THE PRESIDENT:  Hello, everybody.  Good to see you.  (Applause.)  You don’t need to do that.  It’s good to see you.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you so much.  Everybody -- everybody have a seat.

Usually they announce me with some fancy thing, and I think I messed up -- I just walked out here.  (Laughter.)  So I hope you didn’t mind.  But on the way out, if you want, we can play the Ruffles and Flourishes and all that.

I want to, before I start, acknowledge some people who have just done a wonderful job for this area, but also a wonderful job for the country.  First of all, one of the best governors that we’ve got in the United States of America, Governor Jay Nixon.  (Applause.)  One of my -- not just my favorite senators but one of my favorite people and a great friend of mine who is fighting every day for the people of Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill.  (Applause.)

We’ve got two outstanding members of Congress, one from this side and one from that side -- Congressman Emanuel Cleaver -- (applause) -- and Congressman Dennis Moore.  (Applause.)

And finally, I just want to acknowledge all the wonderful people at Smith Electric Vehicles and their energetic and outstanding（杰出的，显著的） staff.

It is outstanding to be here, and I’m not going to take a long time.  I just want to spend some time shaking hands and thanking you for the great work that you’ve done.  I just had a chance to get a tour and saw some of the battery-powered trucks that you’re manufacturing.  I had a chance to talk to some of the folks who build them.  But the reason I’m here today is because, at this plant, you’re doing more than just building new vehicles.  You are helping to fight our way through a vicious recession（衰退，不景气） and you are building the economy of America’s future.

Now, it’s not easy.  We’ve gone through as bad a economic situation as we’ve had since the Great Depression.  And this recession was a culmination（顶点，高潮） of a decade of irresponsibility -- a decade that felt like a sledgehammer（大锤，猛烈的打击） hitting middle-class families.  For the better part of 10 years, people have faced stagnant（停滞的，不景气的） incomes, skyrocketing（突涨） health care costs, skyrocketing tuition costs, and declining economic security.  And this all came to a head in a massive financial crisis that sent our economy into a freefall and cost 8 million American jobs, including many in this community.

So it was in the middle of this crisis that my administration walked through the door, and we had to make some difficult decisions at a moment of maximum peril（危险，冒险） , to avoid a Great Depression, to make sure that we didn’t have a complete meltdown（灾难，垮台） in our financial system.  It was a moment when the markets were in turmoil（混乱，骚动） and we were losing 750,000 jobs every month.

Some of the decisions we made weren’t popular at the time -- and some of them may still be unpopular today.  But we made those decisions because we had to stop that freefall.  And because we made those hard choices, our economy is in a different place today than it was just a year ago.

One of those decisions was to provide critical funding to promising, innovative businesses like Smith Electric Vehicles.  And because we did, there is a thriving（繁荣的，旺盛的） enterprise here instead of an empty, darkened warehouse.  Because of the grant that went to this company, we can hear the sounds of machines humming and people doing their work, instead of just the ghostly silence of an emptied-out building and the memory of workers who were laid off a long time ago.

And we made that kind of decision all across America last year.  And we were guided by a simple idea:  Government doesn’t have all the answers.  Ultimately, government doesn’t create all the jobs.  Government can’t guarantee growth by itself.  But what government can do is lay the foundation for small businesses to expand and to thrive, for entrepreneurs to open up shop and test out new products, for workers to get the training that they need, and for families to achieve some measure of economic security.  And that role is especially important in tough economic times.

And that’s why, when my administration began, we immediately cut taxes -- that’s right.  You wouldn’t know it from listening to folks, but we cut taxes for working families and for small business owners all across American to help them weather the storm.  Through our small business loans, and our focus on research and development, and our investment in high-tech, fast-growing sectors like clean energy, we’re helping to speed our recovery by harnessing the talent and the drive and the innovative spirit of the American people.  So our goal has never been to create another government program, our goal has been to spur（激励，鞭策） growth in the private sector.

For example, right here at Smith, you’ve recently passed a milestone -- hiring a 50th employee -- and I know you’re on the way to hire 50 more.  And we’re seeing similar things all across America, with incentives（激励，奖励） and investments that are creating wind turbines（风力涡轮机） and solar panels.  We’re seeing investments in energy-efficient appliances and home-building materials, and in advanced battery technologies and clean energy vehicles.

So just give you a couple examples, just last week, Abound Manufacturing in Colorado received backing for two plants to produce solar panels.  This is going to create 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.  One of the plants is actually taking over what’s now an empty Chrysler supplier factory.  Another company, called Abengoa Solar, is now planning to build one of the world’s largest solar plants right here in the United States.  And when it’s finished, this facility will be the first large-scale solar plant in the United States that can actually store energy that it creates for later use -- even at night.