Quote

Certainly, 9 percent unemployment and very slow growth is not a good situation.

This majority is working for America, and one of those ways is we have tremendously low unemployment. This economy has created millions of new jobs, and we are expecting growth this first quarter of somewhere higher than 4 percent.

Long-term unemployment can make any worker progressively less employable, even after the economy strengthens.

Well, our economy is very strong and growing. We have created 5.4 million new jobs in the last 3 years. Our unemployment rate is better than the average unemployment rate of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

If there's unemployment, having the government help reduce that unemployment, increase employment directly is a pretty good idea. It's not driving out competition; it's not crowding out.

If unemployment could be brought down to say 2 percent at the cost of an assured steady rate of inflation of 10 percent per year, or even 20 percent, this would be a good bargain.

Three years ago, this week, a newly elected President Obama faced the American people and he said, look, if I can't turn this economy around in three years, I'll be looking at a one-term proposition, and we're here to collect! You know the results. It's been 35 months of unemployment above 8 percent.

The unemployment rate has effectively not gone down from where it was at the peak of the recession. The only reason it's gone technically from 10 percent to 8 percent is so many people are discouraged and have quit work.

We have stabilized our economy. We took over a very sick economy, and we were hemorrhaging 750,000 jobs a month. We have stopped the hemorrhaging. In fact, we had 140,000 job growth last month. And that's what I call progress.