Michael Bennet: “in my townhalls we talk about a lot of things that are very different from what people argue about in this place. One of…”

“in my townhalls we talk about a lot of things that are very different from what people argue about in this place. One of the issues we talk about is the economy. And we talk about these four lines, as shown on this chart. The first line is our gross domestic product, the economic output of the United States of America, which is higher today than it was before we went into this recession. A lot of people do not know that. We are producing more than we were producing before we went into the recession. Our productivity has gone up dramatically since the early 1990s, as we have responded to competition from China and India and other places, as we have used technology to enhance our economic output. We have the most productive economy we have ever seen. But we also face some very potentially catastrophic circumstances in this economy, one of which is that median family income has fallen for the last 10 years--the first time that has happened in our country's history. And the other is that we have 23 or 24 million people who are unemployed or underemployed in an economy that is producing what it was producing before the recession happened. That is a structural issue. I have spoken on this floor about the importance of education in that context because the worst the unemployment rate ever got for people with a college degree during the worst recession since the Great Depression was 4\1/2\ percent.…”