Q    Mr. President, it’s a privilege for me to be here.  You talk about the small business loans.  My company is a high-tech company.  And we are growing, and we are providing high-tech jobs for Americans.  How can we ensure that banking and lending institutions are going to actually lend money to small businesses?  There have been numbers of steps done in that way, but so far I’ve been denied a loan twice and only got the -- for the third time after I asked for SBA-backed loan.

THE PRESIDENT:  Right.  Tell me more about your business, by the way.  I’ve actually read about it.  But tell -- people here I think would be interested, because you’re working on clean energy issues.

Q    This is correct, yes.  I have two lines of business; clean energy part where we are actually trying to get companies to become green and change their practices so that they follow a sustainability（持续性） practice as the regular ways.  And the second part of my business is high-tech.  We are doing IT consulting and IT services for federal government and Fortune 500 companies.

THE PRESIDENT:  How many employees do you have right now?

Q    About 94.

THE PRESIDENT:  Ninety-four?

Q    Yes.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, look, part of the answer is what you already spoke about, which is SBA, the Small Business Administration.  We have doubled the number of small business loans that we’ve been giving through the SBA.  We’ve waived a lot of fees on those loans because we knew that small businesses were getting harder hit than just about anybody during the financial crisis.  They were the ones where the banks were pulling back the most.  So we tried to fill that void as the banks were getting well, making sure the small businesses could keep their doors open.

But even by doubling the number of SBA loans, there’s still not enough capital to meet all the demand for small businesses across the country.

That's why this bill that we’re looking to pass this week out of the Senate, and that Gerry and Jim already voted for, is so important -- because what it would do is it would take funding authorization to provide to community banks, who are most likely to give loans to small businesses, but it would say to those banks, you know what, we’re going to hold you accountable for actually lending the money.  So -- because what we don't want to do is just help the banks boost their balance sheets, but they’re never getting the money out of the door.

Over the long term, we think that there are going to be enormous opportunities for banks to make money with businesses like yours, because yours are the ones that grow.  But they’re still feeling gun shy because of what happened on Wall Street.

And in fairness to a lot of the community banks, they weren’t the ones who were making big bets on derivatives, but they were punished nonetheless.  They’ve been hit really hard in the housing market.  They’ve been hit on their portfolios.  They’ve been trying to strengthen their portfolios.  But when we provide these loan guarantees through the SBA, or we provide cheaper money to them that they can then lend out, and as long as we’re monitoring them to make sure that they actually lend those monies to small businesses, they’re the ones that are most likely to get that money out the door.

This bill is very important.  It has been held up now for a couple of months, unnecessarily.  There was an article in The USA Today just about three weeks ago that said small businesses were actually holding off on hiring because they weren’t sure whether some of these tax cuts（减税） that they were going to get, as well as some of these lending facilities, would actually be set up.

And you hear some of my friends on the Republican side complaining that, well, we’d get more business investment if we had more certainty.  Well, here’s an example where we could give some certainty right away.  Pass this bill.  I will sign it into law the day after it’s passed or the day it is passed.  And then right away I think a lot of small businesses around the country will feel more comfortable about hiring and making investments.

Q    -- this is what’s happening right now is that, you know, I have contracts and I am ready to hire 20 more people.

THE PRESIDENT:  Right.

Q    But nobody is going to give me additional loan right now.  I mean, I had an off-the-record conversation with the vice president of one bank and they said, it’s simply we’ve made a decision not to loan to small businesses; it’s simply more profitable to us to invest this money elsewhere.#p#分页标题#e#

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, that’s why it’s so important to make sure that if they are getting help from us in terms of having more money to lend, that they actually lend it out and they lend it to small businesses.  And we’ve to make a direct link between the help that they’re getting and them actually lending the money.  That’s going to be critical.

All right, who’s next?  Yes, over here.

Q    I'm John’s sister, Wendy.

THE PRESIDENT:  Hey, Wendy.  How are you?

Q    I’m so honored and delighted to be here.  Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT:  You must be John’s younger sister.

Q    Yes, definitely, definitely.  (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s what I figured.

Q    No, he’s my kid brother.  And I actually am the stringer（纵梁） in from Boston with that hockey（曲棍球，冰球） team you’re meeting with this afternoon.

THE PRESIDENT:  There you go.  Yes, I’ve been looking forward to congratulating them.

Q    I would tell you just a little story, which is when I was in high school here at Woodson High School, I got involved in historic preservation.  And I worked on an archeology dig.  I researched the history of an old house.  I helped move the one-room Legato schoolhouse from out in the country into town hall to restore it as a piece of our county’s history.  And that launched my lifelong career is historic preservation.  And so I guess -- and I know you are interested in history and have studied particularly, I think, I’ve read, President Lincoln and the way he created a cabinet and so on.  So I know you value our nation’s history.  And I guess my question for you is, what are your thoughts about what we’re doing in your administration to invest in preserving our nation’s history and our historic places?

And one little job-generating idea I’d give you is that all the studies show that renovating existing buildings, restoring historic buildings is more labor intensive than materials intensive.  It creates more jobs.  They’re local jobs for local people.  So I hope that might be part of your jobs strategy.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I am a huge booster of historic preservation.  If I wasn’t, Michelle would get on me because she used to actually -- in Chicago, used to be on the historic -- on the landmark commission there.  And we live in a landmark district in Chicago.  So this is something that we care deeply about.

I guess I’d broaden the point to say that not only should we be thinking about historic preservation, but we should also be thinking about our national parks, our national forests.  There’s this treasure that we inherited from the previous generation, dating back to Teddy Roosevelt.  And that requires us to continually renew that commitment to our historic structures and our natural resource base, so that when Trevor and Olivia and those guys have their kids, when you guys have your grandkids, that that stuff is there for them, too.

So we have actually tried to ramp up（斜升，增加） our commitment to these issues.  We’ve, where we can, put a little bit more money into it.  But a lot of it’s not just more money; it’s also more planning.  And the Recovery Act gave a range of grants to state and local governments in some cases around preservation issues.

Now, one point -- one other point I want to make, though -- and you were mentioning how renovation oftentimes will actually generate more jobs than new construction.  A related idea is what we can do to make our existing buildings and housing stock more energy efficient, because it turns out that we could probably cut about a third of our total energy use just on efficiency.  We wouldn’t need new technologies.  We wouldn’t need to invent some fancy new fusion energy or anything.  If we just took our existing building stock in homes and insulated them, had new windows -- schools, hospitals, a lot of big institutions -- we could squeeze huge efficiencies out of that.

There’s a lot of ways to be had, and that would benefit everybody.  It would mean that over time we were helping to save the planet by reducing our carbon footprint.  People would be paying less on their electricity bills and their heating bills and their air-conditioning bills.  So it helps consumers.

The problem -- the reason we haven’t done more of this is because it requires some capital on the front end.  I mean, a lot of school districts, for example, would love to retrofit their schools, but they’re having problems just keeping teachers on payroll right now, so they always put off those investments.#p#分页标题#e#

And one of the things that we tried to do through the Recovery Act, and something that I know that Gerry and Jim have been interested in, is something called Home Star that we’ve been working on -- is to essentially provide families as well as small businesses, as well as institutions like schools or hospitals, grants up front, where we say, all right, we’re going to give you $10,000 to retrofit your building or your house.  And then you’re going to pay us back through your savings on utilities over a five-year period, for example, so that over time, it doesn’t cost taxpayers a lot of money, but we’re essentially giving some money up front that’s going to then be recouped（收回，恢复） .

And I think there are a lot of ideas that we can pursue on that front that could really make a difference and put a lot of people back to work, whether they’re the folks selling the insulation（绝缘，隔离） at Home Depot, or the small contractor that for a long time was remodeling kitchens or putting in home additions -- maybe that business has dried up.  This would be a new area for them to get put to work.

And about one out of four construction -- one out of four jobs that have been lost during this recession are related to the construction industry in some fashion.  Those folks have been hit harder than just about anybody else.  This would be an important boost for them.