President Barack Obama on Tuesday evening addressed Congress in an effort to garner support for his legislative agenda, which is a three-pronged approach to clean energy, healthcare reform and education–all important elements of the nation’s long-term sustainability.
"It begins with energy," he said in the speech, which was broadcast nationwide.
He noted that the U.S. has fallen behind in developing renewable energy technologies and industries and reasserted the goal of doubling the nation’s renewable energy supply in three years.
He asked Congress to "to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy."
He also committed to investing fifteen billion dollars a year to develop technologies like wind power and solar power and asserted that despite poor decision making in the U.S. automobile industry, the country could not afford to walk away from it.
Obama insisted that healthcare costs are dragging down the nation’s economy and must be reformed. "So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year," he said.
And he also called on the nation’s young citizens to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. He set a goal for 2020 that America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
The nation’s high school drop out rate is "a prescription for economic decline," Obama said, "because we know the countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow."
He admitted the difficulty of the legislative tasks ahead and asked lawmakers to focus first and last on a shared love for the country in an effort to find compromise on these critical issues.
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The White House budget includes revenues from an emissions trading system in 2012, spokesman Robert Gibbs said.
Read Reuters coverage at the link below.
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Lest we forget the Democrats wholehearted support of labor unions that practically decimated the auto industry in this country. Another way to bring about innovation would be to simply lower taxes and get off the backs of small companies. Reducing payroll taxes and allowing more aggressive write offs of capital expenditures would go a long way to spur on small company grow and additional hiring. Obama failed to mention that our health care has spiraled out of control primarily due to the Doctor’s union (The AMA) and a myriad of State rules that block foreign doctors who would love to come to this country and work for lower salaries than our current overpaid practitioners. Oh well, more business as usual in Washington it seems – borrow, borrow, borrow, consume, consume, consume.