Here are two screenshots from Rachel Maddow’s show on Friday highlighting how much the economy sucks. The private sector added jobs, but those gains were swamped by the government shedding jobs.

The liberal mainstream media has fallen in love again. This time it’s with Wisconsin’s Republican Representative Paul Ryan and his “Roadmap for America’s Future” version 2.0.

Everything’s version 2.0 these days, but in Ryan’s case, his roadmap to “solve America’s long-term economic and fiscal crisis” is really more of a 1.1 version.

You see Newt Gingrich proposed this same plan back in the mid-1990s. You remember that whole “Contract with America” horse-hockey? Well, Ryan’s dusted off Gingrich’s old playbook and the media is lapping it up.

Ryan wants to slather the top 1 percent with huge tax cuts and slash gaping holes into the social safety net. Under his plan, the richest of the rich would see their taxes cut in half. And then he wants to, you guessed it, privatize Social Security and Medicare.

That liberal rag, The Washington Post, ran a shining profile of Ryan on Monday portraying his as the fiscal conscience of the GOP.

According to the profile, Ryan had wanted to be an economist, but decided he would have more impact in Congress, so he ran and won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1998.

Paul Krugman is an economist, and he called Ryan him a “flimflam man.” Despite Ryan’s intellectual dishonesty, Krugman said the mainstream media often describe Ryan with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

Krugman writes:

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”

But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Ryan’s plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next 10 years.

“If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion,” Krugman said. That’s approximately the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under Obama’s plan.

What Ryan is doing is he’s loading up his proposal with huge spending cuts, and having those cuts analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, but ignoring the impact of his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Conservative blogger Megan McArdle jumped into bail out Ryan’s intellectual dishonesty by making the claim that it’s the Joint Committee on Taxation, and not the CBO, that scores tax cuts, but the JCT has been too darn busy to work on his proposal – convenient.

McArdle wrote:

My recollection is also that Paul Ryan couldn’t get the JCT committee staff time anyway because they were a wee bit busy doing all the forecasts for health care reform, and the Roadmap is not going to pass barring some miracle. But I was a wee bit busy with health care reform as well, so I could be wrong about that.

At any rate, the answer to Paul Krugman’s question “Why didn’t he ask” is that “He did, and they said no.”

While I remain skeptical that anything like the Roadmap is politically possible, Paul Ryan is doing exactly what any sensible congressional sponsor with limited access to CBO time does; he’s saying “Well, when this is getting close to being an actual bill, we’ll work with the CBO and the JCT to tweak the tax rates in order to provide the amount of revenue we need.” This is entirely normal.

Ah yes, the “we’re all too busy to do the math” excuse.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum chimed in yesterday.

Responding to McArdle’s “argument” Drum said:

Well … OK. Up to a point. But look: Ryan surely has some responsibility to make the tax side of his plan as realistic as possible, especially given his chosen role as toughminded truthteller. And the Tax Policy Center made it pretty clear months ago that he wasn’t even close to his revenue goal. It’s easy to wave this off as requiring mere “tweaks” to the tax rates, but those tweaks are exactly the place where anyone would quite reasonably be most suspicious of Ryan’s willingness to play fair. After all, two or three points of GDP is a lot of money, and a tax skeptic like Ryan is going to have a very hard time making the changes necessary to come up with that kind of dough.

Ryan’s Roadmap is 70 pages long and obviously the result of a lot of work. So why not put in a little more work and bring the tax side of the plan into the realm of reason? Is it really that cynical to think it’s because he’s trying to get credit for being a deficit fighter without having to give up the dramatic tax cuts for the rich he so obviously has his heart set on?

But now that the mainstream media is singing to Ryan’s tune, who knows what will happen with his plan to gut the social safety and lay fat tax cuts on the wealthy. If the Democrats lose control of the House in November, anything is possible.

At least one Republican is campaigning on the promise that if you elect him, he will lay you off. Another Republican, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, called police, teachers and firefighters “special interests” just looking for another handout from the government. Oh those stinking public servants putting out fires, educating children and fighting crime, they really are the worst of the worst – fire them all.

Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins covers this odd campaign strategy nicely.

Over the past few months, Congressional Republicans and skittish Democrats who’ve lingered too long at the Deficit Panic Kool-Aid Stand have made life extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable members of society — the nation’s unemployed.

Rather than extend unemployment benefits so that the millions of Americans who are out there busting their humps to find the needle-in-a-haystack that is a job of any kind, they’ve demanded that those benefits be offset, essentially punishing the unemployed for the deficits they giddily ran up for years.

Read Linkins’ post here.

It’s time for some tough love folks. The sad fact is that the economy sucks and there’s nothing we can do about it within the confines of our current political system – it’s rigged.

Unemployment will continue to hover around 10 percent for years, with real unemployment at closer to 20 percent. Wages will continue to fall. Health care costs will continue to skyrocket. Home foreclosures will … well, you get the idea.

New York Times Columnist Bob Herbert wrote today about “Long-Term Economic Pain.”

Citing a new report from the Rockefeller Foundation, he said, “Rampant joblessness and skyrocketing medical costs are among the biggest factors tearing at the very fabric of American economic life so painstakingly put together in the early post-World War II decades.”

And what’s being done about all of this? Well, President Obama was able to get a watered down health care bill through Congress, but it’s weak and it doesn’t kick in for another four years.

“Policy makers,” Herbert wrote, “have dropped the ball completely in terms of dealing with this devastating long-term trend of ever-increasing economic insecurity for American families. Long-term solutions that have to do with extensive job creation and a strengthening of the safety net are required. But that doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda.”

What policy makers do care about are their corporate and wealthy benefactors. That means deficit busting tax cuts for the rich.

Since the early 1980s, when President Reagan convinced Americans that slashing taxes for the well-off would magically lead to more and better jobs, income inequality has skyrocketed. We called that voodoo economics – voodoo indeed.

Slashing taxes on the rich is wealth redistribution.

A report by Emmanuel Saez details this trend to redistribute the wealth upward and the effect on income inequality.

Since 1979, income inequality has tripled.

Too many people fail to make the connection between tax cuts, income inequality and jobs. Tax cuts don’t create jobs. Tax cuts for the wealthy do one thing and one thing only – they make rich people richer.

Look at who’s suffering out there, it’s not Warren Buffett or Lloyd Blankfein. It’s the workers who have no job, their unemployment is gone, their homes are foreclosed and they’re living on the streets.

This is our nation’s future. This is what happens when our political process fails to represent the people, but rather the corporations instead. Without political reform, I’m sorry to say, we’re doomed.

For starters, we need publicly financed campaigns, because the current system is rigged. It’s ridiculous that we have an electoral process where people can essentially purchase seats in the House and the Senate. How would we feel if people were allowed to purchase police protection? Yet, it’s OK for the wealthy to purchase lawmakers, but it’s illegal to purchase law enforcers. Which has more real impact? I’d say the lawmakers do. That’s where the money is, and that’s where the power rests.

Until we fix our electoral process, we will continue to slide down the rabbit hole. At some point we will be too far gone and rampant poverty will destroy us. It will happen. It is happening. We need to focus on the real threat.

In this YouTube video mashup from yesterday’s show, Rachel Maddow exposes the hypocrisy and idiocracy of the GOP’s deficit hawk lameness.

Here are the documents regarding the hearings about the role of investments bankers (e.g. Goldman Sachs) leading to the Great Recession.

For seven months a team of investigative journalists from ProPublica looked into a story for us, the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us. It includes our original Broadway song “Bet Against the American Dream.”

Listen “This American Life” with Ira Glass.

Paul Krugman sheds a bit of light on the charges the Securities and Exchange Commission have lobbed at Goldman Sachs.

The main moral you should draw from the charges against Goldman, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong — and not just because no such promise would be credible.

For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.

Read Krugman’s column in its entirety on The New York Times

Nomi Prins is a senior fellow at the public policy center Demos and she published a story today on Alternet about how Wall Street fatcats are raking in stacks of cash and up to their old tricks again while they lobby Congress to not regulate them.

So far it looks like the Democrats are kind of siding with the banks and the Republicans are totally siding with the banks. But what’s going to play well for members of congress come November? I wonder.

As we wind up for another dramatic bipartisan squabble over all the crap Wall Street flung at us, things are getting back to normal – for the wealthy. The top 25 hedge fund managers made a record $25.3 billion dollars in 2009. And despite all those dramatic congressional hearings, average compensation of Wall Street bankers rose by 27 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, banks are hiding their debt with the same old balance sheet magic they’ve been deploying for years and posting record new trading revenues—putting the economy at risk while creating no perceptible economic benefits.

Read the entire story on AlterNet

Regulating the health insurance was a big effing deal, but reigning in the the banks is arguably far more critical to US economic stability. As usual, Economist Paul Krugman is your guide to all things economic, and today he broke down financial reform in simple and easy to understand terms.

There are three groups of people involved in this process. There are those that don’t want any regulation of any banks under any circumstances. We’ll call them Republican members of Congress. Then there are two groups that want to regulate banks but differ in how it should be done. One group we’ll call the Volckers and the other we’ll call the Krugmans.

The Volckers, named after former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, want to regulate the size of banks. For them, the solution to our banking problem will be in eliminating “too big too fail” banks. The theory is that if we just break the banks into smaller pieces, and if some of them fail, the free market will kick in to solve the problem and prevent another taxpayer bailout. Unfortunately history doesn’t support this claim (e.g. The Great Depression).

The Krugmans believe that to fix our banking crisis we need to regulate what banks do – not how big they are.

Opposing the Volckers, Krugman wrote:

Here’s how I see it. Breaking up big banks wouldn’t really solve our problems, because it’s perfectly possible to have a financial crisis that mainly takes the form of a run on smaller institutions. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in the 1930s, when most of the banks that collapsed were relatively small — small enough that the Federal Reserve believed that it was O.K. to let them fail. As it turned out, the Fed was dead wrong: the wave of small-bank failures was a catastrophe for the wider economy.

Paul Krugman economist

According to the Krugmans, the same could happen today, so rather than bailing out a few big banks, the taxpayer would be bailing out lots of smaller banks. The end result would be another taxpayer bailout.

Here‘s the Krugman solution.

After all, the U.S. banking system had a long period of stability after World War II, based on a combination of deposit insurance, which eliminated the threat of bank runs, and strict regulation of bank balance sheets, including both limits on risky lending and limits on leverage, the extent to which banks were allowed to finance investments with borrowed funds. And Canada — whose financial system is dominated by a handful of big banks, but which maintained effective regulation — has weathered the current crisis notably well.

What ended the era of U.S. stability was the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions that carried out banking functions but operated without a safety ne

t and with minimal regulation. In particular, many businesses began parking their cash, not in bank deposits, but in “repo” — overnight loans to the likes of Lehman Brothers. Unfortunately, repo wasn’t protected and regulated like old-fashioned banking, so it was vulnerable to a pre-1930s-type crisis of confidence. And that, in a nutshell, is what went wrong in 2007-2008.

So why not update traditional regulation to encompass the shadow banks? We already have an implicit form of deposit insurance: It’s clear that creditors of shadow banks will be bailed out in time of crisis. What we need now are two things: (a) regulators need the authority to seize failing shadow banks, the way the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation already has the authority to seize failing conventional banks, and (b) there have to be prudential limits on shadow banks, above all limits on their leverage.

From a banker’s perspective, they’d rather have the Volcker regulation than the Krugman one – or even better no regulation at all. Under the Volcker plan, banks merely have to break up into smaller chunks but could still do business as usual. But under Krugman’s plan, banks would have to dramatically adjust how they’ve been doing business, and that they don’t like.

The question is, can Congress fix this problem? If health care reform is any gauge, the answer is maybe.

–
Financial Reform 101 by Paul Krugman

I know many Americans hate progress, change, liberals, equality and workers, but it still surprises me when I see so many regular folks fight so hard to protect wealthy executives and corporations.

I wonder if CEOs for big pharma and health insurance companies sit around drinking scotch and laughing their asses off watching YouTube videos of all the boobs rallying to protect their positions of power.

I mean think about it, the Tea Partiers fought tooth and nail to protect health insurance companies so they can deny them – the protesters – health care, to take away their health care when they need it and to bankrupt them when they get sick.

It makes no sense.

And who do we have to thank for this mind-boggling insanity? President Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t so much the man as it was the time. Reagan, like all presidents, don’t create movements but they ride them.

The 1980s was the “Me Decade.” It was a time when the Baby Boomers were coming of age and they wanted, not just their slice, but the entire American pie. It was a decade plagued with un-checked greed and individualism. Either you were a Gordon Gekko, you wanted to be him or at the very least respected his tenacity and ruthlessness.

The last thing we needed was government intervention and taxes to slow down our quest for all of the money in the world.

There’s no doubt that this anti-government sentiment was rooted in the 1960s and 1970s when the government was doing some pretty horrible things. We had the Vietnam war and we lost. We had Watergate and we lost again. We did get civil rights legislation and Medicare, but the GOP successfully leveraged that as part of its “southern strategy.”

Animosity towards the government was strong on both sides of our political spectrum, and so when Reagan came in saying that it’s “morning in America,” people liked it.

Taxes for the wealthy were slashed and slashed and slashed again. Banking regulation was relegated to the garbage heap. We didn’t want to pay taxes, we wanted voodoo economics.

The idea behind voodoo economics was that by reducing government spending (that didn’t happen), reducing taxes (that did happen), reducing regulation (that happened) and controlling inflation (see Federal Reserve) the wealthy would get so rich some of that money would trickle down to the workers.

That’s called a top-down approach to economics – make the rich really rich and we all benefit. The problem is that it didn’t work.

What happened is that income inequality skyrocketed. While the rich were paying less in taxes, government spending wasn’t reduced and therefore deficits went up and the burden was placed squarely on the shoulders of the middle class. The money did trickle down. It trickled a little here and a little there, but unfortunately, trickle-down economics is just that – a trickle.

And so for the last 30 years, the rich got really rich and the rest of Americans were left with bailing out the Saving and Loans institutions that failed in the ’80s, the hedge fund debacle in the ’90s and the most recent Wall Street bankers who ushered in the Great Recession.

History should be our guide to economic and tax policy. When the rich don’t pay their fair share, like they didn’t in the “Roaring Twenties” which lead to the Great Depression. While we were under the spell of voodoo economics, we all suffered the consequences with the Great Recession. We can’t have an economic system that encourages economic inequality.

You see, one of the fundamental components of a tax system is to distribute the wealth. Either wealth goes up to the rich or down to the masses. Under Reaganomics it went up. Wealth redistribution is not socialism. It’s not communism. It’s how taxation works. And as a society we have to decide who should get the money – the wealthy or the rest of us.

A progressive taxation system is a bottom-up approach. It’s a belief that the real economic engine of this country isn’t the 1 percent of us who are wealthy, but the 99 percent who aren’t. If we have money, we buy a new car every couple of years. We buy new clothes. We go out to dinner. We go on a vacation with our family. The richest among us already do those things regardless of their tax burden, but the rest of us don’t.

It’s the workers of this nation that make this economy strong. When we have money, we spend it.

But the tide is changing. Americans have realized that slashing taxes on the wealthy doesn’t lead to economic prosperity but just the opposite. And when President Obama signed health care reform into law yesterday, he was saying that he supports the workers – the middle class. He said it’s time for the wealthy to start paying their fair share.

Now Obama needs to repeal the Bush tax cuts and then some. What America needs is a return to a progressive tax system and an end to laissez-faire government regulation of our financial system. Obama has a lot of work to do, because Americans don’t want voodoo economics anymore, but those who control the wealth and the GOP surely do, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep things as unfair as possible.

–
In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality

Here is Sarah Palin’s Facebook posting made on Feb. 17, 2010. In an effort to maintain the public record, Palin’s entire message is published here. It was downloaded from Palin’s Facebook page on Feb. 17, 2010 at 11:04 a.m. Eastern.

Stimulus Bill Anniversary Proves Not-So-Stimulating
Feb. 17, 2010 at 7:04am

One year ago today, President Obama signed a nearly trillion dollar stimulus package and handed our children the bill. What did we get for that massive price tag? Many promises, but the promises have proven false. On this stimulus anniversary, Washington needs to hear our message that Americans expect, and deserve, better.

Americans were promised the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8%. It’s now well over that. We were promised it would be targeted and pork-free. It’s been loaded with pork, corporate giveaways, union bosses’ goodies, and other manners of waste. We were promised there would be no fraud, but our government now tells us it can’t even verify the eligibility of people applying for the $325 billion worth of stimulus tax provisions. We were promised there would be strict oversight, but billions of dollars apparently were allotted to congressional districts that don’t even exist. We were promised it would provide “green jobs” for Americans, but 80% of the $2 billion they spent on alternative energy went to purchase wind turbines built in China! We were promised it would help state governments weather the recession, but states receiving the stimulus bait will be in worse fiscal shape now because local governments will be on the hook for new unfunded mandates and continuation of government programs they couldn’t afford in the first place – as many of us governors warned state legislatures.

One year later, we see plainly that the stimulus was not a well-thought out plan. It hasn’t revived our economy; instead the debt-ridden package will prove to be a drag on our economy. It hasn’t put us on the path to a better future; instead it’s unfairly mortgaged our children’s future and stolen opportunities from them. It hasn’t strengthened us; instead it endangers our freedom and security by making us even more beholden to foreign lenders. The legacy of the stimulus isn’t jobs or economic growth – it’s more dangerous debt.

But there is hope! And this hope lies in draining the swamp in D.C. and sending Commonsense Conservatives to Washington who understand the need for fiscal restraint. Those who are willing to rein in spending, respect Constitutional limits, and repeal the stimulus should get our support, and those who have been part of the problem should be replaced.

In this election year, we’ll see many daring Davids take on entrenched Goliaths. Just one of these many brave souls is a northern Wisconsin patriot named Sean Duffy. He’s running in Wisconsin’s 7th congressional district against a liberal Goliath who’s been in Congress over 40 years now and has the dubious distinction of being the author of the stimulus bill. To commemorate the anniversary of the signing of the stimulus, Sean Duffy is holding a fundraising “money bomb” for his campaign so he can replace the career politician who drafted this government-bloating behemoth.

If you’re frustrated about the waste in the stimulus bill, please support a solid fiscal conservative who will work to repeal it. Please visit Sean Duffy’s website and help him help us correct the mistakes of this past year.

On this first anniversary of the stimulus, let’s send a message to the big-spenders in Washington by helping Sean Duffy unseat the author of the stimulus. Let’s put government back on our side and get to work revitalizing America!

- Sarah Palin

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=307630368434

Here’s the transcript and video of President Obama’s Weekly Address. The topics are the economy, the difficulty of bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan Washington and the “pay as you go” rule Obama signed into law last night. The transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 13, 2010 at approximately 10:15 a.m. Eastern.

All across America, people work hard to meet their responsibilities. You do your jobs, take care of your families, pay your bills. Sometimes, particularly in tough times like these, you have to make hard choices about where to spend and where to save. That’s what being responsible means. That’s a bedrock value of our country. And that ought to be a value that our government lives up to as well.

Yet, over the past decade, this hasn’t always not been the case. Ten years ago, we had a big budget surplus with projected surpluses far into the future. Ten years later, those surpluses are gone. In fact, when I first walked through the door, the government’s budget deficit stood at $1.3 trillion, with the budget gap over the next decade projected to be $8 trillion.

Partly, the recession is to blame. With millions of people out of work, and millions of families facing hardship, folks are paying less in taxes while seeking more services, like unemployment benefits. Rising health care costs are also to blame. Each year, more and more tax dollars are devoted to Medicare and Medicaid.

But what also made these large deficits possible was the end of a common sense rule called “pay as you go.” It’s pretty simple. It says to Congress, you have to pay as you go. You can’t spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. This is how a responsible family or business manages a budget. And this is how a responsible government manages a budget, as well.

It was this rule that helped lead to balanced budgets in the 1990s, by making clear that we could not increase entitlement spending or cut taxes simply by borrowing more money. And it was the abandonment of this rule that allowed the previous administration and previous congresses to pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy and create an expensive new drug program without paying for any of it. Now in a perfect world, Congress would not have needed a law to act responsibly, to remember that every dollar spent would come from taxpayers today – or our children tomorrow.

But this isn’t a perfect world. This is Washington. And while in theory there is bipartisan agreement on moving on balanced budgets, in practice, this responsibility for the future is often overwhelmed by the politics of the moment. It falls prey to the pressure of special interests, to the pull of local concerns, and to a reality familiar to every single American – the fact that it is a lot easier to spend a dollar than save one.

That is why this rule is necessary. And that is why I am pleased that Congress fulfilled my request to restore it. Last night, I signed the “pay as you go” rule into law. Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.

But that’s not all we must do. Even as we make critical investments to create jobs today and lay a foundation for growth tomorrow – by cutting taxes for small businesses, investing in education, promoting clean energy, and modernizing our roads and railways – we have to continue to go through the budget line by line, looking for ways to save. We have to cut where we can, to afford what we need.

This year, I’ve proposed another $20 billion in budget cuts. And I’ve also called for a freeze in government spending for three years. It won’t affect benefits through Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. And it will not affect national security – including benefits for veterans. But it will affect the rest of the budget.

Finally, I’ve proposed a bipartisan Fiscal Commission to provide recommendations for long-term deficit reduction. Because in the end, solving our fiscal challenge – so many years in the making – will take both parties coming together, putting politics aside, and making some hard choices about what we need to spend, and what we don’t. It will not happen any other way. Unfortunately this proposal – which received the support of a bipartisan majority in the Senate – was recently blocked. So, I will be creating this commission by executive order.

After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility. It’s easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What’s hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that’s what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend. And with the return of “pay as you go,” as well as other steps we’ve begun to take, that is exactly what we are doing.

Thanks.

President Obama held a news conference following a bipartisan meeting with House and Senate Republicans and Democrats. Here is the full transcript of the president’s remarks and complete video of the news conference. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spoke for about 30 minutes but that is not part of the transcript. The transcript was provided by the White House and downloaded from WhiteHouse.gov on Feb. 10, 2010 at approximately 10:00 a.m. Eastern.

1:38 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. I am glad to see that all of you braved the weather to be here. A little while ago I had a meeting with the Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, and it went very well. In fact, I understand that McConnell and Reid are out doing snow angels on the South Lawn together. (Laughter.) Can you picture that, Chuck? Not really?

The meeting did go well, and I appreciate them making the trek. We had a good and frank conversation and it’s one that I hope we can continue on a more regular basis.

We all understand that there are legitimate and genuine differences between the parties, but despite the political posturing that often paralyzes this town, there are many issues upon which we can and should agree. That’s what the American people are demanding of us. I think they’re tired of every day being Election Day in Washington. And at this critical time in our country, the people sent us here expect a seriousness of purpose that transcends petty politics.

That’s why I’m going to continue to seek the best ideas from either party as we work to tackle the pressing challenges ahead. I am confident, for example, that when one in 10 of our fellow citizens can’t work, we should be able to come together and help business create more jobs. We ought to be able to agree on providing small businesses with additional tax credits and much needed lines of credit. We ought to agree on investments in crumbling roads and bridges, and we should agree on tax breaks for making homes more energy-efficient — all of which will put more Americans to work. Many of the job proposals that I’ve laid out have passed the House and are soon going to be debated in the Senate. We spent a lot of time in this meeting discussing a jobs package and how we could move forward on that. And if there are additional ideas, I will consider them as well. What I won’t consider is doing nothing in the face of a lot of hardship across the country.

We also talked about restoring fiscal responsibility. There are few matters on which there is as much vigorous bipartisan agreement, at least in public, but unfortunately there’s also a lot of partisan wrangling behind closed doors. This is what we know for sure: For us to solve this extraordinary problem that is so many years in the making, it’s going to take the cooperation of both parties. It’s not going to happen in any other way.

I’m pleased that Congress supported my request to restore the pay-as-you-go rule, which was instrumental in turning deficits into surpluses during the 1990s. I’ve also called for a bipartisan fiscal commission. Unfortunately this measure, which originally had received the support of a bipartisan majority of the Senate and was cosponsored by Senators Conrad and Gregg, Democrats and Republicans, was blocked there. So I’m going to be creating this commission by executive order. And during our meeting I asked the leadership of both parties to join in this serious effort to address our long-term deficits, because when the politics is put aside, the reality of our fiscal challenge is not subject to interpretation. Math is not partisan. There ought to be a debate about how to close our deficits. What we can’t accept is business as usual, and we can’t afford grandstanding at the expense of actually getting something done.

During our meeting we also touched briefly on how we can move forward on health reform. I’ve already announced that in two weeks I’ll be holding a meeting with people from both parties, and as I told the congressional leadership, I’m looking forward to a constructive debate with plans that need to be measured against this test. Does it bring down costs for all Americans as well as for the federal government, which spends a huge amount on health care? Does it provide adequate protection against abuses by the insurance industry? Does it make coverage affordable and available to the tens of millions of working Americans who don’t have it right now? And does it help us get on a path of fiscal sustainability?

We also talked about why this is so urgent. Just this week, there was a report that Anthem Blue Cross, which is the largest insurer in the largest state, California, is planning on raising premiums for many individual policyholders by as much as 39 percent. If we don’t act, this is just a preview of coming attractions. Premiums will continue to rise for folks with insurance; millions more will lose their coverage altogether; our deficits will continue to grow larger. And we have an obligation — both parties — to tackle this issue in a serious way.

Now, bipartisanship depends on a willingness among both Democrats and Republicans to put aside matters of party for the good of the country. I won’t hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won’t hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that’s rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience. We talked about this as well, particularly when it comes to the confirmation process. I respect the Senate’s role to advise and consent, but for months, qualified, non- controversial nominees for critical positions in government, often positions related to our national security, have been held up despite having overwhelming support. My nominee for one important job, the head of General Services Administration, which helps run the government, was denied a vote for nine months. When she finally got a vote on her nomination, she was confirmed 96 to nothing. That’s not advise and consent; that’s delay and obstruct.

One senator, as you all are aware, had put a hold on every single nominee that we had put forward due to a dispute over a couple of earmarks in his state. In our meeting, I asked the congressional leadership to put a stop to these holds in which nominees for critical jobs are denied a vote for months. Surely we can set aside partisanship and do what’s traditionally been done to confirm these nominations. If the Senate does not act — and I made this very clear — if the Senate does not act to confirm these nominees, I will consider making several recess appointments during the upcoming recess, because we can’t afford to allow politics to stand in the way of a well-functioning government.

My hope is that this will be the first of a series of meetings that I have with leadership of both parties in Congress. We’ve got to get past the tired debates that have plagued our politics and left behind nothing but soaring debt and mounting challenges, greater hardships among the American people, and extraordinary frustrations among the American people. Those frustrations are what led me to run for President, and as long as I’m here in Washington, I intend to try to make this government work on their behalf.

So, you know, I’m going to take a couple of questions, guys.

Major.

Q After meeting with you, John Boehner came out and told us, “The House can’t pass the health care bill it once passed; the Senate can’t pass the health care bill it once passed. Why would we have a conversation about legislation that can’t pass?” As a part of that, he said you and your White House and congressional Democrats should start over entirely from scratch on health care reform. How do you respond? Are you willing to do that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, here’s how I responded to John in the meeting, and I’ve said this publicly before. There are some core goals that have to be met. We’ve got to control costs, both for families and businesses, but also for our government. Everybody out there who talks about deficits has to acknowledge that the single biggest driver of our deficits is health care spending. We cannot deal with our deficits and debt long term unless we get a handle on that. So that has to be part of a package.

Number two, we’ve got to deal with insurance abuses that affect millions of Americans who’ve got health insurance. And number three, we’ve got to make health insurance more available to folks in the individual market, as I just mentioned, in California, who are suddenly seeing their premiums go up 39 percent. That applies to the majority of small businesses, as well as sole proprietors. They are struggling.

So I’ve got these goals. Now, we have a package, as we work through the differences between the House and the Senate, and we’ll put it up on a Web site for all to see over a long period of time, that meets those criteria, meets those goals. But when I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost. And I said, great, let me see it. And I have no interest in doing something that’s more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it.

So I’m going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas that help promote these goals. What I will not do, what I don’t think makes sense and I don’t think the American people want to see, would be another year of partisan wrangling around these issues; another six months or eight months or nine months worth of hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there’s a lot of posturing. Let’s get the relevant parties together; let’s put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say this is the right way to move forward, even if I don’t get every single thing that I want.

But here’s the point that I made to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell: Bipartisanship can’t be that I agree to all the things that they believe in or want, and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want, and that’s the price of bipartisanship, right? But that’s sometimes the way it gets presented. Mitch McConnell said something very nice in the meeting about how he supports our goals on nuclear energy and clean coal technology and more drilling to increase oil production. Well, of course he likes that; that’s part of the Republican agenda for energy, which I accept. And I’m willing to move off some of the preferences of my party in order to meet them halfway. But there’s got to be some give from their side as well. That’s true on health care; that’s true on energy; that’s true on financial reform. That’s what I’m hoping gets accomplished at the summit.

Q Do you agree the House and Senate bill can’t pass anymore?

THE PRESIDENT: What I agree with is that the public has soured on the process that they saw over the last year. I think that actually contaminates how they view the substance of the bills. I think it is important for all of these issues to be aired so that people have confidence if we’re moving forward on such a significant part of the economy as health care, that there is complete transparency and all of these issues have been adequately vetted and adequately debated.

And this gives an opportunity not just for Democrats to say here’s what we think we should do, but it also gives Republicans a showcase before the entire country to say here’s our plan; here’s why we think this will work. And one of the things that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell both said is they didn’t think that the status quo was acceptable, and that’s, right there, promising. That indicates that if all sides agree that we can’t just continue with business as usual then maybe we can actually get something done.

Q Mr. President, one of the reasons Anthem said — Anthem Blue Cross says that it’s raising its premiums is because so many people are dropping out of individual coverage because the economy is so bad and that leaves the people in the pool who are people who need medical care driving up costs. One of the reasons why businesses are not expanding right now, in addition to some of the credit issues you’ve talked about, at least according to business leaders, is they say there’s an uncertainty of what they need to plan for because of the energy bill, because of health care. That’s what they say. I’m not saying it’s true or not, but that’s what they say. What do you say when you hear that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that the biggest uncertainty has been we just went through the worst recession since the Great Depression and people weren’t sure whether the financial system was going to melt down and whether we were going to tip into a endless recession. So let’s be clear about the sources of uncertainty in terms of business investment over the last several years: A huge contraction, trillions of dollars of losses in people’s 401(k)s; people have a lot of debt coming out of the previous decade that they still haven’t worked out; the housing market losing a whole bunch of value.

So the good news is that where we were contracting by 6 percent the economy is now growing by 6 percent. The CEOs I talked to are saying they are now making investments, and I anticipate that they’re going to start hiring at a more rapid clip. What I’ve also heard is them saying that we would like to feel like Washington is working and able to get some things done.
There are two ways of interpreting the issue of uncertainty. One way would be to say, well, you know what, we’ll just go back to what we were doing before on, let’s say, the financial markets. We won’t have the regulations that we need; we won’t make any changes in terms of “too big to fail.” That will provide certainty — until the next financial crisis.

That’s not the kind of certainty I think that the financial markets need. The kind of certainty they need is for us to go ahead and agree on a bipartisan effort to put some rules of the road in place so that consumers are protected in the financial markets; so that we don’t have banks that are too big to fail; that we have ways of winding them down and protecting the overall system without taxpayer bailouts. That requires legislation. The sooner we can get that done, the better.

The same would be true when it comes to health care. A lot of CEOs I hear from will say, boy, we’d like you to get health care settled one way or another, but they will acknowledge that when they open up their latest invoice for their premiums and they find out that those premiums have gone up 20 percent or 25 percent, that’s the kind of uncertainty that also tamps down business investment.

So I guess my answer would be this: The sooner the business community has a sense that we’ve got our act together here in Washington and can move forward on big, serious issues in a substantive way without a lot of posturing and partisan wrangling, I think the better off the entire country is going to be. I absolutely agree on that.

What I think is important is not to buy into this notion that is perpetrated by some of the business interests that got a stake in this who are fighting financial reform, for example, to say, boy, we’d be doing fine if we just didn’t try to regulate the banks. That I think would be a mistake.

Q Just to play devil’s advocate on that — a small business, let’s say, not somebody who’s going to be affected by the regulatory reform, small business — you have proposed, you would acknowledge, a bold agenda. And a small business might wonder, I don’t know how the energy bill is going to affect me, I don’t know how the health care reform bill is going to affect me — I’d better hold off on hiring.

THE PRESIDENT: The small businesses I talk to — and I’ve been talking to a lot of them as I’ve been traveling around the country over the last several months — their biggest problem is right now they can’t get credit out of their banks so they’re uncertain about that. And they’re still uncertain about orders — do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more.

It’s looking better at this point. But that’s not the rationale for people saying, I’m not hiring. Let me put it this way. Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory, and sell to those customers, they will do so. Okay?

Let’s see, let’s get a print guy here. David.

Q You heard McConnell talk about nuclear power, offshore drilling, free trade — that’s a lot of Republican stuff. Is your party going to go for that if you decide to support that –

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I think that on energy there should be a bipartisan agreement that we have to take a both/and approach rather than an either/or approach. What do I mean by that? I am very firm in my conviction that the country that leads the way in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel, geothermal — that country is going to win the race in the 21st century global economy. So we have to move in that direction.

What is also true is that given our energy needs in order to continue economic growth, produce jobs, make sure our businesses are competitive around the world, that we’re going to need some of the old, traditional energy sources as we’re developing these new ones and ramping them up. So we can’t overnight convert to an all-solar or an all-wind economy. That just can’t happen. We’re going to have needs in these traditional sources.

And so the question then is, are we going to be able to put together a package that includes safe, secure nuclear power; that includes new technologies so that we can use coal — which we have in abundance and is very cheap, but often is adding to our greenhouse gases — can we find sequestration technologies that clean that up; can we identify opportunities to increase our oil and natural gas production in a way that is environmentally sustainable? And that should be part of a package with our development of clean energy.

And my hope is that my Republican friends, but also Democrats, say to themselves, let’s be practical and let’s do both. Let’s not just do one or the other; let’s do both. Over time I think the transition is going to be more and more clean energy and over time fossil fuels become less prominent in our overall energy mix. But we’ve got to do both.

Q How confident are you there will be that kind of consensus for that double-edged approach?

THE PRESIDENT: I am just a eternal optimist — (laughter) — and so — it’s the right thing to do. And all I can do is just to keep on making the argument about what’s right for the country and assume that over time people, regardless of party, regardless of their particular political positions, are going to gravitate towards the truth. Okay?

I’m going to take two more. Let’s see –

Q How about the back? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I just want to make sure that I was getting a balance here, so — go ahead, Chuck.

Q Awwww –

THE PRESIDENT: Why is everybody moaning about Todd?

Q He’s too good. His questions are too precise. (Laughter.)

Q Iran — we got the news today that they’re doing more of these — trying to enhance this uranium even more. Obviously Secretary Gates today in Paris was quoted as saying basically the dialogue seems to be over and now the question is sanctions. Where are we on sanctions? How close is this? I know you had sort of an end-of-the-year deadline when you stood up there with Sarkozy and Brown. It’s now February. How quickly is this moving along?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s moving along fairly quickly. I think that we have bent over backwards to say to the Islamic Republic of Iran that we are willing to have a constructive conversation about how they can align themselves with international norms and rules and reenter as full members of the international community.

The most obvious attempt was when we gave them an offer that said we are going to provide the conversion of some of the low-enriched uranium that they already have into the isotopes that they need for their medical research and for hospitals that would serve up to a million Iranian citizens. They rejected it — although one of the difficulties in dealing with Iran over the last several months is it’s not always clear who’s speaking on behalf of the government, and we get a lot of different, mixed signals. But what’s clear is, is that they have not said yes to an agreement that Russia, China, Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States all said was a good deal, and that the director of the IAEA said was the right thing to do and that Iran should accept.

That indicates to us that, despite their posturing that their nuclear power is only for civilian use, that they in fact continue to pursue a course that would lead to weaponization. And that is not acceptable to the international community, not just to the United States. So what we’ve said from the start was we’re moving on dual tracks. If you want to accept the kinds of agreements with the international community that lead you down a path of being a member of good standing, then we welcome you. If not –

Q Haven’t they responded, though? I mean, by deciding to do what they did, with these –

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m getting to that.

Q Okay.

THE PRESIDENT: And if not, then the next step is sanctions. They have made their choice so far, although the door is still open. And what we are going to be working on over the next several weeks is developing a significant regime of sanctions that will indicate to them how isolated they are from the international community as a whole.

Q What do you mean by “regime of sanctions”?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, meaning that there’s going to be a –

Q Some will be U.N. and some will be –

THE PRESIDENT: We are going to be looking at a variety of ways in which countries indicate to Iran that their approach is unacceptable. And the U.N. will be one aspect of that broader effort.

Q China will be there? You’re confident?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the — we are confident right now that the international community is unified around Iran’s misbehavior in this area. How China operates at the Security Council as we pursue sanctions is something that we’re going to have to see. One thing I’m pleased about is to see how forward-leaning the Russians have been on this issue. I think they clearly have seen that Iran hasn’t been serious about solving what is a solvable dispute between Iran and the international community.

All right? I’m going to make this the last question. And I’ll take somebody from the back — yes.

Q Me?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q Thanks for doing this. It’s been a while. (Laughter.) On health care, the Republicans are asking whether the February 25th session will include economists and public interest groups and people supporting your side, or will it just be the members of Congress? And on Anthem Blue Cross, do you have the authority to go in and tell a private company they can’t charge that — how will you stop them?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don’t have the authority as I understand it — I can’t simply issue an executive order lowering everybody’s rates. If I could I would have done that already and saved myself a lot of grief on Capitol Hill. That’s why reform is so important. That’s why the status quo is unacceptable.

But there is no shortcut in dealing with this issue. I know the American people get frustrated in debating something like health care because you get a whole bunch of different claims being made by different groups and different interests. It is a big, complicated, tough issue. But what is also true is that without some action on the part of Congress, it is very unlikely that we see any improvement over the current trajectory. And the current trajectory is premiums keep on going up 10, 15, 20, 30 percent. The current trajectory is more and more people are losing health care.

I don’t know if people noted, because during the health care debate everybody was saying the President is trying to take over — a government takeover of health care. I don’t know if anybody noticed that for the first time this year you saw more people getting health care from government than you did from the private sector — not because of anything we did, but because more and more people are losing their health care from their employers. It’s becoming unaffordable. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.

We want people to be able to get health care from their employers. But we also understand that you’ve got to fix the system so that people are able to get it at affordable rates and small businesses can afford to give their employees insurance at an affordable rate. And that’s not happening right now.

To your question about the 25th, my hope is that this doesn’t end up being political theater, as I think some of you have phrased it. I want a substantive discussion. We haven’t refined exactly how the agenda is going to go that day. We want to talk with both the Democratic and Republican leaders to find out what they think would be most useful. I do want to make sure that there’s some people like the Congressional Budget Office, for example, that are considered non-partisan, who can answer questions.

In this whole health care debate I’m reminded of the story that was told about Senator Moynihan, who was I guess in an argument with one of his colleagues, and his colleague was losing the argument so he got a little flustered and said to Senator Moynihan, “Well, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Senator Moynihan said, “Well, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I think that’s the key to a successful dialogue on the 25th or on health care.

Let’s establish some common facts. Let’s establish what the issues are, what the problems are, and let’s test out in front of the American people what ideas work and what ideas don’t. And if we can establish that factual accuracy about how different approaches would work, then I think we can make some progress. And it may be that some of the facts that come up are ones that make my party a little bit uncomfortable. So if it’s established that by working seriously on medical malpractice and tort reform that we can reduce some of those costs, I’ve said from the beginning of this debate I’d be willing to work on that. On the other hand, if I’m told that that is only a fraction of the problem and that is not the biggest driver of health care costs, then I’m also going to insist, okay, let’s look at that as one aspect of it, but what else are we willing to do?

And this is where it gets back to the point I was making earlier. Bipartisanship cannot mean simply that Democrats give up everything that they believe in, find the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for and we do those things, and then we have bipartisanship. That’s not how it works in any other realm of life. That’s certainly not how it works in my marriage with Michelle, although I usually do give in most of the time. (Laughter.) But the — there’s got to be some give and take, and that’s what I’m hoping can be accomplished. And I’m confident that’s what the American people are looking for.

So, all right?

Q Jobs question?

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, since there wasn’t a jobs question –

Q Well, I just –

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll make this the last one, jobs question.

Q At the stakeout, the Republicans were saying, well, the jobs package we’ve seen, it’s not really ready yet, we’re a little worried about the cost. Are you satisfied that there is something that can be quickly moved through Congress on jobs?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, my understanding is — first of all, the House has moved forward a jobs package that has some good elements in it. My understanding is, is that there is bipartisan talks taking place as we speak on the Senate side about some elements of a package.

I think there are some things that a lot of people agree on. Just to give you an example, the idea of eliminating capital gains for small businesses — something we can all agree on. I talked about it at the State of the Union address. My hope would be that we would all agree on a mechanism to get community banks who are lending to small businesses more capital, because that is something that I keep on hearing is one of the biggest problems that small businesses have out there.

So I think that it’s realistic for us to get a package moving quickly that may not include all the things I think need to be done, and it may be that that first package builds some trust and confidence that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill can work together and then we move on to the next aspect of the package and so forth. It may take a series of incremental steps, but the one thing I’m absolutely clear about is, is that we’ve got an economy that’s growing right now, a huge boost in productivity — that’s the good news. The bad news is, is that companies still haven’t taken that final step in actually putting people on their payroll full-time.

We’re seeing an increase in temporary workers, but they haven’t yet taken on that full-time worker. And so providing some additional impetus to them, right as the economy is moving in a positive direction, I think can end up yielding some good results.

All right? Thank you, guys. That was pretty good, thanks.

END
2:11 P.M. EST

Despite the technical glitches, White House staff answers some pretty good questions about everything from No Child Left Behind, Iran sanctions, felon voting rights, Afghanistan, carbon taxing, the bank bailouts and more.

Answering questions: Heather Higginbottom of Domestic Policy Council, Brian Deese, from the National Economic Council and National Security Council Ben Rhodes.

It’s worth watching, so check it out.

While data and statistics don’t tell the whole story about our flailing economy and unemployment, but this chart created on Feb. 5, 2010 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is pretty cool. Jobs are being created, even if slower than we’d like.

Here we go again. Just like in 2003, groupthink is sweeping the nation. When the war drums were beating their loudest to attack Iraq, the media and pundits were onboard with the Bush administration lies. No one challenged what everyone knew to be true – that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he was going to attack the US. Now seven years later, we’re back at it again, but this time it’s that deadly deficit that will surely kill you and your family before the year is through.

Economist Paul Krugman has been calling for more deficit spending since the recession began. He wrote that “running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs.”

And according to Krugman, he’s not a lone ranger supporting deficit spending.

“Many economists take a much calmer view of budget deficits than anything you’ll see on TV. Nor do investors seem unduly concerned: U.S. government bonds continue to find ready buyers, even at historically low interest rates,” Krugman said in his Feb. 4 column.

So what’s all the fuss about deficits? It’s politics of course. The GOP and their talk radio and Fox News echo chamber have created the illusion that deficit spending is bad and needs to stop now.

Krugman wrote that “the current sense of panic is that deficit fear-mongering has become a key part of Republican political strategy, doing double duty: it damages President Obama’s image even as it cripples his policy agenda.”

And like the media’s duck-walking in lockstep with Bush’s push for war with Iraq, Americans will suffer if deficit spending is stopped now. Americans need jobs and they need them now. State governments can’t run deficits, but the federal government can.

“For the fact is that thanks to deficit hysteria,” Krugman said, “Washington now has its priorities all wrong: all the talk is about how to shave a few billion dollars off government spending, while there’s hardly any willingness to tackle mass unemployment. Policy is headed in the wrong direction — and millions of Americans will pay the price.”

Read Krugman’s column Fiscal Scare Tactics.”

The following remarks of President Barack Obama as prepared for delivery were supplied by the White House. Town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire on Feb. 2, 2010.

Hello, Nashua! It’s great to be back in New Hampshire today. Now, as some of you might remember, I’ve spent a little time in this state. I’ve had beers at the Peddler’s Daughter here in Nashua and manned the scoop at ice cream socials from Sunapee to Dover to Hudson. I’ve walked Main Street in Concord, and visited with folks in all ten counties. I even once flew into the airport in Milan, which has got to be one of the only airports with a functioning wood stove.

So I’ve had the privilege of getting to know folks here in New Hampshire. I’ve seen firsthand that spirit of independence and self-reliance. I know how hard you all work, and how tough and resilient you all are.

But I also know that folks here in New Hampshire have been tested by these last two years.

We’ve gone through the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and folks here have had their lives uprooted by lost jobs, foreclosed homes, shuttered businesses, and vanished savings. Many good, hard-working people who met their responsibilities are now struggling because folks on Wall Street and in Washington didn’t meet theirs.

So when I took office, we knew the first thing we had to do was break the back of this recession. That meant doing some things that weren’t easy, and that I know weren’t popular. It wasn’t popular to prevent our financial system from collapsing by throwing a lifeline to the very Wall Street banks that helped cause this crisis in the first place. But if we hadn’t taken these steps, the entire system could have gone down and taken our economy and millions of families and businesses with it.

Because of the steps we took, the markets have stabilized. No one’s worrying about another Great Depression like they were a year ago. The worst of the storm has passed. But the devastation remains. Today, one in ten Americans still can’t find work.

That is why jobs will be our number one focus in 2010. And we’re going to start where most new jobs do – with small businesses. These are the companies that begin in basements and garages when an entrepreneur takes a chance on his dream, or a worker decides it’s time she became her own boss. They’re companies like ARC Energy, which I visited earlier today. These folks are hard at work on a new manufacturing process for ultra-efficient LED lights that will make them affordable for ordinary people. The technology they’ve created is the only of its kind in the world. They’re this little business in a condo out on Amherst Street, and they have the potential to revolutionize an industry. Right here in Nashua.

Small businesses like ARC Energy have created roughly 65 percent of all new jobs over the past decade and a half. And I think we should make it easier for them to open their doors, expand their operations, and hire more workers. That’s why I’ve proposed a new tax credit for more than one million small businesses that hire new workers or raise wages – and a tax incentive for all businesses to invest in new plants and equipment. And while we’re at it, we should eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment, so these folks can get the capital they need to grow and create jobs.

That’s particularly critical right now, as bank lending standards have tightened, and many small businesses are struggling to get loans.

That’s why today, I’m announcing a proposal to take $30 billion of the money that was repaid by Wall Street banks, and use it to create a new Small Business Lending Fund that will provide capital for community banks on Main Street. These are the small, local banks that work most closely with our small businesses – that provide them their first loan, and watch them grow through good times and bad. The more loans these banks provide to creditworthy small businesses, the better a deal we’ll give them on capital from this Fund. Combined with my proposal back in December to continue waiving fees and increasing guarantees for SBA-backed loans, this will help small banks do even more of what our economy needs – ensure that small businesses are once again the engine of job growth in America.

This is just one example of what we’ve been doing to create jobs this past year. As some of you might remember, last February, we passed the Recovery Act, which had three parts. One third was tax relief for small businesses and 95 percent of working families. One third was emergency relief like increasing unemployment benefits and helping states keep teachers and police officers from losing their jobs. And one third was putting people to work on infrastructure, renewable energy, medical research and more.

Now, I understand why some people are wondering whether the Recovery Act has really worked. Because while these steps mean 2 million Americans are working right now who’d otherwise be unemployed, and our economy is growing again instead of shrinking – and growing at the fastest rate in 6 years – we lost 7 million jobs during this recession. So we’ve still got a pretty big hole to fill. And if you or a member of your family is one of those 7 million, I know it’s not particularly satisfying or reassuring to hear that it could have been a whole lot worse.

And because there’s no magic wand that will make economic problems that were years in the making disappear overnight, it’s easy for politicians to exploit the anger and anguish folks are feeling right now. But I have to say, I’ve noticed that some of the very same folks in Congress who opposed the Recovery Act – and claim that it hasn’t worked – have been all too happy to claim credit for Recovery Act projects in their districts and the jobs those projects have produced. In other words, they’ve found a way to have their cake and vote against it too.

So we’re making progress here, but it can’t come fast enough. And we know that if we truly want to have long-term economic growth in this country, then we need to start addressing the struggles middle-class families have been grappling with for years, long before this recession ever hit.

This past decade has been one of the toughest our middle class has faced in generations, as folks have seen their paychecks shrink and their housing prices fall, while the cost of everything from groceries to health care to college has gone up. They’re working two jobs; they’re working longer hours – but it’s not adding up. And a lot of people put their kids to bed at night wondering whether they’ll be able to give them the opportunities in life that they deserve.

I didn’t run for president to kick these challenges down the road. I didn’t run for president to play it safe and keep my poll numbers as high as possible for the next election. I ran to solve problems for the next generation. I ran to get the hard things done. And I won’t rest until businesses are hiring again, and wages are rising again, and the middle class is thriving again, and we’ve finally got an economy that works for all Americans again. I won’t rest until we do what we know will secure our continued leadership in the 21st century global economy. I’m not ready to cede the future to China or India or any other country. I’m not willing to settle for second place. Not for the United States of America.

But here’s the thing, Nashua: I can’t do this alone. Democrats can’t do this alone – nor should we. We’ve got two parties in this country. And that’s a good thing. It means we have heated debates and vigorous disagreements. And messy as that is, it means bad ideas can be discarded, good ones can be made better, and we don’t go too far to any one extreme. That’s the genius of our democracy.

So I was pleased when the House Republican Caucus graciously invited me to attend their retreat last week. For more than an hour, we had a frank conversation about the issues facing our country. We aired some grievances. We shared some ideas. There were plenty of things on which we didn’t agree. But there were also things on which we did – and many on which we should if we could just focus on solving problems instead of scoring political points.

We all agree that education is the key to a twenty-first century economy. We agree that the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education. So why don’t we work together to transform our schools, so that every child in America can compete with their counterparts, from Beijing to Bangalore. Let’s work together to upgrade our community colleges, which are the gateway to a career for the children of so many working families. And in an era when a high school diploma is no longer a guarantee of a good job, let’s make college affordable for every qualified student. No graduate should have to pay more than ten percent of his or her income on student loans each year. We can see to it that they don’t – and we should.

Republicans and Democrats may not see eye to eye on the threat of global warming, but shouldn’t we agree that American grown energy is good for our security, and that new clean energy jobs are good for our economy? And surely, we can all agree that these jobs shouldn’t be going to China, or Germany – they should be here in America. So let’s invest in innovation. Let’s put people to work on solar panels and wind towers and cutting-edge batteries. Because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy, and America must be that nation.

These are key parts of the foundation we need to build a better future for our families and our country. And so is fixing a health insurance system that too often works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.

No one should be satisfied with a system that allows insurance companies to deny care to folks with pre-existing conditions, or to kick people off their plans when they get too sick. No one should accept a system where small businesses are forced to pay outrageous premiums to get their workers covered, and seniors have big gaps in their Medicare prescription coverage. No one should accept another decade in which health insurance premiums double and millions lose their coverage altogether.

These are the things I hear about every day in the letters I get – from families going bankrupt; from small businesses crushed by their health care costs. So I won’t walk away from these efforts. I won’t walk away from these people. And I don’t think Congress should either. I think we should keep working to get this done – Democrats and Republicans together.

Finally, shouldn’t we all agree that we have got to do something about our deficits? These deficits won’t just burden our kids and grandkids decades from now – they could damage our markets, drive up our interest rates, and jeopardize our recovery right now

This isn’t how responsible families do their budgets. When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. And it’s time your government did the same.

That’s why I’ve proposed cutting more than 120 government programs – consolidating ones that are duplicative, reducing ones that are wasteful, and eliminating those that just don’t work. That’s why I’ve proposed to cap government spending over the next three years. Spending related to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and our national security will not be affected. But all other discretionary government programs will. And that’s why I’m grateful that both the House and Senate have now voted to reinstate the PAYGO rule that helped create those record surpluses back in the 1990s instead of the record deficits we had when I came into office. The concept here is very simple: you pay as you go. You want to start a new program? Go ahead. But you’ve got to cut another one to pay for it.

That’s how we’ll make sure we’re spending your money wisely. That’s how we’ll get our deficits under control. And that’s something on which Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree, if we could just get past the Washington game. Yet just last week, the Senate blocked a law I supported to create a bi-partisan Fiscal Commission that would come up with a set of recommendations for cutting our deficits in the long term – because solving this difficult challenge is something we can only do together. But this law failed when seven Republicans who had co-sponsored this idea suddenly walked away from their own proposal after I endorsed it. Now, it’s one thing to have an honest difference of opinion on something. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s another to walk away from your responsibilities to confront the challenges facing this country because you think it’s good short-term politics. That’s what we can’t afford.

The message you all sent when you elected me, and that folks made clear this past month, is that you’re out of patience for this kind of business as usual. You made it clear that you want us to start worrying less about our jobs and more about yours. You want us to worry less about our elections and more about solving your problems. And for once, you’d like your government to reflect the sense of responsibility, decency, and generosity with which you live your lives.

It’s the spirit that led students here at Nashua North to spring into action in the wake of the tragedy in Haiti – planning fundraisers, selling ribbons, collecting money at lunch – all to help folks they’ve never known in a place they’ve never been.

It’s the spirit that drives small business owners like Kedar Gupta, the CEO of ARC Energy. Years before Kedar founded ARC, he co-founded a company called GT Solar with just $1,000 – and it now has 343 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue. All along, he made sure his employees shared in the company’s profits. When the company hit tough times, he cut his own salary first. And when talking about his philosophy of business, he explains that many CEOs take a “Me, me and me” approach, but that his approach is about “we” – about not just benefitting himself, but lifting his employees too.

We’ve come through a tough year and a tough decade, but that fundamental decency – that determination to do what’s right that has always been at the core of the American people – that should fill us all with optimism about what lies ahead. So let’s put aside the small things. Let’s come together and do what’s hard, and do what’s necessary to help the middle class succeed again; to give our kids a shot at their dreams again; and to fulfill the promise of this great country in our time. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

The following is the complete transcript of President Obama’s speech announcing the fiscal year 2011 budget. This has been transcribed by the White House and downloaded on Feb. 2, 2010 at 10:45 a.m. Eastern.

Remarks by the President on the Budget
Grand Foyer

10:40 A.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. This morning, I sent a budget to Congress for the coming year. It’s a budget that reflects the serious challenges facing the country. We’re at war. Our economy has lost 7 million jobs over the last two years. And our government is deeply in debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy.

The fact is, 10 years ago, we had a budget surplus of more than $200 billion, with projected surpluses stretching out toward the horizon. Yet over the course of the past 10 years, the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it -– all of which was compounded by recession and by rising health care costs. As a result, when I first walked through the door, the deficit stood at $1.3 trillion, with projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade.

If we had taken office during ordinary times, we would have started bringing down these deficits immediately. But one year ago, our country was in crisis: We were losing nearly 700,000 jobs each month, the economy was in a free fall, and the financial system was near collapse. Many feared another Great Depression. So we initiated a rescue, and that rescue was not without significant cost; it added to the deficit as well.

One year later, because of the steps we’ve taken, we’re in a very different place. But we can’t simply move beyond this crisis; we have to address the irresponsibility that led to it. And that includes the failure to rein in spending, as well a reliance on borrowing –- from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street –- to fuel our growth. That’s what we have to change. We have to do what families across America are doing: Save where we can so that we can afford what we need.

Now, I think it’s very important to understand: We won’t be able to bring down this deficit overnight, given that the recovery is still taking hold and families across the country still need help. We will continue, for example, to do what it takes to create jobs. That’s reflected in my budget; it’s essential. The budget includes new tax cuts for people who invest in small businesses, tax credits for small businesses that hire new workers, investments that will create jobs repairing roads and bridges, and tax breaks for retrofitting homes to save energy.

We also continue to lay a new foundation for lasting growth, which is essential as well. Just as it would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today, it would be equally wrong to neglect their future by failing to invest in areas that will determine our economic success in this new century.

That’s why we build on the largest investment in clean energy in history, as well as increase investment in scientific research, so that we are fostering the industries and jobs of the future right here in America.

That’s why I’ve proposed a more than 6 percent increase in funding for the Education Department. And this funding is tied to reforms that raise student achievement, inspire students to excel in math and science, and turn around failing schools which consign too many young people to a lesser future — because in the 21st century there is no better anti-poverty program than a world-class education.

And that’s why we eliminate a wasteful subsidy to banks that lend to college students, and use that money to revitalize community colleges and make college more affordable. This will help us reach the goal I’ve set for America: By 2020 we will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

These are the investments we must make to create jobs and opportunity now and in the future. And in a departure from the way business had been done in Washington, we actually show how we pay for these investments while putting our country on a more fiscally sustainable path.

I’ve proposed a freeze in government spending for three years. This won’t apply to the benefits folks get through Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare. And it won’t apply to our national security –- including benefits for veterans. But it will apply to all other discretionary government programs. And we’re not simply photocopying last year’s budget; freezing spending does not mean we won’t cut what doesn’t work to pay for what does.

We have gone through every department’s spending line by line, item by item, looking for inefficiency, duplication, and programs that have outlived their usefulness. That’s how we freeze discretionary spending. Last year, we found $17 billion in cuts. This year, we’ve already found $20 billion.

Now, some of these cuts are just common sense. For example, we cut $115 million from a program that pays states to clean up mines that have already been cleaned up. We’re also cutting a Forest Service economic development program that strayed so far from any mission that it funded a music festival. And we’re saving $20 million by stopping the refurbishment of a Department of Energy science center that the Department of Energy does not want to refurbish.

Other cuts, though, are more painful, because the goals of the underlying programs are worthy. We eliminate one program that provides grants to do environmental clean up of abandoned buildings. That’s a mission I support, but there are other sources of private and public funds to achieve it. We also eliminated a $120 million program that allows folks to get their Earned Income Tax Credit in advance. I am a big supporter of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The problem is 80 percent of people who got this advance didn’t comply with one or more of the program’s requirements.

So I’m willing to reduce waste in programs I care about, and I’m asking members of Congress to do the same. I’m asking Republicans and Democrats alike to take a fresh look at programs they’ve supported in the past to see what’s working and what’s not, and trim back accordingly.

Like any business, we’re also looking for ways to get more bang for our buck, by promoting innovation and cutting red tape. For example, we consolidate 38 separate education programs into 11. And last fall, we launched the “SAVE Awards” to solicit ideas from federal employees about how make government more efficient and more effective. I’m proud to say that a number of these ideas — like allowing Social Security appointments to be made online — made it into our budget.

I also want to note even though the Department of Defense is exempt from the budget freeze, it’s not exempt from budget common sense. It’s not exempt from looking for savings. We save money by eliminating unnecessary defense programs that do nothing to keep us safe. One example is the $2.5 billion that we’re spending to build C-17 transport aircraft. Four years ago, the Defense Department decided to cease production because it had acquired the number requested — 180. Yet every year since, Congress had provided unrequested money for more C-17s that the Pentagon doesn’t want or need. It’s waste, pure and simple.

And there are other steps we’re taking to rein in deficits. I’ve proposed a fee on big banks to pay back taxpayers for the bailout. We’re reforming the way contracts are awarded, to save taxpayers billions of dollars. And while we extend middle-class tax cuts in this budget, we will not continue costly tax cuts for oil companies, investment fund managers, and those making over $250,000 a year. We just can’t afford it.

Finally, changing spending-as-usual depends on changing politics-as-usual. And that’s why I’ve proposed a bipartisan fiscal commission: a panel of Democrats and Republicans who would hammer out concrete deficit reduction proposals over the medium and long term, but would come up with those answers by a certain deadline. I should point out, by the way, that is an idea that had strong bipartisan support, was originally introduced by Senators Gregg on the Republican side and Conrad on the Democratic side; had a lot of Republican cosponsors to the idea. I hope that, despite the fact that it got voted down in the Senate, that both the Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican Leader in the House John Boehner go ahead and fully embrace what has been a bipartisan idea to get our arms around this budget.

That’s also why we’re restoring pay-as-you-go: a simple rule that says Congress can’t spend a dime without cutting a dime elsewhere. This rule helped lead to the budget surpluses of the 1990s, and it’s one of the most important steps we can take to restore fiscal discipline in Washington.

You can read more about the budget at budget.gov — very easy to remember — budget.gov. But the bottom line is this: We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don’t have consequences; as if waste doesn’t matter; as if the hard-earned tax dollars of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money; as if we can ignore this challenge for another generation. We can’t.

In order to meet this challenge, I welcome any idea, from Democrats and Republicans. What I will not welcome -– what I reject -– is the same old grandstanding when the cameras are on, and the same irresponsible budget policies when the cameras are off. It’s time to hold Washington to the same standards families and businesses hold themselves. It’s time to save what we can, spend what we must, and live within our means once again.

Thanks very much.

END
10:51 A.M. EST

Transcribed by the White House and downloaded on Jan. 30, 2010 at 10:41 a.m.
Original source
Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
Weekly Address
January 30, 2010

At this time last year, amidst headlines about banks on the verge of collapse and job losses of 700,000 a month, we received another troubling piece of news about our economy. Our economy was shrinking at an alarming rate – the largest six-month decline in 50 years. Our factories and farms were producing less; our businesses were selling less; and more job losses were on the horizon.

One year later, according to numbers released this past week, this trend has reversed itself. For the past six months, our economy has been growing again. And last quarter, it grew more quickly than at any time in the past six years.

This is a sign of progress. And it’s an affirmation of the difficult decisions we made last year to pull our financial system back from the brink and get our economy moving again.

But when so many people are still struggling – when one in ten Americans still can’t find work, and millions more are working harder and longer for less – our mission isn’t just to grow the economy. It’s to grow jobs for folks who want them, and ensure wages are rising for those who have them. It’s not just about improvements we see in quarterly statistics, but ones people feel in their daily lives – a bigger paycheck; more security; the ability to give your kids a decent shot in life and still have enough to retire one day yourself.

That’s why job creation will be our number one focus in 2010. We’ll put more Americans back to work rebuilding our infrastructure all across the country. And since the true engines of job creation are America’s businesses, I’ve proposed tax credits to help them hire new workers, raise wages, and invest in new plants and equipment. I also want to eliminate all capital gains taxes on small business investment, and help small businesses get the loans they need to open their doors and expand their operations.

But as we work to create jobs, it is critical that we rein in the budget deficits we’ve been accumulating for far too long – deficits that won’t just burden our children and grandchildren, but could damage our markets, drive up our interest rates, and jeopardize our recovery right now.

There are certain core principles our families and businesses follow when they sit down to do their own budgets. They accept that they can’t get everything they want and focus on what they really need. They make tough decisions and sacrifice for their kids. They don’t spend what they don’t have, and they make do with what they’ve got.

It’s time their government did the same. That’s why I’m pleased that the Senate has just restored the pay-as-you-go law that was in place back in the 1990s. It’s no coincidence that we ended that decade with a $236 billion surplus. But then we did away with PAYGO – and we ended the next decade with a $1.3 trillion deficit. Reinstating this law will help get us back on track, ensuring that every time we spend, we find somewhere else to cut.

I’ve also proposed a spending freeze, so that as we increase investments in things we need, like job creation and middle class tax cuts – we cut spending on those we don’t, like tax cuts for oil companies and investment fund managers, and programs that are redundant, obsolete, or simply ineffective. Spending related to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected – and neither will national security – but all other discretionary government programs will.

Finally, I’ve called for a bi-partisan Fiscal Commission – a panel of Democrats and Republicans who would sit down and hammer out concrete deficit-reduction proposals by a certain deadline. Because we’ve heard plenty of talk and a lot of yelling on TV about deficits, and it’s now time to come together and make the painful choices we need to eliminate those deficits.

This past week, 53 Democrats and Republicans voted for this commission in the Senate. But it failed when seven Republicans who had co-sponsored this idea in the first place suddenly decided to vote against it.

Now, it’s one thing to have an honest difference of opinion about something. I will always respect those who take a principled stand for what they believe, even if I disagree with them.

But what I won’t accept is changing positions because it’s good politics. What I won’t accept is opposition for opposition’s sake. We cannot have a serious discussion and take meaningful action to create jobs and control our deficits if politicians just do what’s necessary to win the next election instead of what’s best for the next generation.

I’m ready and eager to work with anyone who’s serious about solving the real problems facing our people and our country. I welcome anyone who comes to the table in good faith to help get our economy moving again and fulfill this country’s promise. That’s why we were elected in the first place. That’s what the American people expect and deserve. And that’s what we must deliver.

Thank you.