Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today on a day when we are ever hopeful that we will be able to complete legislation tonight that will remove the threat of a default as well as to open the government and to allow us to go forward now with negotiations on short-term budget issues for the next year and even beyond. I am confident that will happen, that we will be able to complete most or all of the work tonight. In a larger sense, the reason it is vitally important we get this agreement effectuated is because there are an awful lot of people out there hurting, and hurting for several reasons. We have had a recovering economy, but job growth hasn't moved fast enough. We still have, by way of example in Pennsylvania, over \1/2\ million people out of work--at last count, 501,000 Pennsylvanians out of work. The percentage number really doesn't tell you much. It has been hovering around 7\1/2\ percent or a little higher for a long while, but more than \1/2\ million people out of work is devastating. As the Presiding Officer knows, his State of Ohio and Pennsylvania have a lot of similarities in terms of our workforce. When I go across Pennsylvania, we have sometimes the biggest urban areas, such as Philadelphia, still having high unemployment numbers, and sometimes very small counties having an equally high percentage of people out of work. My home area of northeastern Pennsylvania has still far too many people out of work.…”