President Obama visits Concord HS, celebrates Elkhart's recovery

Three weeks into Barack Obama’s presidency, he came to Concord High School to make a promise. He told the crowd that if we work together as a nation, we can recover.

At that time, the local unemployment rate was around 20 percent. Now it stands at 3.9 percent.

President Obama returned to Concord on Wednesday and emphasized the ways in which the country has recovered over the last seven years.

“I wanted to come to the Heartland, to the Midwest, close to my hometown to talk about that economic anxiety and what I think it means. And what I’ve got to say really boils down to two points, although I’m going to take a long time making these two points," the president said, laughing.

"Number one: America’s economy is not just better than it was eight years ago. It is the strongest, most durable economy in the world. That’s point number one.

"Point number two: we can make it even stronger and expand opportunity for even more people. But to do that, we have to be honest about what our real challenges are, and we have to make some smart decisions going forward.

"Now, Elkhart is a good place to have this conversation because, as some of you remember, this was the first city I visited as president. I’d been in office just three weeks when I came here. We were just a few months into what turned out to be the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. Our businesses were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Our auto industry was about to go under. Our families were losing their savings and their health insurance and as Kelly pointed out, they were in danger of losing their homes. And Elkhart was hit harder than most.”

Obama emphasized that a lot has changed since then.

“Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs. That’s the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We’ve seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s. We cut unemployment in half years before a lot of economists thought we could. We cut the oil that we buy from foreign countries by more than half, doubled the clean energy that we produce. For the first time ever, more than 90% of the country has health insurance. So, in fact, a poll that was out just last week says that two out of three Americans think their own family’s situation is in pretty good shape."

Obama also admitted that there have been some setbacks and false starts.

"Now, where we haven’t finished the job, where folks have good reason to feel anxious, is addressing some of the longer term trends in the economy that started long before I was elected that make working families feel less secure. These are trends that have been happening for decades now and that we have to do more to reverse," the president explained. "Despite the drop in unemployment, wages are still growing too slowly, and that makes it harder to pay for college or save for retirement. Inequality is still too high. The gap between rich and poor is bigger now than it has been any time since the 1920s. The rise of global competition and automation of more and more jobs – the race of technology – all these trends have left many workers behind, and they’ve let a few at the top collect extraordinary wealth and influence like never before. And that kind of changes our politics. So, all these trends make it easy for people to feel that somehow the system is rigged and that the American dream is increasingly hard to reach for ordinary folks."

Obama also spoke about the presidential race and how he feels economic concerns are being exploited.

'We know a lot of people are still feeling stressed about their economic future. The pundits say one of the reasons the Republican Party has picked the candidate that it has…" Obama began to say, prompting boos from the crowd. "No, no booing. We’re voting, not booing. If you watch the talking heads on TV, they’ll say, ‘The reason the folks are angry is because nobody’s paid attention to the plight of working Americans and communities like these.' That’s what they say. Now, I’m the first to admit my presidency hasn’t fixed everything. We’ve had setbacks, we’ve had false starts. We’ve frankly been stuck with a Congress recently that’s opposed pretty much everything that we’ve tried to do. But I also know that I’ve spent every single day of my presidency focused on what I can do to grow the middle class and increase jobs and boost wages and make sure every kid in America gets the same opportunities Michelle and I did. I know that. I know that communities like Elkhart haven’t been forgotten in my White House and the results prove that our focus has paid off – Elkhart proves it."

Obama also engaged in some "myth busting."

"If what they were saying was true, then just being against everything we’ve done might make sense. But what they’re saying isn’t true. And if we’re going to fix what’s really wrong with the economy, we’ve got to understand that. So let me just do some quick myth busting. I’m going to start with the biggest myth, which is that the federal government keeps growing and growing and growing and wasting your money and giving your tax dollars to people who don’t deserve it. Now here’s the truth: as a share of the economy, we spend less on domestic priorities -- outside of social security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- we spend less than we did when Ronald Reagan was president. When President Reagan or George W. Bush held this job, our deficits got bigger. When Bill Clinton or I have held this job, deficits have gotten smaller. Our deficits have not grown these last seven and a half years; we’ve actually cut the deficit by almost 75%. Moreover, there are fewer families on welfare than in the 1990s, funding has been frozen for two decades, so there’s not a bunch of giveaways going on right now. Aside from our obligation to care for the elderly and Americans with disabilities, the vast majority of people who get help from the federal government are families of all backgrounds who are working, striving to get back on their feet, striving to get back into the middle class. Sometimes, yes, their kids need temporary food stamps while mom and dad are between jobs. But these kids didn’t cause the financial crisis, these kids aren’t spending us into bankruptcy, they’re not what’s holding back the middle class. And by the way, neither is Obamacare.”