Obama Blames Republicans for Slow Speed of Economic Growth

"The good news is over the past 44 months, our businesses have created 7.8 million new jobs. Since I took office, we've cut the deficits in half. That's right. By the way, you wouldn't know this sometimes listening to folks on TV, but the deficits are going down, they're not going up. They've been cut in half, and they keep on going down. Over the past three years, health care costs have risen at the slowest pace on record. Exports are up. The housing market is up. The American auto industry is roaring back. So we've got a lot of good things to build on. But we've got a lot more work to do. And what we should start doing, the first thing we should do, is stop doing things that undermine our businesses and our economy. Over the past few years, this constant cycle of manufactured crisis, and self-inflicted wounds that have been coming out of Washington, for example, we learned yesterday that over the summer our economy grew at its fastest pace in a year. That's the good news. The bad news is that the very day the economic quarter ended, some folks in Washington decided to shut down the government, and threaten to default on America's obligations for the first time in more than 200 years. And it's like the gears of our economy, every time they are just about to take off, suddenly somebody taps the breaks and says, 'not so fast.'"