Weekly Address: Following the President’s Plan for a Strong Middle Class

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

WASHINGTON, DC— In this week’s address, President Obama called for quick action on the proposals he made during the State of the Union to grow our economy and create jobs, including making America a magnet for manufacturing, strengthening our education system through high-quality preschool for every child, and raising the minimum wage.  Congress must also act now to avert the sequester, which would be a harmful and self-inflicted wound on our economy, by reducing our deficit in a balanced way that makes investments in areas that help us grow and cuts what we don’t need. 

The audio of the address and video of the address will be available online at www.whitehouse.gov at 6:00 a.m. ET, Saturday, February 16, 2013.

Remarks of President Barack Obama
As Prepared for Delivery
The White House
February 16, 2013

Hi, everybody.  This week, I’ve been traveling across the country – from North Carolina to Georgia to here at Hyde Park Academy in my hometown of Chicago – talking with folks about the important task I laid out in my State of the Union Address: reigniting the true engine of America’s economic growth – a rising, thriving middle class.

Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions:  How do we bring good jobs to America?  How do we equip people with the skills those jobs require?  And how do we make sure your hard work leads to a decent living?

I believe all that starts by making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing.  After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three.  What we need to do now is simple.  We need to accelerate that trend.  We need to launch manufacturing hubs across the country that will transform hard-hit regions into global centers of high-tech jobs and manufacturing.  We need to make our tax code more competitive, ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, and rewarding companies that create jobs here at home.  And we need to invest in the research and technology that will allow us to harness more of our own energy and put more people back to work repairing our crumbling roads and bridges. 

These steps will help our businesses expand and create new jobs.  But we also need to provide every American with the skills and training they need to fill those jobs.  Let’s start in the earliest years by offering high-quality preschool to every child in America, because we know kids in these programs do better throughout their lives.  Let’s redesign our high schools so that our students graduate with skills that employers are looking for right now.  And because taxpayers can’t continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education, I’ve called on Congress to take affordability and value into account when determining which colleges receive certain types of federal aid. 

So those are steps we can take today to help bring good jobs to America and equip our people with the skills those jobs require.  And that brings us to the third question – how do we make sure hard work leads to a decent living?

No one in America should work full-time and raise their children in poverty.  So let’s raise the minimum wage so that it’s a wage you can live on.  And it’s time to harness the talents and ingenuity of hardworking immigrants by finally passing comprehensive immigration reform – securing our borders, establishing a responsible path to earned citizenship, and attracting the highly-skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will help create jobs. 

These steps will help grow our economy and rebuild a rising, thriving middle class.  And we can do it while shrinking our deficits.  We don’t have to choose between the two – we just have to make smart choices. 

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion – which puts us more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.  Now we need to finish the job. 

But I disagree with Republicans who think we should do that by making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training; Medicare and Social Security benefits.  That would force our senior citizens and working families to bear the burden of deficit reduction while the wealthiest are asked to do nothing more.  That won’t work.  We can’t just cut our way to prosperity. 

Instead, I’ve proposed a balanced approach; one that makes responsible reforms to bring down the cost of health care and saves hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and well-connected.  And we should finally pursue bipartisan, comprehensive tax reform that encourages job creation and helps bring down the deficit.

So we know what we need to do.  All the steps I’ve mentioned are commonsense.  And, together, they will help us grow our economy and strengthen our middle class. 

In the coming weeks and months, our work won’t be easy, and we won’t agree on everything.  But America only moves forward when we do so together – when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.  That’s the American story.  And that is how we will write the next great chapter – together.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

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February 16, 2013 10:19 AM EST

In Chicago, President Obama laid out a plan to rebuild ladders of opportunity for every American who is willing to work hard and climb them

In this week’s address, President Obama calls for quick action on the proposals he made during the State of the Union to grow our economy and create jobs, including making America a magnet for manufacturing, strengthening our education system through high-quality preschool for every child, and raising the minimum wage.

The two leaders discussed the world economy and President Obama's plan to pursue a U.S.-European Union free trade agreement, which was mentioned in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

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Is ‘The Following’ A Metaphor For The War On Terror?

I did not particularly like Fox’s The Following, Fox’s new drama, which stars Kevin Bacon as an alcoholic former FBI agent who comes out of retirement to hunt down James Purefoy, the pretentious, Edgar Allen Poe-quoting serial killer, who has escaped from prison and trained a whole bunch of other serial killers to fulfill their own dark fantasies and enhance his own legend. The whole thing struck me as a slick but empty excuse to put extraordinarily grotesque violence on television in an attempt to compete with cable, as if violence itself, rather than the things that lead up to violence, were what make cable dramas sophisticated. Over at Vulture, however, Matt Zoller Seitz has a theory about what the show’s really about:

Once you become attuned to the show’s anti-logic, the mix of gnawing dread and random mayhem might trigger the gloomy adrenaline rush of the 2001–2004 period. Hijackings, collapsing skyscrapers, subway explosions, shoe bombers, anthrax attacks, terror alerts, weapons of mass destruction: The Following evokes an alternate-world version of that horrendous time. Watch the skies. Sleep with the lights on. Trust no one. Those co-workers or next-door neighbors or smiling security guards that you deal with each day could be in cahoots with an ice-veined genius-madman. Portions of the first few episodes reminded me less of The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en than a zombie or body-snatchers picture, one in which every character but the lead could secretly be, or potentially become, a monster. Parts of The Following feel like 24 with serial killers instead of terrorists. It’s an apocalypse story as long-form nightmare. The whole world is losing its mind.

It’s an idea that that actually makes me like The Following even less.

We’ve done an enormous number of terrible and inconvenient things to ourselves in the decade since the September 11 attacks, from destroying our moral credibility by torturing suspected terrorists to making it a trial to get through airports, all on the grounds that there are extraordinarily wide-spread and competent terrorist operations out there planning to get us. And that turns out not to be true. The people who want to attack us have tried, unsuccessfully, to smuggle bombs on planes in their underwear and shoes. They’ve failed to detonate explosives in Times Square—that plot was foiled by the attentiveness of a Senegalese immigrant, in a nice reminder of how broad our team is, and how narrow the reach of our enemies, despite the damage we’ve done to ourselves and our international reputation. In a Newburgh, New York case, a terror attack appears to have been dreamed up by a federal informant, who convinced co-conspirators to join him. If there’s anything we should have learned in the last decade, it’s that our enemies are frustrating precisely because of how few of them there are, how easily they can hide out among millions of other people, and how much they’ve been able to convince us to change our own society with relatively few resources at their disposal.

The Following, Williamson suggested at the Television Critics Association press tour, makes the opposite point. “The FBI is constantly sort of chasing their tail a little bit because they don’t realize how insidious and how large and how wide the story is,” he says of his serial killer’s plot. “And so that’s kind of the fun of the show is as they start to learn it.” But there’s something grotesque about the idea that—even though serial killers do, of course, exist—there are so many people out there who are just waiting for someone to teach them how to kill and to unleash them into the world with terrible purpose. In real life, we’ve learned that the number of people who are excited to become mass killers in the name of blinkered ideology is mercifully small. It’s scary that they’re out there in any number, but it’s also frightening what we’ve done to ourselves to thwart them. We need to wake up to that fact, rather than, as Williamson suggests, to double down in hunting through the shadows.

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Texas Republicans Call For More Guns In Schools Following Shooting At Lone Star College

On Tuesday afternoon, the nation experienced its 49th school shooting since the Columbine massacre in 1999, when an altercation between two individuals set off at least five gunshots at Lone Star College in north Houston, Texas, injuring both parties and a nearby janitor caught in the crossfire. The college and the surrounding schools went into lockdown as police secured the area, chasing one of the suspects involved in the incident into a wooded area behind the school. Both men suffered gun shot wounds and are now in custody.

Texas is one of 49 states with a concealed carry law, permitting licensed individuals to carry firearms within the state, and lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow college students and staff with concealed weapon permits to carry firearms on school grounds. Firearms are currently prohibited at Lone Star.

Now, top Republican lawmakers — including Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Tim Poe — are using Tuesday’s incident to call for more weapons on campus. KTRK’s Ted Oberg has the report:

OBERG: Governor Perry said this afternoon his thoughts and prayers are with all the victims, but that anyone licensed and who has training on how to carry a weapon should be able to carry that weapon anywhere within the state and [that he would] indeed review the bill that’s been filed quickly. …. We talked to Ted Poe from the north Houston area, who said students today were defenseless on that campus.

POE: It brings to focus the fact that many schools and universities and students have — are defenseless at the schools and places of higher education and this seems to show that.

Watch it:

Five days ago, Texas State Sen. Brian Birdwell (R) and 13 other Republican authors introduced a measure that would prohibit higher ed institutions from imposing “bans or penalties on students who are licensed to carry a concealed handgun.” Schools could prohibit firearms at college sporting events, however. A similar bill failed to pass last year.

Lone Star already employs armed police officers and unarmed security guards.

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