By John Garamendi (D-Calif.)
Last month I hosted a town hall in Pleasant Hill, a city that I represent in Congress. Given the economic uncertainty in my region and throughout the nation, it will not surprise readers to learn that the state of our economy was at the top of most residents’ minds.
While we’ve made progress in job creation – approximately three million people have jobs today because of the policies of this Administration and this Congress – more needs to be done. That’s why I was pleased to hear President Obama introduce his new proposal to invest $50 billion in our nation’s infrastructure, and that’s why I’ve proposed legislation to bring transportation manufacturing jobs back to America.
To understand why the President proposes 150,000 miles of new or improved roads, 4,000 miles of railways, and 150 miles of runway, we must first look back at the paths we traveled to get to this point.
We lost more than 8,000,000 jobs during the Great Recession that began in 2007. When President Obama entered office in January 2009, our economy was in a freefall, hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs that month. The President and Democrats in Congress got to work immediately, most notably by enacting the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and demonstrably improved a dreadful situation. Because of these efforts, we saw a steady decline in job loss throughout 2009 leading this year to eight consecutive months of private sector job growth.
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