Political Quotes

“Well, we have about 10 minutes left, and I would like to bring us back really to where we started, or where I started this discussion, and that is, for the first 18 months, the strategy of the Democratic Party in this House, in the Senate, and with President Obama has been to stabilize the American economy. Let me go back to this. Let's review what was happening. Beginning in December of 2007, the last 2 years of the George W. Bush administration, the American economy slid into a recession. It became the greatest recession in America's recent history, since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By December of 2008, in January of 2009, the last months of the Bush administration, we were losing over 700,000 jobs, 750,000 jobs a month. President Obama came in and my two colleagues here--I was not yet in Congress, having just joined last November--you put through the stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It stabilized. It stopped the slide, and people began to go back to work, with the largest, middle class tax cut in America's history, the largest middle class tax cut ever in American history. There were major investments in infrastructure. The result, after 18 months, was 2.8 million Americans working that otherwise would have been out of work or had gone back to work; 2.8 million Americans. We see that here. We see the improvement, the monthly reduction in the number of people losing jobs.”