WASHINGTON — President Obama urged the nation on Tuesday to see the economic crisis as reason to raise its ambitions, calling for expensive new efforts to address energy, health care and education programs even as he warned that more money might be needed to bail out banks.In his first address to a joint session of Congress, Mr. Obama mixed an acknowledgment of the depth of the economic problems with a Reaganesque exhortation to American resilience and an expansive agenda with a pledge to begin paring down a soaring budget deficit.“While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken, though we are living through difficult and uncertain times, tonight I want every American to know this,” Mr. Obama said. “We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”He was greeted in the House of Representatives chamber with gregarious applause, particularly from Democrats who hold a strong majority. Yet even Republicans leaned in close to Mr. Obama as he passed by them in the narrow aisle and made his way to the speaker’s dais at the front of the room. 
Mr. Obama said he came to the Capitol not only to address members of the House and Senate who were seated before him, but also to “speak frankly and directly to the men and women who sent us here.”“If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that for too long, we have not always met these responsibilities — as a government or as a people,” Mr. Obama said. “I say this not to lay blame or look backwards, but because it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”A failure to confront the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, deal with the rising cost of health care or find a solution to the decline of American schools contributed to the place the country finds itself in, Mr. Obama said. He renewed his call for investments in all areas, particularly finding a way to create energy resources that do not rely on foreign sources of oil.Mr. Obama, following through on a campaign pledge, challenged Congress to pass a bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet and use $15 billion a year of the revenues from the program to pay for renewable sources of energy.He said that America was falling behind China, Germany, Japan and other nations in production and use of clean energy, but challenged American entrepreneurs to develop technology to make the United States a global leader in energy efficiency.He was vague about how he intends to make health care more affordable and accessible, saying only that the budget he will release on Thursday will make a down payment on the goal of “quality, affordable health care for every American.” On the campaign trail, he committed himself to a number of goals, including establishing a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers, requiring employers to contribute to the cost of coverage for their employees or to the cost of the public plan and requiring that all children have coverage.Mr. Obama said he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, telling his audience for the first time that his administration has “already identified two trillion dollars in savings over the next decade.” In an interview, an administration official said those savings reflected reduced spending on the war in Iraq and higher revenues from letting the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans lapse after 2010.In his litany of proposals, Mr. Obama called for creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans, a nod to Republicans to create some kind of investment vehicles as they consider overhauling the Social Security program.
“My budget does not attempt to solve every problem or address every issue. It reflects the stark reality of what we’ve inherited — a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a financial crisis and a costly recession,” Mr. Obama said. “Given these realities, everyone in this chamber — Democrats and Republicans — will have to sacrifice some worthy priorities for which there are no dollars. And that includes me.” SOURCE:NYT.COM
