Julianna Goldman.  There you are.

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  Your budget relies on revenue from tax increases to multinational corporations that ship jobs overseas and on increases on the oil and gas industry. You’ve been calling on this for years.  And if you couldn’t get it through a Democratic Congress, why do you think you’ll be able to get it through now?  And also doesn’t it blunt your push for deficit-neutral corporate tax reform?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I continue to believe I’m right.  (Laughter.)  So we’re going to try again.  I think what’s different is everybody says now that they're really serious about the deficit.  Well, if you’re really serious about the deficit -- not just spending, but you’re serious about the deficit overall  -- then part of what you have to look at is unjustifiable spending through the tax code, through tax breaks that do not make us more competitive, do not create jobs here in the United States of America.

And the two examples you cite I think most economists would look at and they’d say these aren’t contributing to our long-term economic growth.  And if they're not, why are we letting some folks pay lower taxes than other folks who are creating jobs here in the United States and are investing?  Why are we not investing in the energy sources of the future, just the ones in the past, particularly if the energy sources of the past are highly profitable right now and don't need a tax break?

So I think what may have changed is if we are going to get serious about deficit reduction and debt reduction, then we’ve got to look at all the sources of deficit and debt.  We can’t be just trying to pick and choose and getting 100 percent of our way.

The same is true, by the way, for Democrats.  I mean, there are some provisions in this budget that are hard for me to take. You’ve got cities around the country and states around the country that are having a tremendously difficult time trying to balance their own budgets because of fallen revenue.  They’ve got greater demands because folks have lost their jobs; the housing market is still in a tough way in a lot of these places.  And yet part of what this budget says is we’re going to reduce Community Development Block Grants by 10 percent.  That’s not something I'd like to do.  But -- and if it had come up a year ago or two years ago, I would have said no.  Under these new circumstances, I'm saying yes to that.  And so my expectation is, is that everybody is going to have to make those same sorts of compromises（妥协，和解） .

Now, with respect to corporate tax reform, the whole concept of corporate tax reform is to simplify, eliminate loopholes, treat everybody fairly.  That is entirely consistent with saying, for example, that we shouldn’t provide special treatment to the oil industry when they’ve been making huge profits and can afford to further invest in their companies without special tax breaks that are different from what somebody else gets.

Q    -- you can't eliminate those --

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, what is absolutely true is that it’s going to be difficult to achieve serious corporate tax reform if the formula is, lower our tax rates and let us keep all our special loopholes.  If that’s the formula, then we’re not going to get it done.  I wouldn’t sign such a bill, and I don’t think the American people would sign such a bill.

If you’re a small business person out on Main Street, and you’re paying your taxes, and you find out that you’ve got some big company with billions of dollars in far-flung businesses all across the world, and they’re paying a fraction of what you’re paying in taxes, you’d be pretty irritated（激怒） -- and rightfully so.

And so the whole idea of corporate reform -- corporate tax reform -- is, yes, let’s lower everybody’s rates so American businesses are competitive with businesses all around the world; but in order to pay for it, to make sure that it doesn’t add to our deficit, let’s also make sure that these special interest loopholes that a lot of lobbyists have been working very hard on to get into the tax code -- let’s get rid of those as well.

All right.  April Ryan.  Caught you by surprise, April.

Q    You did, sir.  Thank you.  Mr. President, I want to focus in on the least of these.  You started your career of service as a community organizer and now we are hearing from people like -- organizations like the CBC is saying rebuilding our economy on the backs of the most vulnerable Americans is something that is simply not acceptable, like the cuts to the Community Service Block Grants, Pell Grants, heating oil assistance, and freezing salaries of federal workers.  Now, Roderick Harrison, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, says it’s not good to make these types of cuts at a time of recession, instead of doing it at a time of recovery.

And also I need to ask you, have you been placing calls for your friend, Rahm Emanuel, for his mayoral（市长的） campaign in Chicago?  Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT:  I’ll take the last question first.  I don’t have to make calls for Rahm Emanuel.  He seems to be doing just fine on his own.  And he’s been very busy shoveling snow out there.  (Laughter.)  I’ve been very impressed with that.  I never saw him shoveling around here.  (Laughter.)

Let me use Pell Grants as an example of how we’re approaching these difficult budget choices in a way that is sustainable but preserves our core commitment to expanding opportunity.  When I came into office I said I wanted to once again have America have the highest graduation rates, college graduation rates, of any country in the world -- that we had been slipping.  And so I significantly increased the Pell Grant program by tens of billions of dollars.  And so millions of young people are going to have opportunities through the Pell Grant program that they didn’t before, and the size of the Pell Grant itself went up.

What we also did, partly because we were in a recessionary situation and so more people were having to go back to school as opposed to work, what we also did was, for example, say that you can get Pell Grants for summer school.  Now we’re in a budget crunch.  The take-up rate on the Pell Grant program has skyrocketed.  The costs have gone up significantly.  If we continue on this pace, sooner or later what's going to happen is we’re just going to have to chop off eligibility.  We’ll just have to say, that's it, we can’t do this anymore, it’s too expensive.

So instead what we said was how do we trim, how do we take a scalpel（外科手术刀） to the Pell Grant program, make sure that we keep the increase for each Pell Grant, make sure that the young people who are being served by the Pell Grant program are still being served, but, for example, on the summer school thing, let’s eliminate that.  That will save us some money, but the core functions of the program are sustained.  That's how we’re approaching all these cuts.

On the LIHEAP program, the home heating assistance program, we doubled the home heating assistance program when I first came into office, in part because there was a huge energy spike, and so folks -- if we had just kept it at the same level, folks would have been in real trouble.  Energy prices have now gone down, but the costs of the program have stayed the same.  So what we’ve said is, well, let’s go back to a more sustainable level.  If it turns out that once again you see a huge energy spike, then we can revisit it.  But let’s not just assume because it’s at a $5 billion level that each year we’re going to sustain it a $5 billion level regardless of what’s happening on the energy front.

That doesn’t mean that these aren’t still tough cuts -- because there are always more people who could use some help across the country than we have resources.  And so it’s still a tough decision, and I understand people’s frustrations with some of these decisions.  Having said that, my goal is to make sure that we’re looking after the vulnerable; we’re looking after the disabled; we’re looking after our seniors; we’re making sure that our education system is serving our kids so that they can compete in the 21st century; we’re investing in the future, and doing that in a way that's sustainable and that we’re paying for -- as opposed to having these huge imbalances where there are some things that aren’t working that we’re paying a lot of money for; there’s some things that are underfunded.  We’re trying to make  adjustments so that we’ve got a sustainable budget that works for us over the long term.

And by the way, there are just some things that just aren’t working at all, so we’ve eliminated a couple hundred programs in this budget.  On the education front, we’re consolidating from 33 programs to 11 programs.  There is waste and inefficiency there that is long overdue, and we identify a number of these programs that just don't work.  Let’s take that money out of those programs that don't work, and put in money -- that money in programs that do.