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All right. Young lady right here.
Q Mr. President, I want to thank you for going to Latin America a couple weeks ago. And this is a great story where Ex-Im Bank and Gamesa worked together to supply over 50 turbines to Honduras, for example.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
Q If you could elaborate more on your National Export Initiative, I think that that would be an amazing thing to talk about.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, that’s a good point. You guys are selling some of your turbines overseas, partly because what’s called the Export-Import Bank -- which is a government agency that helps businesses market to overseas markets -- hooked up with Gamesa and saw -- discovered this way where they could get into that market.
Now, one of the ways that we got in trouble before the recession was we were borrowing a lot of money to buy a lot of stuff from somebody else. Right? I mean, basically, what happened was we ran up our credit cards, we took out home equity loans, and we bought a lot of flat-screen TVs, and we bought a lot of whatever you all buy. (Laughter.) I didn’t want to get personal in terms of all the things that you might have purchased. But a lot of it was made somewhere else. And that was great for China. That was great for some of these other countries that are exporting to the United States, but it wasn’t very good for U.S. industry.
The way countries succeed over the long term is by making stuff and selling it to somebody else. (Applause.) So what -- my -- I set a goal. I said I want to double our exports. I want to double our exports over the next five years and we can do it. We’ve already increased our exports by 18 percent. Now that’s a good start, but that means we got another 80 percent to go. And that’s where using something like the Export-Import Bank can be really important, because a lot of these other countries give a big advantage to their exporters. They help give them financing. They help them find markets. They negotiate deals for them. And my attitude is, well, if they’re doing it for their companies I want to make sure we’re doing it for our companies. And I want to make sure that goods that we’re producing here in the United States get sold other places.
We’ve got the best technology. We’ve got the best workers in the world. But we are such a big market that a lot of times we’ve been focused more internally than thinking about how can we sell to other countries. And we can’t be afraid of competition. We’ve got to go after it. All right?
Young lady right there. Yes, you.
Q Hi, my name is Singaza Bell (ph). Yes, my question is in light of what you just said. What of corporate tax incentives and R&D tax incentives that will make companies like Gamesa do their manufacturing here? Because it’s one thing to have the knowledge base in the United States, but we really need manufacturing back here.
THE PRESIDENT: You’re right, and the reason that companies locate in different places is complicated. A lot of it has to do with the fact that labor costs may be lower in some of these other countries, but a lot of it has to do with our tax code, which is kind of screwy（扭曲的，古怪的） .
On paper, we’ve got the highest tax -- one of the highest tax codes for corporations in the world -- on paper. But here’s the catch, we have so many loopholes that it turns out you’ve got a whole bunch of companies who are paying no axes or barely paying taxes, or they keep their money in offshore accounts and it doesn’t get reinvested back here in the United States of America.
So this is one of the reasons why I’ve said that I think it would make sense for us to reform our tax code, simplify it, lower the rate for corporations, but eliminate a bunch of the loopholes（漏洞，枪眼） so that everybody is paying the same and it’s fair.
Because what you pay in taxes should not depend on how good your lawyer is, or how good your accountant is. If you make a certain amount of money, that’s what you should pay. And I think that same principle, by the way, we can apply to individuals as well. So one of the things I’m interested in is looking at tax reform. Ninety percent of you shouldn’t even have to probably file a return.
The way electronics works these days, you should be able to -- with your W-2, it gets plugged in. It’s on a computer somewhere. Here’s your refund. You sign something electronically. It gets done.
Most people don’t itemize（逐条列记） . If you don’t itemize, sending in some complicated return is just a waste of paperwork. And even if you do itemize, most of you probably it’s your mortgage on your house -- interest payments on your mortgage and a couple other things. It shouldn’t be some two-week ordeal（折磨） .
And by the way, because sometimes folks will say, well, you don’t have to do your taxes. Look, it’s true, I don’t do my taxes anymore. I’ve got other stuff that I’ve got to do. But it wasn’t that long ago when I did do my taxes. I remember. It was terrible. (Laughter.) Just like I remember pumping gas. I don’t pump gas anymore, but I remember what it was like when you filled it up and it turned out you didn’t have as much money as you thought.
So I think we can actually simplify it. But on manufacturing, tax reform on the corporate side could make a difference. The other thing, though, is in terms of encouraging manufacturing, we’ve got to understand what our advantage is. See, we’ll never compete in terms of low wages; there’s always going to be someplace that has lower wages than we do. We’re a wealthy country.
So if a company just wants to make plastic toys, we’re just not going to be able to keep up with that. But when it comes to high-end, high-skilled jobs, those are the kind of manufacturing jobs we have to go after. And that’s where research, innovation is so important. That’s where on something like clean energy, making sure that there’s a market for that clean energy is so important. That’s what’s going to produce manufacturing jobs -- making sure we’ve got a good smart grid. Those are the kinds of things that are going to make sure that we have the high-end manufacturing here in our country.
And I just want to introduce -- there’s a guy right here, this guy, I’m going to embarrass him. His name is Ron Bloom. Ron is actually the guy who helped us save the auto industry. He helped to design our program to make sure that G.M. and Chrysler did not get liquidated and did not go under. And by the way, I don’t know if you guys heard, a couple weeks back G.M. said it was now going to hire back every single worker that had been laid off. Every single worker that had been laid off. (Applause.)
So Ron is now working to develop manufacturing strategies for every industry around the country, and he’s doing great work. And I’m sure he’s going to be talking to the folks here at Gamesa and others in terms of finding ways that we can increase manufacturing here in the United States all across the country.
All right, gentleman right here.
Q David Campbell (ph). My question is in regards to the ITC and the PTC -- the investment tax credit and the production tax credit, renewable energy. It’s somewhat known that the large energy developers act somewhat volatile（挥发性的，不稳定的） depending on the looming deadlines in some of the provisions in those tax credits. And they have been known, and they’ve been spoken on in the industry as being helpful. Can you just speak on how your administration plans to support that or plans to continue to support it because you already are?
THE PRESIDENT: We want to make them permanent so that people aren’t looking every few years to try to figure out is this investment going to be there for us. (Applause.)
I want to kick-start this industry. I want to make sure we’ve got good customers, and I want to make sure that there’s the financing there so that we can meet that demand. And there’s no reason why we can’t do both, but it does require us getting past some of these political arguments.
I don’t understand why some folks think that if you promote clean energy that somehow you’re some pointy-headed, environmentalist type, but if you’re all about just drilling and getting more oil, then you’re a tough guy.
If oil is what you’ve got and it works for you, then there’s nothing wrong with oil. But when you only have 2, 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves, why wouldn’t you want to develop alternative sources of energy that are cleaner and more efficient and that produce manufacturing jobs like are being produced right here.
Sometimes people say, well, what about coal? Look, coal -- we are the Saudi Arabia of coal. We’ve got a whole lot of coal, but the fact of the matter is, coal -- if we don’t have clean coal technologies to catch the particles that are sent up in the air, it causes serious pollution that increases the rates of asthma and is contributing to weather patterns changing. So we should work on technologies to make coal cleaner. But that doesn’t mean that it’s an either/or; it’s a both/and.
We can use oil, use coal. We’re going to need those for a while. But let’s also develop these new energies, these cleaner energies, that can really make a difference. We’re going to need bipartisan（两党连立的） support for that. That’s what I’m hoping we’re going to be able to get. |
