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THE PRESIDENT: Well, the -- look, there's no doubt that this past year has been an uncertain time for the American people, for businesses and for people employed by businesses. Some of that certainty just had to do with the objective reality of this economy entering into a freefall. So let's just be -- let's remind ourselves that if you've got an economy suddenly contracting by 6 percent, or a loss of trillions of dollars of wealth basically in the blink of an eye, or home values descending by 20 percent, that that's going to create a whole lot of uncertainty out there in the business environment and among families.
And part of what we've done over the course of this year is to put a floor under people's feet. That's what the Recovery Act did. That's what the interventions and the financial markets did. It broke the back of the recession, stabilized the markets. Nobody is talking about a market meltdown at this point. And people haven't recovered all that they had lost in their 401(k)s, but they're feeling a little better when they open that envelope now than they did six months ago. State budgets were in freefall; that was stabilized. States are still going through incredible pain, but they did not have to lay off teachers and firefighters and cops at the levels that they would have to otherwise lay them off. That provided some stability and some certainty.
So the steps you've taken as a Congress, the steps we've taken as an administration, have helped to stabilize things.
Now, moving forward, Blanche, what you're going to hear from some folks is that the way to achieve even greater economic growth -- and keep in mind the economy is now growing at a 6 percent clip, so the question is when do businesses actually start hiring, because they're now making a profit -- what you're going to start hearing is the only way to provide stability is to go back and do what we'd been doing before the crisis.
So I noticed yesterday when we were -- there was some hearing about our proposal to provide additional financing to small businesses and tax credits to small businesses. Some of our friends on the other side of the aisle said, "This won't help at all. What you have to do is to make sure that we continue the tax breaks for wealthiest Americans. That's really what's going to make a difference."
Well, if the agenda -- if the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression -- we don't tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don't put in place any insurance reforms, we don't mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they're doing now because we don't want to stir up Wall Street -- the result is going to be the same.
I don't know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policies that got us into this fix in the first place. Michael Bennet articulated it very well. Part of the reason people are feeling anxious right now, it's not just because of this current crisis -- they've been going through this for 10 years. They've been working and not seeing a raise. Their costs have been going up, their spouses going to the workforce -- they work as hard as they can. They're barely keeping their heads above water. They're trying to figure out how to retire. They're seeing more and more of their costs on health care dumped in their lap. College tuition skyrockets.
They are more and more vulnerable, and they have been for the last decade, treading water. And if our response ends up being, because we don't want to -- we don't want to stir things up here, we're just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don't know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don't know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.
So the point I'm making -- and Blanche is exactly right -- we've got to be non-ideological about our approach to these things. We've got to make sure that our party understands that, like it or not, we have to have a financial system that is healthy and functioning, so we can't be demonizing every bank out there. We've got to be the party of business, small business and large business, because they produce jobs. We've got to be in favor of competition and exports and trade. We don't want to be looking backwards. We can't just go back to the New Deal and try to grab all the same policies of the 1930s and think somehow they'd work in the 21st century.
So Blanche is exactly right that sometimes we get ideologically bogged down. I just want to find out what works, and I know you do, too, and I know the people in Arkansas do, too. But when you're talking to the folks in Arkansas you also have to remind them what works is not just going back and doing the same things that we were doing before. And, yes, there's going to be some transition time. If we have a serious financial regulatory reform package, will the banks squawk? Yes. Will they say this is the reason we're not lending? Yes. The problem is we know right now they're not lending, and paying out big bonuses. And we know that the existing regulatory system doesn't work.
So we shouldn't be spooked by this notion that, well, is now the time to take seriously in an intelligent way, not in a knee-jerk way, the challenge of financial regulatory reform so that you don't have banks that are too big to fail and you're not putting taxpayers at risk and you're not putting the economy at risk -- now is the time to do it.
The same is true with health care. The same is true with health care. There are, I promise you, at least as many small businesses out there, if you talk to them, who will say, I just got my bill from my health insurance and it went up 40 percent. And we've got to do something for them. All right? (Applause.)
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