Mark Dayton: “I feel compelled to rise and present what I think is a better version of the facts which, as we can see, are very…”

“I feel compelled to rise and present what I think is a better version of the facts which, as we can see, are very different. The majority leader, as I understood his argument, was saying the new jobs that are now being created in the economy are better paying on average than the average of other jobs that were in existence in the year 2003. But that misses the essential point, which is that most of those newly created jobs pay less and offer lower benefits than the over 2.5 million jobs lost during the first 2 rac{1}{2} years of the Bush administration. Most of those jobs were good-paying manufacturing jobs, and most of them have not come back. Many of them have been transferred to other countries with lower wages and no standards. They are not coming back at all. Those are the jobs that the unemployed workers of America are now finding and that are paying on average thousands of dollars less than the jobs those workers held before the recession began in March of 2001. They are among the millions of Americans whose incomes have fallen, who used to have jobs with health insurance but now don't.”