The public sector certainly includes the Department of Labor. Those are jobs that are available. They are open and they are good paying jobs. The government as a whole has been actually retrenching under President Clinton's leadership.
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.
Jobs are created in the private sector. Not by the president or the government unless they're government jobs.
Since the government creates no wealth, it can only transfer the wealth required to hire people. Even if the government creates a million jobs, that is not a net increase in jobs, when the money that pays for those jobs is taken from the private sector, which loses that much ability to create private jobs.
The first Friday of every month is what we call Numbers Day - it's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report. We have a ritual at the Labor Department - at 8 A.M., we gather around a table in my office, and the commissioner of labor statistics briefs me and the department's senior leadership on the numbers.
Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.
If you look at the fact that the best chance we have for a good economy is the private sector. The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then Communism would have worked. But didn't work. So what we have to do is allow the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead us back to a job-filled recovery.
Programs funded by the Department of Labor have already opened doors for many Americans to become apprentices, particularly veterans, women and minorities. But government alone cannot equip the American workforce for the jobs of tomorrow. The private sector must lead.
Jobs are disappearing from every sector of the economy, from engineering to health care workers, forcing hundreds of thousands of families into unemployment and low-paying jobs.
The most important thing we can do is to make sure that we are creating jobs in this country. But not just jobs, good paying jobs. Ones that can support a family.
I focused on jobs. I built private sector jobs all my life. That's what the race was about. Who was going to build private sector jobs? My opponent who never had one? Or me? That's why I won last night.
There are certainly lots of jobs in computer coding, but coding doesn't really require advanced mathematics. And engineering jobs, they vary widely in the amount of demand that we actually need. So, you know, the number of people for whom the job description includes Newton's calculus is not perhaps that high.
If we can get to that 3 percent grow, it is $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion worth of more government revenues. It's 12 million additional jobs. And those are 12 million jobs paying into Medicare, 12 million jobs paying into Social Security. Growth really is what's driving all of this and growth is what our focus is, which is why we're willing to accept increased short-term deficits in exchange for that long-term payoff.
It shouldn't be the case that young people feel they have to go to London to get the good quality jobs. We have to make sure those jobs are available everywhere in the country.
I think we should, as the public sector or politicians, stop creating an illusion that it is the public sector that drives growth and jobs. It is not. It is the private sector that does it. There is no growth without entrepreneurship.
Hillary Clinton: putting big government spending financed by the Chinese ahead of good-paying jobs for middle-class Americans. Is she guilty or not guilty?
Whole communities have been devastated as good-paying jobs continue to leave the U.S.