aSo these are all steps that we’re taking right now to try to move the economy forward.  Now, I have never been more confident about the future of our economy, if we stay on track and we deal with some of these longstanding problems that we hadn’t dealt with for decades.

If we make investments and improve our education system; if we make investments in research and development; if we make investments in things like clean energy so that we’ve got an energy policy that’s not just tied to importing oil from the Middle East but instead start figuring out how can we develop our homegrown industries; if we have a tax system that is fair and helps the middle class, and that also attends to our long-term deficit problems; if we regulate -- but not with a heavy hand -- just regulate enough to make sure that we don’t have a collapse of the financial system, and consumers aren’t taken advantage of, and health insurance companies are responsive to ordinary families -- if we do those things, there’s no reason why we can’t succeed.

And I’ve travelled all around the world and I’ve looked at all the economic data.  If you had a choice of which country you’d want to be, you still want to be the United States of America.  We still have a huge competitive edge and we’ve got the best workers in the world.  And we’ve got the most dynamic（动态的，有活力的） economy in the world.  We’ve got the best universities, the best entrepreneurs in the world.

But we’ve got to tackle these longstanding（长期存在的） problems that have been getting in the way of progress, and we’ve got to do it now.  We can’t wait another 20 years or another 30 years because other countries are catching up.  That’s what we’ve been trying to do over the last two years.

Now, some of these things, I got to admit, are hard. They cause great consternation（惊愕，恐怖） .  When we tried to get some common-sense rules in the financial sector, for example, that means billions of dollars that were going to profits to some of the banks are not going to be going there because you’re getting a better deal on your credit card, and they’re not happy about it. So that ends up creating a lot of drama on Capitol Hill.  And it means that we’ve had some very contentious debates.

But I just want to close by saying this.  Ultimately, when I get out of Washington and I start talking to families like yours, what I’m struck by is not how divided the country is, but I’m actually struck by how basically people have common values, common concerns and common hopes.  They want to be able to find a job that pays a decent wage; give their family -- and their children, in particular -- a bright future; be able to retire with some dignity and respect; not get bankrupt when they get sick.

And that cuts across region; it cuts across racial lines; it cuts across religious or ethnic lines.  People -- there’s a core set of American values that I think people across the country respond to.

And what I want to do is make sure that the government is on the side of those values, of responsibility and hard work and thinking about future generations and not just thinking about the next election.  And I think we’ve made progress, but we’ve got more progress to make.

So with that, I thank you all for being here.  And what I want to do is I just want to answer questions.  And I know folks in the sun are hot, so I’m going to stand in the sun to make sure that you know that I feel -- (laughter) -- I feel your pain, as they -- absolutely.  I wouldn’t mind having that hat, though.  (Laughter.)  That's helpful.  I should have thought ahead.

All right, anybody want to -- John, go ahead.  Yes.  Here, hold on a second.  I’ll give you a mic, so -- oh, we’ve got one.

Q    Mr. President, thank you very much for coming. We really appreciate it.  It’s a great opportunity.  I’m an engineer.  And you talked a lot about R&D and infrastructure and -- I love every dollar spent on that, by definition.  I’m also a paraplegic.  And I have a great interest in stem cell research and how it gets furthered.  So how do we get this issue to be a scientific issue instead of a political issue?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, John, as you know I have been a huge supporter of stem cell research for a very long time.  When I came into office, we said that what’s going to govern our decision-making here is sound（健全的，合理的） science.

There are legitimate ethical issues involved in all this -- the biotech industry, and those are going to continue as time goes on.  I mean, there are some very tricky questions.  And we’ve got to make sure that our values and our ethical standards are incorporated in everything we do.  But we’ve also got to make sure that we’re making decisions not based on ideology（意识形态，观念学） , but based on what the science is.

Now, the executive order that I signed would say that we are not going to create embryos to destroy for scientific research.  We’re not going to do that.

On the other hand, when you’ve got a whole bunch of embryos that were created because families were trying -- couples were trying to start a family, and through in-vitro fertilization, they're frozen in some canister（筒，小罐） somewhere, and are going to be discarded anyway, then it makes sense for us to take those who -- that are going to be destroyed and use them to advance our scientific knowledge to see if at some point we can start making huge progress on a whole set of issues.

Obviously, spinal cord（脊髓） injuries are an example, but Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, juvenile diabetes.  There’s not a single family here who has not in some way been touched by a disease that could end up benefiting from the research that’s done on stem cells.

Now, recently a District Court judge said that not only -- well, essentially said that our executive order he felt went too far beyond what the guidelines that Congress had provided before I came into office.  Although, the way he had written the order, it made it seem like even Bush’s orders were out of line and that you have to stop stem cell research altogether.

We are appealing that.  We’re challenging it.  And what we’re going to keep on doing on a whole range of these decisions is to make sure that I’m talking to scientists and ethicists and others, and try to build a common-sense consensus（一致，舆论） that allows us to make progress over the long term.