Political Quotes

“You're quite correct about smoke and mirrors. When you brought up education, in the American Jobs Act, the President has proposed a better deal for America. And part of it is this education piece. It's right here. In the American Jobs Act--fully paid for; we're not adding a nickel to the deficit--fully paid for is a huge and important education piece. We talked about the renovation of schools. Just the environment in which kids will learn. If you have a good learning environment, it's clean, it's healthy, well lit, the electrical system is working, you have air conditioning and the rest, kids are going to learn much, much faster in a better situation. But you also need a teacher. Now, I know in California, I know from my daughter and son-in-law, both of whom are teachers, the layoffs that have occurred in their school and the increase in their class size. My daughter went from 22 or 23 to 32 or 33 students in her class because of layoffs. The President in his American Jobs Act has proposed that 280,000 teachers across this Nation go back into the classroom, that they don't have a pink slip, that they're not unemployed. That they're actually teaching our kids. And as you said, the most important investment a society makes is in the education of their children. Infrastructure, critically important. Security, national security, military, critically important. But if you don't have a well-educated workforce, all the rest will fail.…”