You can't have 23 million people struggling to get a job. You can't have an economy that over the last three years keeps slowing down its growth rate. You can't have kids coming out of college, half of them can't find a job today, or a job that's commensurate with their college degree. We have to get our economy going.
I got my transferrable skills from working at entry-level, gauging what I wanted from my career, and making sure I had what it took to get the one I truly wanted. But now there's a Catch 22: school leavers need experience to get jobs, but they can't get experience without jobs.
I've never been very fully employed either.
In America, we have lost millions of decent-paying jobs. That has got to end.
Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.
Obama has been trying or was trying to transform the country away from the way it was founded, and it is causing misery, and it is causing a lack of optimism about the future. It's resulted in massive student debt, worthless college degrees, no job opportunities. That's what the election of Trump was all about, trying to reverse this trend.
The crisis was 2008, in 2015 - almost eight years later and the gap between where we would have been and where we are is huge and not closing. The implied unemployment rate is very high, labour force participation is very low, and the increase in wages in the second quarter was the lowest in 25 years. Before this turmoil, the U.S. economy was in better shape than Europe or Canada, but not strong.
And look, we have young people in this country who are thirty years old living with their parents. We have young people in this country who don't have jobs, who graduate from college and are fed the lie of meritocracy. "You get a degree, you get a job." That's not happening. We have young people who have become the Zero Generation: zero hope, zero employment, zero possibilities. Do we really believe that this young generation is going to stand by and not take note of an economic system that - however it calls itself - has completely betrayed them?
To actually unleash an entire generation to do what they've already been trained to do. They've done the work, they have the degrees, they have the passion, but they're working two or three part-time low-wage, temporary jobs just to keep a roof over their heads.
At a lot of college graduations, you'll hear people say, 'Follow your passions,' and that is important, but no one talks about the stress of not having enough money, the issues of debt, and the issues of work stress.
You can be very successful but still struggling financially, and it looked like I'd have to take a year or two off and find whatever menial labouring work you can get as a middle-aged, unskilled bald man.
Middle class America is acutely aware of how bad this economy is, and it is going to demand changes. I don't think politicians can afford to be complacent.
I kept thinking that with all those first jobs, "This is the beginning of something!" And then nothing would happen. That's the real Hollywood.
There is something wrong when we had more bankruptcies last year than college graduates.
She was running for the Democratic Presidential Nomination.
Anyone who is honestly seeking a job and can't find it, deserves the attention of the United States government, and the people.
The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
I did go through a period where I was on unemployment. That was my low point: Martha Quinn on line at unemployment, hoping nobody will recognize her.
I know there's similar dissatisfaction in America. There's a lot of white people who come from blue collar backgrounds and who feel ill-equipped and badly served by modern economics and the modern job market.
My career has been very good to me, but really, the odds are really slim. It's a tough life, and you deal with a lot of rejection and unemployment, and if you're lucky to have a career, it's not easy. So you just want to protect your kids from the pain of rejection.