Obama Touts Job Growth

The White House(PRINCETON, Ind.) — President Obama on Friday trumpeted the latest better-than-expected jobs report, saying “we’re on pace for the strongest job growth since the 1990s.”

“All told, the United States has put more folks back to work than Europe, Japan and all other advanced economies combined. All them combined, we’ve put more folks back to work right here in the United States of America,” the president told workers at Millennium Steel in Princeon, Indiana.

Obama’s remarks came just hours after the Labor Department reported the U.S. economy added 248,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9 percent.

“This progress that we’ve been making, it’s been hard. It goes in fits and starts. It’s not always been perfectly smooth or as fast as we want, but it is real and it is steady and it is happening, and it’s making a difference in economies all across the country,” he said.

As part of “National Manufacturing Day,” the president took the economic campaign message that he outlined on Thursday directly to workers and young people in Princeton, fielding their questions and underscoring the important role that American manufacturing plays in job growth.

“There are a number of steps that we can take to make unemployment go down faster, to make sure that wages are rising faster, and it would benefit everybody,” he said, as he stood in front of massive wheels of steel in a huge plant. “If you look at American history, the times we grow fastest and do best is when we’re growing the economy from the middle out, when middle class families are growing, when working folks can get their way into the middle class.”

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