Chris Van Hollen: “To respond to a couple of things that were just said. The first is that when President Obama was sworn in--in fact…”

“To respond to a couple of things that were just said. The first is that when President Obama was sworn in--in fact, before he even put his hand on the Bible a little more than 4 years ago, we were losing over 700,000 jobs every month. The economy was actually spiraling downward at a faster rate than it was at the time of the Great Depression. And thanks to the resilience of the American people and the emergency actions taken by the President and others, we stopped the free fall, we turned the corner and there have been 36 consecutive months of private sector job growth, more than 6.4 million jobs created. We didn't get any help from our Republican colleagues when we had to make tough decisions to prevent the total collapse of the economy. Now that we've seen some momentum in the job market, we have a Republican budget that's going to put the brakes on that growth. That's according to the Congressional Budget Office. By the way, their budget includes the assumption of those continued sequestration levels into the next year. Let's talk about China for a minute. I got a letter the other day from the CEO of a major biotech company. Here's what he said. He said that over the last couple of years because of the reduction in our national investment in science and research, he laid off 1,000 people. And because of the continuing sequester, they've imposed a hiring freeze right now.…”