Obama: We’ve Created More Jobs than ‘Europe, Japan, and the Rest of the Advanced World’

"Let me just give you a sense of where I think our economy currently is, what’s happening around the world, and where I think it should be, and the chances for us here in Washington to accelerate rather than impede some of the progress that we’ve made.

Around this time six years ago America’s businesses were shedding about 800,000 jobs per month. Today, our businesses, including some of the most important businesses in the world that are represented here today have created over 10.6 million new jobs, 56 months of uninterrupted job growth, which is the longest private sector job growth in our history. We just saw the best six month period of economic growth in over a decade. For the first time in six years the unemployment rate is under 6 percent.

All told, the United States of America over the last six years have put more people back to work than Europe, Japan and the rest of the advanced world combined. And that is a record for us to build on. At the same time what we’ve been doing is working on restructuring and rebuilding our economy for sustained long-term growth. Manufacture has grown. The auto industry has the strongest sales since 2007. Our deficits have shrunk by about two-thirds. something that very few people, I suspect, in the BRT would have anticipated in some of our conversations three or four years ago.

When it comes to health-care costs, premiums have gone up at the lowest pace on record, which means that a lot of the businesses here are saving money, as are a lot of consumers. On the education front, high school graduations are up. College enrollments are up. Math and reading scores have improved. Internationally, our exports continue to hit record levels. On energy, we have seen a revolution that is changing not just the economy, but are also changing geopolitics.

Not only is oil and natural gas production up in part because of the technological changes that have taken place, but we’ve also doubled our production of clean energy and solar energy is up about tenfold. Wind energy is up threefold. Unit costs for the production of clean energy are dropping down to where they are getting close to being competitive to fossil fuels.

And as a consequence we’ve also been able to reduce carbon emissions that cause climate change faster than most of the other industrialized countries. So the bottom line is that America continues to lead."