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Our economy grows from the middle out, not the top down.

Because the truth is our wages are really competitive and they're good.

I would argue that's because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly more money.

Democrats believe we must create jobs, not protect the special interests; build the economy from the middle out, not the top down.

Naturally we are aware of the strength of our economy and naturally we don't want to downplay it.

If you want to get wages up in America for middle income Americans, there's only one way I know how to do that in real terms... by having more businesses want to hire more people.

Many bought into the idea that America could go from a technology-based, export-oriented powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy - and somehow still expect to prosper. That idea was flat wrong. Our economy tilted instead toward the quicker profits of financial services.

I think in part the reason is that seeing an economy that is, in many ways, quite different from the one grows up in, helps crystallize issues: in one's own environment, one takes too much for granted, without asking why things are the way they are.

Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, it is clear that we've got big problems that we need to address, starting with making our economy more competitive so that we can create more good-paying jobs for the middle class.

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.