Political Quotes

“Last week I brought the same chart to the House floor to visibly demonstrate how, starting in 2007, the Great Recession destroyed $17.5 trillion of household aggregate wealth in the United States. I noted that it represented a loss of more than $56,000 for every man, woman, and child in America. Trillions of dollars of home equity were lost, retirement savings and college funds lost. As you can see by the red line here, the worst recession since World War II continually destroyed value from American households for seven straight quarters, from June of 2007 until March of 2009; 21 months of lost net worth. The economy was on the brink of collapse, and the tremendous losses to every American household were directly evident. But this Congress acted. And as you can see from the blue line, since passage of the Recovery Act, Americans recovered $5 trillion in net worth during the second and third quarters of 2009. Today I have even better news. Last week, data came out for the fourth quarter of 2009, and once again Americans' net worth increased for the third straight quarter. There was an additional $800 billion returned to American households over just the past 3 months. Let me put this in context. The Recovery Act was an investment in this Nation, in this economy, in the American people, to help bring us out of the Great Recession. It kept hundreds of thousands of teachers from being laid off, including 800 in my own district.”