Every year-end provides an opportunity to reflect on what we have learned, what we have accomplished and what lies ahead.

It is no different here at the White House. Now that the President has signed an agreement that will allow every working American to keep his or her tax cut – about $1,000 for the average family – and continue vital unemployment insurance for millions of Americans who are looking for work, we are taking stock of this year and looking forward to the New Year. (We’re also finishing our holiday shopping.)

The President asked us early in the year to get out of Washington and meet directly with business leaders from across the country. As he said in his remarks to Congress in September where he introduced the Amerian Jobs Act, “ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers.” Over the past several months, we have traveled across all 50 states meeting with you, America’s job creators.

All told, we held over 500 White House Business Council roundtable discussions with over 10,000 business leaders.  What we heard informed the President’s plan to create jobs: the American Jobs Act. You talked about incentives for small businesses to hire, and so President Obama called for them, including a payroll tax cut, a payroll tax holiday on all new hires and wage increases and the continuation of the 100 percent expensing provision.  You talked about the need for infrastructure, and so the President proposed immediate investments to modernize our roads, rail, airports and waterways and a bipartisan National Infrastructure Bank. You emphasized the need for a competitive labor force, and so the President called for an investment in our teachers and in the modernization of the schools they teach in. And you expressed the need to stimulate demand in your stores, which is in part why President Obama fought for the payroll tax cut extension for every working American.

We are going to continue working on these issues in the year to come.  We have compiled a a few jobs and economy highlights for 2011 below to give you a sense of what we have accomplished together. But there is still much more to do. We look forward to working with you in the months ahead to keep moving our economy forward.

We wish you a restful and energizing holiday season and New Year.

Happy holidays,

Greg and Ari

Gregory S. Nelson
Deputy Director, Office of Public Engagement

Ari A. Matusiak
Executive Director, White House Business Council

9 Jobs and Economy Highlights You Might Have Missed in 2011

1. We Didn’t Wait:  While Congress stalled moving forward on elements of the American Jobs Act, President Obama did not wait to take executive action to support small businesses. The President directed agencies to take steps to speed up the transfer of Federal research from the laboratory to the marketplace. In direct response to what we heard from you, he directed his Administration to stand up BusinessUSA, a centralized, one-stop online platform to make it easier than ever for businesses small and large to access services to help them grow and hire. Additionally, he announced “QuickPay,” an action which will cut in half the amount of time small business contractors get paid by the government, to 15 days instead of 30 days.
2. Catalyzing American Entrepreneurship: This year, President Obama launched Startup America, an initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. The Administration is committing $2 billion as a match for private investment in high-growth companies over the next five years.  Since its launch in January, $2 billion in resources have been made available for startups nationwide, including  a $1 billion Early Stage Innovation Fund that will invest in early-stage, high growth-potential startup companies.  The initiative has already mobilized well over $1 billion in private-sector commitments – from free software to free consulting and legal services — to grow 100,000 U.S. startups over the next three years.  These resources are available to U.S. entrepreneurs right now. President Obama also launched the Startup America Policy Challenge, asking entrepreneurs and everyday Americans to think of ways that we can out-innovate our nation’s most complex challenges.
3. Investing in Small Business: In 2011, the Administration implemented the Small Business Jobs Act.  It included eight new tax cuts and credits, including raising the small business expensing limit to $500,000, simplifying the rules for claiming a deduction for business cell phone use, creating a new deduction for health care costs for the self-employed, allowing greater deductions for start-up expenses for entrepreneurs, and eliminating taxes on all capital gains from key small business investments.  Specifically for 2011, the Administration implemented a tax bill that allows all businesses – large and small – to expense 100 percent of their new investments until year-end.  The Small Business Administration gave over $30 billion in lending support to over 60,000 small businesses, an all time record in small-business lending.
4. Supporting Our Returning Heroes: President Obama has made supporting our veterans and military families a top priority of this Administration. The President signed into law one component of his American Jobs Act which provides businesses that hire unemployed veterans a maximum credit of $5,600 per veteran and businesses that hire veterans with service-connected disabilities a maximum credit of $9,600 per veteran. The President also introduced new resources to help veterans translate their military skills for the civilian workforce: the Veterans Gold Card, giving veterans enhanced services at the roughly 3,000 One-Stop Career Centers located across the country; and online resources like  “My Next Move for Veterans” and the Veterans Job Bank. President Obama has also challenged the private sector to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013.
5. Doubling American Exports: In working to promote American exports, President Obama set a goal for America to double our exports by 2014. We are currently ahead of schedule in meeting the President’s goal: In the first year, the Department of Commerce’s Commercial Service helped over 5,500 U.S. companies enter additional export markets or export their goods for the first time. Over 85 percent of these companies were small and medium-sized businesses. In October, the President signed three trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama into law, a key step towards helping create and preserve U.S. jobs. These three trade agreements combined could increase exports of American goods by over $11 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs. At the same time, the President also signed an extension of the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) that helps workers whose jobs are affected by global competition. All four of these items are important elements of the President’s balanced trade agenda to open markets for U.S. exporters and keep faith with workers here at home.
6. Reforming our Patent System: President Obama knows that the strength and vitality of the U.S. economy depends on a patent system that protects new ideas and investments in innovation and creativity, and he has spent this year working towards this end.  President Obama signed The America Invents Act, the most significant reform of the nation’s patent system in more than half a century, which will help American entrepreneurs and businesses get their inventions to the marketplace sooner so that they can turn them into new products and new jobs. The America Invents Act was passed with President Obama’s strong leadership after nearly a decade of effort to reform the nation’s outdated patent laws.  It will help companies and inventors avoid costly delays and unnecessary litigation, reduce the patent backlog, strengthen patent quality, and ultimately help companies focus instead on innovation and job creation.
7. Attracting Foreign Investment: On June 15, 2011, President Obama signed an Executive Order creating SelectUSA, the first coordinated federal effort to aggressively pursue and win new business investment in the United States and a direct response to concerns expressed by the business community.  SelectUSA, will encourage foreign businesses to operate in the United States, promote expansion of American and foreign businesses here at home, and work with American companies operating outside our borders to “on-shore” their operations back to the United States. SelectUSA, is empowered with executive authority to cut through federal “red tape,” providing assistance to states that need federal departments and agencies to work together in the interest of job creation. It will engage in advocacy and outreach to promote the United States as the best market for business operations in the world and  consolidates all the information on federal programs and services available to companies that operate in the United States into a one-stop web portal.
8. Accelerating the American Auto Recovery: When President Obama took office, the American auto industry was shedding jobs by the hundreds of thousands and GM and Chrysler faced the possibility of liquidation – which would have caused at least 1 million more jobs to be lost. The President made the tough choice to help provide the auto industry the temporary support it needed to grow and prosper.  Because of those decisions, the auto industry in America is on the rebound. 151,700 auto jobs were created through November 2011, the fastest pace of job growth in the auto industry since 1998.
9. Spurring Ongoing Job Creation: President Obama has said that our work is not done until every American who wants a job can find one. 2011 marked the continuation of our economic recovery. Despite some strong headwinds this year, the American economy has now created 2.9 million private sector jobs over the past 21 months, with more than half a million over the last four months.

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It was an honor to spend an evening with these courageous women, and it was a moment when our nation’s past and present were truly woven together. One Freedom Rider whispered to the President Obama that on the day he was born, August 4th, 1961, she was in jail in Mississippi.

The Freedom Riders’ stories should remind us all that change is hard. Very hard. It takes time. But with conviction, determination, and sacrifice, change is always possible. And when it comes to securing equal rights and opportunities for America’s women and girls, our country has made great progress in just a few short years.

Change is the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the very first bill President Obama signed into law, which strengthens a woman’s right to equal pay.

Change is health care reform that makes it illegal to deny coverage for women with pre-existing conditions such as breast cancer or being a victim of domestic violence, and requires insurance companies to cover preventive care, including mammograms and contraception.

Change is investing in STEM education for girls, so that America’s women can be equally represented in the next generation of scientists, researchers, and engineers.

Change is nominating two women to the Supreme Court, so that for the first time in American history, three of the nine justices are women.

Change is creating the White House Council on Women and Girls, which focuses every federal department and agency on working together to improve the lives of women and girls, recognizing that the issues that primarily affect women are not just women’s issues. When a woman is paid equally for equal work, her family is better off, her community is healthier, and our economy grows. When women succeed, America succeeds.

I could not be prouder to work on behalf of a leader who truly understands the importance of these issues. President Obama has worked tirelessly to make sure that women and girls live in a country where, as he put it, “there is no limit on how big they can dream or how high they can reach.”

Yet, President Obama recognizes that we still have a long way to go. Women continue to trail men in science and math, subjects that will be absolutely critical for the jobs of the future. Women still earn only 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. And like every group of Americans, women have been hit hard by the economic crisis, and the recession that followed.

As President Obama pointed out, there are those in Congress who don’t seem to understand the urgency of these challenges. Republicans in the Senate have blocked the American Jobs Act, which would cut taxes for nearly 80 million women. They voted down a measure that would have put hundreds of thousands teachers – about three-quarters of whom are women – back in front of the classroom, where they could help prepare our kids for the future.

The President will continue to urge Congress to put politics aside, and do the right thing for American families. And if Congress refuses to act, he will continue to take steps to improve the economy without them. Because if we harness the potential of every American, there is no question that we will out-compete the rest of the world for the jobs and industries of the future.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when the winners of the Google Science Fair were announced. Over 10,000 young people submitted projects, from 90 different countries. In many ways, this competition was a metaphor for the global competition that will define the 21st century. Citizens and countries will compete for the jobs and industries of the future, and as they do, STEM skills will be absolutely critical. So President Obama was thrilled when he heard that this year’s winners were three teenage girls from America.

After the announcement, President Obama invited all three girls to the White House, so he could personally congratulate them on their achievement. I had the chance to meet these young women, and they were extraordinary. Not only were they very smart, they were full of passion and enthusiasm about learning so that they could contribute to society.

As President Obama said on Wednesday, they demonstrate that America is still “a place where ideas are born, where dreams can grow, and where a student in a classroom or a passenger on a bus or a legal secretary in an office can stand up and decide to change the world.”

Continuing our journey toward a more perfect union won’t be easy. It never is. But as women throughout our country fight for change — for equal rights and equal opportunity — the White House will be a partner in their work.

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