President Barack Obama has proposed increasing spending on highway, transportation and other infrastructure projects, as well as increasing tax breaks for small businesses and offering tax incentives to people who make their homes more energy-efficient. In his speech Tuesday morning at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, Obama also said that small business, infrastructure and clean energy are areas in which Americans can be put to work while putting the nation on a sturdier economic footing.

Obama said there is "an urgent need to accelerate job growth in the short term while laying a new foundation for lasting economic growth," and he also noted that the economy in the country has improved since he took office. "These have been a tough two years," Obama said, "and there will no doubt be difficult months ahead. But the storms of the past are receding. The skies are brightening. And the horizon is beckoning once more."

He recalled meeting with his economic advisers almost exactly one year ago in his presidential transition offices in Chicago. They had presented an analysis of where the economy stood at the time and mapped out a plan to tackle the economic crisis. "The fear among economists across the political spectrum was that we were rapidly plummeting towards a second Great Depression," he said. So, in the weeks and months that followed, Obama and his team took a series of steps to prevent that outcome.

They tried to get lending flowing again so that businesses could get loans to buy equipment and ordinary Americans could get financing to buy homes and cars, go to college, and start or run businesses. Also, to prevent economic collapse, Obama and his advisers extended assistance to many banks, financial institutions and the American auto industry. "These were not decisions that were popular or satisfying; these were decisions that were necessary," Obama said.

Then, less than a month after he took office, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was enacted. It offered tax relief to small businesses and working families, extended and helped increase unemployment benefits for more than 17 million Americans, and helped struggling state and local governments facing historic budget shortfalls. The Recovery Act also helps invest in putting Americans to work in renewable energy projects, boosting medical research and upgrading roads and railways.

Obama said he is doing all that he can to get the economy growing. He signed into law this fall more than $30 billion in tax cuts for struggling businesses, extended an effective tax credit for homebuyers and offered extra unemployment insurance for one million Americans.

"Now, partly as a result of these and other steps, we are in a very different place today than we were one year ago," he said. "We may forget, but we're in a very different place. We can safely say that we are no longer facing the potential collapse of our financial system and we've avoided the depression many feared. Our economy is growing for the first time in a year, and the swing from contraction to expansion since the beginning of the year is the largest in nearly three decades. Finally, we're no longer seeing the severe deterioration in the job market that we once were."

The Department of Labor released unemployment numbers for November showing that 11,000 jobs were lost last month - the fewest jobs lost in a year and far fewer than economists had anticipated. In addition, the job losses for September and October decreased, showing that the rate of job losses has started to decline - from an average of 673,000 per month in the final three months of the Bush administration to 87,000 during the past three months.

The fact that the unemployment rate fell slightly last month is a result made possible in part by the up to 1.6 million jobs that the Recovery Act has already created and saved, Obama said. "But I'm here today because our work is far from done," Obama said. "For even though we've reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who've been swept up in the flood. There are more than 7 million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began. That's a staggering figure, and one that reflects not only the depths of the hole from which we must ascend, but also a continuing human tragedy."

The president outlined some of the steps that he said should be at the heart of the government's effort to increase job growth.

He proposed helping small businesses grow and hire new staff. "It's worthwhile to create a tax incentive to encourage small businesses to add and keep employees," Obama said, "and I'm going to work with Congress to pass one." Also, he said the government needs to address the continuing struggle of small businesses to get loans that they need to start up and grow, so he proposed waiving fees and increasing the guarantees for Small Business Administration-backed loans. And he said he is asking his treasury secretary to keep mobilizing the remaining Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds to facilitate lending to small businesses.

Obama also proposed a boost in investment in the nation's infrastructure - beyond what was included in the Recovery Act - to continue modernizing the nation's transportation and communications networks.

More than 10,000 such projects already have been funded through the Recovery Act, and the president said that "Recovery Act work on roads, bridges, water systems, Superfund sites, broadband networks and clean energy projects will all be ramping up in the months ahead."

In addition, Obama is calling on Congress to consider a new program to provide incentives for consumers who retrofit their homes to become more energy-efficient, which he said will create jobs, save money for families and reduce the pollution that threatens our environment.

"Incentives to promote energy efficiency and clean energy manufacturing don't automatically create jobs or lower carbon emissions," Obama said, "but these steps provide a framework in which companies can compete and innovate to create those jobs and reduce energy consumption."

He also called for winding down the TARP program created to stabilize the financial system so that banks would lend again. "Because of our stewardship of this program, and the transparency and accountability we put in place, TARP is expected to cost the taxpayers at least $200 billion less than what was anticipated just this past summer," Obama said. "And the assistance to banks, once thought to cost taxpayers untold billions, is on track to actually reap billions in profits for the taxpaying public. So, this gives us a chance to pay down the deficit faster than we thought possible and to shift funds that would have gone to help the banks on Wall Street to help create jobs on Main Street."

Obama said, "We have refused to go along with business as usual; we are taking responsibility for every dollar we spend." Also, he said, "We've begun not only changing policies in Washington, we've also begun to change the culture in Washington."

He said he also is hopeful for the country's economic future. "I have every hope and expectation that we can rise to this moment, that we can transcend the failures of the past, that we can once again take responsibility for our future," he said.

Also, he said, "There is a nation ready to meet the challenges of this new age and to lead the world in this new century. And as we look back on the progress of the past year, and look forward to the work ahead, I have every confidence that we will do exactly that."

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said that Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress share a strong commitment to their top priority: putting Americans back to work. "There is growing consensus around the need for action to create more jobs, keep our economy on the road to recovery, and to lower the deficit," Pelosi said. "This year the Recovery Act and other efforts have created or saved more than 1 million jobs and brought our economy back from the brink of depression. But more must be done.

Also, Pelosi said that Congress and the White House are working together on a jobs package that keeps economic recovery on track. It calls for "putting Americans to work building a 21st-century infrastructure and making homes more energy-efficient, ensuring that small business owners gain easier access to capital and credit, and helping to keep teachers, police, and firefighters on the job in our communities. With the president's leadership, we will develop a plan that works for America's families, expands opportunity for our nation's workers, and places our economy on the path to prosperity."

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said he liked Obama's plan to create more jobs: "I am pleased that he included bridge and road infrastructure among his priorities - which could help Vermont and New York accelerate construction of a new Champlain Bridge," he said. "It is time for Congress to act on these and other ideas so that we can pick up the pace in getting our economy moving again. I agree with President Obama's plan to use TARP funds to pay for this in a fiscally responsible way. Now that big Wall Street banks are paying back billions of borrowed taxpayer dollars, it is time to sharpen the focus on creating jobs on Main Street."

Like Obama, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) emphasized the importance of small businesses succeeding. "Small businesses make up the backbone of our economy, and small businesses will lead us out of this recession," Brown said. "As we consider additional ways to create jobs, we should make sure small businesses have the resources they need to expand operations and create jobs."

Deepak Bhargava is executive director of the Center for Community Change, which strengthens the leadership, voice and power of low-income communities nationwide. He offered his reaction to Obama's speech: "The magnitude of this crisis is so severe and the prospect of the private sector creating enough jobs quickly enough is so slim that we really have no choice but to jump-start job creation through a direct hire, community jobs program," he said. "It's simply not enough for government to take action by helping the private sector. For decades we've seen how this tactic has failed to meet the needs of everyday Americans who need work to feed their families. We need a strong public sector in order to really come out of this economic crisis."

Also, Bhargava said, "Turning this economy around rests heavily on putting people back to work quickly so they're able to inject dollars into the system."