Days after his Republican rival Mitt Romney's surprise debate win, Barack Obama had some good news as unemployment dipped below eight per cent to the lowest point of his first term in the White House, with a relieved President saying today that the US is "moving forward" again.
"Four years after the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, we're seeing signs that, as a nation, we're moving forward again. After losing about 800,000 jobs a month when I took office (in January 2009), our businesses have now added 5.2 million new jobs over the past two and a half years.
"And on Friday, we learned that the unemployment rate is now at its lowest level since I took office. More Americans are entering the workforce. More Americans are getting jobs," Obama said in his weekly radio address to the nation.
To keep the country moving forward, he said Congress should act on his plan to keep taxes low for 98 per cent of the American people, rather than giving more budget-busting tax cuts to the wealthiest two per cent.
Congress should cut red tape so responsible homeowners can save about USD 3,000 a year on their mortgage by refinancing at lower rates, and act on his proposal to create a veterans jobs corps to help returning heroes find work, the President said.
It is time, Obama argued, for elected leaders to get back to work to help the middle class and build the economy from the middle-out, not the top down.
"... Too many of our friends and neighbours are still looking for work or struggling to pay the bills – many of them since long before this crisis hit. We owe it to them to keep moving forward. We've come too far to turn back now. And we've made too much progress to return to the policies that got us into this mess in the first place," he said.