Jeff Duncan: “Some people think because the stock market is at record highs that that means that everything is OK, but I think we need…”

“Some people think because the stock market is at record highs that that means that everything is OK, but I think we need to ask ourselves, are we really in the lull before the storm? Because in the last 3 years, 1.5 million people have lost their jobs due to corporate downsizing, and as one of the national newscasts reported a few days ago, almost all of the people, unlike in the eighties, almost all of the people who lost their jobs in the nineties have stayed out of work on average about twice as long as in the eighties and they have had to take jobs at far less pay than the ones they lost. In addition to that, we had a $153 billion trade deficit last year, and every leading economist will tell us that conservatively we lose 20,000 jobs per billion dollars. So that means we lost over 3 million jobs due to poor trade policies just in the last year. And then, even more importantly than that, Mr. Speaker, our unemployment rate is relatively low but our underemployment rate is terrible. We have millions of college graduates who cannot find jobs in the fields for which they were trained, and we are ending up with the best educated waiters and waitresses in the entire world. We need to work on these things if we are going to straighten this country out and make it a land of opportunity again, as if should be.”