Political Quotes

“Thank you. Following on Congressman Lungren, my colleague from the neighboring district, I didn't realize that Senator Dave Cox had died. I join him in the eulogy that he so graciously gave here on the floor. An extraordinary individual, represented my mother in the mountain counties, and was dedicated, as was said, to the betterment of California. So I will start with that. What I intended to discuss here today was jobs, American jobs, and the situation we are faced with today and the extraordinary burden that's placed upon so many Americans who have lost their jobs in the last years of this great recession. What I wanted to really start with was to try to get a sense of what has happened over the last 3 years, 2rac{1}{2}, almost 3 years now. Beginning in December of 2007, the great American recession began during the George W. Bush period. And we began to lose jobs, largely as a result of the subprime mortgage, the lack of regulation that was going on, loans being made to people that didn't qualify, and all the games of Wall Street that began to unravel and to cause the American economy to literally crash. As that Wall Street problem magnified and grew, the number of jobs that were lost grew, so between December of 2007, when there is actually some modest job growth, and December of 2008, we saw an extraordinary decline in jobs. So that in December 2008 you are looking at over 750,000 jobs lost.”