A Quote by Tom Vilsack

I think President Barack Obama is going to be treated very, very well by history in terms of his ability to save the economy. And that's certainly true in rural areas. The unemployment rate is substantially reduced, the poverty rate is down, and in large part because of the investments that were made during the Recovery Act and thereafter, historic investments.
The economy is better than the one President [Barack] Obama inherited, and unemployment is lower, but the unemployment rate gap remains large.
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.
The President [Barack Obama], I think if you look at it from his shoes, you know, was facing a very difficult situation where he had to own Washington, tame New York, save a collapsing economy, with a collapsed financial system. He moved, I think, to a team that he felt was tried and true, in terms of dealing with financial crisis. That was his decision.
We've seen tremendous progress in many ways under President [Barack] Obama. I mean, if we think about where the economy was when he got in - you know, we were losing more than 700,000 jobs a month. The unemployment rate was skyrocketing. And now it's at under 5 percent, so there is a lot of progress that has happened.
It was shameful that, after Haiti, Colombia was the second most unequal country in Latin America. But we've achieved some things; the inequality is coming down, and coming down fast. The growing economy has provided us with the funds to finance a very progressive social policy that has reduced extreme poverty. We have the lowest inflation rate of all Latin-America countries and the highest growth rate.
The black unemployment rate has to be twice that of the white rate in the US. If the national unemployment rate were 6.8 percent, everyone would be freaking out. We ought to not take too much solace in the 6.8 percent, but ask ourselves what can we do to bring that down to white rates, which are below 4 percent now. Some of that has to do with education, but that's just part of the story. You find that those unemployment differentials persist across every education level. I think it means pushing back on discrimination and helping people who can't find work get into the job market.
In Greece, the unemployment rate has risen to 22%. The solution to the problem was to raise taxes on the rich, according to the Greek president Barack Obama-opolis.
Large profits are even more insidious than large losses in terms of emotional destabilization. I think it's important not to be emotionally attached to large profits. I've certainly made some of my worst investments after long periods of winning.
President Obama's proposal to raise the top rate to 39 percent is equal to the rate under President Clinton in the 1990s when Wall Street reached record high levels and the economy produced lots of jobs.
I supported Barack Obama originally. I supported him for reelection and the alternative of a Mitt Romney is very, very clear to everybody. And I think the president has done a good job in a number of areas. But one area that has concerned me from day one has been his reliance on Wall Street type people in terms of financial matters.
If you look at how the US economy has suffered over the last 15 or 20 years, it's in significant part because we haven't done the investments in research and development and infrastructure and other public goods that are necessary for our growth. And, unfortunately, we're going to be feeling that overhang for a long time to come, because it's the investments we made in the 1950s and '60s and '70s that result in some of the greatest technological breakthroughs that we enjoy today.
This is part of the president's problem. Where's Barack Obama been when the crime rate and the murder rate in Chicago has gone up in 18 percent? Where has he been when the murder rate in New York is up 11 percent? Instead he and liberals like Bill de Blasio and Rahm Emanuel and others, what they're doing is not supporting the police departments, not making sure that they're being supported, and they're letting them do their jobs. And so we have criminals who have easy access to guns.
Under the leadership of President Obama and a whole host of partners, including nonprofits, foundations, and advocates, the Department of Labor has made historic investments in community colleges, apprenticeships, coding boot camps, and summer jobs.
When I was much younger, I realized that when I was handling something very large, and I was on my own doing that, that my breathing rate would increase, and that would affect my ability to think as well as I normally would. So when that starts happening, I slow down.
I can't possibly predict precisely what the unemployment rate will be at the end of one year. I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6%, and perhaps a little lower.
History teaches that the level of unemployment is not as important as whether the rate's going down.
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