Canceled.LTroll.8
Banned
A lot of times, when you're in Washington, you're busy, you’ve got a lot of stuff to do, and you're in a bubble when you're President, and sometimes you just don't have the opportunity to have the kinds of interactions that I used to have even when I was a senator, and so these kinds of formats are terrific for me.
The whole point of this is for me to hear directly from you and to answer your questions, hear about your concerns, hear about your hopes, and hopefully that will translate itself into some of the things that we're doing at the White House.
Now, I'm only going to say a few things at the top, and I want to talk a little bit about why I decided to run for President in the first place, back in 2007-2008.
Having served as a state senator, having then served as a United States senator, I had had a chance to see how economic policies were having an effect on working-class families and middle-class families for a long time, and my wife and I, we came out of hardworking families who didn’t have a lot, but because the economy was growing, because there was an emphasis on what was good for the middle class, we were able to get a great education, we were able to get scholarships.
Michelle’s dad worked as a blue-collar worker, but just on that one salary he was able to provide for his family and make sure that they always had enough and the kids had opportunities, and what it seemed like was, for about a decade there, middle-class families were losing more and more ground, and some of that had to do with changes in the global economy and greater competition from around the world.
But, a lot of it had to do with the policies that had been put in place, which really boiled down to cutting taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires, cutting regulations, that made consumers and workers more vulnerable, failing to make investments that were so critical in growing our middle class over the long term, and so when I ran for President, my goal was to make sure that we get a set of economic policies in place that would lay the foundation for long-term growth in the 21st century so that the 21st century would be an American Century, just like the 20th century had been.
And that's what we've tried to do over the last 19 months, in the midst of the worst financial crisis that we've seen since the Great Depression.
The first thing we had to do was just stop the bleeding, stabilize the financial system and make sure we didn’t trip into a Great Depression, and we have done that.
So, when I was sworn in on that very cold day in January, some of you may remember, we lost 750,000 jobs in that month alone.
Now we've seen eight consecutive months of private sector job growth because of the policies we’ve put in place, and what I want to do is make sure that the government is on the side of those values, of responsibility and hard work and thinking about future generations and not just thinking about the next election, and I think we’ve made progress, but we’ve got more progress to make.
So, with that, I thank you all for being here, and what I want to do is, I just want to answer questions.
The whole point of this is for me to hear directly from you and to answer your questions, hear about your concerns, hear about your hopes, and hopefully that will translate itself into some of the things that we're doing at the White House.
Now, I'm only going to say a few things at the top, and I want to talk a little bit about why I decided to run for President in the first place, back in 2007-2008.
Having served as a state senator, having then served as a United States senator, I had had a chance to see how economic policies were having an effect on working-class families and middle-class families for a long time, and my wife and I, we came out of hardworking families who didn’t have a lot, but because the economy was growing, because there was an emphasis on what was good for the middle class, we were able to get a great education, we were able to get scholarships.
Michelle’s dad worked as a blue-collar worker, but just on that one salary he was able to provide for his family and make sure that they always had enough and the kids had opportunities, and what it seemed like was, for about a decade there, middle-class families were losing more and more ground, and some of that had to do with changes in the global economy and greater competition from around the world.
But, a lot of it had to do with the policies that had been put in place, which really boiled down to cutting taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires, cutting regulations, that made consumers and workers more vulnerable, failing to make investments that were so critical in growing our middle class over the long term, and so when I ran for President, my goal was to make sure that we get a set of economic policies in place that would lay the foundation for long-term growth in the 21st century so that the 21st century would be an American Century, just like the 20th century had been.
And that's what we've tried to do over the last 19 months, in the midst of the worst financial crisis that we've seen since the Great Depression.
The first thing we had to do was just stop the bleeding, stabilize the financial system and make sure we didn’t trip into a Great Depression, and we have done that.
So, when I was sworn in on that very cold day in January, some of you may remember, we lost 750,000 jobs in that month alone.
Now we've seen eight consecutive months of private sector job growth because of the policies we’ve put in place, and what I want to do is make sure that the government is on the side of those values, of responsibility and hard work and thinking about future generations and not just thinking about the next election, and I think we’ve made progress, but we’ve got more progress to make.
So, with that, I thank you all for being here, and what I want to do is, I just want to answer questions.
