Ted Cruz Quotes

Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.

Once you stop looking for a job, you are no longer considered part of the unemployment number.

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.

More Americans are working today than at any time in history.

There are a number of people who are not in the workforce who have given up looking for jobs, and that's the real economic crisis in America.

When you have 7 percent unemployed, you have 93 percent working.

Treating unemployment as a national problem is almost always a mistake. Employment trends vary dramatically by race, geography, gender and level of education. But none of that is reflected in the all-encompassing unemployment rate, and hence policies informed only by that number are bound to fall short.

Every time I have a political rally I meet some people who say, "I need a job."

Bush said the unemployment situation is turning around. Last week alone, 5,000 people started working for John Kerry.

Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americas signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not 'disabled' as that term is generally understood. Rather, it's the U.S. economy that's disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency.

About 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don’t work.

I've never believed unemployment numbers because the way that they calculate unemployment makes no sense whatsoever. It's not how many people are unemployed. It's how many people are actively looking for a job.

When you have a country that can boast that more than 95 percent of its eligible workforce is employed and pumping money back into economy, that's exceptionally good news, especially as we prepare to observe Labor Day.

Employment no longer responds to governments …

Unemployed people are spoiled

Americans don't believe that we have a surplus of jobs. They believe that we have a surplus of job seekers, and they are competing for these jobs.

It’s being reported that the economy lost 95,000 jobs in September. And that’s just people leaving the White House.

Generous unemployment benefits can increase both structural and frictional unemployment. So government policies intended to help workers can have the undesirable side effect of raising the natural rate of unemployment.

Today President Obama gave a major speech where he defended his handling of the economy. And there were tons of people in the audience, you know, since nobody had to be at work.

We're starting to see, as the economy improves, that the unemployment rate among veterans and military spouses - we're seeing some improvement in those numbers. And that's a good thing.

The White House says that the unemployment rate is good news because it means more people are looking for jobs. More good news like that, and everyone at the White House will be looking for jobs.

But of course, now we're told we're in recovery but this sure doesn't feel like a recovery to more than 9 percent of the Americans out there who are unemployed, or the 16 percent of the African-Americans, 11 percent of Hispanics in the same position, or the millions who can only find part-time work or those who have even stopped looking for a job.

Paul Ryan looks around, sees three unemployed workers for every job opening in America, and blames the people who can't find a job.

The people who are unemployed want to do the work, but the system is such a catastrophic failure that it cannot bring together idle hands and work. This is all hailed as a great success, and it is a great success - for a very small sector of the population.

For any economy, there are two basic factors determining how many jobs are available at any given time. The first is the overall level of activity - with GDP as a rough, if inadequate measure of overall activity - and the second is what share of GDP goes to hiring people into jobs. In terms of our current situation, after the Great Recession hit in full in 2008, US GDP has grown at an anemic average rate of 1.3 percent per year, as opposed to the historic average rate from 1950 until 2007 of 3.3 percent.