Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am going to talk about the basic underlying bill we are debating, not the amendment my colleagues have just been talking about. As a way of framing the discussion about this bill, I will cite some statistics that I think will help us understand the nature of the problem our country faces right now and why, in my opinion, this particular legislation does not solve that problem. According to official statistics, the unemployment rate in the U.S. has risen from 6.8 percent when President Obama was elected in November of 2008 to 9.1 percent in May of 2011. Between the end of 2008 and the year 2010, America experienced a net job loss in the nonfarm sector of almost 7 million jobs. So just since the end of 2008 through 2010, 7 million jobs lost. In that same time, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.1 percent--that was in October of 2009. It averaged 9.3 percent during 2009, 9.6 percent during 2010, and the 5-month average for 2011 so far is 9.1 percent, where we are right now. We are not making progress. In short, since President Obama's stimulus was enacted, unemployment has averaged more than 9 percent a year, and that is up from 6.8 percent when he took office. This is not progress. The May unemployment figures show that the U.S. economy added only 54,000 jobs--far fewer than the 150,000 needed just to keep pace with population growth, let alone to help dig us out of the recession.…”