The keys to job creation

After a decade of hardship for middle class families, and a recession that wiped away millions of jobs, we are in the middle of a tough fight to rebuild this economy and put folks back to work.

Winning this fight will not depend on government alone.

It will depend on the innovation of American entrepreneurs, on the drive of American small business owners, on the skills and talents of American workers.

These are the people who will help us grow our economy and create jobs.

But, government still has an important responsibility, and that’s to create an environment in which someone can raise capital to start a new company, where a business can get a loan to expand, where ingenuity is prized and folks are rewarded for their hard work.

That’s why I fought so hard to pass a jobs bill to cut taxes and make more loans available for entrepreneurs.

It eliminated the capital gains taxes for key investments in small businesses.

It increased the deduction to defray the costs of starting a company, and it’s freeing up credit for folks who need it.

In fact, in just the first two weeks since I signed the bill, thousands of business owners have been able to get new loans through the SBA.

But, we need to do more, so I’ve proposed additional steps to grow the economy and spur hiring by businesses across America.

Now, one of the keys to job creation is to encourage companies to invest more in the United States.

But, for years, our tax code has actually given billions of dollars in tax breaks that encourage companies to create jobs and profits in other countries.

I want to close these tax loopholes.

Instead, I want to give every business in America a tax break so they can write off the cost of all new equipment they buy next year.

That’s going to make it easier for folks to expand and hire new people.

I want to make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent.

Because promoting new ideas and technologies is how we’ll create jobs and retain our edge as the world’s engine of discovery and innovation, and I want to provide a tax cut for clean energy manufacturing right here in America.

Because that’s how we’ll lead the world in this growing industry.

These are commonsense ideas.

When more things are made in America, more families make it in America, more jobs are created in America; more businesses thrive in America.

But, Republicans in Washington have consistently fought to keep these corporate loopholes open.

Over the last four years alone, Republicans in the House voted 11 times to continue rewarding corporations that create jobs and profits overseas, a policy that costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year.

That doesn’t make a lot sense.

It doesn’t make sense for American workers, American businesses, or America’s economy.

A lot of companies that do business internationally make an important contribution to our economy here at home.

That’s a good thing, but there is no reason why our tax code should actively reward them for creating jobs overseas.

Instead, we should be using our tax dollars to reward companies that create jobs and businesses within our borders.

We should give tax breaks to American small businesses and manufacturers.

We should reward the people who are helping us lead in the industries of the future, like clean energy.

That’s how we’ll ensure that American innovation and ingenuity are what drive the next century.

That’s how we’ll put our people back to work and lead the global economy, and that’s what I’ll be fighting for in the coming months.

Thank you.
 
Now, in a little more than two weeks, you have the opportunity to set the direction of this country for the next several years.

In two weeks, you can continue the journey that we started in 2008, and just like you did in that election, you can defy the conventional wisdom that says you can’t change Washington, you can’t overcome the cynicism of politics, you can’t overcome all the special interest money, you can’t solve tough problems.

That has always been the conventional wisdom.

It was the conventional wisdom two years ago.

You remember that?

Everybody said, “No, you can’t”, and two years ago, you said, “Yes, we can”, and you can say that same thing two weeks from now.

I want everybody to be clear.

there is no doubt this is a difficult election.

It is difficult here and it is difficult all across the country.

This is a tough political environment.

This is a difficult election because we’ve been through an incredibly difficult time as a nation.

For most of the last decade, middle-class families saw their costs rise and their incomes fall.

They saw too many jobs disappear overseas.

There were too many parents who couldn’t afford to send their kids to college or see a doctor when they got sick, or Americans working two jobs, three jobs just to make ends meet.

And all these problems were compounded when we had the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst in most of our lifetimes, a recession that cost us more than 4 million jobs in the six months before I took office, 750,000 jobs lost the month I was sworn in, 600,000 the month after that, 600,000 the month after that.

All told, 8 million jobs lost before any of our economic plans an opportunity to take effect.

It was a once-in-a-generation challenge, and I’ll be honest with you, our hope was that because this was such a unique challenge, that it would cause both parties to put politics aside for the sake of the country.
 
That was our expectation.

Our hope was that we could move beyond the division and the bickering and the game-playing that had dominated Washington for so long, because although we are proud to be Democrats, we’re prouder to be Americans.

But, you know what happened.

The Republican leaders in Washington made a different decision, and I want to be clear it was the decision of Republicans in Congress, because I think there were a whole lot of Republicans all across the country who in fact wanted the same thing, but that’s not what they saw in Washington.

Their attitude, it was tactical on their part, was that we were climbing out of such a deep hole, they had made such a big mess, that they figured it was going to take some time to repair the economy, longer than any of us would like.

They knew that people would be frustrated.

They knew people would be angry, and they figured if they just sat on the sidelines and opposed us every step of the way, if they said no even to policies that they could agree with, that historically they had supported, then people might forget that they were the ones who had caused the mess , and that people’s anger and frustration would lead them to success in the next election.

That was their strategy, and you have to give them credit.

In terms of short-term tactics, it wasn’t a bad strategy.

In terms of what was good for the country, it didn’t work out so well.

So the other side wants you to believe that this election is simply a referendum on the current state of the economy.

But make no mistake.

This election is a choice, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
 
If they win this election, the chair of the Republican campaign committee has promised to pursue the exact same agenda as they did before I took office.

We know what that agenda was.

You cut taxes, mostly for millionaires and billionaires.

You cut rules for special interests, and then you cut middle-class families loose to fend for themselves.

We also know the results of that agenda.

It’s not as if we didn’t try it.

We don’t have to guess in terms of how their theories might work out.

From 2001 to 2009, slowest job growth since World War II.

2001 to 2009, incomes for middle-class families went down by 5 percent.

Those aren’t my claims.

That was trumpeted in The Wall Street Journal.

Took a record surplus and turned it to a record deficit.

An agenda that let Wall Street run wild at the expense of folks on Main Street.

An agenda that nearly destroyed our economy.

That’s what they say they want to go back to, the exact same agenda.
 
If they take over Congress, the other side has promised to roll back health reform so that insurance companies can go back to denying you coverage when you get sick, or denying your child coverage if they’ve got a preexisting condition.

They want to roll back Wall Street reform so that taxpayers are on the hook again for Wall Street bailouts, and credit card companies can hit you with hidden fees and penalties, and mortgage brokers can steer you to the most expensive mortgage, or a mortgage you can’t afford.

They want to cut back on education spending by 20 percent to help pay for a $700 billion tax break that only the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans will ever benefit from.
 
This is the same theory they’ve been peddling for years.

This is not as if they went off into the desert after 2008, and they said, boy, we really screwed up.

Let’s meditate here a little bit and let’s try to figure out what we did wrong, and then they came back and they said, we realize the error of our ways and we got some new.

That’s not what’s happening.

They’re just pretending as if all that stuff didn’t happen, and so it’s up to you to remind your friends and your neighbors and your coworkers, we’ve tried that stuff.

It didn’t work.

We’ve been there before and we’re not going back.

We’re moving forward, not backwards.
 
This is the same theory they’ve been peddling for years.

This is not as if they went off into the desert after 2008, and they said, boy, we really screwed up.

Let’s meditate here a little bit and let’s try to figure out what we did wrong, and then they came back and they said, we realize the error of our ways and we got some new.

That’s not what’s happening.

They’re just pretending as if all that stuff didn’t happen, and so it’s up to you to remind your friends and your neighbors and your coworkers, we’ve tried that stuff.

It didn’t work.

We’ve been there before and we’re not going back.

We’re moving forward, not backwards.

You lie!
 
We don’t want to keep giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas.

We want to give tax breaks to companies that are investing right here.

We don’t want tax cuts for folks who don’t need them by borrowing the money from China to pay for them and cut education in the process.

We want to invest in young people right here in the United States of America, because we know that the countries that out-educate us today are going to out-compete us tomorrow, and so we’re going to invest in our young people.

We don’t want to go back.
 
We don’t want to go back to the days where insurance companies and Wall Street banks had free reign to run roughshod over the middle class.

We don’t want to see more two years of gridlock and game-playing and point-scoring in Washington.

We want to solve problems.

We want to move forward.
 
We want to solve problems for the families and people all across America.

We want a growing middle class and an economy that’s built to compete in the 21st century, and because of the steps we’ve taken, we no longer face the possibility of a second depression.

The economy is now growing again.

We’ve seen job growth in the private sector nine months in a row now.

But, we still have a long way to go.

We’ve still got a lot of work to do.

There are a lot of people hurting out there.

I hear from them every day, families hanging on by a thread.

That’s what’s keeping me up at night.

That’s what keeps me fighting, and I know this, the biggest mistake we could make right now as a country is to go back to the same policies that caused this hurt in the first place.
 
We want to solve problems for the families and people all across America.

We want a growing middle class and an economy that’s built to compete in the 21st century, and because of the steps we’ve taken, we no longer face the possibility of a second depression.

The economy is now growing again.

We’ve seen job growth in the private sector nine months in a row now.

But, we still have a long way to go.

We’ve still got a lot of work to do.

There are a lot of people hurting out there.

I hear from them every day, families hanging on by a thread.

That’s what’s keeping me up at night.

That’s what keeps me fighting, and I know this, the biggest mistake we could make right now as a country is to go back to the same policies that caused this hurt in the first place.

You lie!!
 
The last thing we should do is return to a philosophy that nearly destroyed our economy and decimated the middle class over the course of years, and that’s what this election is about, not where we are right now, but where we want to go two years from now and five years from now and 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

It’s not about the work we’ve done, but the work we have left to do.

I bring this up not because I want to re-litigate the past.

It’s because I don’t want to re-live the past.

I want to reach for a better future.
 
The last thing we should do is return to a philosophy that nearly destroyed our economy and decimated the middle class over the course of years, and that’s what this election is about, not where we are right now, but where we want to go two years from now and five years from now and 10 years from now and 20 years from now.

It’s not about the work we’ve done, but the work we have left to do.

I bring this up not because I want to re-litigate the past.

It’s because I don’t want to re-live the past.

I want to reach for a better future.

You lie!
 
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