Political Quotes

“today I would like to engage in a discussion about the economic situation we find ourselves in, the state of our economy and what it is that we are going to do about it, what we have done about it in the House, what needs to be done by the other body. I would like to begin by just summarizing, reflecting briefly on something I hope we all understand, I hope we all appreciate, and that is the very difficult situation that we find ourselves in today. The fact is our economy had been in a slowdown mode. We had been slowing down the rate of growth of our economic output for over a year prior to September 11, 2001, and certainly since September 11 the downturn has accelerated. It has gotten to the point now where we know by various experts, government and private sector economists, that we no longer have economic growth that we can talk about. Today we are experiencing economic contraction. The consensus is almost a half, four-tenths of a percent, anyway, of actual economic contraction in the third quarter of this year. There is very little reason to believe that the fourth quarter is going to turn around and show growth. Many believe that we started the contraction back in March. In any case, in all likelihood we are in a recession right now, and we are going to be in a recession for some time going forward. Now, of course, one of the very most unfortunate, tragic things about a recession is the job losses that always result.…”