Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank Senator Whitehouse very much for his passion, his leadership. Just to emphasize what the Senator was talking about on the floor in terms of where we have come from, I remember being in the House of Representatives in 1997, I believe, when we voted to balance the budget for the first time in 30 years under President Clinton. It was tough. We had to make tough decisions, but we did that, and we were on a trajectory so that by the year 2000--when I was elected to the Senate in 2001 and came into the Budget Committee--the big debate was what to do with the biggest surplus in the history of the country. We saw that big surplus, during the 8 years of President Bush, go red with red ink, down, down, down, down, so much so that when President Obama came in, the job loss was at about 750,000 jobs a month. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month. So we went to work and we focused on people in the middle class, on innovation and investing in businesses and creating opportunities and so on, and these numbers now, on jobs per month, have gone from a negative now up to a positive. The challenge is--we are not done yet--do not stop what we have been doing. This jobs bill on the floor is to get us to a point where those numbers keep going up and up and up, so everybody who wants to work can work. We have turned this around in terms of job loss. The numbers are going up. But it is not enough. We are not there yet, and too many people are caught in the middle.…”