Obama gets down to business
The president talks of his plans for stimulating the economy in his State of the Union address. Submit your questions about the speech to a top White House official.
The State of the Union address is President Barack Obama's opportunity to report on the prior year and lay out his agenda for the next 12 months. In his address before Congress and the nation on Tuesday night, he explained how he plans to stimulate the still-struggling economy and create more jobs while controlling government spending.
"We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world," Obama said. "We need to make America the best place in the world to do business."
As expected, Obama called for greater innovation, improved education and spending on infrastructure to create jobs. He got his biggest laugh of the evening when he quipped that high-speed rail for some trips would be "faster than flying, without the pat-down."
As reported earlier in the day, Obama called for a five-year freeze on discretionary spending and some cuts to military spending. He also pledged to improve foreign relations, restructure federal government to make it more efficient, preserve health care reform and restructure the corporate tax structure to make it more equitable. "None of this will be easy," he said. "All of it will take time."
Readers, no doubt, have plenty of questions about Obama's economic and tax policies. We're going to help get them answered directly from the White House.
Please leave your questions about the State of the Union in the comments below. Include your first name and your town or city.
Then, on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. ET, I will sit down with Austan Goolsbee (pictured), chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, and some other journalists, and we'll ask him as many of your questions as we can.
Come back to MSN Money to see the live broadcast of the roundtable. You can also read our follow-up article, detailing his answers, later that day.
The original idea behind capitalism and the industrial revolution is that people would work in factories to earn money to buy the very goods they produced. Because corporations offshored our jobs for short-term gain, their consumers will soon have no money to buy their products & services. Corporations will crumble unless they’re willing to pay a little more in labor costs, in order to receive that money back in sales. The best way to create jobs is the obvious – END TAX INCENTIVES FOR OUTSOURCING! Move the factories and customer support centers back to the United States.
Alicia, Portland OR
Mr President, ask that the public representatives give up their paid for by the public health care benefits in exchange for paid for by themselves health care without an adjustment to their compensation if they are so opposed to ObamaCare. Perhaps if they were faced with the same obstacles and costs that the general population and self employed/small business are they would change their positions. It's easy to oppose something that has no impact on yourself or your family.
Melissa from Dallas, Texas
Here on street-level as a small business, an entrepreneur, the single-most common frustration is clearly the lock-up of capital in giant corporations who are recording record profits, abundant with cash, and are sitting on it. Most of my valuable time that could go into creating jobs to revolutionize mobile commerce, instead is spent calling and nagging to giant companies to pay their increasingly, needlessly overdue bills. This country doesn't have cash-flow. It's fact, it's policy, and biggest of all, it's mindset. How are we to invent the future and get capital when we can't even get corporations to honor their business transactions?
HERE'S THE QUESTION: Is there not a policy that can be put into play that rewards banks that actually make business loans by access to more favorable overall borrowing rate? That is, if some ratio of assets-to-new-lending actually determines who gets rewarded.
Perhaps it's a tax policy: companies that meet some kind of job creation markers are only then eligible for favorable tax treatments. Right now, there is no motive for banks, which control the lifeblood of the economy, to ramp up the circulation, when it pays them even better to, *ahem*, sit on their assets.
If republicans want to cut spending as much as they are claiming ....let them start wityh their own excesses that we tax payers are covering...for instance....a pay scale that they create and add to themselves, If cuts are to be made, let them demonstates their own cuts to themselves first...rather than passing all cuts to those that can least afford it....AS for taxes.. even CPA's have a hard time figureing out what is said in the tax laws that our rlected keep messing with ....I would think a straight flat tax...on goods purchased , not food or cloths....with no exceptions....just might cover us all better than what congress keeps doing, which so far has made things worse.
One other item...the housing mess we have today was helped a lot by a congress that has yet to admit they made a large mistake in the deregulation of the financial industry....and considering the money that lobbyist threw at them to get this done...I have to wonder why,,,that money is not considered a bribe....for anyone one else to accept funds of any kind...it would be fraud...and jail time...what makes that money any different for them than us?
I would like to know why we still have legislation in place that gives corporation tax benefits for shipping jobs overseas. There should be legislation that gives companies benefits for hiring Americans, and keeping the jobs in the states.
Many middle income degreed professionals jobs have been eliminated in the great recession. What is he proposing to encourage the creation of jobs for American workers in America? We need jobs now - we have been patient long enough.
If more American jobs were created, and filled by American employees, the deficit problem would be greatly reduced.
To all of you die hard Republicans, you seem to ignore the facts that it is George W. Bush and the Republican Congress that put us in this financial fiasco. The buildup of the defense department, the tax cuts, and two wars is what is driving us to demise. If the Republican Congress is so gung ho on cutting excess spending, why aren't they starting with their salaries, their outrageous retirement benefits, their health benefits and paid time off benefits? They spend most of their time campaigning, politicking and pandering to their lobbyist. They should reduce their salaries by 5%, pay 20% of their health insurance, and their retirement benefits should not be at levels equal to what they were making as Congressman.
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