OBAMA FOR USA
Mr. Obama spoke in the White House Rose Garden on Friday.
Fresh off Air Force One and his failed attempt in trying to secure the 2016 summer Olympics for Chicago, President Obama talked about the day’s bad economic news. Earlier Friday, the Labor Department released the job-loss figures for September, with the highest rate so far for unemployment since 1983 — 9.8 percent. Republicans quickly pounced on the figures as a sign that the $787 billion stimulus package wasn’t doing much to create new jobs.
The Obama administration had earlier warned — perhaps in trying to deal with expectations — that the rate could reach 10 percent before declining early next year. The president alluded to that peak in talking about how the unemployment rate would lag behind other signs of an economic recovery.
Mr. Obama said:
As I’ve said before, my principle focus each and every day, as well as the principle focus of my economic team, is putting our nation back on the path to prosperity. Since the period last winter when we were losing an average of 700,000 jobs per month, we’ve certainly made some progress on this front. But today’s job report is a sobering reminder that progress comes in fits and starts — and that we’re going to need to grind out this recovery step by step.
According to the Labor Department, 263,000 jobs were lost in September, a higher number than most economist expected.
Earlier in the day, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. acknowledged the bad news, but also invoked the inheritance issue that the administration has repeatedly summoned up because the economy tanked last September, before this team took over. “We inherited a lot of baggage,” Mr. Biden said. But, he stressed that he believed the stimulus package would alleviate some of the job losses later on.
The day has been strewn with commentary on the unemployment numbers. From the get-go, Michael Steele, the Republican party’s national chairman, juxtaposed Mr. Obama’s whirlwind trip to Copenhagen for the Olympic bid with the unemployment rate:
As President Obama travels to Copenhagen to bring the Summer Olympics to his hometown seven years from now, Americans back home are increasingly concerned they won’t have a job seven months from now as they see more and more of their neighbors and friends lose jobs today. The president’s verbal gymnastics will not hide that fact that more than 263,000 Americans lost their jobs in the month of September alone and the national unemployment rate increased yet again to 9.8 percent. The president said, ‘the measure of an economy is, is it producing jobs?’ Clearly it isn’t. President Obama can either acknowledge that his economic experiments have failed and change course, or continue down this path and see even more Americans lose their jobs. (NYTimes.com)
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