Political Quotes

“Thank you, Chairman Obey, for yielding and thank you for introducing this bill. It's very important. And I want to thank you for your leadership. Also to Chairman Miller and Speaker Pelosi for working with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to ensure that this legislation does include funding, which is paid for, for a summer youth jobs initiative to target funds for our young people who are unemployed. The members of the Congressional Black Caucus have been very focused on stimulating the economy and creating jobs, especially for the chronically unemployed. As my colleagues know, we are currently in the midst of a 5-week campaign launched at the beginning of this month to seek policy solutions for the chronically unemployed. We are working with our leadership, President Obama, Members of this House and our coalition partners to put a strategy together to put America back to work. One of the key components of our proposed jobs package was to provide $1.3 billion to the summer youth jobs program with a goal of creating approximately 500,000 jobs for young people throughout the country. We met with the President, with our Speaker. We raised the importance of the summer jobs program to adjust the huge unemployment rate among young people. We are committed to putting people back to work, especially our young people, because now, with this economic downturn, many of our young people, their parents are unemployed, and so they're helping to buy the food and to pay the rent.”