Read the complete transcript here. Excerpts below:
OBAMA: You’ve seen a change in the economic conditions of your community.
You see, all too often in Washington, what happens is, is that people think in terms of numbers and statistics. They think about it in abstract terms.
But when we say we’ve lost 3.6 million jobs since this recession began, nearly 600,000 in the past month alone, when we say that Lee County has seen its unemployment rate go from 3.5 percent to nearly 10 percent in less than two years, when we talk about the plummeting home prices and soaring foreclosure rates that have plagued this area and the layoffs at companies like Kraft Construction and Chico’s (ph), companies that have sustained this community for years, we’re not just talking about faceless numbers.
We’re talking about families. We’re talking about some of the people in this town hall meeting today, your neighbors, your friends. We’re talking about people like Steve Atkins (ph), who joins us today with his wife, Michelle (ph), and their son, Bailey (ph), and daughter, Josie (ph).
Steve’s the president of a small construction company in Fort Myers that specializes in building and repairing schools, but work has slowed considerably, like it has across the board in the construction area. Now, he’s done what he can to reduce overhead costs, but he still has been forced to lay off half his workforce, which means that many of those people may now be trying to figure out how are they going to pay their mortgage, how are they going to pay for the basic necessities of life, which puts us on a downward economic spiral.
Steve and Michelle have made sacrifices of their own. They’ve sold their home and moved into a smaller one.
And that’s what this debate is about: folks in Fort Myers and all across the country who have lost their livelihoods and don’t know what will take its place, parents who’ve lost their health care and lie awake at night praying their kids don’t get sick, families who’ve lost the home that was the foundation of their American dream, young people who put that college acceptance letter back in the envelope because they can’t afford it.
(APPLAUSE) That’s what’s behind the numbers; that’s what’s behind the statistics; that’s the true measure of this economic crisis. Those are the stories I heard every time I came to Florida, because this isn’t new. When we were campaigning down here, before the election, I was hearing about Florida suffering the first recession that it had in 16 years.
We didn’t know then how deep it was going to go. Well, it’s gone deep. It’s gotten worse. And the stories that I’ve heard here in Florida and in Indiana and all across the country I carried with me to the White House.
(APPLAUSE)
I promised you back then that, if elected president, I would do everything I could to help our communities recover, that I would not forget. And that’s why I’ve come back here today to tell you how I intend to keep that promise to make communities like Fort Myers stronger.
(APPLAUSE)
So the situation we face could not be more serious; I don’t have to tell you that. We’ve inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression.
And economists across the spectrum have warned, if we don’t act immediately, then millions more jobs will disappear, the national unemployment rates will approach double digits, more people will lose their homes and their health care, and our nation will sink into a crisis that at some point is going to be that much tougher to reverse.
So we cannot afford to wait. We can’t wait and see and hope for the best. I believe in hope, but I also believe in action.
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We can’t afford to posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place.
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That’s what the election was about. You rejected many of those ideas because you know they didn’t work. You didn’t send us to Washington because you were hoping for more of the same; you sent us there to change things. And that’s exactly what I intend to do as president of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: The problems that led us into this crisis are deep, they’re widespread, and so we’re going to have to do a lot of different things to get the economy moving again. We need to stabilize and repair our financial system.
We need to get credit flowing again to families and businesses. We need to stem the spread of foreclosures that are sweeping this country.
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