Jeff Bingaman: “the country faces two large economic challenges. The first is growing our economy, creating jobs, getting the economy…”

“the country faces two large economic challenges. The first is growing our economy, creating jobs, getting the economy back on track. The second major challenge is cutting the deficit. I wish to briefly talk about both of those. I have four charts--one that relates to jobs and growing the economy and three that deal more specifically with the deficit. Unfortunately, in Washington, the debate has shifted almost entirely to a discussion of the deficit. Too many people in Washington are pretending our efforts to generate growth in the economy have been accomplished, that it is a done deal, that we have recovered from the recession, and we can now focus full time on how to cut the deficit. The fact is, this is simply not true. Professor Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton and former Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Senate Finance Committee a couple weeks ago. He made the following statement: The economic recovery is mediocre at best and unemployment remains high. To me, those conditions describe a bad time to put the economy on a diet of either spending cuts or tax increases. Let me point to the first chart to underscore the point professor Blinder made. The recession we have just gone through created a very deep hole. If you look at the number of private sector jobs that were lost between November of 2007 and the end of March of 2010, you can see--it is February of 2010--8.8 million jobs were lost as a result of the recession.…”