Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I thank Senator Stabenow. We are here to attempt to extend unemployment benefits for a brief period of time so Americans do not get caught up in the expiration of these benefits on April 5. This has been a repeated struggle. We have had many incidents over the last several months where we have had to come down here and, at the last moment, attempt to project these benefits further. I hope we do not fail again today. In 2009, when President Obama walked into office, we were losing 700,000 jobs per month. This is a crisis of epic proportions, rivaling, in some respect, in some regions of the country, the Great Depression. In my home State of Rhode Island, we have a 12.7-percent unemployment rate, and it has been persistent now for almost 2 years. We are seeing an unfortunate record of long-term unemployment. We have to help our colleagues, our neighbors, our friends, and we have to do it in a way that does not deny them the basic necessities to hang on in a difficult economy. But this situation is not just as a result of the last several months or the last several years. If you look back across the past decade-- from 2000 to 2010--it has been an extraordinarily unproductive one for working Americans. There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. We have had no decade since the 1940s where job growth was less than 20 percent. This is the culmination of a decade in which people could not find the kind of work they typically found in America.…”