Obama's Jobs Speech in Pennsylvania
Following is the text of President Obama's speech and question-answer session on the economy on Friday in Allentown, Pa., as released by the White House:
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. Hello. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Please, have a seat. Thank you. It is great to see you all. It's good to be back in Pennsylvania. (Applause.) Good to be back in Allentown and Lehigh Valley. (Applause.) Lot of wonderful faces here.
There are a couple of people I want to acknowledge. First of all, the great governor of the great state of Pennsylvania, please give it up for Ed Rendell. (Applause.) We've got an outstanding -- an outstanding congressional delegation that's here: Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz is here. (Applause.) Congressman Chris Carney is here. (Applause.) And Congressman Paul Kanjorski is here. (Applause.)
We also have Keith McCall, speaker of the Pennsylvania State House. (Applause.) We've got Ed Pawlowski, mayor of Allentown -- (applause) -- maybe the next member of Congress. We've got John Callahan, mayor of Bethlehem. (Applause.) I just want to clarify here -- Ed is not running, John is running. I got those reversed. So don't vote for Ed because he's -- (laughter) -- I mean, vote for him for mayor. (Laughter.) John is going to be outstanding. And Don Cunningham, Lehigh County Executive. (Applause.)
So it's been about a year and a half since I last visited Allentown and Bethlehem and I was running for office. And while it was a pleasure to be here as a candidate, it's an honor to be here as your President. It really is. (Applause.)
Pennsylvania helped put me into office. (Applause.) Thank you. But even on the most trying days, I want you to know that I'm grateful for the opportunity to serve you in these challenging times for America. And I'm grateful for this chance to get out of Washington -- (laughter) -- and spend the day in the Lehigh Valley, talking with people about this very tough economy.
I just came from Allentown Metal Works, where I had a chance to visit with workers there. And they were working hard -- not just to forge the heavy machinery that makes this country run. In fact, one of their projects is actually related to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and the Twin Towers down there. So you could just tell the extraordinary pride that the workers take in this project.
But like so many others across America, these workers have also been doing the best they can to stay afloat in a brutal recession that has hit folks like them hardest of all.
In the two years since this recession began, too many members of our American family have felt the gut punch of a pink slip. Eight million Americans have lost their jobs. Every one of us knows somebody who has been swept up by this storm: neighbors who have lost their homes or their health care; friends who have used up their savings or put off their retirement; relatives who have downscaled their dreams -- or dropped them entirely; young people who aren't sure whether they can afford their college educations.
I've heard these stories from every corner of America, and I see them in the letters that I read every single night.
So as we come to the end of this very tough year, I want to do something I haven't had a chance to do that often during my first year in office, and that is to share some modestly encouraging news on our economy.
Today, the Labor Department released its monthly employment survey and reported that the nation lost 11,000 jobs in November -- which was about 115,000 fewer than was forecast -- and is about close to zero, from the perspective of our overall economy. (Applause.) The unemployment rate ticked down, instead of up. (Applause.) The report also found that we lost about 160,000 fewer jobs over the last two months than we had previously thought. So overall this is the best jobs report that we've seen since 2007. (Applause.)
And this is good news, just in time for the season of hope. I've got to admit, my chief economist, Christy Romer, she got about four hugs when she handed us the report. But I do want to keep this in perspective. We've still got a long way to go. I consider one job lost one job too many. (Applause.) And as I said yesterday at a jobs conference in Washington, good trends don't pay the rent. We've got to actually grow jobs and get America back to work as quickly as we can.
Now, the journey from here will not be without setbacks or struggles. There may be gyrations in the months ahead, there are going to be some months where the reports are a little better, some months where the reports are worse, but the trendline right now is good. The direction is clear. When you think about how this year began, even before I was sworn in, and we were losing 700,000 jobs a month -- a month -- today's report is a welcome sign that there are better days ahead. In fact, we were losing more than 700,000 jobs a month, and that's roughly -- that's roughly half the size of Philadelphia -- each month. Our financial system was on the verge of collapse. Economists were warning of a second Great Depression. You remember.
So from the moment I was sworn into office, I began taking a number of difficult steps to end this economic crisis. And by the way, can I just say I didn't take these steps because they were popular or because they were particularly gratifying to me -- they weren't. You can be sure that when I was running for this office, things like saving the banks and rescuing auto companies were not on my to-do list. They weren't even on my want-to-do list. (Laughter.) But I did them because they were necessary to save our country from even greater catastrophe.
We also took steps to unlock our frozen credit markets so average Americans could get the loans that they needed to buy a home or a car; to go to college or start a small business. We enacted measures to stem the crisis in our housing markets, helping responsible homeowners stay in their homes, curbing the decline in home values overall. And we've seen some stabilization in the housing market. We cut taxes -- think about this, because you wouldn't know it from watching the news -- the only tax policy we instituted during the course of this year was to cut taxes for 95 percent of hardworking families -- just as I promised I would when I ran for President. (Applause.)
And we passed the Recovery Act, which created or saved up to 1.6 million jobs, stopped our freefall, lifted our economy to the point where it's growing for the first time in more than a year. And I was just talking to the governor before we walked in and he's got a whole series of charts about how much more steel is produced in Pennsylvania because of the Recovery Act; how much more infrastructure spending is taking place out here; putting people to work doing the work that America needs done.
So today's report is another hopeful sign that these steps that we took, difficult steps, have helped turn the tide. But we've got a lot more work to do before we can celebrate, because even though our economy is now growing again, a lot of companies are still hesitant to hire; they're still worried about hiring.
Now some of this is because they're still trying to get out of the red brought on by tough times this year and they're still seeing consumers pull back because people got overextended on their credit cards; those home equity loans suddenly didn't look so attractive. And so people are spending a little bit less.
But part of what's happened also among a lot of companies is they figured out how to squeeze more productivity out of the workers that they've got; they're working people longer hours, they're doing more overtime, or not, but either way they're producing the same amount of product or providing the same services without hiring more people.
And that's something that we're going to have to really work on. Now, it's typical that it takes time for job growth to catch up with economic growth. And it's typical that it takes a little more time to come out of a recession when it comes to hiring. But Americans who've been desperately looking for work for months -- some of them maybe for a year or longer -- they can't wait. And we won't wait. We need to do everything we can, right now, to get our businesses hiring again so that our friends and our neighbors can go back to work. (Applause.)
Source: New York Times
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