THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  Sorry to keep you waiting.

For the past few weeks there’s been a lot of talk around Washington about taxes and there’s been a lot of political positioning between the two parties.  But around kitchen tables, Americans are asking just one question:  Are we going to allow their taxes to go up on January 1st, or will we meet our responsibilities to resolve our differences and do what’s necessary to speed up the recovery and get people back to work?

Now, there’s no doubt that the differences between the parties are real and they are profound（深远的） .  Ever since I started running for this office I've said that we should only extend the tax cuts for the middle class.  These are the Americans who’ve taken the biggest hit not only from this recession but from nearly a decade of costs that have gone up while their paychecks（薪水） have not.  It would be a grave injustice to let taxes increase for these Americans right now.  And it would deal a serious blow to our economic recovery.

Now, Republicans have a different view.  They believe that we should also make permanent the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.  I completely disagree with this.  A permanent extension of these tax cuts would cost us $700 billion at a time when we need to start focusing on bringing down our deficit.  And economists from all across the political spectrum（范围） agree that giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires does very little to actually grow our economy.

This is where the debate has stood for the last couple of weeks.  And what is abundantly（丰富地，大量地） clear to everyone in this town is that Republicans will block a permanent tax cut for the middle class unless they also get a permanent tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, regardless of the cost or impact on the deficit.

We saw that in two different votes in the Senate that were taken this weekend.  And without a willingness to give on both sides, there’s no reason to believe that this stalemate（僵局，困境） won't continue well into next year.  This would be a chilling prospect for the American people whose taxes are currently scheduled to go up on January 1st because of arrangements that were made back in 2001 and 2003 under the Bush tax cuts.

I am not willing to let that happen.  I know there’s some people in my own party and in the other party who would rather prolong（延长，拖延） this battle, even if we can't reach a compromise.  But I'm not willing to let working families across this country become collateral damage（附带损害） for political warfare here in Washington.  And I'm not willing to let our economy slip backwards just as we're pulling ourselves out of this devastating recession.

I'm not willing to see 2 million Americans who stand to lose their unemployment insurance at the end of this month be put in a situation where they might lose their home or their car or suffer some additional economic catastrophe.

So, sympathetic as I am to those who prefer a fight over compromise, as much as the political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems, it would be the wrong thing to do.  The American people didn’t send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories.  They would much rather have the comfort of knowing that when they open their first paycheck on January of 2011, it won’t be smaller than it was before, all because Washington decided they preferred to have a fight and failed to act.