WASHINGTON, Oct 6: President Barack Obama has said the US is moving forward and the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since he took office four years ago.
His remarks came hours after latest figures revealed that America’s unemployment rate has dropped to 7.8 per cent in the month of September, the lowest since 2009.
“Today I believe that as a nation we’re moving forward again,” he said during an election campaign meeting in Ohio.
“When I was sworn into office, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Now our businesses have added 5.2 million jobs over the past 2 ½ years. This morning we found out that the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since I took office. So more Americans enter the workforce, more people are getting jobs,” Obama said.
According to the latest report by the Bureau of labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in the US dropped to 7.8 per cent in the month of September during which the economy added 114,000 jobs.
“The unemployment rate declined by 0.3 percentage point to 7.8 per cent in September. For the first eight months of the year, the rate held within a narrow range of 8.1 and 8.3 per cent. The number of unemployed persons, at 12.1 million, decreased by 456,000 in September,” it said.
“Today’s news should give us some encouragement,” Obama said.
“It shouldn’t be an excuse for the other side to try to talk down the economy just to try to score a few political points. It’s a reminder that this country’s come too far to turn back now. Because the strength and the resilience of the American people, we’ve made too much progress to return to the policies that led to this crisis in the first place.
“We can’t allow that to happen. We won’t allow that to happen. And that is why I’m running to be your president for four more years,” said the US President.
Obama alleged that his Republican challenger Mitt Romney wants to roll back those rules which his administration put in place to prevent the economic crisis.
“One of the main reasons we had this crisis was because we had big banks on Wall Street making bets with other people’s money. And now Governor Romney wants to roll back those rules that we put in place to stop that behavior,” he said.
“One of the main reasons we went from record surpluses into record deficits is because we put two wars and two tax cuts on a credit card,” he added. (PTI)
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