President Obama will take his renewed jobs push beyond the Washington beltway again Tuesday, heading to the politically critical state of New Hampshire for a town hall meeting.The president plans to use the event to spotlight his call for a $30 billion investment in a new small-business lending fund.
Obama's initiative would recycle $30 billion of the remaining Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds into a government lending program offering cheap capital to community banks that boost their small-business lending this year.
While credit conditions for large businesses have improved over the past year, small companies are still widely reporting problems finding the capital they need to fund their operations.
Since small businesses employ about half of American workers, policymakers worry that the ongoing credit crunch they face is contributing to the nation's high rate of job losses.
Under the plan, banks with assets of less than $10 billion would be able to borrow money from the Treasury at a dividend rate as low as 1 percent if they use the cash to make more small-business loans this year than they did in 2009.
New Hampshire, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, is considered in many ways to be a political bellwether for an administration struggling to maintain the support of independent voters.
More than 40 percent of the state's voters were registered independents as of last November, according to the New Hampshire secretary of state's office.
Obama easily carried the state in the 2008 general election, but a slight plurality of New Hampshire voters disapproved of his job performance in a December 2009 American Research Group survey.
Tuesday's trip will be Obama's second visit to New Hampshire since becoming president.
Steve Gordon, a small manufacturer from Clearwater, Florida, criticized Obama's new small-business lending proposal during a town hall meeting with the president last week in Tampa.
"I appreciate the pledge of $30 billion to small businesses. But lending it to the banks to lend to us is not the answer," he told the president. "You lent directly to the automakers, you lent directly to the banks -- why can't the government make [loans] available directly to us?"
The Small Business Administration doesn't have the staff or infrastructure for a lending program of that magnitude, Obama responded. The nation's banks have to be part of the solution.
"I am absolutely sympathetic to what you're saying because I'm hearing it everywhere I go," he said. "You've got a lot of small-business owners who are ready to grow, ready to hire, but they just can't get financing. So we're going to use the SBA as one tool; this $30 billion is going to help."
While the banks helped cause an economic meltdown by lending too freely, now "the pendulum has shifted too far in the other direction," Obama said."What we're trying to do is to encourage [banks] to get that happy medium where they're not taking such exorbitant risks that they threaten the entire system, but they're also open to enough risk that America's dynamic free enterprise system is actually able to work."CNN's Catherine Clifford and Alan Silverleib contributed to this report.
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