Political Quotes

“if you talk to the people in Vermont, and I suspect in any other State in America, they will say the most serious crisis facing this country is the lack of decent-paying jobs, particularly when it comes to young Americans. This is an issue we do not talk enough about, and this is an issue on which we have to focus. Yes, we are better off today than we were 6 years ago when we were hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month and the Nation's financial system was on the verge of collapse, but the truth is that the economy for working families and lower income families today remains in very difficult straits. The middle class of this country--the backbone of this country--continues to disappear and more and more people are living in poverty. In fact, we have almost more people living in poverty today than at any time in the history of this country, and all the while we are seeing more wealth and income inequality, such that 95 percent of all new income generated in America since the Wall Street crash is going to the top 1 percent. The fact is that real unemployment in this country is not the ``official'' 6.1 percent we see on the front pages of newspapers. The truth is that if you count those people who have given up looking for work because they live in high-unemployment areas or the people--and there are many of these--who are working part time when they want to work full time, real unemployment is 12 percent. That is a crisis situation.…”