Political Quotes

“Madam Speaker, according to independent economists, the action of this Congress pulled the economy back from the brink of falling into another Great Depression. I hope my colleagues have had a chance to review the recently released study by former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, Moody's Analytics chief economist and former economic adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. We have heard some from the other side of the aisle demagogue on the value of the Recovery Act and other actions we took to stabilize this economy. Republicans loudly claim these programs were failures. But what do the actual economists say? From the study, I quote. ``There is little doubt that, in total, the policy response was highly effective.'' Madam Speaker, after careful analysis, the study's bipartisan authors conclude that the Nation's gross domestic product would have been 11.5 percent lower than it is today without government intervention. They conclude that an additional 8.5 million working Americans would have lost their jobs. When this Congress took office in January of 2009, we were facing an economy in freefall with the second Great Depression in clear sight. We were in the midst of a deepening recession, the worst in 80 years. Increasing monthly job losses had peaked in January of that year at 741,000; housing prices were mired in 22 straight months of decline; foreclosures dramatically increased.…”