Winning this fight will not depend on government alone. It will depend on the innovation of American entrepreneurs; on the drive of American small business owners; on the skills and talents of American workers. These are the people who will help us grow our economy and create jobs.

But government still has an important responsibility. And that’s to create an environment in which someone can raise capital to start a new company; where a business can get a loan to expand; where ingenuity is prized and folks are rewarded for their hard work.

— President Barack Obama

This message was aimed at workers with dreams to be business owners. Business owners and entrepreneurs who dream to get unstuck and hire again. It also brings back the 2008 primary debate about jobs going overseas. Keep jobs at home and you’ll receive tax breaks and rewards.

As much as I want to exhale optimism from the President’s Weekly to re-boot or tweak the economic situation through stay-at-home entrepreneurs, I couldn’t help but agree with the following opening statement in an article in today’s Washington Post Business section by Fortune magazine’s Allan Sloan, Tory Newmyer and Doris Burke:

There is nothing that the U.S. government or the Federal Reserve or tax cutters can do to make our economic pain vanish overnight. There are no all-powerful, all-knowing superheroes or supervillains who can rescue or tank the economy all by themselves.

From listening to what passes for public debate in our country, you’d never know that. You’d think that the federal government could revive the economy quickly if only Congress would let it be more aggressive with stimulus spending. Or that the Fed could fix it if only it weren’t overly worried about touching off inflation. Or that the free market could fix it if only we made deep and permanent tax cuts.

Watch enough cable TV, listen to enough talk radio, read enough blogs and columns, and you’d think that they – the bad guys – are forcing the country to suffer needlessly when a simple and painless solution to our problems is at hand. But if you look at things rationally rather than politically, you’ll see that Washington has far less power over the economy, and far less maneuvering room, than people think.

Nevertheless, everyone has to do something. Sitting on our hands is not an option.

Now, one of the keys to job creation is to encourage companies to invest more in the United States. But for years, our tax code has actually given billions of dollars in tax breaks that encourage companies to create jobs and profits in other countries.

I want to close these tax loopholes. I want to give every business in America a tax break so they can write off the cost of all new equipment they buy next year. That’s going to make it easier for folks to expand and hire new people. I want to make the research and experimentation tax credit permanent. Because promoting new ideas and technologies is how we’ll create jobs and retain our edge as the world’s engine of discovery and innovation. And I want to provide a tax cut for clean energy manufacturing right here in America. Because that’s how we’ll lead the world in this growing industry.

There is no “get-rich-quick” plan for the economy to recover. The system is too complex and too kooky (set up to rule in the top 1%’s favor). There are certain truths for the majority to digest. One is there are no quick fixes (as stated above) for the state we’re in. The second is to get moving with ideas. Feeling stuck is a sure way to feeling powerless which ultimately leads to some pretty destructive behavior. Ideas may not turn things around overnight, but ideas can lay great groundwork for the future. Third and an unspoken truth is these are sobering up times from the spend/loan/debt/spend binge enjoyed by so many. No super villains and only a handful of super victims. If you have to eat hot dogs and beans again to pay for college, you do it!

As the career/life self-help guru Barbara Sherr said, “…you can have whatever you really want in this life, in one form or another, sooner or later. All you have to do is take care of your health and be lucky enough to live for a while. But you can’t have it all at once and you can’t have it forever.”

Transcript available here.