Tom Hayden Quotes

When you go to places like Gary and Detroit, you see the economic problem in this country and who it's really affecting.

For a variety of reasons, we are not producing at a given level of economic activity the jobs we used to have.

We've got people, our friends and neighbors, who are losing their jobs, factories being closed. We have to get America moving again.

Growing up in Buffalo, I saw shuttered factories that once housed thousands of steel manufacturing jobs. I remember the hollowing-out of the middle class in our community. I witnessed hope turn to hardship as a once-thriving city reckoned with a fast-changing world.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

We're losing all kinds of white-collar jobs, all kinds of jobs in addition to manufacturing jobs, which we're losing by the droves in my state.

The United States faces structural employment problems because of the long-term effects of globalization and technology. This was only exacerbated by the Great Recession.

Most of the folks to whom I listen are concerned for their future. Too many of them know someone who's out of work, has lost their own job, or fear they might. And, they increasingly believe that the opportunity for a better life for their children is slipping away.

The world is dealing with issues of immigration, deindustrialization, and poverty.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

I thought the Bush economic policy was a disaster. We lost 500,000 private sector jobs during his tenure.

I would say that workers in general, and white workers particularly, are correct that their economic wellbeing is deteriorating.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

We hear the stories every day now: the father who puts on a suit every morning and leaves the house so his daughter doesn't know he lost his job, the recent college grad facing up to the painful reality that the only door that's open to her after four years of study and a pile of debt is her parents'. These are the faces of the Obama economy.

While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.

Like many places across the country, Wisconsin lost more than 100,000 jobs from 2008 to 2010. Unemployment during that time topped out at over 9%.

Folks in the bottom half of the economy are already squeezed hard. They will be bloodied and bankrupt if economic policy inadvertently induces a recession.

Let me tell you the story about Massachusetts under Governor Romney. It did fall to 47th out of 50 in jobs creation. Wages went down when they were going up in the rest of the country. He left his successor with debt and a deficit, and manufacturing jobs left that state at twice the rate as the rest of the country.

If workers have less money in their pockets to put food on the table, they will be spending less money; your economy will suffer.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

A while ago I did a story comparing the change in employment rates in recessions in the U.S. and in Europe, and what I found was that America fired a lot of people and rehired a lot of people faster than Europe. That difference is disappearing, and that is a problem.

This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.

Certainly, 9 percent unemployment and very slow growth is not a good situation.

Americans are terrified because so many of them have been laid off in recent years and months and they fear that they may be next. Even if they have not been laid off or have not known anyone laid off, they definitely know someone who has lost his home.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.