So what we’ve said is let’s make sure that consumers know exactly the kinds of mortgages they're getting.  Let’s make sure that they can’t be steered¹（控制，驾驶） into these balloon-type payments where there’s no chance that over the long term they're going to be able to make their payments.

Let’s make sure that credit card companies have to notify you if they're going to increase your interest rates.  And let’s make sure that they can’t increase your interest rates on your existing balances, only on future balances, so that they're not tricking you into suddenly paying exorbitant²（过高的，过分的） fees and putting you in the hole over the long term.  (Applause.)

Gerry likes that one.  (Laughter.)

So we set up a bunch of rules both in the financial services area, in the housing sector³ and in health care.  And I know that a lot of people here heard a lot about the health care bill.  One of the most important things that that was about was making sure that insurance companies treated you fairly.  So if you’ve got health insurance, companies are not going to be able to drop you from coverage⁴ when you get sick, which is part of what had been happening.  They couldn’t deny you insurance because of a preexisting（先前存在） condition or if your child had a preexisting condition, which obviously makes families enormously vulnerable.

So a set of rules of the road for how companies interact with consumers, how they interact with workers.

And then the final thing that we’ve tried to do to lay this foundation for long-term economic growth is to put our investments in those things that are really going to make us more competitive over the long term.  So we have made the largest investment in research and development, in basic research and science, in our history, because that's going to determine whether we can compete with China and India and Germany over the long term.  Are we inventing stuff here that we can then export overseas?

We’re making investments in our infrastructure⁵（基础设施，公共建设） , because we can’t have a second-class infrastructure and expect to have a first-class economy.  Just an interesting statistic⁶ over the last decade:  China spends about 9 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure.  Europe spends about 5 percent.  We’ve been spending 2 percent.  And that’s part of the reason why we no longer have the best airports, we no longer have the best rail systems, we don’t have the best broadband service.  South Korea has better broadband service and wireless⁸ service than we do.  And over time, that adds up.  It makes us less competitive.  So what we’ve said is we’ve got to make investments in infrastructure.

A third area -- education.  A generation ago, we had the highest proportion of college graduates of any country in the world.  We now rank 11th or 12th in the proportion of college graduates.  Well, we can’t win in an information society, in a global, technologically⁹ wired economy, unless we’re winning that battle to make sure our kids can compete.

So what we’ve said is we’re going to put more money into higher education and through K-12 -- but here’s the catch -- the money is only going to those communities that are serious about reforming their education system so they work well.  Because it’s -- education is not just a matter of putting more money into it. You also have to make sure that we’ve got the best teachers, that we’ve got accountability（有义务，有责任） , that the way we’re designing our schools help our kids actually succeed over the long term, especially in areas of math and science, where we’re lagging even further behind than we were a generation ago.

So those are the things that we’ve been trying to do over the last 19 months.  Now, as I said before, the economy is growing, but it’s not growing as fast as we would like.  So over the last week, I’ve put forward a few more things that I think can really make a difference.

Number one, instead of giving tax breaks to companies that are investing overseas, which our tax code does right now, what I’ve said is let’s close those tax loopholes（漏税） and let’s provide tax breaks（税收减免） to companies that are investing in research and development here in the United States.  That's a smart thing to do.  We want to incentivize businesses who actually are making profits right now to say, we should go ahead and take a chance, and let’s invest in that next new thing.

Second is -- what I’ve proposed is, is that we allow companies to write off essentially¹⁰ their new investments early if they make those investments here in 2011, so essentially accelerating the depreciation¹¹ that they can take on their taxes to encourage them to frontload making investments now.

The third thing that we’ve proposed -- and this is actually pending⁷ right now in the Senate, the United States Senate, because Gerry and Jim have already voted on it, is a small business package that would eliminate capital gains taxes for small businesses, would help small businesses obtain loans.  It is a common-sense bill that traditionally would have garnered¹² a lot of bipartisan（两党连立的） support, but we’re in the political silly season right now so it’s been blocked up by the Senate Republicans for the last month and a half, two months.

Small businesses are still having trouble getting loans.  And what we want to do, even though we’ve already given them eight different tax breaks, is we want to say we’re going to give you just a little bit more incentive¹³, because if we can get small businesses growing and investing and opening their doors and hiring new workers, that's probably going to be the area where we can make the most progress over the next year in terms of accelerating employees and reducing the unemployment rate.