Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I look forward to this hour with my colleagues to talk about jobs. How do we create jobs in America? We are now well over 14 months of the Republican control of this House, and not one significant bill has passed this House that would create new jobs. There are many bills to wipe out environmental laws, many bills to wipe out regulations that protect the citizens of the United States from pollution and contamination of one sort or another, but where are the jobs bills? We absolutely have to create the jobs in America. Today, we are going to take about an hour to discuss how we can create jobs in America. One of the principal ways is to Make It in America: Manufacturing Matters. Manufacturing was the heart and soul of and the foundation for the great middle class, the rise of the middle class here in the United States. It wasn't too long ago that manufacturing in the United States was a big deal. About 20, 23 years ago, we had almost 20 million Americans in manufacturing. It also happened to coincide with the largest percentage of Americans that were in the middle class. Over the intervening years, we've seen the slow decline until we hit this period of 2000 to 2009, and we saw a precipitous drop to just over 11 million manufacturing jobs in America. That coincided with the decline of the middle class in the United States. So what we want to do today is to focus on, how can we rebuild the American middle class?…”