WASHINGTON, Sept 16: US President Barack Obama has said that his administration has stabilised the country’s economy, which is growing again and producing jobs.
“Everything that I’ve done to, number one, has been designed to stabilise the economy, get it growing again, start producing jobs again. Number two, trying to push against these trends that had been happening for decades now,” Obama told the ABC news in an interview.
“That’s why we made sure that we had a tax system that was a little bit fair by asking people to pay more at the top. That’s what the Affordable Care Act, health care reform, is about, is making sure that folks who had been left out in the cold when it comes to health care are able to get health care,” he said.
Obama said when he became the country’s president, the economy was on the verge of a Great Depression.
“In some ways, actually, the economic data and the collapse of the economy was worse than what happened in the 1930s. And we came in, stabilised the situation,” he said.
“We’ve now had 42 straight months of growth, 7 1/2 million new jobs created, 500,000 jobs in manufacturing, 370,000 jobs in an auto industry that had completely collapsed. The banking system works. It is giving loans to companies who can get credit. So we have seen I think undoubtedly progress across the board. The housing market has recovered,” he said.
In his interview, Obama blamed the Republicans in the Congress for coming in the path of economic growth.
“The problem that we got right now is you’ve got a portion of Congress whose policies don’t just want to, you know, leave things alone; they actually want to accelerate these trends,” he said.
“There is no serious economist out there that would suggest that if you took the Republican agenda of slashing education further, slashing Medicare further, slashing research and development further, slashing investments in infrastructure further, that that would reverse some of these trends of inequality,” he said. (PTI)
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