WASHINGTON, July 24: Noting that his country has bounced back from its worst ever recession, US president Barack Obama has said America is now the top place for investors to do business.
“When I came into office, investors around the world thought that China was the top place to do business. Today they think that America is the top place to do business,” Obama told a Democratic Party luncheon in California.
This is in part because the US recovered faster than most industrialised nations and in part because some of the energy policies that US administration has put in place means that for the first time in over 20 years the country is now producing more oil than it imports, he said.
Obama said when he came into office America was going through the worst ever recession.
“We doubled clean energy, tripled the amount of wind energy that we produce, increased by 10 times the amount of solar energy that we’re producing, and we have reduced carbon pollution by the largest factor of any industrialised nation.
“High school dropout rates have gone down; college attendance is up,” he said.
Manufacturing, he noted, has emerged stronger than any time since the 1990s.
“An auto industry that was on the verge of collapse now fully recovered and stronger than ever and producing cars that not only people want to buy but also are slated to double fuel efficiency by the next decade — it’s no wonder then that a lot of people outside of the United States would say we’ve got the best cards out there,” he said.
“There’s no country that wouldn’t gladly trade places with us in terms of our strategic position.
“And part of that is also because we continue to have a culture of innovation and dynamism that Silicon Valley represents better than anyplace else on Earth,” Obama said.
“In fact, the contraction was actually larger by some measures than the Great Depression. In part because of the incredible resilience of the American people, but in part because we actually put some smart policies in place, the record over the last five years is some pretty remarkable progress,” he said.
“There’s almost no economic measure by which we are not better off today than we were when I came into office — that 52 straight months of job growth; 10 million jobs created; this past year, the biggest drop in unemployment in 30 years,” he argued.
“Unemployment now is lower than it was before Lehman’s. We’ve seen the deficit cut by more than half. Millions of people have health care that didn’t have it before and health care inflation is the lowest that it’s been in 50 years,” Obama said.
“The stock market, obviously, has more than recovered and that’s important for Wall Street but, more importantly, it’s important for Main Street,” he added. (PTI)
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