Q    Hi, Mr. President.  I was actually recently laid off of a position working at our local community college, helping dislocated workers get back and get retrained.  But the position was funded on workforce investment dollars and the funding ended. As I look for a new position in social services, one of my concerns is I’m having trouble finding a position that pays enough so that I can pay my bills and also send my daughter to quality childcare.  So I was wondering if there’s anything that’s been done to reduce childcare costs.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, we have a childcare credit in place. We’d like to make it stronger.  This is one of those back-and-forths we’ve been having with the Republicans, because we actually think it is a good idea and they don’t.  But I think that giving families support who have to work each and every day is absolutely critical.

Now, there’s some companies that are starting to get smart about providing childcare on site for their employees, which makes a huge difference.  It’s a huge relief.  But those are usually bigger companies.  And some of the smaller companies or small businesses don’t have that capacity.

Bottom line is we just got to make sure that we’re providing you more support, primarily through a tax credit（税收抵免） mechanism.  This is something that we have incorporated in the past in our budget; we haven’t got everything that we’d like done on it.  It will be something that we continue to try to work on a bipartisan（两党连立的） basis to get the cost of childcare down.   There’s another component of this, though, and that’s also boosting the quality of childcare. 

Kids learn more from the age of zero to three than they do probably for the rest of their lives -- and this goes to the earlier question about education.  We want to get them off to a good start knowing their colors and their numbers and their letters and just knowing how to sit still.  And a high quality childcare environment can help on that front.  But that means that childcare workers, for example, have to be paid a decent wage and get decent training.

And we’ve been working -- we set up actually a task force that is trying to lift up the best practices, who is really doing a great job in creating high quality health care -- or childcare at an affordable rate, and then trying to teach other states and other cities and other communities how to replicate（复制，折叠） some of that great progress that’s been made.  There are some terrific programs out there, but they’re still too far and few between.

All right, I’ve got time for two more questions.  Yes, sir, right here.

Q    I work for a company who is benefiting from some stimulus（刺激，激励） money here in Columbus.  And it’s keeping me and my crews afloat for a while.  But what we really need is a stronger housing market here in Columbus.  We need to be building new roads and making houses affordable for people.  They need to get out there buying.  They need to be able to get the loans.  And what’s up with that?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, remember I told you that it’s going to take some time for this economy to come back.  One of the reasons it’s going to take time for this economy to come back is the housing market is still a big drag on the economy as a whole.  And the reason the housing market is still a big drag on the economy as a whole is we built a lot of homes over the previous five, seven, 10 years.  Every year, about 1.4 million families are formed that are ready to buy a new house, or need some place to live.

And what happened over the previous four, five, seven years during this housing bubble was we were building 2 million homes a year when only 1.4 [million] were being absorbed.  And then the bubble burst, and now we’re only building 400,000.

And all that inventory（存货清单） that happened during the housing bubble, it’s still out there.  So some states are worse than others.  You go to places like Nevada or Arizona or Florida, California, their inventory of unsold homes was so high that it is just going to take a whole bunch of years to absorb all that housing stock.

Now, what we can do is to help people who are currently in their homes stay in their homes.  We can strengthen the economy overall so that that new family that just formed, they feel confident enough to say, you know what, it’s time, honey, for us to go out and take the plunge and start looking.  And right now they’re kind of holding back, the way a lot of people are still holding back, because there’s uncertainty in the market.  And we’ve initiated, through the Treasury Department, a number of programs like that to help support the housing market generally.

But I want to be honest with you.  It is going to take some time for us to absorb this inventory that was just too high.  And there’s no really quick way to do it, because we’re talking about a $5 trillion market.  And we can’t plug that big hole in terms of all the housing that needs to be absorbed.  We’re not going to be able subsidize（资助） all that over-capacity right now.

What we can do is just stabilize it and then improve the economy overall.  What we’re going to do is get back to the point where we’re building 1.4 million homes a year, instead of 400,000 -- and that's a huge difference.  So the industry is going to come back.  The question is can we just nudge（推动） it a little bit more.  And the most important thing we can do now is to improve the economy overall so that people start feeling a little more confidence.

All right?  I’ve got time for one more?  You’ve got a question?  Here you can use mine.