Heidi Alexander: “tonight we welcome President Obama to the Congress to deliver a jobs address. The President will be coming at a time…”

“tonight we welcome President Obama to the Congress to deliver a jobs address. The President will be coming at a time when we have had persistent unemployment at a greater rate than at any time since the Great Depression. No one should blame our President for problems with an economy that he inherited, but the President should take responsibility for making the economy worse. Unemployment is up. The debt is up. Housing values are down. The morning paper reports we may be on our way--at least the chances are 50-50, the newspaper says this morning--to a double-dip recession. The number of unemployed Americans is up about 2 million since the President took office. The amount of Federal debt is up about $4 trillion. As I mentioned in discussing the proposals of the Senator from Nebraska, the President's policies, rather than helping over the last 2\1/2\ years, have thrown a big wet blanket over private sector job creation. They have made it more expensive and more difficult for the private sector to create jobs for Americans. Let me be specific about that. The President chose, 2 years ago, rather than to focus exclusively on jobs, to focus on health care. His proposal was to expand a health care delivery system that already cost too much, that was already too expensive. So we have new health care taxes and mandates that make the economy worse. Why do I say that?…”