Political Quotes

“I was just walking through the Chamber and I had the opportunity to visit with some of my colleagues in the back, and I heard what my colleague from Texas was saying, and I just want to add a couple things, if I could. One is to say he is absolutely right in terms of the underlying problem here, which is a weak economy, and really a historically weak economy. Never coming out of a recession have we had a recovery this weak. The Senator made that point well--that typically we go into a recession in sort of a V formation. We go in and then come back out with a relatively strong recovery from a relatively deep recession. That certainly happened in 1981, where at this point in Ronald Reagan's recovery we had created over 8 million new jobs. Unfortunately, we are not creating the new jobs that we created in these other recoveries. As a result, we do have these problems with folks who are both unemployed and long-term unemployed. I think it is important to note that we now have historic levels of long-term unemployment, people who have been out of work for more than a half year, more than 26 weeks--the highest levels ever. So something is not working. It is different this time. I think what is not working is that some of our basic structural institutions--such as our tax system, our regulatory system, the regulations that have come from ObamaCare, and so on--are adding more and more burdens to the economy.…”