Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to share a few thoughts about the state of the American economy and the lack of effectiveness of this Congress in confronting it--in particular, the lack of the leadership of the U.S. Senate to deal with the crisis we are facing both economically and financially as part of our economic condition. We can't separate those two. The leading economic indicators are not good. Last week, we were pummeled with a series of reports that were bad news. The numbers continue to be disturbing, actually. The share of our population that is employed today declined to 58.4 percent--the lowest level since 1983. So the percentage of people working today is the lowest we have had since 1983. The May jobs report that just came in fell well short of projections. The consensus view of economists was for a gain of 165,000 jobs, but, in fact, we gained 111,000 fewer than that. We had a very low job creation month, and it marks the worst jobs report in 8 months. Everybody is saying things are getting better and jobs are getting better, but this is a wake-up call. The numbers have not been strong. They have actually been very fragile. The jobs have to increase about 180,000 a month to actually stay level, and to begin to increase, we have to be above that. To reduce our unemployment rate, it has to be above 180,000. So we were far below that this month.…”