Political Quotes

“Thank you again, Congressman Pocan, not just for your friendship, but tonight for organizing and bringing us here to have this conversation. For us in Illinois and Wisconsin, throughout the country it has been a harsh winter. Everyone has talked about the weather and the snow and the storms, but for some it has been a harsher winter than for others. In January, I hosted a roundtable on unemployment, long-term unemployment. At that roundtable I met a young mother, 29 years old, with two young children, and she told me how, at the end of the day, she comes home, she makes dinner for her kids, and they crawl into bed under the covers to eat dinner and watch TV because she had to make the choice between paying her rent and paying her heat. I met another woman who has been looking for work now for over a year. Her story was a little different. She was in an industry, travel agency, that is shrinking. She has two kids, high school age, who are looking forward to going to college, and she is now in the position of having to deplete the kids' college accounts so that they can simply make ends meet as she looks for work. This is the reality for 2 million people around the country, and the numbers, as you have pointed out, grow by 72,000 people every single week. In Illinois alone, there are more than 116,000 people who have lost their unemployment insurance and are struggling just to survive.…”