Q Mr. President, sir, I was born and raised in a good blue-collar town in Toledo, Ohio. I grew up in a union family and I work now for a significant number of pension assets in the labor union market with an investment firm. I think the question I have that most bothers me is what’s important to my people out there that I talk to, and those two things are, the first, what’s going to happen with their pensions, especially those, as you know, in the red and the yellow. The PPA has not exactly been that favorable to them. And the PBGC is not a very good option. My father had to take early retirement. He’s not receiving the maximum amount after decades of hard work and service that he had anticipated.The second part is I’m not naïve（天真的，纯朴的） enough to think that just the pensions alone can help save workers. We’ve got 9.5 percent unemployment in this country, at least at last release, and I’m sure as you know, that’s even more -- it’s larger than that for the manufacturing industry and us in the Rust Belt（铁锈地带） -- Toledo, Detroit, Cleveland. Obviously we need to put those guys back to work; they need to have man-hours out there. How can we create a sustainable, competitive product at an advantage to make us another leader in the manufacturing and labor force industry going forward, not just to get them back to work for a year or two, sir, but to get to work for the long term so they can grow the market on their own with their own product and their own work?THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, this is a great question and it goes to the heart of what our economic strategy has to be. And Senator Brown and Congresswoman Kilroy and others, I know this is their number one concern each and every day. And certainly this is your governor’s number one concern each and every day, is how do we make sure that we’re creating a competitive America in which we aren’t just buying things from other countries, we’re selling things to other countries, and we’re making things here in the United States of America.Let me give you a couple of examples of areas that I think have enormous promise. Number one is the whole clean energy industry -- and Toledo actually is becoming a leader in this, creating good jobs, in areas like solar -- building solar panels, wind turbines, advanced battery manufacturing. There is a whole series of huge potential manufacturing industries in which we end up being world leaders and, as a bonus, end up creating a more energy-efficient economy that is also good for the environment.Now, we made, at the beginning of my term, the largest investment in clean energy in our history. And so there are plants that are opening up all across the country, creating products made in America that are now being shipped overseas. I"ll give you one example, and that's the advanced battery manufacturing industry. These are the batteries that go into electric cars, or the batteries that are ending up helping to make sure that if you get solar power or wind power, that it can be transmitted in an efficient way.We have 2 percent of the entire market -- 2 percent. By 2015, in five years, we’re going to have 40 percent of that market because of the investments that we made. So one of the advanced battery manufacturing plants that we helped get going with some key loans and support and tax breaks, they’re now putting those batteries into the Chevy Volt. And you combine it then with an entire new U.S. auto industry that is cleaner and smarter and has better designs and is making better products -- those are potentially thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of manufacturing jobs. And the Midwest is really poised to get a lot of those jobs. In a town like Toledo where you’ve still got a lot of skilled workers, they are poised to be able to take off on that. But we’ve got to continue to support it.The other area that I’ve already mentioned is infrastructure（基础设施） . We’ve got about $2 trillion worth of infrastructure improvements that need to be made all across the country -- roads, bridges, sewer lines（污水管道） , water mains. It’s crumbling（破碎的） . The previous generation made all these investments that not only put people to work right away but also laid the foundation then for economic growth in the future.And we used to always have the best infrastructure worldwide. Now, if it comes to rail, we certainly don't have the best rail system in the world. Our roads in a lot of places aren’t the best. Our airports aren’t the best. Somebody is laughing -- they just got -- obviously, went through an airport. So we’ve got a lot of work to do on infrastructure. And this is an area where I hope we can get some #p#分页标题#e#bipartisan（两党连立的） agreement.It’s hard to get bipartisan agreement these days. But I think the notion that we can put people to work rebuilding America, investing in making stuff here in the United States that -- by the way, every time you build a road, that's not just putting people to work on the actual construction; all those supplies that go into road building, all those supplies that go into a bridge, all those supplies that go into rail, that's creating a ripple effect（连锁反应） all throughout the economy. So I think that's a second area of great potential.Last point you made was -- had to do with pensions. Look, the truth be told, the way we were handling pensions both in private companies and among public employees, a lot of it wasn’t that different from some of the stuff that was going on in Wall Street, because what happened was -- is that these pensions weren’t adequately funded. Some of these companies would underfund it, and then say, well, we’re going to get an 8 percent return or 10 percent return on our pension funds, to make it look like they were adequately funded when they weren’t. That contributed to pension funds chasing a lot of risky investments that promised these high returns that, in fact, were built on a house of cards. So you’re going to see a number of pensions in a number of companies that are under-funded.Now, we’ve got a mechanism at the federal level that provides a certain percentage backup or guarantee for these pension funds if they fail. But we’re going to have to, I think, work with these private sector companies so that -- right now, they’ve become very profitable. Companies are making money right now. We were talking earlier about the economy and how it’s moving slow. Well, corporate profits are doing just fine. They're holding onto a whole bunch of cash -- they're kind of sitting on it, waiting to see if they can make more money and more opportunity, but they haven’t started hiring yet. One of the things they need to be doing with some of this cash is shoring up their pension funds that are currently under-funded.It’s a girl’s turn. Yes, right there.
|
|
