President Barack Obama said that Friday’s jobs numbers for June represent “a step in the right direction,” but that the U.S. can’t be complacent.
“We learned this morning that our businesses created 84,000 new jobs last month, and that overall means that businesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months, including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs,” Obama said during a campaign appearance in Poland, Ohio. “Our goal was never to just keep on working to get back to where we were back in 2007 … we’ve got to grow the economy even faster and we’ve got to put even more people back to work.”
Alan Kreuger, the White House’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, delivered a similar statement Friday.
“Employment is growing,” Kreuger said. “But it is not growing fast enough given the jobs deficit caused by the deep recession.”
