Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I come to the floor to discuss the President's budget, which we understand will be released tomorrow. The budget comes out at a time when there is a lot of economic news floating around. The jobs report came out last week and indicated that job growth had been much slower than expected. There were about 190,000 jobs that were expected to be created, but there were only 88,000 jobs created, according to that report. Although the unemployment dropped a little to 7.6 percent--if we factor in the number of people who had quit looking for jobs, which was half a million people--we had a labor participation rate which is literally the lowest since 1979. We have to go back to Jimmy Carter's Presidency to find a time when the labor participation rate hit that low number where 63.3 percent of the people who are eligible to work are actually out looking for work. There a lot of people who have completely quit looking. We also looked at the U-6 number, which measures employment in a different way. It adds in the number of people who are no longer looking for work or who are working part time but would like to work full time. The unemployment rate for that is about 13.8 percent. This is a very sluggish, weak economy, where there are a large number of people across this country who continue to be unemployed, who continue to try and make their way without the advantage of having a job out there to pay their bills.…”