Obama: Kansas City’s Smith is helping fight a ‘vicious recession’

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President Barack Obama is calling for better fuel efficiency.

President Obama visited Kansas City on Thursday, stopping at an electric vehicle plant to talk about the economy of the future, the stimulus package and job creation.

Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. Corp., a young company that opened its first plant last year, has received $32 million in U.S. Department of Energy grants.

“...At this plant, you are doing more than producing new vehicles,” Obama said. “You’re helping us to fight our way out of a vicious recession.”

The New York Times reported that President Obama said that government investment in clean energy would generate 700,000 jobs in the next few years.

Here’s an excerpt from the White House of the president’s planned speech:

It’s great to be here at Smith Electric Vehicles. We just finished a tour where we saw some of the battery-powered trucks you’re manufacturing. And I had a chance to talk to a few of the folks who build them. But the reason I’m here today is because, at this plant, you are doing more than producing new vehicles. You’re helping us to fight our way out of a vicious recession.

Now, that’s not easy. This recession was the culmination of a decade of irresponsibility — a decade that fell like a sledgehammer on middle-class families. For the better part of 10 years, folks faced stagnant incomes, skyrocketing health care costs and tuition bills, and declining economic security. This all came to a head in a massive financial crisis that sent our economy into a freefall and cost 8 million Americans their jobs, including many in this community.

It was in the middle of this crisis that my administration walked through the door. And we had to make some difficult decisions at a moment of maximum peril — a moment when the markets were in turmoil and we were losing millions of jobs. Some of those decisions were unpopular at the time — and, in fact, may still be unpopular today. But I made those decisions to stop a nosedive that threatened to drag us into a second Great Depression. And because we made those hard choices, our economy is in a different place today than it was just a year and half ago.

One of those decisions was to provide critical funding to promising, innovative businesses like Smith Electric. And because we did, there is a thriving enterprise here instead of an empty, darkened warehouse. Because of the grant that went to this company, we can hear the sounds of machines humming and people doing their jobs, instead of the quiet of an empty building where the workers were laid off long ago.

And we made decisions like this all across America. We were guided by a simple idea. Government doesn’t have all the answers. And it cannot generate the jobs or growth we need by itself. But government can lay the foundation for small businesses to expand and hire, for entrepreneurs to open up shop and test new products, for workers to get the training they need, and for families to achieve some measure of economic security. And that role is especially important in tough economic times.

Read the full transcript via the Kansas City Business Journal.