President Barack Obama has said the US has "risen from recession" and has got better prospects of economic growth than any other country, including India, China or Germany.
"The resilience and the grit and the basic decency of the American people and our willingness to work hard and our innovation, our willingness to take risks puts us in such a good position," Obama said on Friday.
"I travel all around the world. I know the economies of every country in the world. I know their problems, I know their advantages. People talk about China and they talk about Germany and they talk about India - nobody has got better cards than we do if we make good decisions together," he said.
Somebody once said about America, we always end up doing the right thing after we've tried everything else.
And I'm hoping that we don't have to try every other thing before we do the right thing right now to help middle-class families get ahead, Obama said.
"If we do that, the economy is going to be stronger, businesses are going to do better, consumers are going to be more confident, we'll sell more good overseas, our kids will have the kind of future we want for them."
That's what I'm going to be working on for the next two years," he said. He said the US had come a long way in the past six years when it suffered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
"We have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any nation on Earth. But we've got to make some decisions about what that future looks like," he said.
"Now, this morning, we found out that America's businesses added another 267,000 jobs. In 2014, our economy created more than 3.1 million jobs, and that's the best year of job growth since the 1990s," Obama said.
"So, over the past 59 months, the private sector has added about 11.8 million - so that's almost 12 million - new jobs. And that's the longest streak of private sector job growth in our history," he said.
"Our deficits are shrinking - they've gone down by about two-thirds. Our dropout rates are down. Our graduation rates are up. We're as free of foreign oil as we've been in 30 years," he said.
The US has doubled the amount of clean energy it's producing, Obama said, adding that the prices of petroleum have come down.
"So America is poised for another good year," Obama said. "Are we going to be a nation where a few of us do spectacularly well and everybody else is struggling to get by?
Or are we going to have a country in which everybody has opportunity, everybody has got a chance to succeed?" Obama questioned.
