know what, we’re just going to keep on pushing. We’re going to keep on fighting.
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And part of what I think we’ve got to examine is are we designing our universities in a way that focuses on the primary thing, which is education. You’re not going to a university to join a spa; you’re going there to learn so that you can have a fulfilling career. And if all the amenities of a public university start jacking up the cost of tuition significantly, that’s a problem.
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And I think that economically, immigrants can actually be a huge source of strength to the country. It’s one of our big advantages is we’ve got a younger population than Europe, for example, or Japan, because we welcome immigrants and they generally don’t. And that means that our economy is more vital and we’ve got more people in the workforce who are going to be out there working and starting businesses and supporting us when we’re retired, and making sure Social Security is solvent. All those things are important.
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So we’ve set up a number of these mortgage modification programs that are out there. But I don’t want to lie to you -- we’ve probably had hundreds of thousands of people who’ve been helped by it. I think there have been a couple of million who’ve applied. But that doesn’t meet the entire need because this is such a huge housing market.
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For example you had mentioned that a lot of people can’t afford to upgrade their homes, things that they need. Well, we are able to provide assistance through Washington, the state of New Mexico, and some other agencies to provide free assistance for a lot of elderly or people who are -- meet certain criteria. So I want to say thank you again for that weatherization program. It has helped a lot of New Mexicans, as myself, as mortgage modification, as a personal friend of yours, I want to say thank you because it has helped my family.
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I want to acknowledge our mayor, Dwight Jones. Thank you so much for being here. And of course, I’ve got to say thanks again to Ms. Shelton for being here. We are graced by your presence.
This is really a casual setting, so I hope that we just open it up for a good conversation about where the country is at, where it’s going, how folks are feeling down here in Richmond. I want to hear from you at least as much as you’re hearing from me.
I find this really useful to me because when you’re in Washington all the time and you’re in these battles, sometimes you’re in what’s called the bubble. And I’m always trying to do what I can to break out of it and be able to get back with folks and have a conversation.
What I want to do is -- what I want to do is just speak briefly about what’s going on in the economy, and then just open it up.
Obviously we’re going through a tough time. And these last two years have been as tough as any that we’ve seen in most of our lifetimes, except for Ms. Shelton. Because the truth is, is that the financial crisis that we experienced was the worst since the Great Depression. We lost about 4 million jobs in the six months before I was sworn into office. We lost 750,000 jobs the month I was sworn into office; 600,000 jobs the two months after I was sworn in. So before any of my economic policies were put into place, we had already lost most of the 8 million jobs that we ended up losing in this recession.
And my first job was to make sure that the banking system did not completely collapse, and to make sure that we didn’t dip into a second depression. And we’ve done that. The economy that was contracting is now growing. We’ve had eight straight months of private sector job growth. So we’re making some progress.
But the truth is, is that people were having a tough time even before the crisis hit. We had gone -- from 2001 to 2009, there was a period in which the average middle-class family lost 5 percent of their income -- 5 percent of their wages -- during that period. At the same time, the costs for health care and college tuitions were skyrocketing. It was the slowest period of job growth since World War II, from 2001 to 2000.
So middle-class families were generally having a very difficult time even before the crisis hit. And obviously the crisis just made things worse. And this is all at a time when we’ve got increased global competition. You’ve got countries like China and India and Brazil that are really moving. They’re educating their kids much more aggressively than they ever were. They are exporting much more than they ever were. And so we’re having to compete at levels that we didn’t have to compete before.
And so part of the reason I ran for President was because I felt it was very important for us to start grappling with some longstanding issues that we’ve been putting off for way too long.
We had to stop a health care system that was broken from bankrupting families and businesses and the federal government, so we initiated health reform so that we could start getting a better bang for our health care dollar.
And it’s estimated that we’ll end up saving over a trillion dollars because we make the system more efficient over time, even though we’re going to be insuring more people.
We had to re-regulate the financial system so we never have a system where we’ve got taxpayer bailouts again. And so we passed financial regulatory reform. We had to transform our education system. And one of the things I’m most proud of, although it hasn’t gotten some of the fanfare that some of these other issues have gotten, is we’ve initiated reforms across the country through a program called Race to the Top where we’re encouraging states to reform how they do business, emphasizing more math, emphasizing more science, making sure that we’ve got the very best teachers in the classroom, making sure that we’re focusing on low-performing schools -- because it’s unacceptable where you’ve got schools in which a third of the kids or half of the kids drop out, and even the kids who graduate aren’t graduating at grade level.
We use to be at the top in terms of math and science performance. Now our kids typically rank around 21st in science and 25th in math. That’s just not acceptable.
We used to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the country -- now we rank around 12th. And that’s going to affect how we can compete long term, so part of what we did was to shift tens of billions of dollars that were going to subsidies to financial services groups in the direct student loan program, give those dollars directly to students, and we’ve got millions more students who are now getting grants and cheaper student loans.
Now, the other thing that we had to do is we had to confront all these problems -- a financial crisis, people losing their jobs, small businesses not getting the financing they need to open or expand their businesses -- we had to all do this in the context of a really bad budget.
When Bill Clinton left office, we had a record surplus. We hadn’t had a surplus since World War II. And suddenly by the time I took office, we had a $1.3 trillion deficit. And this was a direct result of some policies that thought only about the present and didn’t think about the future.
So we had tax cuts, mostly for millionaires and billionaires, in 2001 and 2003 that weren’t paid for, and there weren’t the cuts to go with it. So that ballooned the deficit. Then we had two wars that weren’t paid for. That further ballooned the deficit. We had a prescription drug plan that was put into place that cost about $800 billion. That wasn’t paid for. So you add all those things up, by the time I got into office we already had a $1.3 trillion deficit and we had exploded the national debt.
So one of the challenges now that I’ve got, having stabilized the economy but we still need it to grow, we still need small businesses to get help, we still have to help people find work, we want to invest in research and development and technology -- we’ve got to do all that but we’ve also got to think, how are we going to get our budget under control over the long term.
And I was amused as I was driving in, there were some signs there that said “cut spending” -- which sounds plausible and I know your congressman here I think has strong ideas about what he says he wants to do. Last week, the Republicans put forward what they called a Pledge to America, which purported to say we’re going to cut your taxes and we’re also going to control spending and we’re going to somehow balance the budget. But when you actually looked at the numbers, it was hard to figure out how they all added up.
Now, I’m not a math teacher. But I know a little bit about math. They’re proposing about $4 trillion worth of tax cuts. About $700 billion of those tax cuts are for people who typically are millionaires and billionaires, and on average would get $100,000 in tax relief -- $700 billion that we don’t have, we’d have to borrow in order to provide these tax cuts. And 98 percent of Americans wouldn’t see any benefit from it.
And keep in mind that because we don’t have it, it would actually end up costing more than $700 billion, because we’d end up having -- since we’re borrowing it, we’d have to pay interest on it.
Now, just to give you some sense of how they are proposing to pay for this, they’re recommending a 20 percent cut in education spending. They are proposing essentially that we lower our support to students on student loans who want to go to college and grants for students who want to go to college, which would affect millions of students all across the country. They are proposing to roll back tax cuts that we had put in place during the Recovery Act that give 95 percent of working Americans tax relief.
So when you add it all up, essentially their proposal would drastically expand the deficit instead of shrinking it. Now, what they’ll say is, well, we’re going to have additional cuts. But they don’t specify what those cuts would be. And one of the things I’m here to tell you -- and then I want to sort of hear from you in terms of what your priorities are -- is I’ve got some very smart people working for me in my budget office. But they will tell me that one thing they can’t do is cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans by $700 billion, protect Social Security, protect Medicare, protect veterans funding, and balance the budget. They just can’t do it. The math doesn’t add up.
And so part of the challenge, I think, particularly if we’re thinking about the next generation, is making sure, as we move forward over the next couple of years, that we have an honest and serious conversation about how we’re going to get control of our budget. That is going to be a big challenge.
And the choice that you make in this election I think should be based on facts and making sure that whatever politicians are saying, that they can back it up with some actual figures and numbers that work.
I know that here in Virginia and all across the country, there are a lot of people who are genuinely, legitimately and sincerely concerned about the deficit and the debt. And no matter how much I say to them, well, this really has to do with problems that we inherited, it’s not because of the emergency measures we took last year, their attitude is, okay, but it’s still your job to solve it.
And I think that’s a legitimate point of view. But if you are genuinely and sincerely concerned about debt and deficits, then you have to understand the other side just is not presenting a serious idea of how to balance our budgets and put us on a stable fiscal footing.
What they’re selling is the same thing that they sold back in 2000 and 2001, which is you could slash taxes, including for the wealthiest Americans, and somehow that’s not going to affect anything. And that’s just not how it works. It’s not how it works in your household, right? So it’s not going to work for the country, either. And we’ve got to have an honest conversation about it. All right?
So, with that -- I know it’s a little warm in here, but if anybody wants to pull out their fans, feel free. If gentlemen want to take off their jackets, I’m sure nobody will mind. And let’s just open it up for questions and comments.
And as I said, I don’t -- it doesn’t have to be a question. You can give me a suggestion. If you’ve got good ideas, I need to hear them.
And we’ll start with this gentleman. Please introduce yourself.
Q Thanks, . I manage a small business. We serve ESOP companies -- hundreds of ESOP companies. And I’ve just found it extraordinary in visiting many of these ESOP companies with the culture that they’ve developed, and the productivity and competitiveness, and it’s a good model for keeping jobs here in the U.S.
You want to just explain to everybody what ESOPs are? These are employee-owned businesses -- I just want to make sure everybody understands.
Q Exactly, exactly. And I wanted to just -- the ESOP laws that have been in place for over 35 years have allowed employee owners to share a piece of the action of the business while not having to get in their -- dig in their own pockets for that, so it’s helped them get to retirement, which is tough these days long term.
My main question is just, with your good initiatives -- you’re for focusing on small business in the new act -- will you consider encouraging or expanding the law to help more small privately held companies look to the ESOP model? Thank you.
I would absolutely be interested in taking a look at it. The idea behind these ESOPs is that if employees have a piece of the action -- they’re essentially shareholders in these companies -- then you are aligning the interests of workers with the interests of the company as a whole.
Now, what that means is, is that when a company has a tough time, workers have to take a hit because they’re owners, essentially. On the other hand, when things are going well, they’re getting a share of the profits. And so theoretically, at least, it’s something that can help grow companies, because the workers feel like they’re working for themselves, and they’re putting more of themselves into their job each and every day.
I think that it’s something that can be encouraged. I have not seen specific proposals that are out there legislatively, but I’m sure you can share them with me.
Q Yes, there actually has been a lot of strong research recently.
Good. So I’ll be interested in taking a look at that stuff.
Let me say something more generally about small businesses. As part of the Recovery Act, we actually cut taxes for small businesses eight different ways. And I make mention of that because -- and then I just signed a bill this week on Monday, before I went on the road, that further cuts taxes for small businesses, including eliminating capital gains for investments in startup businesses, making sure that small businesses can invest in inventory or in plant and equipment now and be able to take these deductions now so it gives them an incentive to start investing earlier on.
We have provided tax breaks for small companies who are providing health insurance to their employees because typically it’s -- small businesses are the hardest folks to be able to provide health insurance because they -- they’re not part of a big pool. And what we’ve said is, let’s give them a tax break -- they can get up to a third of the premiums that they’re paying for their employees as a credit so that it’s just cheaper for them to provide health insurance.
So I wanted to point that out because somehow there’s a myth out there I think that we have raised taxes on small businesses. If you listened to the other side, you’d be thinking, boy, Obama is just trying to crush small businesses with these high taxes. We’ve lowered taxes on small businesses over the last two years. In fact, we’ve lowered taxes on just about everybody over these last two years. And -- but when you look at the polls, there’s a decent number of folks who still think that somehow their taxes have gone up instead of gone down.
And that debate is going to be coming to a head now. I mentioned this $700 billion in tax cuts that they want to provide to the top 2 percent. We’re in danger of seeing lapse tax breaks that everybody here probably is getting on their paychecks every two weeks. A lot of people didn’t notice that they were getting a tax break because we did it incrementally, paycheck -- it wasn’t in one lump sum; it was like each paycheck you had a little bit less taken out in taxes. That’s going to lapse if we don’t renew it and the proposal -- the Republicans are proposing to eliminate it.
So this is an example of where we’ve got to know what the facts are in order to make sure that the broadest base of people are getting the broadest base of help.
Yes, sir.
Q President Obama, my name is Dan Ream. I’m a librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University here in Richmond, the state’s largest public university.
We love libraries.
Q We thank you. Libraries love the love. VCU, where I work, has benefited tremendously from your stimulus program. In fact, there are countless librarians, faculty and staff members there who have their jobs today thanks to the stimulus program. So thank you for that. It’s very important to us.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Q My son, by the way, is a student at Davidson College. He is a swim coach here at the Southampton swim team, and he is in Madrid today. And he said, this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened on my street and I’m out of the country. So, Dad and Mom, would you ask my question?
Okay, go ahead.
Q May I?
Although I have to say being in Madrid is not that bad.
Q It’s not.
I mean, that’s a pretty good deal.
Q He loves it. Anyway, this is from Paul Ream, who is probably watching this on TV somewhere in Madrid.
Good.
Q His question is this: In this public discussion of the economic crisis and in the nation’s political discourse in general, I feel like Democrats have lost hold of the populist attitude and rhetoric that truly embody the party’s foundations.
Our swim team community here at Southampton provides a wonderful example of that attitude. Like politics, it’s a sport that focuses on individual performance. But what leads to success is a team-oriented, sportsmanlike approach. Respect for each other and respect for one’s opponents are key to the success. And I think those are important elements of the Democratic Party.
With that in mind, what are the ways we can change the dialogue to really emphasis this? Doing what’s best for the people is not characterized by doing what’s best for some individuals at the cost of others, which is the interpretation of some citizens today, especially with regard to the economy. How can we reframe the debate and really highlight the respectful and sportsmanlike nature of policies directed at benefiting the American people as a whole?
Well, that’s a pretty good question.
Q It’s from Paul Ream.
I like that. And you read it very well, too. So I’m sure he’ll --
Q Thank you. I have my own question, too, if we have time.
-- he’ll be very happy with your presentation.
Q Thank you.
Look, I think he makes a terrific point, and I’ve tried to make this point in most of my speeches when I talk about the economy. Part of what makes America the greatest country on earth and what has made our economy the envy of the world for the last hundred years is that we combine this incredible sense of individual freedom and entrepreneurship and the profit motive and dynamic capitalism so that if you’ve got a good idea, if you want to start a whitewater rafting company or you want to open a new restaurant because you’ve got this great recipe, you can do it. And you don’t have to go through a lot of bureaucracy, and you don’t have to pay a bribe. And that is the wellspring of our wealth and how well we do.
Now, at the same time, part of what our strength has been is what we do in concert, in common, just like a team. Dwight Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System. Nobody individually could build a highway system. So we pool our resources together to build the highway system, and that then provides opportunity and a platform for businesses to grow and prosper.
The Internet was direct -- a direct result of a investment in research and science, through the government, that created the initial platforms that evolved into the Internet. And now there are all kinds of Internet companies that are starting, and you’ve got Facebook, and -- a lot of wealth has been generated, a lot of jobs have been created. But those individual initiatives couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t made that initial investment, through our government, in the resources and development, because there was no sure thing. It wasn’t like there was money to be made tooling around with these computers, trying to figure out how to communicate with each other more efficiently.
Clean energy is a good example as we move forward. Right now all of us would benefit if we had a cleaner, more efficient energy policy in this country. But nobody individually has that much incentive to do it. The oil companies -- they’ve got tons of money, but they’re making tons of money by selling oil. And the more oil they sell, the better off they’re going to be. So they’re not making huge investments in solar or wind or biodiesel.
A lot of people I think would benefit from retrofitting their homes or their buildings or hospitals. But it turns out that even though they’ll recoup their money, they might not be able to afford up front to make the investment without some help. And so they don’t do it, which means that we probably use 30 percent more energy because we’ve got buildings that are poorly insulated or poorly designed. And it would make sense for us to help small businesses and individuals make that investment.
If we gave them some loans on the front end, then all of us would benefit, and individually each of us would benefit. But the point is, is that Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, I think had it right. He basically said, we should never do things for people that they can do for themselves. But government’s role is to do what people can’t do better by themselves -- whether it’s our collective defense, whether it’s our firefighters, whether it’s our libraries, whether it is our infrastructure or investments in research and development.
And I think that that’s part of what the choice we’re making in this election and over the next several years is going to be: Are we still able to make those decisions together about how to move the country forward, or are we each going to just be looking out for ourselves, in which case, what’s going to happen is, is that if you’ve got enough money that you an afford to live in a gated community, then you don’t have to worry about police. If you can afford to have private schools, then you don’t have to worry about public schools.
But over time what happens is, as a group, we’re going to get poorer, even though some people do very well. All right?
Q Thank you.
Thank you. Yes.
Q Hello, . I’m a teacher at Albert Hill Middle.
What do you teach?
Q I teach civics. I teach eighth graders.
This is a good thing. You’ll be able to tell your class tomorrow that you --
Q Yes. Actually, I have some questions --
Oh, no --
Q -- that I would love to give to you from my students.
All right. I will try to respond to some of them.
Q Okay. Especially if you can send a picture and some autographs to them.
Okay. All right, sounds good.
Q I’m from a education family -- my mother is a teacher, my husband is a teacher also for the city at Thomas Jefferson High School, and I’m a mother of three. And the main focus has been on the middle class and the poor, but what about working-class families? They seem to be on the fringe, not able to get a lot of these incentives and other programs of help. Childcare is a major issue. Education for our children. Proper nutrition -- being able to afford proper food is an issue for working families. What is the government going to do for that?
And then I also have another question, if I could ask about the education reforms that you’re going to do. A lot of my students are concerned about those education reforms and they would like some explanations about how is an extended day and how is going to school for an extra month going to make them more competitive in the global world.
Well, let me take the second question first, because I want to be clear -- I haven’t passed a law that everybody has got to go to school for an extra month. I was asked about this on the Today Show and I made the observation, which is absolutely true, that most of our competitors, most other advanced countries, have their kids go to school about a month longer every year than we do. The three-month summer is a direct result of public schools having been started when most of us still lived on farms, and so you took three months off because you had to help on the harvest.
But there’s nothing written in stone that says we’ve got to have the organization, the school year the way we have it. There is a -- studies show that kids lose something during that three-month period. Poorer kids lose more during that three-month period because they may not have as many books at home, supplemental activities. They may not be going to the museum or on field trips during the summer. And so they tend to lose more of what they’ve learned. And that’s part of what contributes probably to the achievement gap and them falling behind.
So I think it’s important for states to look at what they’re doing and finding ways that potentially kids don’t lose ground compared to kids in China or South Korea or other parts of the country.
Now, it’s going to cost some money if we decide to make the school year longer because teachers and custodial workers, that means that they’re in -- they’re working even longer than they’re already working. And so we’d have to make some choices budgetarily.
Keep in mind, though, that this is why the choice in this election is so important. I’ll give you an example. During just a couple months ago, we had a debate in the House of Representatives. The Democrats decided to -- because they were worried about states laying off teachers, decided to close a corporate tax loophole that actually incentivized investment overseas instead of investment here in the United States. So they decided to close one of these loopholes.
And that saved enough money to send several billions of dollars to the states so that they could keep their workforce intact. This is at a time, by the way, where there are states like Hawaii that had gone down to a four-day a week school week because they couldn’t afford to pay teachers for the fifth day.
Now, I promise you we can’t compete against other countries if our kids are going to school four days a week. We can’t compete if teachers are being laid off and classrooms get more crowded and teachers are having to dig more into their pockets for basic supplies in their classroom.
But when we had this proposal, we could not get any Republicans to support this position. And they had the usual rhetoric about Obama’s trying to kill business and raise taxes, et cetera. No, we’re just trying to make sure that we’re making investments in the long term for our kids, which will be good for business -- because businesses in this country aren’t going to succeed if we don’t have engineers and scientists developing new products and so forth.
So I don’t want to lose the votes of all your kids by saying that they need to be in school another month. I do think that we have to have a debate, state by state in local school districts, about making sure what we can do to ensure our kids keep up.
Now, in terms of the issue that you raised about sort of middle class versus poor versus working class, my attitude is that everybody who is working hard, who’s meeting their responsibilities, trying to raise a family, trying to send their kids to college, trying to retire with dignity and respect, trying to get health care -- those folks -- that’s what it means to be middle class in this country.
This is who Michelle and I came from. I mean, I was raised by a single mom. I lived most of my formative years in an apartment that probably was smaller than this room right here, living with my grandparents, and sometimes when my mother was -- when I was living with her, it definitely was an apartment smaller than this.
Michelle, her dad worked as a blue-collar worker for the City of Chicago. And he had multiple sclerosis, but he never missed a day of work. He never graduated from college. Her mom never graduated from college. And yet somehow they were able to -- both of our families were able to give us the best education in the world, and we grew up to be President and First Lady.
Now, that’s what the American Dream is about. So I don’t make a distinction between middle class, working class, poor folks who are trying to get into the middle class. As long as you’re working hard, trying to meet your responsibilities, trying to better yourself and your family, that’s what the American Dream is about.
All the policies that we’ve put in place have been designed to help those folks. So if you are a working family, whether you’re making -- your family income is $100,000 a year or $50,000 a year or $30,000 a year, if you’ve got a kid with a preexisting condition and you can’t get health insurance, because of health reform that child is going to be able to get insurance. And if you can’t afford it because your boss doesn’t offer health insurance, you’re going to be able to be part of a big pool and buy the same health insurance that members of Congress get.
Regardless of where you fall on that income spectrum, if you’ve got a credit card, then the new financial reform bill says credit card companies can’t jack up your interest rates without letting you know. And they can’t increase your interest rates on your existing balances. They can’t run a bait-and-switch and say you’re on -- this is a zero percent interest credit card, then you get $5,000 on your credit card, and you get a letter saying suddenly interest is 29 percent. Can’t do that.
Mortgage brokers can’t steer you into interest rates on buying a house that are more expensive than what you could have gotten because they’re getting a kickback.
A lot of the consumer protections that we put in place, they affect everybody out here.
The student loan programs that we put into place, that impacts families across the board, because, again, whether you’re making $100,000 or $50,000 or $30,000, if you’re trying to send your kid to college, they’re going to probably have to take out some debt. And what we did to take billions of dollars that were going to banks in unjustified subsidies and us saying, no, we’re going to give that money directly to young people in the form of more grants or cheaper loans, capping how much they’re going to have to repay in college to 10 percent of their income -- that helps everybody.
So I think that that -- what will make our economy grow is if this beating heart of our economy, middle-class folks who are working hard, pushing to improve their lot in life, if they’re given some hands up to help them get to where they want to go, then I think our economy as a whole will do well.
Okay. Yes, sir.
Q I’d like to ask you about a local and regional issue -- the James River that runs through Richmond here and the Chesapeake Bay into which it goes. The Perrys depend on the James River to make a living with their outfitting company. Your EPA has very thankfully initiated a wonderful effort to finally clean up all the waters that enter the Chesapeake Bay.
However, our state government is resisting playing its part, whereas going ahead with this cleanup would create thousands of private sector jobs as well as the benefits from clean water and better fish. They’re saying that we can’t afford to do this in this economy, when actually doing it would be the kind of thing that would help the economy and our waters recover. Do you have anything to say about that?
Well, I agree with you, and I’ll pass on your suggestions to Mr. McDonnell -- because -- look, the point you make I think is important as sort of a general point, which is for a long time we tended to think of the environment in conflict with the economy, right? The notion was clean air, clean water is nice to have, but if it comes down to it, it’s more important that we have jobs.
The point you’re making is that clean air and clean water can improve the economy and create new jobs if we think about it in creative ways. And that’s part of the argument that I’ve been making about clean energy.
Let me give you an example. When I came into office, we were producing about 2 percent of the advanced batteries that are used in hybrid cars and electric cars -- 2 percent of the market. And we were probably just barely hanging on. Eventually, if you only got 2 percent of the market, you’re going to end up with zero percent of the market.
So what we did was we said as part of the Recovery Act, let’s invest in a Made in America, homegrown battery manufacturing effort. And we now have across the country people working in factories making advanced batteries that are going into American-made cars, because what we also did at the same time was we raised fuel-efficiency standards on cars and trucks for the first time in 30 years. We didn’t do that, by the way, through legislation. We actually got autoworkers and auto companies and environmentalists and all the stakeholders to agree on raising fuel-efficiency standards nationally. So it didn’t get a lot of attention, because there wasn’t a big ruckus in Washington, we just did it.
And so automakers now want to make more fuel-efficient cars, and we now have the advanced battery manufacturing here in the United States to take advantage of that new market. We estimate that by 2015, we’re going to have 40 percent of the advanced battery market.
So you’ve got a homegrown manufacturing industry here in the United States, putting people to work in good jobs and good wages. But that wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t a market for clean cars.
That’s one of these guy’s -- one of those mics is going off, so I think we’re good.
But I want everybody to understand there are going to be some times where we do have to make some choices. I mean, coal is a good example, where -- coal is a dirty-burning fuel, and mining coal can often be environmentally really destructive, particularly to rivers and waterways. On the other hand, we’ve got tons of coal. We’re the Saudi Arabia of coal.
So what I’ve said is, well, let’s invest in research and development to see if we can burn coal cleanly. And if we have regulations that provide incentives for coal companies to burn coal cleanly and mine coal cleanly, they’ll adapt and they’ll start using new technologies, and that will create a more future-oriented growth industry.
But a lot of folks resisted. Their attitude is, well, no, we don’t want to change anything. We just want to keep on doing what we’ve been doing.
Sooner or later, the world passes you by. China, India, Japan -- all these countries are all thinking about new ways to find clean energy. And if we’re not the ones who get there first in terms of figuring this stuff out, then they’re the ones who are going to get the jobs of the future. And I don’t want them to get those jobs. I want us to have those jobs right here in the United States.
So, yes, sir.
Q My name is Bob -- I’m retired.
Here, Bob, why don’t you grab a mic, although you’ve got a good strong voice.
Q And I had one question for you regarding interest rates. The federal government’s current policy seems to be to keep interest rates at a historical low level. The impact this has on retired seniors is the loss of income they receive on interest on CDs and IRAs. When do you see this policy changing so rates can get back to more normal levels?
Well, first of all, I just want to make clear the administration doesn’t make decisions on interest rates. The Federal Reserve makes decisions on interest rates. And so the -- they really are an independent agency. I have to be very careful when I have a conversation with Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve. I can talk generally about the economy, but I can’t tell him “lower or jack up interest rates.” So I want to make that clear.
But your general point I think is an important one. Interest rates are at a historic low because that was part of the way to avoid us tipping into a depression. By keeping interest rates very low, that meant that businesses that had seen consumer demand really shrink were still able to service their debt and to keep their doors open. And so it was the right thing to do to keep interest rates low.
You are absolutely right that that does have an adverse impact on savers, and particularly seniors on fixed incomes because they’re not getting as much of a return on their savings. The flip side of it is, though, is that inflation is also at a historic low. And so in terms of actual purchasing power, inflation is still low enough that savers are not losing a whole lot of money; they’re just not seeing sort of the compounded interest expand their nest egg like it once did.
I think that you will see a return to higher, more normal interest rates when the economy gets stronger; you naturally start seeing more inflation than you’re currently seeing. And when that happens, that will I think change the position of the Federal Reserve Bank. But as I said, this is not -- this is one of those areas -- the President has got a lot of power, a lot of juice. This is not one area where he’s got juice.
Q What about the over 70 1/2 mandatory deduction you have to take from your savings, IRA savings? Last year you changed it -- we didn’t have to do it.
Yes, we did that temporarily as part of an effort because we understood that people were really going through a tough time and might have to dip into savings. We wanted to make sure they weren’t penalized for it.
Q But we’re still doing that.
Yes, the -- well, things don’t always get through Congress the way you want them. But we’re going to be working on this. We’re going to have to examine a lot of these issues moving forward as part of how we think about simplifying the tax code, making it fairer, and also making sure that folks in fixed incomes aren’t harmed in this environment where it’s harder and harder to save for retirement. So thank you for the question.
Q , my name is --
Well, hold on a second, though -- just because -- I’ll get to you, but this gentleman had his hand up first. Or somebody over here did. It was over here.
Q President Obama, I’m a small business owner, and one thing for sure about small business owner -- tremendously busy.
What kind of business are you in?
Q It’s an arborist firm, tree care. And get home at night, I feel like now I’m one of the few Americans who doesn’t think he can watch a little bit of cable TV and tell everything you know about how to run the economy.
I don’t have time to watch it. It’s over my head. A good percentage of what we talk about here, the economy, I know I’m too busy working to understand how to tell you how to fix the economy.
So what I like to do is elect an official and send him to Washington and have all you smart guys figure that out. Returning to Dan’s question that we didn’t get all the way through, and a young person can recognize it, and I certainly recognize it trying to build team in small business -- is there hope for us returning to civility in our discourse to healthy legislative process to something that I can trust, so as I strap on the boots again tomorrow morning I know you guys got it under control? Because I’m not smart enough to fix it. I’d love to send you guys to Washington and have you do it. And it’s hard to have that faith right now.
Well, look, the -- first of all, I think you give everybody too much credit when you say everybody in Washington is smart guys. I -- we might dispute that.
But you’re making such a powerful point. I think a lot of people were inspired by our campaign because we tried to maintain a very civil tone throughout the campaign. And part of my agenda was changing Washington, right? I mean, I came into national notice when I made a speech in Boston talking about there aren’t red states and blue states, there’s the United States of America. I believe that so profoundly.
I will tell you that changing the culture in Washington is very hard, and I’ve seen it these last two years, because I think that folks in Washington tend to think about how to stay in power more than they think about how to solve problems.
Now, if you look at what happened over the course of these last two years -- and look, I’m sure I made some mistakes -- but essentially what happened was the other side made a calculated decision. They said, “You know what, we really got beat in 2008 bad. The economy is a mess. It’s probably going to take us a while to dig our way out of it. We’ve got two choices. One choice would be to cooperate with the President and work with him to kind of solve these problems, in which case if things don’t work, we get to share the blame, and if things do work, he gets all the credit, and he’ll stay in power.”
So just from a pure political calculation, they said, “We’re better off just saying no to everything, blocking everything. If things don’t work, then Obama will get all the blame. And if things get a little bit better, we won’t be any worse off than we would have been.” That I think was the political calculation.
Now, I have to give them credit -- that from just a raw political point of view, it’s been a pretty successful strategy, right? Because right now people are frustrated. All the good feeling that we had coming into the campaign is dissipated. Everybody is thinking to themselves, well, gosh, you know, we sent Obama up there, we thought the tone would change, folks are arguing just as much as they were before, so we’ve kind of lost hope and we’re a little discouraged, and that means a lot of the people who were supporting me may stay -- are talking about maybe just staying home in the election. And meanwhile, the other side is all ginned up -- we can take power back.
I think that the only way this is going to change is if the same folks who supported me in 2008 -- not just Democrats, but independents and Republicans who want to see the country move forward -- if they don’t sit on the sidelines, they don’t give up, you don’t give up, but you say I’m going to keep on looking for folks who are trying to offer serious solutions to problems. And, you know, we don’t expect our elected officials to be perfect but we do expect them to be honest and real with us about what we’re going to do about education or what we’re going to do about energy or what we’re going to do about this problem or that problem.
And I’ve just got to assume that if people more and more insist and demand on that kind of attitude and are willing to punish folks when they go over the top, whether it’s on the left or the right, in being not so civil, that eventually politicians adapt because they start saying to themselves, well, you know what, this is what voters want.
Now, there’s one last aspect of this that makes it tough and that is the media has gotten very splintered. So what happens is these cable shows and these talk show hosts, they figure -- a lot of them have figured out, the more controversial I can be, if I’m going out there and I’m calling Obama this name or that name or saying he wasn’t born in this country or -- that will get me attention. I will then write a book, I’ll go and sell it, I get -- right?
And there are folks on the left who do the same thing, trying to be purposely provocative, saying the meanest, nastiest things you can say about the other side. They get rewarded in the way our media is set up right now.
So part of the challenge is figuring out how to create a space for people saying we’re all Americans and we’re just going to try to solve our problems, and we’re going to have some differences, because some of these issues are hard -- is there a way where those voices get heard, because right now they’re not really getting heard.
I was amused -- Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show,” apparently he is going to host a rally called something like Americans in Favor of a Return to Sanity or something like that. And his point was, you know, 70 percent of the people, it doesn’t matter what their political affiliation are, 70 percent of the folks are just like you, which is they’re going about their business, they’re working hard every day, they’re looking after their families. They don’t go around calling people names. They don’t make stuff up. They may not be following every single issue, because they just don’t have time. But they are just expecting some common sense and some courtesy in how people interact. And having those voices lifted up is really important. So hopefully, since they’ve got a whole bunch of cameras here, somebody was just listening to you.
Q We’re counting on you, because if you can’t do it, I’m not sure who is going to.
Well, I appreciate that.
Q So my wife and I are counting on you.
Thank you so much. It means a lot. All right, you get -- I’m going to have to make this the last question. Go ahead.
Q Okay, lucky me. , I’m the President of a very small community bank locally. And my question is this. Do you believe that our country, our nation, is stronger as a result of your leadership, having been elected President? And the reason I ask this question is, I was reading earlier today that the consumer confidence index is down almost to the lowest point this year in the last September reading. And the expectations index is also trending downward. And I wonder if you think our nation is strong -- which I would hope you do -- the question is, what is the disconnect between consumers’ perception of the nation, of our economy, and yours?
Right. Well, it’s a great question. There is no doubt in my mind that the country is stronger now than it was a year ago. And so the policies we put in place have reversed a contracting economy. It’s now growing.
As I said before, we were losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month; now each month we’re adding jobs in the private sector.
Businesses are very profitable, which is why the stock market has actually recovered a lot of its value is because companies are making a profit. But I think that the reason there is a disconnect has to do with a couple of things. Number one, it’s the point that -- I’m sorry, what was your name?
Q Scott.
The point that Scott made. I think people just -- it seems like everybody is out there yelling at each other and angry, and so that kind of is disquieting. It makes people feel like the country just is pulling apart as opposed to coming together.
And then that adds to an atmosphere -- oops -- remember I talked energy-efficient buildings, we got to -- (laughter.) So I think that’s part of it. But obviously the most important part of it is just that people are still hurting economically. Even though things have gotten modestly better, you’ve still got millions of people out there who are out of a job.
You’ve still got hundreds of thousands of folks out there who are losing their homes. I hear from them every day in settings like this. I hear from them because I get letters every night from folks who are asking me, why aren’t we seeing faster progress in terms of the economy picking up.
And so, you know, this has been now -- this was the longest recession and the deepest recession by far that we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. Basically, unless you were of age during the Great Depression, folks have never seen anything like this.
So understandably, people are nervous. And I think those two things combine because if you don’t have confidence that the country can pull together and you know that the problems are hard to solve and you know that we’ve got competition from China and India and Brazil and Europe, then you start thinking, well, maybe we’re not going to be the same land of opportunity 20 years from now or 30 years from now as we were. And I think even people who are doing okay right now are anxious about the future of the country.
And I guess my response then to people is to say, look, in our own individual lives each of us go through times where it just seems like we get -- it feels like we get some bad breaks or we make some mistakes, something happens in our life where we’re kind of in a hole. And the deeper the hole sometimes the harder it is to muster up the energy and the go-get-’em attitude to be able to climb out of it.
But if you persist -- at least I’ve found in my life and I’m sure everybody here has found in their lives -- if you persist, if you stay with it, if you have a positive attitude that doesn’t ignore problems but says, “I can solve these problems, as long as I apply myself, and if something doesn’t work I don’t brood on the fact that it doesn’t work; I’m going to try something different. But I’m just going to keep my eye on a better future,” then eventually you get out of the hole. You figure it out. And America has always done that. We’ve been in tough times before, but we’ve always figured it out. Eventually -- this isn’t the first time we’ve had such contentious politics. I mean, shoot, I was -- some people may remember when Bill Clinton was President, folks were going nuts, calling him names, and Hillary names, and frankly, when Ronald Reagan was President, the first couple of years, they were -- the economy went through a very tough time.
And even though now everybody remembers him as a great communicator, at the time, everybody was saying, “Oh, the country is falling apart.” We had inflation and high unemployment. But we got our way -- we found our way through it.
And I think we’ll find our way through this as well. We’re just going to have to be persistent. And the one thing I think everybody has to admit about me, even my detractors, is I’m stubborn. I just -- I stay with it. And I’m not going to lose heart about this country because I know what this country has given to me in my own life.
This is the only country in the world where somebody born in my circumstances could stand before you as the President of the United States -- or as the President of their country. There’s no other country that can provide that kind of opportunity. And if that was true for me, that’s going to be true for the next generation. But we’re just going to have to keep on pushing. And being with families like all of yours gives me great confidence in the future.
So thank you very much, everybody. Appreciate it.
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Now, here’s the good news -- and I’ve said this to young people. I think that this generation, your son’s generation, is smarter, more sophisticated, more passionate, has a broader worldview. I think that they don’t take things for granted; they’re willing to work hard for whatever they can achieve. I think they think about the community and other people and they don’t just have a narrow focus on what’s in it for me. When I meet young people these days, I am very impressed with them. I think they’re -- they are terrifically talented.
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Now, the situation there is very tough. Afghanistan is the second-poorest country in the world. There are a lot of countries in the world. This is the second poorest. It has a 70 percent illiteracy rate. Afghanistan was much less developed than Iraq was. And it had no significant traditions of a strong central government that could provide services to its people, or a civil service, or -- just the basic infrastructure of a modern nation state.
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Here’s the impact it will have on our budget. There are going to be still some hangover costs from these two wars -- the most obvious one being veterans, which we haven’t always taken care of as well as we should have, and I’ve had to ramp up veterans spending significantly because I think that’s a sacred trust. They’ve served us well; we’ve got to serve them well. And that means services for post-traumatic stress disorder, reducing backlogs in terms of them getting disability claims, help specifically for women veterans who are much more in the line of fire now than they’d ever been before. All those things cost some money.
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We don’t think credit card companies should be able to jack up your rates without any notice and without any reason. We want to make sure that taxpayers never again have to pay for bailouts because of reckless risks taken by a few. We don’t believe in privatization of Social Security -- because as long as I’m President we’re not going to have our retirement savings handed over to Wall Street.
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Whether you care about protecting Social Security, or you care about protecting our environment; whether you care about having an energy policy that can start freeing ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, or you believe in a foreign policy that fosters cooperation among other nations, there is a choice in this election. We know what we're fighting for.
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That’s the choice in this election. We believe Social Security should never be privatized, not as long as I'm President. We’re not going to take the retirement savings of a generation of Americans and hand it over to Wall Street. That’s the choice in the election. That’s what we’re fighting for.
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And that’s what we’ve done over the last two years. And I could not be prouder of the record of accomplishment in this Congress. A lot of it happened so fast people didn’t realize it. Within the first few months, not only had we made investments in clean energy that were unprecedented, not only did we significantly increase our research and development so that we could continue to be an innovation economy, not only did we make the largest investment in infrastructure since Eisenhower built the Interstate Highway System, not only did we make the largest investment in education in history, but we had made sure that 4 million children who hadn’t previously gotten it had health insurance.
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I want to thank the first-time voters and Temple University Young Democrats -- for all the great work you guys have done. And give it up for Quincy Lyons for the great job he’s doing organizing.
Now, I am not here to give a long speech, because I want everybody out there, not in here. I’m here to deliver two messages.
The first message is thank you, because not only did all of you mobilize, organize and energize in 2008 to help send me to the White House -- but over the last two years, so many of you have continued to be involved each and every day to make sure that we could keep moving this country forward. It’s because of you that young people are getting college scholarships that weren’t getting it before.
It’s because of you that young people can now stay on their parents’ health insurance till they’re 26 -- and folks who have health insurance aren’t dropped by insurance companies when they get sick.
And the fact that -- and it’s because of you that we’re also going to be able to fund AIDS. It’s because of you that we are going to be in a position to make sure that each and every person out there is able to find work after a devastating economic crisis that made such a difference to so many families all across this country.
Now, here’s the thing, though, guys. You cannot stop now, because the fact of the matter is we are in a difficult election. It’s difficult here in Pennsylvania. It is difficult all across the country.
And unless each and every one of you turn out, and get your friends to turn out, and get your families to turn out, then we could fall short, and all the progress that we’ve made over the last couple of years can be rolled back.
So the key right now is not just to show up here, it’s not just to listen to speeches. It’s to go out there and do the hard work that's going to be required to bring this home over the last few days. That's going to be the key.
And so I know that some of you may have been at the rally we had with 20,000 folks of Germantown. But you know what, coming to a rally, that's not the hard part. What I need this weekend is 20,000 doors knocked on by all the volunteers who are here today. Is that something that you think you can do, 20,000?
In order for Joe Sestak to be successful and Dan Onorato to be successful and the entire Democratic ticket to be successful, you're going to need to talk to folks everywhere you can and make sure that you describe to them the future that you see for this country.
You want a country where every young person can get a decent education. You want a country where nobody is bankrupt because they get sick. You want a country where our seniors can retire with dignity and respect, and Social Security is there not just for this generation but for future generations.
You want a country that has the best infrastructure in the world. We used to be number one. We can’t have the best rail lines and the best airports built in China or Singapore. They need to be right here in the United States of America.
We don't want to be falling behind in math and science and technology. We’ve got to be first in research and development and technology to make sure that the new products and new services are developed right here in the United States.
We want clean energy here. We don't want solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars built in China or Europe. We want them built here in the United States with American workers.
And so it is absolutely critical that you go out there and you describe your hopes for the future, especially the young people here, because this election is not just going to set the stage for the next two years. It’s going to set the stage for the next 10, for the next 20.
And for those of you who were so excited two years ago, I just want to remind you this. Two years ago was not about me. It was about you and it was about this country. And I said then that change was going to be hard. Now, we’ve been involved in some tough fights over the last two years. We can’t move backwards now. We’ve got to keep moving forward now. And that's all going to be up to you.
So I want everybody to get out there, knock on doors, make phone calls, volunteer, talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, go into the beauty shops, go into the barber shops, when you’re in church or -- you know, this weekend, I want everybody to be talking about -- have folks voted.
If you do that, then I am confident we’re not just going to win this election but we’re going to keep on moving this country forward so that the American Dream is accessible for everybody, not just some.
Thank you very much, Philadelphia. I love you. God bless you. Let’s get busy. Let’s go to work. Thank you.
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All of us have benefited from their work. The scientists in this room helped develop the semiconductors and microprocessors that have propelled the Information Age. They’ve modeled the inner workings of the human mind and the complex processes that shape the Earth’s climate. They’ve conducted pioneering research -- from mathematics to quantum physics -- into the sometimes strange and unexpected laws that govern our universe.
Folks here can also claim inventions like the digital camera, which has revolutionized photography -- as all these folks back here will testify. As well as superglue, which, in addition to fascinating children -- has actually saved lives as a means of sealing wounds.
And the men and women we celebrate today have helped to unlock the secrets of genetics and disease, of nanotechnology and solar energy, of chemistry and biology -- breakthroughs that provide so many benefits and hold so much potential, from new sources of electricity to new ways of diagnosing and treating illness.
Along the way, many of these folks have broken down barriers for women and minorities who’ve traditionally been underrepresented in scientific fields -- but obviously are no less capable of contributing to the scientific enterprise.
Just as an example, at the start of her career, decades ago, Esther Cornwell [sic] was hired as an assistant engineer. But soon after she was told that this position wasn’t open to a woman. She had to serve as an engineer’s assistant instead. Of course, that didn’t stop her from becoming a pioneer in semiconductors and materials science.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the scientists and innovators in this room have saved lives, improved our health and well-being, helped unleash whole new industries and millions of jobs, transformed the way we work and learn and communicate. And this incredible contribution serves as proof not only of their incredible creativity and skill but of the promise of science itself.
Every day, in research laboratories and on proving grounds, in private labs and university campuses, men and women conduct the difficult, often frustrating work of discovery. It isn’t easy. It may take years to prove a hypothesis correct -- or decades to learn that it isn’t correct. Often the competition can be fierce -- whether in designing a product or securing a grant. And rarely do those who give their all to this pursuit receive the attention or the acclaim they deserve.
Yet it is in these labs -- often late at night, often fueled by a dangerous combination of coffee and obsession -- that our future is being won. For in a global economy, the key to our prosperity will never be to compete by paying our workers less or building cheaper, lower-quality products. That's not our advantage. The key to our success -- as it has always been -- will be to compete by developing new products, by generating new industries, by maintaining our role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It’s absolutely essential to our future.
And that’s why we’re here today, and why I look forward to events like these. I believe one of the most important jobs that I have as President is to restore science to its rightful place. That means strengthening our commitment to research. It means ensuring that our government makes decisions based on the best evidence, rather than politics. It means reforming and improving math and science education -- and encouraging the private sector to inspire young people to pursue careers in science and engineering.
And it means fostering a climate of innovation and entrepreneurship -- from incentives in clean energy to tax breaks to start-ups. I’d also point out that’s not just a job for government. Creating this climate depends on all of us, including businesses and universities and nonprofits.
One of the most important ways in which we can restore science to its rightful place is by celebrating the contributions of men and women like all of you. Because that’s how we’ll excite a new generation to follow in your footsteps. That’s how we can spark the imagination of a young person who just might change the world. I was reminded of how important this is just a few weeks ago. We held a science fair here at the White House. Some of you may have heard about it.
We welcome all the time championship sports teams to the White House to celebrate their victories. I thought we ought to do the same thing for the winners of science fairs and robotic contests and math competitions -- because those young people often don’t get the credit that they deserve. Nobody rushes on the field and dumps Gatorade on them -- when you win a science award. Maybe they should.
So I got to meet these incredibly talented and enthusiastic young men and women. There was a team of high school kids from Tennessee that had designed a self-powered water purification system. We had robots running all over through the State Dining Room.
The last young person I spoke to was a young woman from Texas -- she was 16 years old. She was studying biology as a freshman, decided she was interested in cancer research, so taught herself chemistry during the summer; then designed a science project to look at new cancer drugs, based on some experimental drugs that are activated by light. They could allow a more focused treatment that targets the cancer cells while living, healthy cells remain unharmed.
She goes on to design her own drug; wins the international science competition. And she told me that she and her high school science teacher are being approached by laboratories across the country to collaborate -- on this potential new cancer treatment. This is a true story -- 16 years old, taught herself chemistry. Incredibly inspiring.
And at a time of significant challenge in this country -- at a moment when people are feeling so much hardship in their lives -- this has to give us hope for the future. It ought to remind us of the incredible potential of this country and its people -- as long as we unlock it; as long as we put resources into it and we celebrate it and we encourage it, we embrace it.
You know, Carl Sagan once said, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” That way of thinking -- that combination of curiosity and skepticism, the sense of wonder and the willingness to test our assumptions -- it’s what, at root, we are honoring today. It’s what has spurred countless advances and conferred untold benefits on our society. And it’s an idea that has driven our success for as long as we have been a nation.
And I’m confident that this spirit of discovery and invention will continue to help us succeed in the years and decades to come. And our country owes every one of our laureates with us today a big measure of thanks for nurturing that spirit and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge.
So it is now my privilege to present the National Medals of Science and the National Medals of Technology and Innovation.
(The citations are read.)
Yakir Aharonov. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Yakir Aharonov, Chapman University, for his contributions to the foundations of quantum physics and for drawing out unexpected implications of that field ranging from the Aharonov-Bohm effect to the theory of weak measurement.
(The medal is presented.)
Stephen J. Benkovic. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Stephen J. Benkovic, Pennsylvania State University, for his research contributions in the field of bioorganic chemistry, which have changed our understanding of how enzymes function and advanced the identification of targets and strategies for drug design.
(The medal is presented.)
Esther M. Conwell. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Esther M. Conwell, University of Rochester, for her broad contributions to understanding electron and hole transport in semiconducting materials, which helped to enable commercial applications of semiconductor and organic electronic devices, and for extending her analysis to studying the electronic properties of DNA.
(The medal is presented.)
Marye Anne Fox. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Marye Anne Fox, University of California San Diego, for her research contributions in the areas of organic photochemistry and electrochemistry, and for enhancing our understanding of excited-state and charge-transfer processes with interdisciplinary applications in material science, solar energy conversion, and environmental chemistry.
(The medal is presented.)
Susan Lee Lindquist. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Susan Lee Lindquist, Whitehead Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for her studies of protein folding, demonstrating that alternative protein conformations and aggregations can have profound and unexpected biological influences, facilitating insights in fields as wide-ranging as human disease, evolution, and biomaterials.
(The medal is presented.)
Mortimer Mishkin. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Mortimer Mishkin, National Institutes of Health, for his contributions to understanding the neural basis of perception and memory in primates, notably the delineation of sensory neocortical processing systems, especially for vision, audition, and somatic sensation, and the organization of memory systems in the brain.
(The medal is presented.)
David B. Mumford. The 2009 National Medal of Science to David B. Mumford, Brown University, for his contributions to the field of mathematics, which fundamentally changed algebraic geometry, and for connecting mathematics to other disciplines such as computer vision and neurobiology.
(The medal is presented.)
Stanley B. Prusiner. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Stanley B. Prusiner, University of California San Francisco, for his discovery of prions, the causative agent of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and other related neurodegenerative diseases, and his continuing efforts to develop effective methods for detecting and treating prion diseases.
(The medal is presented.)
Warren M. Washington. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Warren M. Washington, National Center for Atmospheric Research, for his development and use of global climate models to understand climate and explain the role of human activities and natural processes in the Earth’s climate system, and for his work to support a diverse science and engineering workforce.
(The medal is presented.)
Amnon Yariv. The 2009 National Medal of Science to Amnon Yariv, California Institute of Technology, for foundational contributions to photonics and quantum electronics, including the demonstration of the semiconductor distributed feedback laser that underpins today’s high-speed, optical fiber communications.
(The medal is presented.)
Harry W. Coover. The 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Harry W. Coover, Eastman Chemical Company, for his invention of cyanoacrylates -- novel adhesives known widely to consumers as “super glues” -- which today play significant roles in medicine and industry.
(The medal is presented.)
Helen M. Free. The 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Helen M. Free, Miles Laboratories, for her seminal contributions to diagnostic chemistry through development of dip-and-read urinalysis, which gave rise to a technological revolution in convenient, reliable, point-of-care tests and patience self-monitoring.
(The medal is presented.)
Steven J. Sasson. The 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Steven J. Sasson, Eastman Kodak Company, for the invention of the digital camera, which has revolutionized -- which has revolutionized the way images are captured, stored, and created, creating new opportunities in commerce, education, and global communication.
This picture better be good.
Federico Faggin, Marcian E. Hoff Jr., and Stanley Mazor. The 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Federico Faggin, Marcian E. Hoff Jr., and Stanley Mazor, Intel Corporation, for the conception, design and application of the first microprocessor, which was commercially adopted and became the universal building block of digital electronic systems, significantly impacting the global economy and people’s day-to-day lives.
(The medals are presented.)
Well, let me make two closing points. Number one, I feel really smart just standing up here with these folks. I think it kind of rubbed off on me.
Number two, I want to congratulate our military aide for being able to read all those things. I want to assure you he practiced a lot.
And finally, let me just once again say to all the honorees who are here tonight, you have truly revolutionized the world in ways that are profoundly important to people in their day-to-day lives, but also help to create those steps in human progress that really make us who we are as human beings. And so we could not be prouder of you, could not be more grateful to you for your contributions.
Please give them one last big round of applause.
Everybody, enjoy the party.
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I’m confident that we should be able to get the votes. Keep in mind that every President since Ronald Reagan has presented a arms treaty with Russia and been able to get ratification. And for the most part, these treaties have been debated on the merits; the majority of them have passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support. There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to get that done this time as well.
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Our two most fundamental challenges are keeping the American people safe and growing our economy -- and it’s in that spirit that I look forward to sitting down tomorrow and talking about urgent matters like the ratification of the New START treaty, which is so essential to our safety and security; and the status of the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of this year. And this is just one of the many economic issues we’ve got to tackle together in the months ahead.
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I did not reach this decision easily. This is not just a line item on a federal ledger. These are people’s lives. They’re doctors and nurses who care for our veterans; scientists who search for better treatments and cures; men and women who care for our national parks and secure our borders and our skies; Americans who see that the Social Security checks get out on time, who make sure that scholarships comes through, who devote themselves to our safety. They’re patriots who love their country and often make many sacrifices to serve their country.
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It is important, I think, to note that even with China’s enormous population, the United States still does more trade with Europe than it does with China. That, I think, gives an indication of the amount of progress that can be made if we are consulting with each other, if we are hearing specifically from businesses in terms of how we can ease some of the frictions that exist in our trading relationship.
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To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. We must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans’ guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.
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And so Robert came to work with me and we had what appeared to be a pretty significant general election, and then Alan Keyes came in and so that ended up not being our primary focus. We then had this incredible opportunity to speak at the national convention in Boston. And I know that a lot of you think that probably most attention was devoted to the speech that I delivered, the keynote speech in Boston, but in fact actually the most challenging problem was what tie to wear.
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I want us to be an economy that is not simply buying from other people and borrowing to do it. I want us to be selling to other people and having some other folks owe us some money. And so it is going to be absolutely critical for us during a period of significant fiscal constraint that we create the kind of public/private partnership that makes that happen. And it’s going to be very important for us to get ideas from people who’ve actually -- are actually on the ground right now, trying to build your businesses and operate in a extraordinarily competitive world.
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I also share your concern about Medicaid costs. I know this has been a topic of significant conversation over the last couple of days. We know that over half of all Medicaid costs come from just 5 percent of enrollees, many of whom are what’s called dual eligibles -- seniors in Medicare as well as in Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act helps address this by changing the incentives for providers so that they start adopting best practices that will work to reduce cost while improving quality.
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First of all, I think it’s very easy to square our military actions and our stated policies. Our military action is in support of a international mandate from the Security Council that specifically focuses on the humanitarian threat posed by Colonel Qaddafi to his people. Not only was he carrying out murders of civilians but he threatened more. He said very specifically, we will show no mercy to people who lived in Benghazi.
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So there are a whole range of policies that we are putting in place that has created one of the most powerful international consensuses around the isolation of Mr. Qaddafi, and we will continue to pursue those. But when it comes to our military action, we are doing so in support of U.N. Security Resolution 1973, that specifically talks about humanitarian efforts. And we are going to make sure that we stick to that mandate.
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Absolutely. We are in consultations as we speak. As I said, there are different phases to the campaign. The initial campaign, we took a larger role because we’ve got some unique capabilities. Our ability to take out, for example, Qaddafi’s air defense systems are much more significant than some of our other partners. What that does then is it creates the space; it shapes the environment in which a no-fly zone can actually be effective.
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PRESIDENT PINERA: (As translated.) Good afternoon, everyone. Firstly, I would like to cordially and heartily welcome a friend of Chile and a personal friend, President Obama. I think that your visit, President, is very important and has enormous significance for Chile. It’s the first time in more than 20 years that a President of the United States visits our country.
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And in fact, as part of the planning effort leading up to this, I specifically had discussions with Admiral Mullen and other of our military personnel to make sure that we had the kind of standard recovery efforts in place, because there are risks involved. And on the day that I indicated that this was a possibility, and then on the day that I indicated that we, in fact, were moving forward, I said that there is no military operation that does not entail risk. And that's why this is always the most difficult decision that I make as Commander-in-Chief and as President of the United States.
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We're already seeing a significant reduction in the number of U.S. planes that are involved in operations over Libya, because, as I said initially, our job was to take our unique capabilities and create a space to shape the environment so that the operation of a no-fly zone could operate effectively, and to make sure that our immediate humanitarian goals could be met.
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Specifically on immigration reform first, as I indicated in my remarks and as I said in my State of the Union speech, I continue to believe in comprehensive immigration reform. America is a nation of laws and it is a nation of immigrants. And so our job is to create secure borders, to make sure that we’re got a legal immigration system that is effective and is not frustrating for families, doesn’t divide families.
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Now, you were absolutely right that as long as Qaddafi remains in power, unless he changes his approach and provides the Libyan people an opportunity to express themselves freely and there are significant reforms in the Libyan government, unless he is willing to step down, that there are still going to be potential threats towards the Libyan people.
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And specifically with respect to young people who are coming to school and English may not be their native language, we’ve got to make sure that we continue to fund strong programs, both bilingual education programs but also immersion programs that ensure that young people are learning English but they’re not falling behind in their subjects even as they are learning English.
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I set this goal knowing that we’re still going to have to import some oil. It will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time, until we’ve gotten alternative energy strategies fully in force. And when it comes to the oil we import from other nations, obviously we’ve got to look at neighbors like Canada and Mexico that are stable and steady and reliable sources. We also have to look at other countries like Brazil. Part of the reason I went down there is to talk about energy with the Brazilians. They recently discovered significant new oil reserves, and we can share American technology and know-how with them as they develop these resources.
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Now, in light of the ongoing events in Japan, I want to just take a minute to talk about nuclear power. Right now, America gets about one-fifth of our electricity from nuclear energy. And it’s important to recognize that nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So those of us who are concerned about climate change, we’ve got to recognize that nuclear power, if it’s safe, can make a significant contribution to the climate change question.
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Hi, . My name is Vinita Griffin (ph). I’m a late student here at Northern Virginia Community College. I’m in my second career now. My question is, in about 15 years I’ll be eligible for Social Security. And I’m part of the baby boomer generation, and I don’t know if there will be Social Security when I get ready to -- and I probably won’t retire for another 25 years, I’m thinking.
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Well, let me talk about Social Security. The big drivers of our deficit are health care costs. I mean, the thing that we’ve really got to get control of is Medicare and Medicaid. That’s what’s skyrocketing really fast. Because not only is the population getting older, but health care costs are just going up a lot faster than people’s wages and salaries -- or tax revenues to the federal government.
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Now, here’s the thing. If we don’t do anything on Social Security, if we just don’t -- if we don’t touch it at all, then what would happen is, by the time you retire, or maybe just a couple years after you retire, you might find that instead of getting every dollar that you were counting on, you’re only getting 75 cents out of that dollar. Because what’s happening is the population is getting older; there are more retirees per worker and more money starts going out than is coming in.
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So we do have to stabilize Social Security’s finances, but we can do that with some relatively modest changes -- unlike health care, where we’ve got to get in and work with providers and really get some much more substantial reforms. With Social Security, it’s just a matter of tweaking how it currently works.
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Now, politically, it’s hard to do. Politically, it’s hard to do. For example -- I’ll just give you one example of a change that would make a difference in Social Security. Right now you only pay a Social Security tax up to a certain point of your income. So a little bit over $100,000, your Social Security -- you don’t pay Social Security tax.
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Now, how many people are making less than $100,000 a year? Don’t be bashful. The point is, for the vast majority of Americans, every dime you earn, you’re paying some in Social Security. But for Warren Buffett, he stops paying at a little bit over $100,000 and then the next $50 billion he’s not paying a dime in Social Security taxes.
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So we are going to have to make some changes in Social Security, but it’s not the major driver of our deficit. And what I’ve proposed is let’s work on Social Security, but let’s not confuse that with this major budget debate that we’re having about how we deal with both spending and revenues because that is the problem that is going to require some really hard work and some bipartisan cooperation. Okay?
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So now what we’ve got is a situation not only do we have this accumulated debt, but the baby boomers are just now starting to retire. And what’s scary is not only that the baby boomers are retiring at a greater rate, which means they're making greater demands on Social Security, but primarily Medicare and Medicaid, but health care costs go up a lot faster than inflation and older populations use more health care costs. You put that all together, and we have an unsustainable situation.
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So we've put in place a bunch of programs to try to see if we can speed along the process of reaching a new equilibrium. For example, what we did is we went to the mortgage lender and said, why don't you renegotiate with your mortgage -- with the person with the mortgage, renegotiate the terms of their mortgage so that their principal is a little bit lower, they can afford the payments, and that way homes don't get foreclosed on, there are fewer homes on the market, and that will raise prices and that will be good for everybody. And we've seen some significant progress on that front.
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We made the largest investment in history in clean energy research, and it’s really paying off. For example, when I came into office, we had about 2 percent of the advanced battery manufacturing here in America. And as everybody here knows, what’s really holding us back from my goal of a million electric vehicles on the road is that battery technology is still tough. It’s clunky; it’s heavy; it’s expensive. And if we can make significant improvements in battery technology then I think the opportunities for electric vehicles, alternative vehicles that are much cheaper -- our opportunities are limitless.
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Their basic view is that no matter how successful I am, no matter how much I’ve taken from this country -- I wasn’t born wealthy; I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents. I went to college on scholarships. There was a time when my mom was trying to get her PhD, where for a short time she had to take food stamps. My grandparents relied on Medicare and Social Security to help supplement their income when they got old.
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Our hope is, is that over the next five years, we’re able to see significant savings through these mechanisms, and that will save everybody -- not just people who are on Medicare and Medicaid -- it will save everybody money including folks here at Facebook. Because I’m sure that you guys provide health insurance and I suspect if you look at your health insurance bills they don't make you happy. Okay.
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Well, first of all, I appreciate the support and I appreciate the work you’re doing on education. It turns out that when Social Security was passed, initially it was really unpopular, and all kinds of lawsuits were brought against Social Security. And people said we were going socialist. Sound familiar? And now everybody loves Social Security, because once the program got up and running, people understood, you know what, this provides a basic floor, a baseline, so if something goes wrong in my life, even though I’m doing all the responsible things, even though I’m saving, I’m working hard every day, I’m looking out for my family, I’m doing what I’m supposed to do -- if at the end, somehow, things didn’t work out the way I planned, I’ve still got this baseline of savings.
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I’m going to be very brief. First of all, I just want to thank Jeffrey and Marilyn and all of you who were involved in helping put this together. Jeffrey has been an extraordinary friend from the start, and a lot of you got involved at a time when the prospect of electing a Barack Hussein Obama to the Oval Office was slim. None of you asked for my birth certificate. It was a complete leap of faith.
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Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on at any given day and I've got other things to do. But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we're going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here.
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And we’ve got the potential, I think, to make some decisions that are going to have ramifications for the next 50 years. I’m optimistic we’ll make the right decisions. And I’m optimistic that for the next five-and-a-half years I’m going to be able to do my part in leading the country in a good direction.
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GENERAL ALLEN: , thank you. I’m deeply honored by this selection, and I’m grateful for the support and the leadership of Secretary Gates and Chairman Mullen. Sir, I am mindful of the significance of this responsibility and I am deeply committed to the leadership of the magnificent young men and women of our armed forces and those of the armed forces of this great and historic coalition of nations.
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If I’m driving by Central Park and I see an elderly couple strolling, holding hand-in-hand, and I think to myself someday Michelle and me, we’re going to be strolling hand-in-hand. And I’ll be able to take a walk in Central Park again, and nobody will recognize me. But it makes me to feel good to know that that couple, they’ve got Social Security, they’ve got Medicare, that they’ve got a sense of dignity and security in their golden years.
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We do it not just out of charity but because it makes our lives better. We know that when we see that elderly couple strolling through Central Park, holding hands, and they know that they’ve got the security of Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, that that makes us better, because we think, you know, someday I want to be Michelle -- I want it to be me and Michelle strolling down Central Park. There’s going to be a time where I can go walking again. And I would want to make sure that I’ve got some security in those golden years.
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Even since before the earthquake and the disaster, we have been working on the rebirth of Japanese economy and fiscal conservation and reform in Japan’s social security and those various challenges. And the work on those agenda came to a halt right after the earthquake. But along with our efforts on reconstruction from the disaster, we will be working on those challenges which have been pointed out even since before the earthquake.
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All of France is happy to welcome you, sir, and in particular, the people of Normandy that have certainly not forgotten all that they and we owe the Americans. For all of us French men and women, and particularly for the people of Normandy, when the President of the United States is standing on this ground, it is particularly significant, because, sadly, there are many young Americans who gave their lives for us, who rest on Normandy soil. And I think it’s very important to send this message back with you home. As time passes, we have not forgotten the sacrifices you made.
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Talking about the direct security of Poland, I have to tell you that it is a very important sign for us to reach an agreement which will be finalized by the signing of the memorandum of understanding, the memorandum that in the future will mean the presence of American troops on the Polish soil. The order of magnitude is not really large, but the gesture is very significant.
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Now, as the Prime Minister mentioned, that evolution of our security relationship continues to evolve. The aviation detachment that is being finalized will be significant, and we’re proud that we’ve gotten that completed. Our missile defense plans that we have laid out that involve Poland will allow us to deal with shared threats. And what we want to do is to create an environment in this region in which peace and security are a given. That’s not just good for this region; it is good for the United States of America. And we will always be there for Poland.
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And so, for us to see Democratic senators acknowledge that we've got to deal with our long-term debt problems that arise out of our various entitlement programs, and for Republican senators to acknowledge that revenues will have to be part of a balanced package that makes sure that nobody is disproportionately hurt from us making progress on the debt and deficits I think is a very significant step. And as I said, the framework that they put forward is broadly consistent with what we've been working on here in the White House and with the presentations that I've made to the leadership when they've come over here.
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So here's where we stand. We have a Democratic President and administration that is prepared to sign a tough package that includes both spending cuts, modifications to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare that would strengthen those systems and allow them to move forward, and would include a revenue component. We now have a bipartisan group of senators who agree with that balanced approach. And we’ve got the American people who agree with that balanced approach.
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Well, as I said, I think what you’re going to be seeing is an evaluation of that plan versus the things that we’ve been looking at. I think what you’re going to see is some significant overlap. But obviously just because we might agree in principle with a range of issues with six senators or seven senators, that doesn’t get us out of the House of Representatives; that doesn’t get us out of the Senate. There’s going to have to be a broader agreement on the part of all the leadership that we’re going to get this done in a serious way, and we’ve got a tight deadline to do it.
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Q Hi, my name is Darla Bunting. I’m a third grade literacy teacher in Southeast D.C. And I view gentrification as a Catch 22, because, on one hand, you’re bringing major businesses to underdeveloped areas in different cities, but on the other hand, the very people who live in the neighborhoods, it kind of seems as though they’re not reaping the benefits. And I wanted to know how can we create sustainable neighborhoods that allow people who are still trying to achieve the American Dream to be able to afford and live in these brand new neighborhoods and communities?
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Well, first of all, I have to say that gentrification has been a problem in some communities. But right now, frankly, that would probably be a problem that a lot of communities would welcome if there was a lot of investment going on. We’re probably seeing in a lot of cities around the country the reverse problem, which is no investment, people not building new homes, young people not moving back into some of these communities and it's emptying out. So as problems go for cities, this is probably not a bad problem to have because it means the city is growing and attracting new businesses and new energy.
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But, as I said, for a lot of cities right now, the big problem is not gentrification. The big problem is property values have plummeted -- you got a bunch of boarded-up buildings, a bunch of boarded-up stores. And the question is how do you get economic activity going back in those communities again.
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Now, what you’ll hear from the other side is the most important thing for putting people back to work is simply cutting taxes or keeping taxes low. And I have to remember -- I have to remind them that we actually have sort of a comparison. We have Bill Clinton, who created 22 million jobs during the eight years of his presidency, in which the tax rates were significantly higher than they are now and would be higher even if, for example, the tax breaks for the high-income Americans that I’ve called for taking back, even if those got taken back taxes would still be lower now than they were under Bill Clinton, but the economy did great; generated huge amounts of jobs. And then we had the eight years before I was elected, in which taxes were very low, but there was tepid job growth.
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Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs -- Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation, and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.
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So let me reiterate what we were offering. We were offering a deal that called for as much discretionary savings as the Gang of Six. We were calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed. And we were calling for modifications to entitlement programs, would have saved just as much over the 10-year window. In other words, this was an extraordinarily fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.
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And I think that one of the questions that the Republican Party is going to have to ask itself is can they say yes to anything? Can they say yes to anything? I mean, keep in mind it’s the Republican Party that has said that the single most important thing facing our country is deficits and debts. We’ve now put forward a package that would significantly cut deficits and debt. It would be the biggest debt reduction package that we’ve seen in a very long time.
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And so the question is, what can you say yes to? Now, if their only answer is what they’ve presented, which is a package that would effectively require massive cuts to Social Security, to Medicare, to domestic spending, with no revenues whatsoever, not asking anything from the wealthiest in this country or corporations that have been making record profits -- if that’s their only answer, then it’s going to be pretty difficult for us to figure out where to go. Because the fact of the matter is that’s what the American people are looking for, is some compromise, some willingness to put partisanship aside, some willingness to ignore talk radio or ignore activists in our respective bases, and do the right thing.
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Well, when it comes to all the checks, not just Social Security -- veterans, people with disabilities -- about 70 million checks are sent out each month -- if we default then we’re going to have to make adjustments. And I’m already consulting with Secretary Geithner in terms of what the consequences would be.
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But that shouldn’t even be an option. That should not be an option. I’m getting letters from people who write me and say, at the end of every month I have to skip meals. Senior citizens on Social Security who are just hanging on by a thread. Folks who have severe disabilities who are desperate every single month to try to figure out how they’re going to make ends meet. But it’s not just those folks. You’ve got business contractors who are providing services to the federal government, who have to wonder are they going to be able to get paid and what does that do in terms of their payrolls.
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You’ve got just a huge number of people who, in one way or another, interact with the federal government. And even if you don’t, even if you’re not a recipient of Social Security, even if you don’t get veterans’ benefits or disabilities, imagine what that does to the economy when suddenly 70 million checks are put at risk. I mean, if you’re a business out there, that is not going to be good for economic growth. And that’s the number one concern of the American people.
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Now, what is absolutely true is we wanted more revenue than they had initially offered. But as you’ll see, the spending cuts that we were prepared to engage in were at least as significant as the spending cuts that you’ve seen in a whole range of bipartisan proposals, and we had basically agreed within $10 billion, $20 billion -- we were within that range.
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So that wasn’t the reason this thing broke down. We were consistent in saying that it was going to be important for us to have at least enough revenue that we could protect current beneficiaries of Social Security, for example, or current beneficiaries of Medicare; that we weren’t slashing Medicaid so sharply that states suddenly were going to have to throw people off the health care rolls. And we were consistent in that.
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If I’m saying to future recipients of Social Security or Medicare that you’re going to have to make some adjustments, it’s important that we’re also willing to make some adjustments when it comes to corporate jet owners, or oil and gas producers, or people who are making millions or billions of dollars.
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What’s clear now is that any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan. It must have the support of both parties that were sent here to represent the American people -– not just one faction. It will have to have the support of both the House and the Senate. And there are multiple ways to resolve this problem. Senator Reid, a Democrat, has introduced a plan in the Senate that contains cuts agreed upon by both parties. Senator McConnell, a Republican, offered a solution that could get us through this. There are plenty of modifications we can make to either of these plans in order to get them passed through both the House and the Senate and would allow me to sign them into law. And today I urge Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to find common ground on a plan that can get support -- that can get support from both parties in the House –- a plan that I can sign by Tuesday.
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So there are plenty of ways out of this mess. But we are almost out of time. We need to reach a compromise by Tuesday so that our country will have the ability to pay its bills on time, as we always have -- bills that include monthly Social Security checks, veterans’ benefits and the government contracts we’ve signed with thousands of businesses. Keep in mind, if we don’t do that, if we don’t come to an agreement, we could lose our country’s AAA credit rating, not because we didn’t have the capacity to pay our bills -- we do -- but because we didn’t have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating.
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All these leaders were elected through free and fair elections. They’ve shown extraordinary persistence in wanting to promote democracy in their countries despite significant risks to their own personal safety and despite enormous challenges, in some cases -- most recently in Côte d’Ivoire -- in actually implementing the results of these elections.
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These countries all underscore what I emphasized when I visited Ghana and gave a speech about Africa as a whole -- this is a moment of great opportunity and significant progress in Africa. Politically, the majority of Sub-Saharan African countries are now embracing democracy. Economically, Africa is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world.
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When folks tell you that we’ve got a choice between jobs now or dealing with our debt crisis, they’re wrong. They’re wrong. We can’t afford to just do one or the other. We’ve got to do both. And the way to do it is to make some -- reform the tax code, close loopholes, make some modest modifications in programs like Medicare and Social Security so they’re there for the next generation, stabilize those systems. And you could actually save so much money that you could actually pay for some of the things like additional infrastructure right now.
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Well, first of all, let me separate out some of these programs. And I’m going to start with Social Security. People pay into Social Security. It’s a social insurance program. They’re not getting it for free. It’s not a handout. It’s taken out of your check. It’s been taken out of your check for a lifetime. And it provides you a floor when you retire.
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Now, hopefully, people have other savings that help supplement their incomes in their golden years. But we’ve got to make sure Social Security is there not just for this generation but for the next generation. Now, Social Security is not posing a huge problem with respect to our debt and our deficit. There is a problem that if we don’t make any modifications at all, then in a few years what will start happening is, is that the amount of money going out is more than the amount coming -- amount of money going in. And people debate how soon, but in a couple of decades you’d start having a situation where you’d only get 75 cents on the dollar that you expected on Social Security.
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If we make some modest changes now, the kind of changes that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill agreed to back in 1983, we can preserve Social Security, make sure it’s there for the future 75 years out. So Social Security is something that we can solve relatively easily. It doesn’t mean that we don’t make any changes at all, because there may be some tweaks that we can make to the program, but we can assure that Social Security is there for future generations.
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But I want to be honest with folks: We are going to have to make some modifications to Medicare and Medicaid. They don’t have to be radical, but we’re going to have to make some modifications to them in order for them to be there for the next generation. That’s part of our obligation, because we can’t just be not thinking about our kids and our grandkids as we move forward.
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Well, first -- this is a very well-informed young man here. You’re exactly right that the way the Social Security system works, there’s what’s called -- there’s basically a cap on your Social Security, which there isn’t, by the way, on Medicare. But Social Security, it only goes up to the first $107,000; and you’re right, somebody who makes -- who has net assets of $250 million and are making maybe $5 million a year just on interest or capital gains or something, just a fraction of it’s going to Social Security. I think there’s a way for us to make adjustments on the Social Security tax that would be fairer than the system that we use right now.
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I do think, in terms of how we calculate inflation, that’s important as well. By the way, seniors -- a bunch of them were upset over the last couple years because some of -- because seniors didn’t get a cost-of-living adjustment. I got a lot of letters -- “, how come I didn’t get a COLA this year for my Social Security?” And I answered this question at the previous town hall; I figured I’d clear something up now. The way the system works is you automatically get a cost-of-living adjustment based on the inflation rate. The President doesn’t make that decision; it’s based on a formula.
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Well, first of all, you’re absolutely right that housing has been at the key -- at the core of a lot of the hardships we’ve been going through over the last two and a half years. And that’s why we’ve made it such a priority to try to help families stay in their homes the last two and a half years. And that’s why we’ve made it such a priority to try to help families stay in their homes if they can still afford the home. There were some folks who couldn’t -- who bought homes they couldn’t afford, but there were a lot of folks who just had a run of bad luck because somebody lost a job or lost a shift. And so what we’ve been trying to do is push the banks, push the servicers to do loan modifications that will allow people to stay in their homes and will try to buck up housing prices generally.
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Well, what we’ve been trying to do is make sure that -- we’ve probably had a couple of million loan modifications that have been taking place. The problem is, is that the housing market is so big. And so a lot of families have just had to work down their debts, and they’ve been successful -- and as you said, we were starting to see things bottom out and confidence start picking up.
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And basically what they recommended was what I’ve been talking about, which is a balanced approach in which we’re making some modifications to what’s called discretionary spending -- that’s the spending we do every year on everything from farm programs to student loan programs to food stamps to you name it -- that we cut defense spending in a sensible way, that we look at how we can make modifications that strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the next generation, and how we raise additional revenue so that we bring the overall budget into a sustainable place.
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Well, here’s -- it’s just math. If you have a deal that does not have revenue in it and you still want to close the deficit by, say, $4 trillion, which is what the experts say is required in order to stabilize our debt and our deficit -- and this is over a 10-year period -- if you have no revenue, then the only way to do that is you’ve got to drastically cut things like Medicare. You have to -- there’s no two ways about it. You’ve got to drastically cut Medicare; you’ve got to drastically cut Medicaid; you’ve got to cut back on education support in significant ways that affect schoolkids right here in Atkinson and all across the country.
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Well, let me talk to you about Social Security. It is very likely that she will see a COLA, a cost-of-living increase next year, because inflation actually rose this year. The reason that there were a couple of years where she did not get a cost-of-living increase was because even though she probably felt like the cost of food and gas and groceries were going up, the overall inflation index actually did not go up. There was a period there where we actually had what’s called deflation, where the costs were a little bit lower than they had been comparable to the previous year.
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While we’re on the topic of Social Security, though, I want to make sure everybody understands Social Security is not in crisis. We have a problem with Medicare and Medicaid because health care costs are going up so fast. Part of the reason we passed health care reform was to make sure that we could start changing how the health care system operates and try to reduce health care inflation.
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Social Security is in a better position. And so when I hear folks say, is Social Security going to be there for me 20 years from now -- yes, it will be there for you 20 years from now. It should be there for you 30 or 40 years from now. And the adjustments that we have to make on Social Security are relatively modest. They’re the kind of changes that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill agreed to back in 1983 that created long-term solvency of the system. We can have Social Security solvent for another 75 years with just a few modest changes.
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Yes, well, first of all, I think it’s important to understand if we take a balanced approach we don’t need drastic cuts. The Low Income Housing Assistance Program, just to take one example, what we’ve done is we’ve said -- we have modestly reduced it, but partly because we had increased it significantly right when the recession hit, and it turned out that we didn’t need as much budgeted as was actually used. And obviously it varies depending on the weather any given winter. But what we’ve tried to do is actually keep the bulk of that program in place, and folks will get help in the winter if they can’t afford to buy home heating oil. That’s not going away.
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So that affects specifically the FEMA funding that our Henry County gets. Henry County is not eligible for the FEMA money. They get the set-aside. And this year, because of the unemployment rate, we were not even able to get those set-aside funds. So I think that’s kind of a skewed number by using the unemployment rate.
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So this stuff is always hard. But this is going to be especially hard, because a lot of people are discouraged and a lot of people are disillusioned about the capacity of their leadership and of government to make significant changes in their -- that impact them in a positive way. But I’m determined, because there is too much at stake. The alternative I think is an approach to government that will fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. And that’s not the kind of society that I want to bequeath to Malia and Sasha -- and your children and your grandchildren.
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Every bit of progress that's been worth making has been a struggle -- whether it was civil rights, or women's rights, the movement to expand educational opportunities to all, the institution of our basic safety net like Social Security and Medicare -- always been a struggle. And there have been points at every juncture where it's been discouraging. People have felt like, well, maybe things can't happen. Maybe we're stuck. Maybe America's best days are behind us. And what's prevented that from happening has been the American people -- that sense not only of innate decency and sense of fairness that is just in the DNA of America, but also that sense, you know what, we're not somebody who -- we're not a people who sit back and give up. We don't just let things happen "to" us; we make things happen.
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And so what I said was not only will we put a jobs act that puts a couple million people back to work, and it’s estimated it will raise our GDP by a couple of percent, but we can also pay for it in a responsible way -- building off the work we did this summer, which is, we made some judicious cuts spread out over 10 years so it doesn’t impact our recovery, but we’ve cut a trillion dollars from the budget. We’re proposing that we can actually find an additional half a billion dollars in savings, making some modest modifications to Medicare and Medicaid to bend the cost curve, but not in a way that hurts beneficiaries. And once we’ve done that we’ve also got to make sure that we’ve got a tax code that is fair and in which everybody does their fair share.
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Think about it. Independent economists have estimated that, if we pass the entire package, the American Jobs Act, we would increase GDP by close to 2 percent; we would increase employment by 1.9 million persons. And that is the kind of big, significant move in the economy that can have ripple effects and help a recovery take off.
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The American Jobs Act is specifically tailored to putting more of those folks back to work. It’s not going to solve all our problems. We’ve still got a housing situation in which too many homes are underwater. And one of the things that we’ve proposed as part of the American Jobs Act is, is that we’re going to help reduce the barriers to refinancing so that folks can get record-low rates. That will put more money into people’s pockets. It will provide tax cuts to not only small businesses, but almost every middle-class family. That means they’ve got more money in their pockets, and that means that they’re going to be able to spend it on products and services, which provide additional incentives for business to hire folks like you.
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First of all, let me talk about Social Security and Medicare, because this has obviously been an issue that has been discussed a lot in the press lately as we think about our long-term finances. You can tell your mom that Medicare and Social Security will be there for her -- guaranteed. There are no proposals out there that would affect folks that are about to get Social Security and Medicare, and she’ll be qualifying -- she already is starting to qualify for Medicare, and she’ll be qualifying for Social Security fairly soon.
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Social Security is actually the easier one; it’s just a pure, simple math problem, and that is that right now the population is getting older, so more people are going on Social Security; you’ve got fewer workers supporting more retirees. And so if we don’t do anything, Social Security won’t go broke, but in a few years what will happen is that more money will be going out than coming in. And over time, people who are on Social Security would only be getting about 75 cents on every dollar that they thought they’d be getting.
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And so the Social Security system is not the big driver of our deficits, but if we don’t want -- if we want to make sure that Social Security is there for future generations then we’ve got to make some modest adjustments. And when I say modest, I mean, for example, right now Social Security contributions are capped at a little over $100,000 of earnings, and that means the vast majority of people pay Social Security taxes on everything they earn. But if you're earning a million dollars, only one-tenth of your income is taxed for Social Security. We could make that modification; that would solve a big chunk of the problem.
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So that’s on Medicare and Social Security. In terms of her finding a job, the most important thing we can do right now is to pass the American Jobs Act, get people back to work. Because, think about it, if she’s been in the food service industry, that industry is dependent on people spending money on food, whether it’s at a restaurant, or a cafeteria, or buying more groceries. And if a construction worker and a teacher or a veteran have a job because of the programs that we proposed in the American Jobs Act, they’re going to be spending more money in food services, and that means that those businesses are going to have to hire more, and your mom is going to be more likely to be hired. All right?
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And the fact of the matter is, is that if what happened on Wall Street ends up having a spillover effect to all of Main Street, it is our responsibility to make sure that we have a dynamic economy, we have a dynamic financial sector, but we don’t have a mortgage brokerage operation that ends up providing people loans that can never be repaid and end up having ramifications throughout the system.
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So what we’ve started to say is let’s have a sort of a reverse boot camp. As folks are thinking about retiring, as folks are thinking about being discharged, let’s work with them while they’re still in the military to say is there a way to credential them so that they can go directly into the job and work with state and local governments and employers, so that if they’ve got a skill set that we know is applicable to the private sector, let’s give them a certification, let’s give them a credential that helps them do that right away.
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We’ve also then started to put together a network of business, and I actually asked for a pledge from the private sector, and we’ve got a commitment that 100,000 veterans will be hired over the next several years. And that creates a network -- and maybe they’ll end up using Linkedin, I don’t know. But what we want to do is to make sure that, whether it’s the certification process, whether it’s the job search process, whether it’s resume preparation, whether it’s using electronic networking, that we’re using the huge capacity of the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense, and all the federal agencies, to link up together more effectively.
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Because not only is the federal government obviously a big employer itself -- and we’ve significantly increased the hiring of veterans within the federal government, including, by the way, disabled veterans and wounded warriors -- but the federal government is also a big customer of a lot of businesses. And there’s nothing wrong with a big customer saying to a business, you know what, we’re not going to tell you who to hire, but here’s a list of extremely skilled veterans who are prepared to do a great job and have shown incredible leadership skills. Now, you think of these -- you’ve got 23, 24, 25-year-olds who are leading men into battle, who are handling multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment, and they do so flawlessly. Those leadership skills, those technical skills should be able to translate directly into jobs.
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And so what we’ve said is let’s make sure that we’ve hired enough teachers; let's train them effectively; lets pay them a good wage; let's make sure that we’re putting a special emphasis on recruiting more math and science teachers -- STEM education is an area where we’ve fallen significantly behind. Let’s make sure they’re accountable, but lets also give them flexibility in the classroom so that they don't have to do a cookie-cutter, teach-to-the-test approach that squashes their creativity and prevents them from engaging students. But at the end of the year, let’s make sure that they’re doing a good job. And if there are teachers out there who are not doing a good job, let’s work to retrain them. And if they’re not able to be retrained, then we should probably find them a different line of work. We’ve got to have top-flight principals and leadership inside the schools. That makes a big difference.
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So one last point I'll make about this is George Bush actually was sincere I think in trying to improve the education system across the country through something called No Child Left Behind, that said we're going to impose standards, there's going to be accountability; if schools don't meet those standards we're going to label them as failures and they're going to have to make significant changes. The intent was good. It wasn’t designed as well as it could have been. In some cases, states actually lowered their own standards to make sure that they weren’t labeled as failures. There wasn’t enough assistance given to these schools to meet the ambitious goals that had been set.
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And so I am extraordinarily confident about America’s long-term future. But we are going to have to make some decisions about how we move forward. And what’s striking to me is, when we’re out of Washington and I’m just talking to ordinary folks, I don’t care whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, people are just looking for common sense. The majority of people agree with the prescriptions I just offered. The majority of people by a wide margin think we should be rebuilding our infrastructure. The majority of folks by a wide margin think that we should be investing in education. The majority of people by a wide margin think we should be investing in science and technology. And the majority of people think by a wide margin that we should be maintaining programs like Social Security and Medicare to provide a basic safety net.
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So we've got an opportunity to put people back to work right now. And by the way, it is paid for. Every dime. Now, this has caused some controversy -- well, how do you pay for it? Keep in mind that it is absolutely true that we've got to have a government that lives within its means. And we weren't living within our means over the last decade: two wars we didn't pay for, a prescription drug plan we didn't pay for, tax cuts we did not pay for. So we've already made $1 trillion worth of cuts over the course of this summer. We've slated another half million dollars in cuts, including making some modest modifications to entitlements.
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What the jobs act does is a couple of things. Number one, it, yes, puts people back to work rebuilding roads, bridges, schools. Those infrastructure projects could employ a lot of construction workers -- including a lot of Latino construction workers -- who were laid off after the housing bubble burst. And so that could significantly reduce unemployment in that sector.
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The tax breaks that we give -- there are 250,000 Latino small businesses. They hire a lot of people. And if they are getting significant tax breaks, that gives them more capital; it allows them to expand their businesses, grow, and potentially hire more workers. And the bill also addresses summer jobs for disadvantaged youth. It also provides unemployment insurance for those who are still looking for work.
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Because of the work that we did to change how the student loan program worked -- instead of going through banks, it’s now going directly to students -- we’ve freed up about $60 billion that we’re going to be able to provide for Pell Grants and scholarships. And as a consequence, we’ve actually seen the Latino college enrollment rate go up significantly over the last couple of years.
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Well, we made a decision that was a very significant decision, based on my assessment of the Constitution, that this administration would not defend DOMA in the federal courts. It's not going to be years before this issue is settled. This is going to be settled fairly soon, because right now we have cases pending in the federal courts.
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Administratively, we can't ignore the law. DOMA is still on the books. What we have said is even as we enforce it, we don't support it, we think it's unconstitutional. The position that my administration has taken I think will have a significant influence on the court as it examines the constitutionality of this law. And once that law is struck down -- and I don't know what the ruling will be -- then addressing these binational issues could flow from that decision, potentially.
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And so we’ve made these modifications that send a signal that we’re prepared to show flexibility and not be stuck in a Cold War mentality dating back to when I was born. On the other hand, we have to see a signal back from the Cuban government that it is following through on releasing political prisoners, on providing people their basic human rights, in order for us to be fully engaged with them. And so far, at least, what we haven’t seen is the kind of genuine spirit of transformation inside of Cuba that would justify us eliminating the embargo.
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But let me just say this. Obviously if we saw a release of political prisoners, the ability for people to express their opinions and to petition their government, if we saw even those steps those would be very significant, and we would pay attention and we would undoubtedly reexamine our overall approach to Cuba if we saw a serious movement in that direction.
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So telling our children, you have to turn off the TV, stop playing the video games, do your homework, aspiring to excellence in education -- that's the issue that probably we have to work on. And there's no quick fix there. I mean, that's a 10-year, 20-year project. It's not a six-month project. But if we can make significant changes there, then I think that the future prospects for our kids are going to be very strong.
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MR. LERNER: , this question came repeatedly -- on Social Security, from New York: I would ask mi presidente, because he's my presidente, when are you going to give us a stimulus on our retired person's check? And from Piney Creek, North Carolina adds: We have not received anything additional in two years, but everything we buy or need keeps increasing really fast.
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This is a question that I always get from Social Security recipients as well. The way Social Security is set up is each year there's a cost-of-living adjustment. But over the last two years, because of the recession, inflation didn’t really exist in the aggregate. So even though one particular good or gas prices might have gone up a little bit, when you looked at the basket of goods there wasn’t a lot of inflation over the last two years. That's why the cost-of-living adjustment did not kick in.
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And I think people think that this was a decision somehow that was made by us. It's actually something that just happens automatically. We expect that people will be getting a cost-of-living adjustment this year because there has been some significant inflation, particularly in food and fuel prices. So the expectation is that this year you'll get it. You didn’t get it in the last two years, not because I didn’t want to give it to you, but because the law said that if there's no inflation, then you don't get it.
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11:41 A.M. EDT
Thank you very much. Secretary Panetta, thank you for your introduction and for your extraordinary leadership. Members of Congress, Vice President Biden, members of the Joint Chiefs, service secretaries, distinguished guests, and men and women of the finest military in the world.
Most of all, Admiral Mullen, Deborah, Michael, and I also want to also acknowledge your son Jack, who’s deployed today. All of you have performed extraordinary service to our country.
Before I begin, I want to say a few words about some important news. Earlier this morning, Anwar al-Awlaki -- a leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- was killed in Yemen. The death of Awlaki is a major blow to al Qaeda's most active operational affiliate. Awlaki was the leader of external operations for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In that role, he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans. He directed the failed attempt to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009. He directed the failed attempt to blow up U.S. cargo planes in 2010. And he repeatedly called on individuals in the United States and around the globe to kill innocent men, women and children to advance a murderous agenda.
The death of al-Awlaki marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. Furthermore, this success is a tribute to our intelligence community, and to the efforts of Yemen and its security forces, who have worked closely with the United States over the course of several years.
Awlaki and his organization have been directly responsible for the deaths of many Yemeni citizens. His hateful ideology -- and targeting of innocent civilians -- has been rejected by the vast majority of Muslims, and people of all faiths. And he has met his demise because the government and the people of Yemen have joined the international community in a common effort against Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains a dangerous -- though weakened -- terrorist organization. And going forward, we will remain vigilant against any threats to the United States, or our allies and partners. But make no mistake: This is further proof that al Qaeda and its affiliates will find no safe haven anywhere in the world.
Working with Yemen and our other allies and partners, we will be determined, we will be deliberate, we will be relentless, we will be resolute in our commitment to destroy terrorist networks that aim to kill Americans, and to build a world in which people everywhere can live in greater peace, prosperity and security.
Now, advancing that security has been the life’s work of the man that we honor today. But as Mike will admit to you, he got off to a somewhat shaky start. He was a young ensign, just 23 years old, commanding a small tanker, when he collided with a buoy. As Mike later explained, in his understated way, when you’re on a ship, “colliding with anything is not a good thing.”
I tell this story because Mike has told it himself, to men and women across our military. He has always understood that the true measure of our success is not whether we stumble; it’s whether we pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and get on with the job. It’s whether -- no matter the storms or shoals that come our way -- we chart our course, we keep our eye fixed on the horizon, and take care of those around us -- because we all we rise and fall together.
That’s the story of Mike Mullen. It’s the story of America. And it’s the spirit that we celebrate today.
Indeed, if there’s a thread that runs through his illustrious career, it’s Mike’s sense of stewardship -- the understanding that, as leaders, our time at the helm is but a moment in the life of our nation; the humility, which says the institutions and people entrusted to our care look to us, yet they do not belong to us; and the sense of responsibility we have to pass them safer and stronger to those who follow.
Mike, as you look back as your four consequential years as chairman and your four decades in uniform, be assured our military is stronger and our nation is more secure because of the service that you have rendered.
Today, we have renewed American leadership in the world. We’ve strengthened our alliances, including NATO. We’re leading again in Asia. And we forged a new treaty with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenals. And every American can be grateful to Admiral Mullen -- as am I -- for his critical role in each of these achievements, which will enhance our national security for decades to come.
Today, we see the remarkable achievements of our 9/11 generation of service members. They’ve given Iraqis a chance to determine their own future. They’ve pushed the Taliban out of their Afghan strongholds and finally put al Qaeda on the path to defeat. Meanwhile, our forces have responded to sudden crises with compassion, as in Haiti, and with precision, as in Libya. And it will be long remembered that our troops met these tests on Admiral Mullen’s watch and under his leadership.
Today, we’re moving forward from a position of strength. Fewer of our sons and daughters are in harm's way, and more will come home. Our soldiers can look forward to shorter deployments, more time with their families, and more time training for future missions. Put simply, despite the stresses and strains of a hard decade of war, the military that Admiral Mullen passes to General Dempsey today is the best that it has ever been.
And today, thanks to Mike’s principled leadership, our military draws its strength from more members of our American family. Soon, women will report for duty on our submarines. And patriotic service members who are gay and lesbian no longer have to lie about who they are to serve the country that they love. History will record that the tipping point toward this progress came when the 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went before Congress, and told the nation that it was the right thing to do.
Mike, your legacy will endure in a military that is stronger, but also in a nation that is more just.
Finally, I would add that in every discussion I’ve ever had with Mike, in every recommendation he’s ever made, one thing has always been foremost in his mind -- the lives and well-being of our men and women in uniform. I’ve seen it in quiet moments with our wounded warriors and our veterans. I saw it that day in the Situation Room, as we held our breath for the safe return of our forces who delivered justice to Osama bin Laden. I saw it at Dover, as we honored our fallen heroes on their final journey home.
Mike, you have fulfilled the pledge you made at the beginning -- to represent our troops with “unwavering dedication.” And so has Deborah, who we thank for her four decades of extraordinary service, her extraordinary support to our military families, her kindness, her gentleness, her grace under pressure. She is an extraordinary woman, Mike. And we're both lucky to have married up.
Now the mantle of leadership passes to General Marty Dempsey, one of our nation’s most respected and combat-tested generals. Marty, after a lifetime of service, I thank you, Deanie, Chris, Megan and Caitlin for answering the call to serve once more.
In this sense, today begins to complete the transition to our new leadership team. In Secretary Panetta, we have one of our nation’s finest public servants. In the new Deputy Secretary, Ash Carter, we will have an experienced leader to carry on the work of Bill Lynn, who we thank for his outstanding service. And the new Vice Chairman, Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, will round out a team where -- for the first time -- both the Chairman and Vice Chairman will have the experience of leading combat operations in the years since 9/11.
Leon, Marty, Ash, Sandy, men and women of this department, both uniformed and civilian -- we still have much to do: From bringing the rest of our troops home from Iraq this year, to transitioning to Afghan lead for their own security, from defeating al Qaeda, to our most solemn of obligations -- taking care of our forces and their families, when they go to war and when they come home.
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If Congress passes this jobs bill, we can get Project Rebuild moving right away. If Congress acts, then people in Nevada and all across the country can get significant relief. But remember what I said. We can’t just wait for Congress. Until they act, until they do what they need to do, we’re going to act on our own, because we can’t wait for Congress to help our families and our economy.
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There has been progress. And so the key now is to make sure that there’s strong follow-up, strong execution of the plans that have been put forward. But I was very pleased to see that the leaders of Europe recognize that it is both in Europe’s interest and the world’s interest that the situation is stabilized. And I think they’ve made significant progress over the last week. And the key now is just to make sure that it drives forward in an effective way.
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So I am honored to be here to celebrate National Italian American Heritage Month and to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. And I want to congratulate the President, the Chairman, all of you who are doing so much work to keep that heritage alive for the next generation. And I’m grateful for your generous welcome.
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So in a sense, every American joins us in celebrating this anniversary of Italian unification. What would America be without the contributions of Italy and Italian Americans? What would we be without the daring voyages of Columbus, and Verrazano, and Vespucci? What would our science and technology be without not just DaVinci and Galileo, but Fermi? What would movies and music be without the magic of Capra, or Sinatra, or Sophia Loren, my favorite. I’m just saying.
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On that score, obviously, we're both concerned about the situation in the eurozone, in which the Netherlands has a very significant voice. And I'm going to be interested in hearing from Mark his views in terms of how this issue gets resolved. Because, as I said yesterday during my meeting with Presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso, we have a very deep interest here in the United States in making sure that that process is resolved, so that we can continue to grow our economy and put people back to work here at home.
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Remember in those years, in 2001 and 2003, Congress passed two of the most expensive tax cuts for the wealthy in history. And what did it get us? The slowest job growth in half a century. Massive deficits that have made it much harder to pay for the investments that built this country and provided the basic security that helped millions of Americans reach and stay in the middle class -- things like education and infrastructure, science and technology, Medicare and Social Security.
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Q (As interpreted.) Mr. Prime Minister, you stated that there is cooperation in the area of armament. Can you tell us the amount of military cooperation between the United States and Baghdad in this area? Specifically, have you received any promises from President Obama in this regard, specifically -- of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad? There is argument going on inside Iraqi politician now regarding the size -- it’s 15,000. And I wonder if you discussed with Prime Minister to reduce the number of the diplomats. Thank you.
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That’s what you affirmed last night. But more importantly, it’s what you affirm every day with your words and your actions. And I promise you that as you pray with your feet, I will be right there with you every step of the way. I’ll be fighting to create jobs, and give small businesses a chance to succeed. I’ll be fighting to invest in education and technology. I will fight to strengthen programs like Medicare and Social Security. I will fight to put more money in the pockets of working families. I won’t be afraid to ask the most well-off among us -– Americans like me –- to pay our fair share, to make sure that everybody has got a shot. I will fight alongside you every inch of the way.
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The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long-term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.
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And when we've got a trillion -- more than $1 trillion worth of tax breaks that were supposed to be temporary for the top 2 percent slated to continue, we've got a tax code full of loopholes for folks who don't need them and weren't even asking for them -- we've got to ask ourselves, what's more important to us? Is it more important for me to get a tax break, or is it more important for that senior to know that they've got Medicare and Social Security that's stable? Is it more important for me to get a tax break, or is it better for that young person to get a break on their college education? Is it more important for me to get a tax break, or is it more important that we care for our veterans?
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We’ve done some great work together -- whether it’s making sure that Indian Health was permanently extended and that we were putting additional resources to make sure that we’re picking up the health of Native Americans all across the country. Whether it’s an executive order that specifies our focus on education with all of your tribes, whether it’s making sure that we are working hard to allow the expansion of land in trust on behalf of nations to go further, we’ve made some significant progress. But we’ve got a lot more to do.
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On defense and security, I expressed my gratitude to the President for the extraordinary contributions that have been made by the Georgian military in Afghanistan. They have been one of the most dedicated contributors outside of NATO to the ISAF effort, and in fact have taken on some significant casualties as a consequence of those efforts.
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Well, we still had to do something about energy. And although we were not able to get, at this stage, the kind of climate legislation that I think is ultimately going to be necessary, we were able, without a lot of fanfare, to initiate the most significant environmental legislation probably since the Clean Air Act by doubling fuel-efficiency standards on cars and trucks and heavy trucks, which is not only good for our environment, but good for our economy.
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In Afghanistan, I thanked the Prime Minister for the extraordinary contributions of Danish troops in the Helmand area. They operate without caveat, have taken significant casualties, for which obviously all of us extend our condolences to the families that have been affected. But because of the outstanding work that's been done by Danish soldiers in Afghanistan, we're seeing great progress in the areas where they operate.
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We had a chance to talk about the economy. As we were exchanging notes, it turns out that, like folks here in the United States, everybody in Denmark wants to talk about the economy all the time, and jobs and growth. And we agreed that there has been some progress in resolving the sovereign debt issues, that there has been some progress with respect to the agreements between the EU and the IMF and Greece, the new government in Italy, new governments in Spain and Portugal are all making significant progress, but that there's a lot more work to do. And we will be consulting closely with Denmark.
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A second meeting after the first one that was held in Washington will be held in Turkey in June this year to talk about those relations, which, in turn, in my opinion, will also lead to a significant increase once again for those relations.
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Our country has become a center of migration in that more than 17,000 people have had to come over from the Syrian side to Turkey as a result of the events in Syria. And we also see significant number of people who are killed, and there seems to be continuous action in terms of bombing and burning cities and settlement areas by headquarters and the need to do more of this.
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Well, I'm going to just make a very brief statement here. We wanted to do this brief appearance to highlight one of the most significant examples of what we've been doing through this Nuclear Security Summit, and what our three countries have been able to accomplish through some painstaking cooperation over the last several years.
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So it was a very simple point, and one that essentially I repeated when I spoke to you guys yesterday, which is that we're going to spend the next nine, 10 months trying to work through some of the technical aspects of how we get past what is a major point of friction -- one of the primary points of friction between our two countries, which is this whole missile defense issue. And it involves a lot of complicated issues. If we can get our technical teams to clear out the underbrush, then hopefully, in 2013, there's a foundation to actually make some significant progress on this and a lot of other bilateral issues.
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And so not only have we been able to right the ship and get the banking system working again and make sure that the economy has an opportunity to grow, but we're also dealing with some of those underlying issues that had challenged us for a very long time -- doubling fuel efficiency standards on cars, probably the most significant piece of environmental legislation in a very long time that could end up saving us billions of dollars and taking all kinds of carbon out of the atmosphere.
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The recent budget that just passed the House, the budget that passed the House yesterday, if you did the math, essentially the only thing that would be left in the federal government would be defense, social security and the entitlement programs -- although those would be diminished -- interest on the national debt. That would be about it. You'd be looking at about 1 percent of the entire federal budget devoted to everything else
-- education, environmental protection, science, those things that historically have made us an economic superpower, but also a country in which everybody has a fair shot, everybody does their fair share and everybody is playing by the same set of rules.
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So we've got a lot more work to do. And here's the good news: I think that when you look at the issues, when you look at where people stand in terms of making sure that everybody is getting a fair shot, everybody is doing their fair share, and everybody is playing by the same set of rules; when you look at how they feel about Wall Street reform or health care reform, and break it down specifically -- not sort of just the rhetoric that goes on out there -- but do you believe that young people should be able to stay on their parents’ health care plans; do you believe that seniors should be able to afford prescription drugs and get bigger discounts; do you believe that we should prevent reckless behavior on Wall Street; do you believe that we should have an all-of-the-above energy strategy -- when you break down the issues, then people are on our side. They believe what we believe.
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First, we’re going to require colleges that want to enroll members of our military or veterans or your families to provide clear information about their qualifications and available financial aid. You’ll be able to get a simple fact sheet called “Know Before You Owe.” Know before you owe. And it will lay out all the information that you need to make your own choices about how best to pay for college.
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5:57 P.M. EDT
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Hey! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank mostly Dorothy for having us here. Terry actually likes it when there are hundreds of people in his back yard. And I'm delighted that their -- four of their five children are here -- Jack, Mary, Sally and Peter. Dori, their other daughter, is off playing in a national tournament in lacrosse. Jack plays rugby for the Naval Academy, where he is in his first year -- and I'm very proud of him for his service he's doing.
I love poor Terry McAuliffe. He's so laid back and repressed. He just can't express himself. I worry about him. But I tell you what, we had a hundred more like him we wouldn't lose as many elections -- he is a -- and I'm grateful.
My job is to introduce the President. I'm going to tell you a couple of things I hope you'll remember and share with others. When you become President, your job is to explain where we are, say where you think we should go, have a strategy to get there, and execute it. By that standard, Barack Obama deserves to be reelected President of the United States. And I'm going to tell you the only reason we're even meeting here. I mean, this is crazy -- he's got an opponent who basically wants to do what they did before, on steroids -- which will get you the same consequences you got before, on steroids.
So let's be serious here. When then-Senator Obama was running for President, he laid out a forward-looking plan to restore broad-based prosperity with a 21st century economy in the United States, to advance the national security of America, and to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. And if he had taken office in that world and implemented those plans in energy, education, health care and across the board -- which he has done -- we'd be roaring.
But then what happened? September the 15th, 2008, we had a financial crash -- only seven weeks before the election. And it didn't bottom out till he he'd been President six months and before any of his policies had time to take effect. If you go back 500 years, whenever a country's financial system collapses, it takes between 5 and 10 years to get back to full employment. If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there's a mortgage collapse it almost always takes 10 years. He's beating the clock, not behind it. Don't listen to those Republicans. We are beating the clock.
So if somebody says, well, but I don't feel all that great yet, or not everything is back yet, or it's still kind of slow yet, you just remind them we've gotten 4 million jobs since the recession bottomed out; the ones we lost in the crash have been restored. Thanks to the stimulus which kept unemployment one and a half to two points lower than it would have been. Thanks to his restructuring of the American automobile industry, which saved a million and a half jobs and created 84,000 more. Thanks to the astonishing agreement between labor and management and the environmental groups and the federal government to raise mileage standards on cars that will create 150,000 high-tech jobs and clean the environment for our future. These are the things that have been done.
Terry McAuliffe is moving two factories into America -- one in Mississippi, one in Virginia -- because of the manufacturing initiatives this President got the Congress to adopt to bring American manufacturing back to the forefront in the world. I'm telling you.
Why do I tell you this? Because somebody will say to you, maybe, but I don't feel better. And you say, look, the man's not Houdini; all he can do is beat the clock. He's beating the clock. It's not going to take us 10 years to get back to full employment. When I was President, Japan went through a long real estate and financial collapse, and after 10 years they still weren't back to full employment. We are moving this country forward. We are going in the right direction under President Obama's leadership. And I'm telling you -- (applause.)
My wife has a traveling job, so I'm home alone a lot. And I have more time to read this stuff than most people. So I noticed yesterday that the American people are about to get -- not counting California, our biggest state -- $1.3 billion in refunds on their health insurance premiums because the health care law says that you have to spend 85 percent of your health care premium on health care and not profits and promotions. Then I noticed in the paper today that, for the last two years, inflation in health care costs has been 4 percent -- the lowest two-year total in 50 years. And then I might say -- (applause.)
Folks, I spoke to a big conglomerate group that was meeting last week in a convention; they asked me to come speak. There were insurers, there were health care providers, there were all these people that -- in the health care industry. And I thought they might be hostile to me, and I just had -- I said, look, folks, I have to tell you, I support what was done; we had to do something. We were spending almost 18 percent of our income on health care, and nobody else is spending more than 12. That's a trillion dollars a year we're giving up to our competitors. One of the reasons workers have not been getting pay raises in America is their employers wanted to give them pay raises but they had to spend it on their health insurance premiums. So we have to do this.
So after it was over, they said, you're preaching to the saved -- even those of us who don't like certain provisions of the health care law would be mortified if it were repealed; we've got the train going down the tracks now. If there's something wrong with it, let's fix it; don't start all over again. And I said -- (applause.)
So whether it's on energy, where America led the world in clean energy investment in the last year even though the Chinese government spent more than we did -- our investments plus our private venture capital investment led the world. That's because of President Obama's policies -- or whether it's on health care, on education.
I just have to mention one more thing. One of the things that I think 20 years from now will be among the most important things he's accomplished as President that is never mentioned when I read about what's going on, is the reform in the student loan law which will let every student pay back his or her loan for up to 20 years as a small percentage of their income so nobody ever has to drop out of college again. And I want to tell you why that's important. When he took office, we had dropped -- in a decade -- from first to 15th in the world in the percentage of our young people with a college education, and we need that back. People need to be able to afford to go and afford to stay.
So I think he's done a good job. I think he is beating the historical standard for coming out of a financial collapse and a mortgage collapse. I think the last thing you want to do is to turn around and embrace the policies that got us into trouble in the first place. We need to keep going forward by reelecting Barack Obama President of the United States.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Thank you so much. It’s always good to be in Virginia.
To Dorothy, most of all -- but also to this guy here, Terry -- I want to thank the McAuliffe family for this incredible hospitality. Jack, we could not be prouder of you. You look sharp in whites, man. And to the whole family, it is a -- I’m sure Terry and Dorothy feel the way Michelle and I feel about Malia and Sasha, and the way Bill feels about -- Bill and Hillary feel about Chelsea. There’s nothing we do that’s more important than raising our kids. And when we see outstanding young people like this, it gives us a lot of satisfaction.
A couple of other people I want to mention. It was already noted that the next U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Tim Kaine, is here. I love Tim Kaine. One of the finest men I know. And just a great friend and was a great governor here, obviously.
You also have an outstanding congressman in Jim Moran in the house. And I need to acknowledge, because some of you know I am a former state senator, so I never pass up the chance to introduce state senators, Barbara Favola is here, and this is her district, and we love state senators. Where’s Barbara? She’s over there somewhere. Good to see you, Barbara.
Well, you guys get two Presidents for one out of this event -- which is a pretty good deal. And I was -- as I was listening to President Clinton speaking, I was just thinking about the remarkable record that he was able to create during his presidency, and his singular capacity -- to be able to explain very difficult concepts in very understandable terms to the American people; a master communicator. But more importantly than his communication skills was -- Bill Clinton understood at a time when, let’s face it, the Democratic Party was a little bit lost, he understood what it meant to refocus not on ideology, not on abstractions, but focus on where people live, what they’re going through day to day.
And early in our party in such a way that we were thinking about what has always been the central promise of America; the idea that if you work hard, if you play by the rules, if you’re responsible, then you can live out that basic American promise -- the idea that you can find a job that pays a decent living; and buy a home; and send your kids to school; and not have to worry, if you get sick, that you might go bankrupt; and retire with dignity and respect.
And everything he did, all the years that he was in office, was designed to give people the tools to help fulfill that promise. And he did so to a remarkable degree. Terry mentioned the record.
And ever since that time, because of Bill Clinton’s leadership, I think that when you look at the Democratic Party and what we’ve stood for, it has been squarely at the center of how the American people think and what they believe, and is entirely consistent with some of our best traditions and our deepest values.
Now, as has been mentioned, when I came into office, obviously we were experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The month I was sworn into office we lost 750,000 jobs, as I was taking the oath. We had lost 4 million jobs the six months prior, and we would lose another several million jobs before economic policies had a chance to take effect.
So a lot of what we’ve done over the last three and a half years has been designed just to right the ship to respond to crises, to make sure that Detroit didn’t go under, to make sure that the banking system was no longer locked up, to make sure that small businesses could get loans, and consumers could buy a home again or buy a car again; making sure that the system did not break down. And that took enormous amounts of energy and some pretty tough and difficult political decisions.
But I didn’t run for President simply to get back to where we were in 2007. I didn’t run for President simply to restore the status quo before the financial crisis. I ran for President because we had lost our way since Bill Clinton was done being President. And for almost a decade what we had seen -- for almost a decade what we had seen for ordinary families was a betrayal of that basic promise; that core American idea.
The economy in fits and starts grew between 2000 and 2008, but wages and incomes flat-lined. Corporations were profitable, but ordinary people felt like they were working harder and harder just to get by. That sense of middle-class security and the notion that successive generations would do better than the previous one -- that felt like it was slipping away for too many people. That’s why I ran for President in 2008 -- to restore that basic promise.
And that’s why over the last three and a half years, in addition to dealing with immediate crises, what we’ve tried to do is make sure that we were finally dealing with some of those issues that had been put off and put off and put off so that once again we could build an economy with a firm foundation; an economy built to last, an economy that would deliver for ordinary Americans -- regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, what their last names were; that idea that you could make it here if you try.
And that’s why we took on issues like health care reform -- because as President Clinton said, the single most important thing to liberate our businesses, to make sure workers are getting raises, and to free ourselves from crippling debt both at the federal level and at the state level was if we started having a more sensible health care system that provided better quality for lower cost.
And what we’ve been able to do as a consequence -- if you look right now -- 2.5 million young people able to get health insurance because they’re staying on their parents’ plan; millions of seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs that they weren’t getting before; people being able to get preventive care, the best kind of care, instead of having to go to the emergency room; 30 million people who are going to be able to get health care who didn’t have it before -- (applause); people not having to worry if they’ve got a preexisting condition; and now we’re seeing rebates all across the country -- over a billion dollars in rebates to consumers, even as health care costs overall are going down.
On education, not only did we make college more affordable, taken $60 billion that was going to banks as middle men in the student loan program, and we were able to cut out the middle man and send that money directly to young people so that now millions more young people are either eligible for Pell Grants or getting higher Pell Grants than they were before and are able to access a college education, we put in place a $10,000 tax credit for young people -- or for their parents. I know you guys are sympathetic.
But we also started focusing on K-12, and how we’re going to not just -- how we’re going to get past this debate about reform or more money, and say we need money and reform, and let’s reform those districts and those states and those schools that are doing the right thing, and retaining outstanding teachers, and developing them. And let’s stop just teaching to the test. Let’s make sure that teachers can teach with creativity and passion, but let’s hold them accountable. And so with the help of Arne Duncan and the Secretary of Education, we are on track. Over 40 states now have adopted unprecedented reforms that are going to help us win the 21st century.
We refocused on manufacturing. And everybody has noted the fact that we helped to save Detroit, but here’s the good news. Detroit is building better cars. Cars that folks want to drive. We’re going to be getting 55 miles per gallon by the middle of the next decade, which will save the average driver $8,000 at the pump. And that’s part of the reason why, actually, we are now consuming -- less than 50 percent of our energy is imported; less than 50 percent of our oil is important. So there is an economic benefit, there is a security benefit.
But not only have we helped Detroit produce better cars; we’ve also created entire new industries. Advanced battery manufacturing. The key to electric cars is going to be who wins the race to make the best battery. And when we came into office, it looked like maybe 2 percent of the market was going to go to U.S. companies. Now it looks like it’s going to be 40 percent, because of what we did. We are going to be winning the race for clean energy all across the board.
So whether it’s our investments in clean energy, whether it’s our reform of education, whether it’s our reform of the health care system, whether it’s making sure that Wall Street is operating by the same rules so we don’t go through the same cycle that we did before, whether it’s creating a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that ensures people that aren’t getting cheated in their financial transactions -- what we’ve done is not just deal with crisis but also try to play the long game, and try to think what are the strategies, what are the investments that are going to help us grow over the long term, and what do we need to do to make sure that everybody gets a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share, and everybody is playing by the same set of rules.
Now, I joke sometimes with my staff, a lot of what we’ve done, a lot of what President Clinton did -- there was a time when Republicans thought these were pretty good ideas. No, that’s the truth. I mean, you can go back to the first Republican President who comes from my home state, a guy named Abraham Lincoln, who built the first -- helped to create the Trans-Continental Railroad System, and in the midst of Civil War started the land grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences; understood the need to make investments in the future. That was not a foreign idea to the Republican Party.
There’s Teddy Roosevelt who thought it was a good idea to have a progressive income tax because he understood that the market works best -- Teddy Roosevelt was no socialist. But what he understood was -- is that if you’ve got basic rules of the road in place, and you’ve got equity in the tax system, then everybody can compete, and people win based on the best ideas, not who they can prevent from competing. And you create platforms in which everybody can succeed. That was part of Republican ideas.
As recently as when President Clinton was President, when he tried to tackle health care, he had partners in the United States Senate and in the House on the Republican side who said, you know what, this is an idea that has to be tackled. We may not agree with you on every detail, but we understand that we can’t keep on spending 18 percent of our GDP on health care, and leave 30, 40 million people uninsured. That doesn’t make sense.
And it used to be a guy like a Bob Dole or a Howard Baker, if they wanted to -- you know, they were conservative, fiscal hawks -- the idea was we were going to balance a budget, and they sure didn’t like tax increases, but they understood if we’re making cuts in spending, then we also need to pay for the kind of government we want. And we’re going to do a balanced approach to how we bring down deficits.
These were not just Democratic ideas. These were American ideas. And part of what’s happened -- so part of what’s happened is we now have a Republican Party that’s unrecognizable. I’ve said this and I meant it: Ronald Reagan could not get through a Republican primary in this election cycle. Could not get through it. Here’s a guy who raised taxes. That in and of itself would have rendered him unelectable in a Republican primary.
So I want to -- when you’re talking to your friends and your neighbors -- I know everybody here knows some Republicans. You might be married to some. Might have a mom and dad and whoever. And describe for them what it is that’s at stake in this election.
When you’ve got a House Republican budget that would, on top of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, initiate an additional $4 trillion or $5 trillion in tax cuts that would be paid for by decimating everything that Bill Clinton talked about, everything that Terry McAuliffe talked about, everything I’ve been talking about so that the non-defense side of the budget other than Social Security would amount to less than 1 percent -- historically it’s never been under 8 percent, even under Republican Presidents. And they’re talking about taking this -- everything -- education, infrastructure, food safety, environmental protection, national parks -- whatever it is that you conceive of as part of what we do together, because we can’t do it on our own, that would be reduced to less than 1 percent of the budget. It would basically be wiped out. That’s not my opinion. That’s what they’re proposing.
And so it is impossible taking their budget, taking their philosophy, taking their approach, to imagine how we compete with China on something like clean energy. It’s impossible to imagine us being able to rebuild our roads, our bridges, our ports, our broadband lines. It’s impossible for us to imagine being able to educate our kids effectively and to produce the number of engineers that we’re going to need, the number of scientists we’re going to need, the number of mathematicians that we’re going to need.
So every election Presidents will -- or candidates will say this is the election that -- this is a crossroads, this is the biggest election in history. I’m sure back in 1988, 1989, every -- you say this is -- we need a bridge to the 21st century and all that. Every election is the most important election in our history.
But let me tell you -- (laughter and applause) -- this one matters. This one matters. This one matters.
And that’s before we start talking about foreign policy. Hillary and I -- we’ve spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after other folks’ messes. And by the way, we’ve got them -- we’re starting to get them pretty cleaned up. The war in Iraq is over. We’re transitioning in Afghanistan. We’ve got the strongest allies we’ve ever seen. And al Qaeda is on the ropes. So we’ve done what we said we’d do.
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5:57 P.M. EDT
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Hey! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank mostly Dorothy for having us here. Terry actually likes it when there are hundreds of people in his back yard. And I'm delighted that their -- four of their five children are here -- Jack, Mary, Sally and Peter. Dori, their other daughter, is off playing in a national tournament in lacrosse. Jack plays rugby for the Naval Academy, where he is in his first year -- and I'm very proud of him for his service he's doing.
I love poor Terry McAuliffe. He's so laid back and repressed. He just can't express himself. I worry about him. But I tell you what, we had a hundred more like him we wouldn't lose as many elections -- he is a -- and I'm grateful.
My job is to introduce the President. I'm going to tell you a couple of things I hope you'll remember and share with others. When you become President, your job is to explain where we are, say where you think we should go, have a strategy to get there, and execute it. By that standard, Barack Obama deserves to be reelected President of the United States. And I'm going to tell you the only reason we're even meeting here. I mean, this is crazy -- he's got an opponent who basically wants to do what they did before, on steroids -- which will get you the same consequences you got before, on steroids.
So let's be serious here. When then-Senator Obama was running for President, he laid out a forward-looking plan to restore broad-based prosperity with a 21st century economy in the United States, to advance the national security of America, and to build a world with more partners and fewer adversaries. And if he had taken office in that world and implemented those plans in energy, education, health care and across the board -- which he has done -- we'd be roaring.
But then what happened? September the 15th, 2008, we had a financial crash -- only seven weeks before the election. And it didn't bottom out till he he'd been President six months and before any of his policies had time to take effect. If you go back 500 years, whenever a country's financial system collapses, it takes between 5 and 10 years to get back to full employment. If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there's a mortgage collapse it almost always takes 10 years. He's beating the clock, not behind it. Don't listen to those Republicans. We are beating the clock.
So if somebody says, well, but I don't feel all that great yet, or not everything is back yet, or it's still kind of slow yet, you just remind them we've gotten 4 million jobs since the recession bottomed out; the ones we lost in the crash have been restored. Thanks to the stimulus which kept unemployment one and a half to two points lower than it would have been. Thanks to his restructuring of the American automobile industry, which saved a million and a half jobs and created 84,000 more. Thanks to the astonishing agreement between labor and management and the environmental groups and the federal government to raise mileage standards on cars that will create 150,000 high-tech jobs and clean the environment for our future. These are the things that have been done.
Terry McAuliffe is moving two factories into America -- one in Mississippi, one in Virginia -- because of the manufacturing initiatives this President got the Congress to adopt to bring American manufacturing back to the forefront in the world. I'm telling you.
Why do I tell you this? Because somebody will say to you, maybe, but I don't feel better. And you say, look, the man's not Houdini; all he can do is beat the clock. He's beating the clock. It's not going to take us 10 years to get back to full employment. When I was President, Japan went through a long real estate and financial collapse, and after 10 years they still weren't back to full employment. We are moving this country forward. We are going in the right direction under President Obama's leadership. And I'm telling you -- (applause.)
My wife has a traveling job, so I'm home alone a lot. And I have more time to read this stuff than most people. So I noticed yesterday that the American people are about to get -- not counting California, our biggest state -- $1.3 billion in refunds on their health insurance premiums because the health care law says that you have to spend 85 percent of your health care premium on health care and not profits and promotions. Then I noticed in the paper today that, for the last two years, inflation in health care costs has been 4 percent -- the lowest two-year total in 50 years. And then I might say -- (applause.)
Folks, I spoke to a big conglomerate group that was meeting last week in a convention; they asked me to come speak. There were insurers, there were health care providers, there were all these people that -- in the health care industry. And I thought they might be hostile to me, and I just had -- I said, look, folks, I have to tell you, I support what was done; we had to do something. We were spending almost 18 percent of our income on health care, and nobody else is spending more than 12. That's a trillion dollars a year we're giving up to our competitors. One of the reasons workers have not been getting pay raises in America is their employers wanted to give them pay raises but they had to spend it on their health insurance premiums. So we have to do this.
So after it was over, they said, you're preaching to the saved -- even those of us who don't like certain provisions of the health care law would be mortified if it were repealed; we've got the train going down the tracks now. If there's something wrong with it, let's fix it; don't start all over again. And I said -- (applause.)
So whether it's on energy, where America led the world in clean energy investment in the last year even though the Chinese government spent more than we did -- our investments plus our private venture capital investment led the world. That's because of President Obama's policies -- or whether it's on health care, on education.
I just have to mention one more thing. One of the things that I think 20 years from now will be among the most important things he's accomplished as President that is never mentioned when I read about what's going on, is the reform in the student loan law which will let every student pay back his or her loan for up to 20 years as a small percentage of their income so nobody ever has to drop out of college again. And I want to tell you why that's important. When he took office, we had dropped -- in a decade -- from first to 15th in the world in the percentage of our young people with a college education, and we need that back. People need to be able to afford to go and afford to stay.
So I think he's done a good job. I think he is beating the historical standard for coming out of a financial collapse and a mortgage collapse. I think the last thing you want to do is to turn around and embrace the policies that got us into trouble in the first place. We need to keep going forward by reelecting Barack Obama President of the United States.
Thank you so much. It’s always good to be in Virginia.
To Dorothy, most of all -- but also to this guy here, Terry -- I want to thank the McAuliffe family for this incredible hospitality. Jack, we could not be prouder of you. You look sharp in whites, man. And to the whole family, it is a -- I’m sure Terry and Dorothy feel the way Michelle and I feel about Malia and Sasha, and the way Bill feels about -- Bill and Hillary feel about Chelsea. There’s nothing we do that’s more important than raising our kids. And when we see outstanding young people like this, it gives us a lot of satisfaction.
A couple of other people I want to mention. It was already noted that the next U.S. senator from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Tim Kaine, is here. I love Tim Kaine. One of the finest men I know. And just a great friend and was a great governor here, obviously.
You also have an outstanding congressman in Jim Moran in the house. And I need to acknowledge, because some of you know I am a former state senator, so I never pass up the chance to introduce state senators, Barbara Favola is here, and this is her district, and we love state senators. Where’s Barbara? She’s over there somewhere. Good to see you, Barbara.
Well, you guys get two Presidents for one out of this event -- which is a pretty good deal. And I was -- as I was listening to President Clinton speaking, I was just thinking about the remarkable record that he was able to create during his presidency, and his singular capacity -- to be able to explain very difficult concepts in very understandable terms to the American people; a master communicator. But more importantly than his communication skills was -- Bill Clinton understood at a time when, let’s face it, the Democratic Party was a little bit lost, he understood what it meant to refocus not on ideology, not on abstractions, but focus on where people live, what they’re going through day to day.
And early in our party in such a way that we were thinking about what has always been the central promise of America; the idea that if you work hard, if you play by the rules, if you’re responsible, then you can live out that basic American promise -- the idea that you can find a job that pays a decent living; and buy a home; and send your kids to school; and not have to worry, if you get sick, that you might go bankrupt; and retire with dignity and respect.
And everything he did, all the years that he was in office, was designed to give people the tools to help fulfill that promise. And he did so to a remarkable degree. Terry mentioned the record.
And ever since that time, because of Bill Clinton’s leadership, I think that when you look at the Democratic Party and what we’ve stood for, it has been squarely at the center of how the American people think and what they believe, and is entirely consistent with some of our best traditions and our deepest values.
Now, as has been mentioned, when I came into office, obviously we were experiencing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The month I was sworn into office we lost 750,000 jobs, as I was taking the oath. We had lost 4 million jobs the six months prior, and we would lose another several million jobs before economic policies had a chance to take effect.
So a lot of what we’ve done over the last three and a half years has been designed just to right the ship to respond to crises, to make sure that Detroit didn’t go under, to make sure that the banking system was no longer locked up, to make sure that small businesses could get loans, and consumers could buy a home again or buy a car again; making sure that the system did not break down. And that took enormous amounts of energy and some pretty tough and difficult political decisions.
But I didn’t run for President simply to get back to where we were in 2007. I didn’t run for President simply to restore the status quo before the financial crisis. I ran for President because we had lost our way since Bill Clinton was done being President. And for almost a decade what we had seen -- for almost a decade what we had seen for ordinary families was a betrayal of that basic promise; that core American idea.
The economy in fits and starts grew between 2000 and 2008, but wages and incomes flat-lined. Corporations were profitable, but ordinary people felt like they were working harder and harder just to get by. That sense of middle-class security and the notion that successive generations would do better than the previous one -- that felt like it was slipping away for too many people. That’s why I ran for President in 2008 -- to restore that basic promise.
And that’s why over the last three and a half years, in addition to dealing with immediate crises, what we’ve tried to do is make sure that we were finally dealing with some of those issues that had been put off and put off and put off so that once again we could build an economy with a firm foundation; an economy built to last, an economy that would deliver for ordinary Americans -- regardless of where they came from, what they looked like, what their last names were; that idea that you could make it here if you try.
And that’s why we took on issues like health care reform -- because as President Clinton said, the single most important thing to liberate our businesses, to make sure workers are getting raises, and to free ourselves from crippling debt both at the federal level and at the state level was if we started having a more sensible health care system that provided better quality for lower cost.
And what we’ve been able to do as a consequence -- if you look right now -- 2.5 million young people able to get health insurance because they’re staying on their parents’ plan; millions of seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs that they weren’t getting before; people being able to get preventive care, the best kind of care, instead of having to go to the emergency room; 30 million people who are going to be able to get health care who didn’t have it before -- (applause); people not having to worry if they’ve got a preexisting condition; and now we’re seeing rebates all across the country -- over a billion dollars in rebates to consumers, even as health care costs overall are going down.
On education, not only did we make college more affordable, taken $60 billion that was going to banks as middle men in the student loan program, and we were able to cut out the middle man and send that money directly to young people so that now millions more young people are either eligible for Pell Grants or getting higher Pell Grants than they were before and are able to access a college education, we put in place a $10,000 tax credit for young people -- or for their parents. I know you guys are sympathetic.
But we also started focusing on K-12, and how we’re going to not just -- how we’re going to get past this debate about reform or more money, and say we need money and reform, and let’s reform those districts and those states and those schools that are doing the right thing, and retaining outstanding teachers, and developing them. And let’s stop just teaching to the test. Let’s make sure that teachers can teach with creativity and passion, but let’s hold them accountable. And so with the help of Arne Duncan and the Secretary of Education, we are on track. Over 40 states now have adopted unprecedented reforms that are going to help us win the 21st century.
We refocused on manufacturing. And everybody has noted the fact that we helped to save Detroit, but here’s the good news. Detroit is building better cars. Cars that folks want to drive. We’re going to be getting 55 miles per gallon by the middle of the next decade, which will save the average driver $8,000 at the pump. And that’s part of the reason why, actually, we are now consuming -- less than 50 percent of our energy is imported; less than 50 percent of our oil is important. So there is an economic benefit, there is a security benefit.
But not only have we helped Detroit produce better cars; we’ve also created entire new industries. Advanced battery manufacturing. The key to electric cars is going to be who wins the race to make the best battery. And when we came into office, it looked like maybe 2 percent of the market was going to go to U.S. companies. Now it looks like it’s going to be 40 percent, because of what we did. We are going to be winning the race for clean energy all across the board.
So whether it’s our investments in clean energy, whether it’s our reform of education, whether it’s our reform of the health care system, whether it’s making sure that Wall Street is operating by the same rules so we don’t go through the same cycle that we did before, whether it’s creating a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau that ensures people that aren’t getting cheated in their financial transactions -- what we’ve done is not just deal with crisis but also try to play the long game, and try to think what are the strategies, what are the investments that are going to help us grow over the long term, and what do we need to do to make sure that everybody gets a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share, and everybody is playing by the same set of rules.
Now, I joke sometimes with my staff, a lot of what we’ve done, a lot of what President Clinton did -- there was a time when Republicans thought these were pretty good ideas. No, that’s the truth. I mean, you can go back to the first Republican President who comes from my home state, a guy named Abraham Lincoln, who built the first -- helped to create the Trans-Continental Railroad System, and in the midst of Civil War started the land grant colleges and the National Academy of Sciences; understood the need to make investments in the future. That was not a foreign idea to the Republican Party.
There’s Teddy Roosevelt who thought it was a good idea to have a progressive income tax because he understood that the market works best -- Teddy Roosevelt was no socialist. But what he understood was -- is that if you’ve got basic rules of the road in place, and you’ve got equity in the tax system, then everybody can compete, and people win based on the best ideas, not who they can prevent from competing. And you create platforms in which everybody can succeed. That was part of Republican ideas.
As recently as when President Clinton was President, when he tried to tackle health care, he had partners in the United States Senate and in the House on the Republican side who said, you know what, this is an idea that has to be tackled. We may not agree with you on every detail, but we understand that we can’t keep on spending 18 percent of our GDP on health care, and leave 30, 40 million people uninsured. That doesn’t make sense.
And it used to be a guy like a Bob Dole or a Howard Baker, if they wanted to -- you know, they were conservative, fiscal hawks -- the idea was we were going to balance a budget, and they sure didn’t like tax increases, but they understood if we’re making cuts in spending, then we also need to pay for the kind of government we want. And we’re going to do a balanced approach to how we bring down deficits.
These were not just Democratic ideas. These were American ideas. And part of what’s happened -- so part of what’s happened is we now have a Republican Party that’s unrecognizable. I’ve said this and I meant it: Ronald Reagan could not get through a Republican primary in this election cycle. Could not get through it. Here’s a guy who raised taxes. That in and of itself would have rendered him unelectable in a Republican primary.
So I want to -- when you’re talking to your friends and your neighbors -- I know everybody here knows some Republicans. You might be married to some. Might have a mom and dad and whoever. And describe for them what it is that’s at stake in this election.
When you’ve got a House Republican budget that would, on top of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, initiate an additional $4 trillion or $5 trillion in tax cuts that would be paid for by decimating everything that Bill Clinton talked about, everything that Terry McAuliffe talked about, everything I’ve been talking about so that the non-defense side of the budget other than Social Security would amount to less than 1 percent -- historically it’s never been under 8 percent, even under Republican Presidents. And they’re talking about taking this -- everything -- education, infrastructure, food safety, environmental protection, national parks -- whatever it is that you conceive of as part of what we do together, because we can’t do it on our own, that would be reduced to less than 1 percent of the budget. It would basically be wiped out. That’s not my opinion. That’s what they’re proposing.
And so it is impossible taking their budget, taking their philosophy, taking their approach, to imagine how we compete with China on something like clean energy. It’s impossible to imagine us being able to rebuild our roads, our bridges, our ports, our broadband lines. It’s impossible for us to imagine being able to educate our kids effectively and to produce the number of engineers that we’re going to need, the number of scientists we’re going to need, the number of mathematicians that we’re going to need.
So every election Presidents will -- or candidates will say this is the election that -- this is a crossroads, this is the biggest election in history. I’m sure back in 1988, 1989, every -- you say this is -- we need a bridge to the 21st century and all that. Every election is the most important election in our history.
But let me tell you -- (laughter and applause) -- this one matters. This one matters. This one matters.
And that’s before we start talking about foreign policy. Hillary and I -- we’ve spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after other folks’ messes. And by the way, we’ve got them -- we’re starting to get them pretty cleaned up. The war in Iraq is over. We’re transitioning in Afghanistan. We’ve got the strongest allies we’ve ever seen. And al Qaeda is on the ropes. So we’ve done what we said we’d do.
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Q (As interpreted.) Imaichi, of TBS Television, and I have a question for both President Obama and Prime Minister Noda. How do you regard the Futenma relocation issue in the context of this joint statement, although you did not refer specifically to Futenma relocation? And the interim report on U.S. Forces Japan realignment leaves this question open to some extent. And what do you think of the possibility that Futenma Air Station ultimately will be relocated to a place other than Henoko as agreed between Japan and the United States?
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And I think the reports we get are relatively accurate in the sense that there is real improvement. In those areas where we’ve had a significant presence, you can see the Taliban not having a foothold, that there is genuine improvement in the performance of Afghan national security forces.
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Number two, Congress should give every responsible homeowner the opportunity to save an average of $3,000 a year by refinancing their mortgage. We're starting to see a little bit of stabilizing in some of the housing markets around the country, but that continues to be a significant drag on our economy. But when families are able to take advantage of these historically low rates, it makes a difference. It puts money in their pockets or it may help them rebuild some of their equity. It gives them more confidence and the housing market stabilizes further.
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Ronald Reagan worked with Democrats to save Social Security and pay down the deficit by, yes, asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little bit more in taxes. They understood that our economy is stronger when we don’t balance our budget on the backs of middle-class and poor Americans. We do it best when everybody does their fair share.
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And so the question is going to be how bad do we want it? How bad are we willing to work for it? How committed are we to making sure that our kids get a great education? How committed are we to making sure that Social Security and Medicare are there for folks in the future? How committed are we to making sure that our veterans, who have served us valiantly, that we're serving them as well as they've served us? How committed are we to bringing down our deficit in a balanced way? How committed are we to continuing to invest in science and research? How committed are we to that basic American bargain that says if you work hard, you can get ahead?
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And so, there may not be any quick fixes and easy solutions to some of the challenges we face, but we're going to fix them. I have every bit of confidence. In fact, the problem we have right now is not that we don't have good ideas for things like housing and education, making sure that we're bringing down our deficit and protecting seniors' Medicare and Social Security. The problem is not that we don't know how to do it. The problem is we've got a stalemate in Washington.
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And by the way, just like we tried their way and it didn’t work -- the way I’m talking about, we tried that, too, under a guy named Bill Clinton, and we created 23 million new jobs -- and we had a surplus instead of a deficit, and Medicare was protected, and Social Security was protected. And by the way, wealthy people did pretty well, too.
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Issue Position |
Romney has talked often about using entitlement reform to rein in government spending, noting that he would keep the existing Social Security program for soon-to-be retirees while implementing changes for younger generations. He has opposed raising taxes to cover the program’s deficit.
The former Massachusetts governor has proposed raising the retirement age and slowing the growth of benefits for higher-income retirees, partly changing the formula for cost of living adjustments. He has also supported allowing personal retirement accounts.
Romney has said that he disapproves of the federal government “raiding the dollars from Social Security to pay for annual government expenditures,” suggesting that he might be open to Social Security “lock box” ideas similar to the one Al Gore proposed in his 2000 presidential run.
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Romney on Social Security105 Comments
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Romney's Statements (19)
We must also get tough on employers who hire illegal immigrants. That means putting in place an employment verification system that is both reliable and secure.
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My dad used to say that “the pursuit of the difficult makes men strong." Our next president is going to face difficult choices. Among these will be the future of Social Security and Medicare. In their current form, these programs will go bankrupt. I know that, you know that, and even our friends in the other party know that. The difference is that I will be honest about strengthening and preserving them, and they won’t.
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I believe we can save Social Security with a few commonsense reforms. First, there will be no change for retirees or those near retirement. No change. Second, for the next generation of retirees, we should slowly raise the retirement age. And, finally, for the next generation of retirees, we should slow the growth in benefits for those with higher incomes.
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While President Obama has been silent on Social Security, his agenda for Medicare is disastrous. He’s the only president in modern history who has cut Medicare for seniors—do not forget, it was President Obama who cut $500 billion from Medicare, not to preserve it or sustain it, but to pay for his vaunted Obamacare. And he put the future of Medicare in the hands of 15 unelected bureaucrats. These bureaucrats have the power to enact further cuts to Medicare without congressional approval, even if those cuts overturn a law previously passed by Congress. President Obama’s so-called Medicare reforms could lead to the rationing or denial of care for seniors on Medicare.
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These ideas will give tomorrow’s seniors the same kinds of choices that most Americans have in their healthcare today. The future of Medicare should be marked by competition, choice, and innovation—rather than bureaucracy, stagnation, and bankruptcy. Our path for the future of Social Security and Medicare is honesty and security, theirs is demagoguery and deception.
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But cutting spending and bureaucracy alone won’t be enough. In their current form, Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable. And we cannot afford to avoid our entitlement challenges any longer.
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I am the only candidate for President who has offered a sweeping, specific plan to save Social Security and reform Medicare. There are those who say you can’t talk straight to the American people on these key issues and still win an election. I say we can, we must, and I will!
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We will slowly and gradually raise the retirement age for Social Security – and, we will slow the growth in benefits for our nation’s higher-income retirees.
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Third, he said he’d make Medicare and Social Security solvent for future generations. Three years later, he still hasn’t offered a serious proposal for either one.
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These changes will not add to the deficit. Stronger economic growth, spending cuts, and base broadening will offset the reductions. Middle-income Americans will continue to enjoy tax benefits that favor important priorities, including home ownership, charitable giving, health care, and savings. But there will be some changes in the current deductions and exemptions for higher-income Americans. Those who receive the greatest benefit from rate cuts will see the most significant limits.
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A few commonsense reforms will ensure we make good on our promises to today’s seniors while saving Social Security and Medicare for future generations. Tax hikes are off the table, and there will be no change for those at or near retirement. But younger generations will enter a system strengthened for the 21st century.
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When it comes to Medicare, tomorrow’s seniors will have a choice among insurance providers, including traditional Medicare. As with Medicare Part D today, the private sector will compete to offer insurance coverage at the lowest possible price. Seniors will then receive government support to ensure they can afford that coverage. And with Medicare, like with Social Security, lower-income seniors will receive the most generous benefits.
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President Obama has yet to offer a single serious proposal for saving Medicare or Social Security. I have a plan to save both – and, unlike him, I have the courage to put my plan on the table.
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President Obama doesn’t have a single serious proposal for saving Medicare or Social Security. I have a plan that saves and strengthens both – and I have the courage to put it on the table.
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I have already proposed a plan that will save and strengthen Medicare and Social Security for future generations. And, unlike President Obama, I have the courage to stand behind my plan and the leadership to enact it.
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My plan preserves these programs for those at or near retirement and strengthens them for future generations – without tax increases. I will gradually raise the retirement age for Social Security, and reduce the rate of benefit growth for tomorrow’s higher income seniors. I will introduce market competition and consumer choice to Medicare, while also preserving traditional Medicare coverage as an option, so that future seniors can get higher quality care at lower cost.
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Few things are more important to us than our health, and our healthcare. The 10th amendment preserves the right to choose our own healthcare, and all rights not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution, to the states, and to the people. Obamacare violates the Constitution. I'm counting on the Supreme Court to say exactly that.
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Third, I will reduce government spending. Our high level of debt slows GDP growth and that means fewer jobs. If our goal is jobs, we must, must stop spending over a trillion dollars more than we earn. To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.
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Those results revealed what good teachers can do if the system will only let them. The problem was, this success wasn’t shared. A significant achievement gap between students of different races remained. So we set out to close it.
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