Robert Reich Quotes

The job market improved impressively under Barack Obama's presidency after the Great Recession, when millions of jobs vanished seemingly overnight.

Larger deficits are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare.

Rising unemployment and the recession have been the price that we have had to pay to get inflation down. That price is well worth paying.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

Obama has so mismanaged the economy.

And people talk about the stimulus package and the jobs that it was supposed to create, it certainly didn't have the intended effects that everybody was hoping for or that the president and administration certainly was hoping for. So I think it's time to lay some new solutions on the table, some new ideas.

It's Obama's bad luck that he got elected just as the mayhem of the foreclosures, the banking collapse, and the General Motors disaster was accelerating the surge in unemployment to warp speed.

I mean, the reality is unemployment today - over 14 million Americans are unemployed. That's exactly what it was a year ago. I mean, this - the American people know we can't borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy.

The tax relief package enacted in 2001 was central to pulling the economy out of the post 9-11 recession. It's the reason we've got low unemployment and have created more than two million jobs in the last year.

But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided - and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality.

In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy -unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster.

But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.

Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.

History shows that tax increases during a recession are a recipe for greater unemployment and economic loss.

Historians will likely give Obama credit for steering the country away from the brink of economic collapse in 2009.

After several trillion dollars of stimulation by the Obama Administration and the Fed, one might think the economy would be chugging along at a pretty good clip. But, it just isn't so, and the light at the end of the tunnel is pretty dim. Just ask a small business owner.

It has become fashionable to rail against government intervention in the economy, and the FHA is a favorite example by those trying to show the government's overreach. In reality, the FHA shows how government action during the Great Recession forestalled a much worse economic fate.

You do not have to be an economist to know that putting up the cost of employing someone is a pretty barking thing to do when you're trying to get out of a recession.

If we don't get this economy going, the numbers that represent this stimulus package are going to be small compared to the loss of revenue to the federal government for our economy.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

Let’s have a moratorium on press conferences …. Get off your asses and let’s do something and fix the biggest doggone crisis in the history of this country.

The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.

The revival of the U.S. financial system after the crash of 2008 is arguably the Obama administration's biggest domestic policy success.

There is a broad consensus, not only in the United States but in most of the world, that if you are in an economic downturn, you need to stimulate. Germany seems to be an exception.

The financial crisis and the Great Recession posed the most significant macroeconomic challenges for the United States in a half-century, leaving behind high unemployment and below-target inflation and calling for highly accommodative monetary policies.