Yunji de Nies and Sunlen Miller,ABC News
The Economic Recovery Bill may have been signed,but the president was out today still selling his plan. Obama spoke at a police academy graduation ceremony in Columbus,Ohio,for a group of new recruits whose jobs were saved by the bill.
President Obama may have saved 25 jobs,but he has hundreds of thousands more to go. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’latest jobs report shows that for the 14th month in a row,the nation lost jobs —more than eight percent of Americans are now out of work. The president acknowledged the tough battle ahead.
“We lost another 651,000 jobs throughout the country in the month of February alone which brings the total number of jobs lost in this recession to an astounding 4.4 million —4.4 million jobs,”he said,“I don’t need to tell this graduating class what it’s like to know that your job might be next because,up until a few weeks ago,that is precisely the future that this class faced,a future that millions of Americans still face right now. Well,that is not a future I accept for the United States of America.”