THE PRESIDENT:  I want to say a special thanks to John and Nicole.  Trevor and Olivia are back there.

MS. ARMSTRONG:  They’re turning the A/C unit off.

THE PRESIDENT:  Yes, exactly.  That’s all right.  But I'm so grateful for their hospitality（好客，殷勤） .  They are just a wonderful family, and for them to open up their backyard for us is just terrific.  So this is really -- oh, I’ve got a mic.  So thank you to the entire family for opening up -- and thanks to all of you for taking the time to be here.  Because I want to -- I was telling John and Nicole that a lot of times, when you're in Washington, you're busy, you’ve got a lot of stuff to do, and you're in a bubble when you're President.  And sometimes you just don't have the opportunity to have the kinds of interactions（交互，相互作用） that I used to have even when I was a senator.

And so these kinds of formats are terrific for me.  And my hope is, is that despite all these people who are here with cameras and microphones and all that stuff, that people won't be shy -- because the whole point of this is for me to hear directly from you and to answer your questions, hear about your concerns, hear about your hopes, and hopefully that will translate itself into some of the things that we're doing at the White House.

I obviously want to make some introductions that -- I think all of you know that you’ve got some members of Congress who are working very hard here in Northern Virginia, and I want to acknowledge them.  First of all, Congressman Jim Moran, who’s been doing great work for a very long time.  (Applause.)  Congressman Gerry Connolly has been doing terrific work here locally and now on Capitol Hill.  (Applause.)  We've got Sharon Bulova, who is the chairwoman of the Fairfax County Board of Commissioners.  (Applause.)

And we've also got a couple of small business owners, because one of the things I want to talk about is how we can grow the economy and get people back to work, and so who better to hear from than a couple of small business owners.  Don't worry, I'm not going to call on you, but I'm just glad you're here.

First of all, we've got Cherrelle Hurt, who is the owner of As We Grow Learning Center.  Hey, Cherrelle.  Thanks for being here.  (Applause.)  And Larry Poltavtsev -- did I say that right, Larry? -- who is the CEO of Target Labs, Inc.  (Applause.)  And so we're glad that you guys could join us.

Now, I'm only going to say a few things at the top.  And I want to talk a little bit about why I decided to run for President in the first place, back in 2007-2008.

Having served as a state senator, having then served as a United States senator, I had had a chance to see how economic policies were having an effect on working-class families and middle-class families for a long time.  And my wife and I, we came out of hardworking families who didn’t have a lot, but because the economy was growing, because there was an emphasis on what was good for the middle class, we were able to get a great education, we were able to get scholarships.  Michelle’s dad worked as a blue-collar worker, but just on that one salary he was able to provide for his family and make sure that they always had enough and the kids had opportunities.

And what it seemed like was, for about a decade there, middle-class families were losing more and more ground.  And some of that had to do with changes in the global economy and greater competition from around the world.  But a lot of it had to do with the policies that had been put in place, which really boiled down to cutting taxes, especially for millionaires and billionaires; cutting regulations -- that made consumers and workers more vulnerable（易受伤害的） ; failing to make investments that were so critical in growing our middle class over the long term.

And so when I ran for President, my goal was to make sure that we get a set of economic policies in place that would lay the foundation for long-term growth in the 21st century so that the 21st century would be an American Century, just like the 20th century had been.

And that's what we've tried to do over the last 19 months, in the midst of the worst financial crisis that we've seen since the Great Depression.  The first thing we had to do was just stop the bleeding, stabilize the financial system and make sure we didn’t trip into a Great Depression.  And we have done that.

So when I was sworn in on that very cold day in January -- some of you may remember -- we lost 750,000 jobs in that month alone.  Now we've seen eight consecutive months of private sector（私营部门） job growth because of the policies we’ve put in place.

We were on the verge of financial meltdown.  Anybody who was involved in business at that time remembers banks were not lending at all.  You couldn’t even get an auto loan or a consumer loan.  And now the financial systems have stabilized, although they’re not completely where we need them to be.  The economy was shrinking at a pace of -- an astounding（令人震惊的） pace of about 6 percent annually.  And now the economy has been growing.

So we stopped the bleeding, stabilized the economy, but the fact of the matter is, is that the pace of improvement has not been where it needs to be.  And the hole that we had dug ourselves in was enormous.  I mean, we lost 4 million jobs in the last six months of 2008, when I was still running -- we lost 4 million jobs.  And all told, we’ve lost 8 million jobs.  And so even though we’ve grown jobs this year, we haven’t been able to yet make up for those 8 million jobs that had been lost.  And that’s an enormous challenge.

Now, the second part of the challenge, though, is to make sure that even as we’re digging ourselves out of this hole, we start making some better decisions so that, long term, we don’t find ourselves in the circumstance again, and we start creating the kind of economy that’s working for middle-class families.

So a couple of things that we did on that front:  We cut taxes for middle-class families because we understand that people’s incomes and wages have not gone up, have not kept pace with increases in health care, increases in college, and so forth.

The second thing that we felt was very important was to start creating some rules of the road again.  So in financial services, for example, we passed a financial regulatory（管理的，控制的） bill that makes sure that we’re not going to have taxpayer bailouts, makes sure that banks have to operate a little bit more responsibly and take less risks with the money that they’re investing.  And we also made sure that consumers are treated more fairly -- because part of what happened in this financial crisis was people were getting mortgages that they didn't understand.  Suddenly, the bottom fell out of the housing market and banks found themselves in a crisis situation.