Political Quotes

“one of the major reasons the middle class of this country is in decline and why the working class is being decimated and why real wages are going down for millions of American workers who are working longer hours for low wages is that for a number of years now we have been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs. While this trend has in fact been going on for decades, it accelerated during the 8 years of the Bush administration. During that period, those 8 years, we went from 17 million manufacturing jobs to about 12 million. We lost somewhere near 5 million manufacturing jobs during that 8-year period, a decline of about 30 percent in manufacturing jobs. Today, here in the United States, we now have the fewest number of manufacturing jobs since the beginning of World War II. As Senator Durbin pointed out on the floor today, from 1999 to 2008, multinational corporations based in the United States laid off nearly 2 million American workers at exactly the same time period as they were hiring over 2 million workers abroad. They laid off 2 million workers in this country and hired 2 million workers abroad. Under President Bush, our trade deficit with China more than tripled, and our overall trade deficit nearly doubled. Today our trade deficit is over $370 billion. In other words, we are importing $370 billion more than we are exporting.”