Obama urges more efforts for economic growth
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More efforts were needed in the United States to spur job creation and bolster a sustained economic growth despite nascent recovery signs, as the world's largest economy was competing with other countries in a changing world, U.S. President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
"We are poised for progress. Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again," Obama said on Capitol Hill, adding that U.S. people never measured progress by those benchmarks alone.
"We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer," he said in the speech.
Obama contended that the nation had more work to do on the road ahead, as the "steps we have taken over the last two years may have broken the back of this recession."
To win the future, the nation needed to take on new challenges, as the world and business rules had changed due to technology revolutions, he added.
The nation had to out-innovate, out-educated and out-build the rest of the world to enjoy a better position to compete for the jobs and industries globally, he said.
"We will invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people," the president said, adding that the United States was aiming at becoming the first nation to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.
Obama stressed the importance of clean energy sector to the nation's economy and future, saying that "I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal -- by 2035, 80 percent of America's electricity will come from clean energy sources."
Obama said that within 25 years, the nation's goal was to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail and within the next five years, the United States would make it possible for business to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans.
"To help businesses sell more products abroad, we set a goal of doubling our exports by 2014, because the more we export, the more jobs we create at home. Already, our exports are up," he said.
He also said recent agreements signed with India and China would support more than 250,000 jobs in the United States.
With the nation's spiking public debt inviting criticism both at home and abroad, Obama said "I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. This would reduce the deficit by more than 400 billion U.S. dollars over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president."
When talking about the nation's tax cuts package passed last year, Obama believed that it could help the U.S. middle-class and boost businesses' investment, but the nation could not afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
He reiterated his stance of simplifying the nation's individual tax code, and called on both the Democratic and Republican parties to "make the hard choices now to rein in deficits" in an effort to beef up investments the nation needs most to win the future global competition.
