Q    If I could add to that, just one thing, which is, it’s really not necessary to replace the windows to get that energy efficiency.  Didn’t somebody write about the caulking gun（油灰枪） ?

THE PRESIDENT:  Caulking is --

Q    It’s a lot less expensive.  (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT:  Absolutely.  Cash for caulkers.  (Laughter.)  Good point.

All right, gentleman right there.

Q    Mr. President, my name is Mark Murphy.  I’m a neighbor of John and Nicole.  Welcome to our neighborhood.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  It’s a beautiful neighborhood.

Q    And before I say anything more, I'd be remiss, and my children would be not letting me back home, if I didn’t say hi to you.

THE PRESIDENT:  What are their names?

Q    Andrew, Tim, and Ellie, and my beautiful wife, Shannon.

THE PRESIDENT:  Tell everybody I said hi.

Q    Thank you.  Now, the question I have for you is, I’m a union-side labor attorney in D.C.  And I know you have some background in that.  And your comments here today and both -- your Labor Day comments struck me and my colleagues about the shrinking middle class, and those jobs that were lost, and how you’re going to and your administration is going to replace those jobs.

I work every day with working-class, blue-collar workers; I deal with a lot of different issues.  One of the issues that is dear to my heart and I know a lot of my colleague and union members is the Employee Free Choice Act.  And for people who don't know about that, it’s just basically an act, a law that would make it easier to unionize.  And it’s proven that unions -- unionized employees get better wages and better benefits.  And unfortunately that act hasn’t been passed yet and I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that.  Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, a little bit of background, for those who aren’t as familiar with it.  The Employee Free Choice Act is in response to 20, 30 years where it’s become more and more difficult for unions to just get a fair election and have their employers actually negotiate with them.

I mean, the laws that have been on the books have gotten more and more difficult to apply.  A lot of times, companies who may be good employers but just don’t want the bother of having a union will work very hard to make sure a union doesn’t develop.  And they will drag out the process for a very long time, and in some cases, workers who are joining unions or want to join a union or are helping to organize one may get intimidated（威胁，恐吓） .

And so the idea behind the Employee Free Choice Act is let’s just make the playing field even.  We don’t have to force anybody to be in a union, but if they want to join a union let’s make it a little easier for them to go ahead and sign up.

Now, the answer -- the short answer to your question is, we are very supportive of this.  Frankly, we don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.  So the opportunity to actually get this passed right now is not real high.  What we’ve done instead is try to do as much as we can administratively to make sure that it’s easier for unions to operate and that they’re not being placed at an unfair disadvantage.

Let me speak more broadly, though, about the point that you just made.  So many things we take for granted came about because of the union movement -- minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, child labor laws -- you name it -- weekends -- a lot of these things came about because people were fighting for them.  They didn't come about automatically and naturally.

The other thing that unions did, particularly in the manufacturing sector, was it gave a base for blue-collar workers to get a middle-class wage, which meant that essentially the guys working at the Ford plant could afford to buy a Ford.  And so it increased demand overall and, ironically, it meant that businesses had more customers and could make more money.

Now, we now live in an era of international competition.  And that makes it harder for businesses.  I mean I think we should acknowledge that the business environment now is much more competitive than it was back in the 1960s or ‘70s.  Technology has made it more difficult for businesses to compete.  Transportation has made it more difficult to compete.  The costs for shipping big, manufactured goods from China to the United States -- or high volumes of goods from Japan or Korea or Malaysia, or Indonesia to the United States is a lot cheaper now than it was.  So what that means is, we’ve got to be sympathetic to business concerns that they don't get priced out of the market if they're competing internationally.#p#分页标题#e#

And I think the best way to balance that is to make sure that business interests here in the United States, and labor interests -- workers’ interests here in the United States are aligned; make sure that businesses are looking after their workers and giving them a good deal.  But workers and unions also have to think about businesses and not put them in a position where they’re potentially priced out of the marketplace.

Now, I think that that balance is tilted way too far against unions these days.  And I think that actually if we had some of these businesses with employees who were there for a longer term, were more loyal, they weren’t worried about their jobs being shipped overseas, that that would actually be good for the economy as a whole and would be good for businesses here as a whole.

But we have to acknowledge that competition means that businesses and workers here in the United States have to be better trained, better skilled, more competitive, leaner, meaner. And we’ve got to invent more stuff so that we constantly are working on high-end jobs as opposed to the low-end jobs -- because the truth is the low-end jobs, we’re never going to be able to compete on the basis of price.  I mean, there’s always going to be a country -- actually, wages are starting to go up a little bit in China.  Our problem is not China.  The next is going to be Vietnam or it’s going to be Bangladesh or -- there’s always going to be someplace in the world where they pay lower wages.

Our advantage is going to be if we have higher skills, we have a workforce that works together more effectively, that our businesses are better organized -- if we have that, then I think that we can compete against anybody.

And one of -- a good example is actually Germany, which has a much higher rate of unionization（联合，结合） than we do.  But they’ve actually been able to continue to export at very high levels and compete all around the world, mainly because they’ve got such a highly skilled workforce, they’re putting together high-end products that can compete with anybody.

Yes, right here.  A mic is coming.

Q    Hi, Mr. President.  It’s an honor.  I’m so nervous.

THE PRESIDENT:  Don’t be nervous.

Q    Oh, I am so nervous.  I love everything you’re doing.  I love your vision.  I’m so glad you got into office.  I love medical -- health care reform.  Where I come from, when we have to go to the doctor, we went to the doctor.  If we needed surgery, we got surgery.  And then I came here and found out, oh, my gosh, you need insurance -- you need this, you need that -- which I could never afford on the salary I make.  Now I’m very lucky.  My husband -- unfortunately, he is in the construction business -- but hopefully, that’s going to come back.

So my question is also -- I work for Fairfax County public schools, and I haven’t had a raise in two years and I may not even have a job next year -- because I hear it’s going to get worse before it’s going to get better.  Do you agree with that?  Like, I mean, I know it’s -- we’re starting to improve and jobs are starting to come back, but how long do you think this is going to take?  It sounds wonderful.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, you have a better chance of keeping your job in the public school systems now, because Gerry and Jim voted to close a pretty egregious tax loophole（漏税） that was incentivizing jobs going overseas and that even some corporations that stood to benefit thought was ridiculous.  They closed that loophole in order to fund teacher jobs and police officer jobs and firefighter jobs all across the country.  So that’s been very helpful in providing assistance to school districts that are strapped.

The economy is improving.  But one of the headwinds that the economy is experiencing is actually that state and local governments have been getting really hard hit.  Now, we gave states a lot of help at the beginning of this crisis because their budgets were just imploding.  And typically state and local governments, they get hit faster by declines in tax revenues（税收） and property tax -- obviously they’re relying on property taxes, and with the housing market collapsing, that was really hitting them hard.  And so they were looking at possibly laying -- slashing 30 percent of jobs in school districts or in social services.

And one of the most effective ways of preventing this from tipping over into a Great Depression was giving them help.  The problem is some of that help is running out.  And property tax revenues haven’t improved yet; sales tax revenues haven’t improved yet as much as they’d like.  So local districts, states, are still having big budget problems, and they’ll probably have those big budget problems next year.#p#分页标题#e#

Now, the challenge we have is, ironically, that if you start laying off a whole bunch of teachers, or a whole bunch of police officers or firefighters, now they don’t have a job, which means they spend less, which means that there’s less tax revenue.  And you start getting into a vicious, downward spiral（螺旋式下降） .

So that's why the steps that we took were so important.  And I’ve got to say, this is an example of where you’ve just got a fundamental disagreement between Republican leadership right now and Democrats.  John Boehner, who stands -- wants to be the Speaker -- the next Speaker of the House, if the Republicans take over, he specifically said, well, these are just government jobs and they're not worth saving.  And he fought -- he voted no on closing this tax loophole that was incentivizing jobs from going overseas.

Now, it’s just not smart from an economic perspective for us to allow a whole bunch of those jobs that are right here in the United States to go away while we’re giving tax revenue away to companies that are creating jobs somewhere else.  It just doesn’t make sense.

And so we’re going to continue to have some of these battles over the next several years.  And I think that, frankly, how state and local governments are able to deal with these budget challenges next year is in part going to depend on whether the people who are making the decisions are Jim and Gerry, or whether they're John Boehner -- because they’ve just got a different set priorities.  And I don't know about you, but I like these guys making these decisions more than the other folks.  (Applause.)  But that's just my unbiased（公正的） opinion.

All right.  Yes, go ahead.

Q    Mr. President, thank you so much for visiting us here in Mantua.  It’s quite an honor.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.

Q    I think my question is kind of a good segue on that.  We do face -- the political environment has changed a lot since you were elected.  And I think with the upcoming midterm elections, you can certainly expect a lot of new faces in Congress, and certainly a lot of new representatives and senators are going to have been elected on platforms that are really opposed to government intervention in the economy.  What’s your plan for working with the new Congress to make sure we get the actions that you see are necessary to end the recession?  And what do you see as really common ground with Republicans in Congress for some of the solutions that can bring the recession to an end?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, let me just say that I don't believe in wholesale government intervention in the economy.  My starting point is, is that what makes us the wealthiest, most dynamic country on Earth is a free-market system where small business owners are creating jobs, and what start off as small businesses like AOL end up being big businesses, and some kid at Harvard starts something called Facebook, and the next thing you know it’s revolutionized part of our economy.  That's our strength.

So that's a starting point where Republicans and Democrats should be able to come together.  We all believe in that.

But there are some fundamental differences.  At the beginning of the crisis, for government not to intervene when the financial system was on the verge of meltdown, and we were shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, and the credit markets had just frozen completely -- for us not to intervene in that situation would have been simply irresponsible -- would have been irresponsible.  And I don’t know a economist, Democrat or Republican, who would suggest otherwise.  It would have been simply irresponsible.

So that’s -- so some of these steps that we had to take had to do with emergency situations.  A great example is the auto industry.  When we decided to intervene -- keep this in mind:  We had been bailing out the auto industry for years under the previous administration.  The difference was we hadn’t ever asked them anything in return.  So they kept on with their bad practices, creating cars that, frankly, in this kind of energy environment, weren’t the cars of the future.  And they never changed their practices.

So what we said was, you know what, we’re going to help you, but this time we’re going to help you by also restructuring.  And we’re going to bring all the stakeholders（利益相关者） together -- the workers, management, shareholders -- and we’re going to say if taxpayers are going to help you out, you’ve got to change how you do business.  And they have.  And they emerged from bankruptcy and now you’ve got all three U.S. auto companies operating at a profit.#p#分页标题#e#

If we had not taken that step, we would have lost a million jobs in the auto industry.  You would not have an auto -- maybe Ford might have survived.  GM and Chrysler definitely would not have.  And the ripple effects（涟漪效应） on the economy would have been devastating.

So sometimes you make these decisions not because you believe in government intervention, per se.  You make these decisions because we’ve got a crisis and we’ve got to respond.

Now, right now we’ve got a disagreement also on taxes.  Jim, Gerry, the vast majority of Democrats, think that because wages and incomes had flat-lined for middle-class families, which we define as less than $250,000 a year, that they should definitely get an extension of the tax cuts that were instituted in 2001, 2003.

Now, keep in mind that if you make more than $250,000 a year, you’d still get a tax cut.  It’s just you’d only get it up to your first $250,000.  So if you make half a million dollars a year, you still get tax relief on the first half of your income. If you made a million, it would be the first quarter of your income.  After that, you’d go back to the rates that were in place when Bill Clinton was President -- which I just want to remind everybody, at that time we had 22 million jobs created, much faster income and wage growth, the economy was humming pretty good.

We could get that done this week.  But we’re still in this wrestling match with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell about the last 2 to 3 percent, where, on average, we’d be giving them $100,000 for people making a million dollars or more -- which in and of itself would be okay, except to do it, we’d have to borrow $700 billion over the course of 10 years.  And we just can’t afford it.

Now, I wanted to lay out those differences before I talked about where I think we can work together.  Where I think we have a great opportunity to work together is on the issue of our long-term debt.

Our big challenge right now is creating jobs and making sure the economy takes off.  And the steps that we’ve been taking, including cutting taxes for small businesses, providing loans for small businesses, accelerating depreciation -- those steps can encourage investment right now.  They cost some money, but they're wise investments because right now our number one focus has to be jobs, jobs, jobs, and encouraging business investment. But on the horizon, sort of in the middle term and the long term, we do have a very real problem with debt and deficits.

And I have to say that I understand a lot of people who are upset on the other side.  And some of them were rallying in D.C. today -- or yesterday.  I do understand people’s legitimate fears about are we hocking our future because we’re borrowing so much to finance debt and deficits.  I understand that.  They saw the Recovery Act.  They saw TARP.  They saw the auto bailout.  They look at this and -- God, all these huge numbers adding up.  So they’re right to be concerned about that.

And I think that there’s an opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to come together and to say, what are the tough decisions we’ve got to make right now that won’t squash the recovery, won’t lead to huge numbers of teacher layoffs -- short term we don’t want to constrict too much early -- but how can we get ourselves on a trajectory where midterm and long term we’re starting to bring our debt and deficits slowly under control?

Now, I set up a bipartisan（两党连立的） fiscal commission that’s designed to start coming up with answers.  And they’re supposed to report back to me right after the election.  That was on purpose, by the way.  We said, don’t give us the answer before the election because nobody will have an honest conversation about it, everybody will posture politically.  But as soon as the election is over, report to us and let’s see if Democrats and Republicans can come together to make some tough decisions.

And, by the way, they are going to be some tough decisions.

People, I think, have a sense that somehow if we just eliminated a few pork projects and foreign aid, that somehow we would solve our debt.  The big problem with our debt is actually the costs of Medicare and Medicaid.  Our health care system is by far the thing that is exploding faster than anything.  And as the population gets older and it’s using more health care services, if we don't get control of that, we can’t control our long-term debt.  That's why health care reform was so important -- because we’re trying to rationalize and make the system smarter, but that's only one piece of it.  We’ve also got to look at everything from defense budgets to food stamps.  You name it, we’ve got to look at it and see are there ways that we can reduce our costs over the long term.#p#分页标题#e#

But we can’t give away $700 billion to folks who don't need it and think somehow that we’re going to balance our budget.  It’s not going to happen.

That's one area where I think we can make progress.

A second area where I hope we can still make progress is on energy.  Everybody agrees our energy policy doesn’t make sense.  We don't have an energy policy.  We’ve talked about this since Richard Nixon.  Remember OPEC, ’73, and oil -- lines at the gas station?  And every President has said this is a national security issue, this is a crisis, we’ve got to do something about it.  But we don't do anything about it.

So my suggestion is let’s both -- let’s join hands, Democrats and Republicans, and go ahead and take the leap and try to solve this problem.  And there’s not a silver bullet, there’s not one magic solution to our energy problems.  We’re going to have to use a bunch of different strategies.

I already mentioned efficiency.  That has to be a huge push. With respect to transportation sector, one of the things that we did without legislation -- nobody has really noticed this, but this was huge -- we increased fuel-efficiency standards on cars for the first time in 30 years -- cars and trucks.  And we got the car companies and auto workers to agree to it, not just environmentalists.  That's going to help.

We’ve got look at nuclear energy.  Historically, a lot of environmentalists have said, oh, we don't like nuclear energy.  There are real problems with storage, et cetera.  But if we’re concerned about global warming and greenhouse gases, nuclear energy is a legitimate fuel -- energy source that the Japanese and the French have been using much more intelligently than we have.  We’ve got huge reservoirs of natural gas that are relatively clean, but we’ve got to use those in an environmentally sound way.  We’ve got to develop those in an environmentally sound way.  So that's an area where I think that we can still hopefully make some progress.

And the last thing I’ll say -- and some people disagree with me on this.  They think it’s too incendiary, it’s too politically difficult, et cetera.  I think we need to reform our immigration system, and we should be able to find a way that secures our borders and provides people who are already here a pathway so that they are out of the shadows.  They're paying a fine.  They're learning English.  They're getting assimilated（吸收，同化） , but they're not living in fear.  We should be able to do that.

And we had 11 Republican senators who voted for it, including John McCain was a cosponsor of the bill -- we should be able to get that done again.  Because everybody agrees that the system we’ve got right now is broken.

And one last thing I wanted to mention is actually education.  The reason I didn't mention up front is this has been one of the few areas where I’ve actually gotten some compliments from Republicans.  (Laughter.)  I think the strategy that we have right now -- which is to maintain high standards, work with states in a smart way to develop curriculums, teacher-training strategies, to boost our higher education -- institutions of higher education -- that's an area where we should all agree. Because it’s indisputable that if we are working smarter, if our kids are better trained, then we will succeed.  And if they’re not, it doesn’t really matter what else we do -- over time, we’re going to decline.

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