Sean Patrick Maloney: “the great American jobs machine, which brought the unemployment rate down under President Clinton from 7.5 percent in…”

“the great American jobs machine, which brought the unemployment rate down under President Clinton from 7.5 percent in 1992 to 4 percent in 2000, has been sputtering under President Bush. We are only just emerging from really the worst job slump since the 1903s, and job creation is still sluggish. There continues to be substantial hidden unemployment. Wages are not keeping up with inflation, and there is a widening disparity, as we talked about, in wages and incomes. {time} 2330 The benefits of the economic recovery are showing up in the bottom line of companies, but it is not showing up in the pocketbooks of American workers. Let us look at hidden unemployment. The good news is that the official unemployment rate has come down from its high of 6.3 percent in June of 2003 to 5 percent this last month. The very bad news is that a 5 percent unemployment rate is still nearly a percentage point higher than it was when President Bush took office. But, it is worse than that, because there is an additional hidden unemployment. People have not come back into the labor force the way they usually do in an economic recovery. Last month, 7.5 million people were officially counted as unemployed, 1.5 million more people than were unemployed when President Bush took office in January of 2001.…”