In the month of May of this year employment rose to an all-time high in the United States of more than 71 million jobs. The unemployment rate yesterday dropped to 5.1 percent. For married men the unemployment rate dropped to 2.6 percent--the lowest unemployment rate for married men in the last 6 years. What does this mean? This means that 97.4 percent of all married workers in this country now have jobs. In the last 12 months alone in this country we have added 2 million jobs to the American economy. We have lowered unemployment, even though 1.4 million people have entered the labor market in the past 5 months, compared with a normal full-year increase of 1.2 million. Thus has promise become progress. For these achievements are not the easy product of chance or circumstance. They have resulted from the patient and the determined pursuit of policies, including the largest tax cut in the history of America designed to deter recession and generate growth. And we will continue this pursuit until every American who wants to work can find a job.

Hasn't it become obvious in this discussion that there has to be a reason why over the last 15 years we haven't solved this problem as a nation? Stop and think. Our unemployment level is about 4.5, and that's about as low as you can get it. So, where is the problem? We have to have people fill these jobs. They come in and fill these jobs. We call them illegal. Are they illegal? They're filling jobs that need to be done.

They were also disregarding the real true unemployment rate... even in January of 2016, among African Americans 16%... were unemployed... so this is not full employment... and by education, among African Americans [those who did not finish high school] 32% were unemployed. Now you know why the George Floyds get into trouble with the law. They are not able to find their place in the legal labor market. ...So this is what Marty Feldstein and Donald Trump think of [as] a good economy. Not in my view!

The achievement of all our goals depends on the first one that I mentioned-a strong and a growing economy. At the beginning of this administration, less than 4 months ago, our economy was still floundering from the worst recession in 40 years. The well-being of our people was squeezed between the twin pressures of high unemployment and inflation. That picture has already improved because we have restored the confidence of consumers and business. Last month, the number of Americans with jobs in the private sector of our economy went over 90 million for the first time in our country's history. Eight hundred thousand people have gone off the unemployment rolls since December. Half a million found jobs in April alone. Private surveys have shown that business investment plans for 1977 are up significantly, more than 15 percent, compared to 1976. Unemployment now stands at the lowest level in 29 months--down a full 1 percent since last November. But of course, you know and I know that a 7-percent unemployment rate is still completely unacceptable. We still have a long way to go.

About one in six working-age men in America is now out of the workforce, one of the highest rates among developed countries.

The illegal immigrants who have taken jobs that should go to people here legally, while over 20 percent of Americans are currently unemployed or underemployed. Believe me, they’re all over the place. I see them. I talk to them. I hug them. I hold them. They are all over the place.

The Secretary of Labor just recently completed a study that I had requested with regard to unemployment of youth in the United States. I don't need to tell this group of employers that the unemployment rate for youth, of course, is always higher than adults in any country, industrial or otherwise. In the United States, it is three times as high. But the sad part of the statistic is that unemployment among youth in the United States is higher than in any industrial country in the world. This, of course, poses the problem, and it also poses the challenge and the opportunity for this group. I know that under the leadership of Henry Ford, naturally, the slogan of this organization was that this was the group with the "better idea," and I would suggest that under the leadership of Don Kernal this should be the group that "thinks young." In that respect, while I am not, of course, underplaying in any regard the immense responsibility that you have with regard to those in the older-age brackets, I would urge that you particularly concentrate on those programs that deal with unemployment among youth and see that they are folded into the others.

Hillary Clinton was the worst Secretary of State in the history of the country. The world came apart under her reign... I will be the one to beat Hillary.
If you start adding it up, our real unemployment rate is 42%.

Next, just for the sake of argument, imagine if, during the first two years of her administration, she achieved stunning successes: The Dow rises 7,000 points after being nearly flat around 18,000 the two prior years. Consumer confidence surges to an eighteen-year high. Black unemployment hits 5.9%, the lowest level ever recorded. Hispanic and Asian-American unemployment also hit record lows of 4.5% and 2%, respectively. Female unemployment is at the lowest rate since 1953 (3.6%). Unemployment among the young is at its lowest in five decades (9.2%), among veterans the lowest in two (3%). Economic growth for the year nears 3% in 2018, for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. There is a freeze on new regulations, to the relief of American businesses. For every new regulation, about twenty-two are repealed. Jobless claims are at their lowest level in five decades. Job openings outnumber people looking for jobs for the first time on record. The positive job-growth streak is the longest on record. Job satisfaction is at its highest level in a decade and a half, and 85% of blue-collar workers think the country is “headed in the right direction.” Some $5.5 trillion in tax cuts are instituted, with most families seeing savings as a result. The corporate tax rate is lowered as well, since it had been the highest in the developed world and was discouraging investment. The president cleared bureaucratic obstacles to constructing the Keystone XL pipeline and withdrew from the onerous Paris Climate Agreement. The president helped make the United States the world’s biggest crude oil exporter for the first time. ISIS’s Iraq arm is effectively finished off. The United States stops funding Syrian militias with terror ties, quieting that country’s civil war. Military conflicts in other parts of the world are largely avoided. NATO partner nations are successfully pressured into paying their fair share for the alliance, reducing the US burden. Sentencing reductions for nonvi

well over 50 percent of Americans are unhappy at work. Many of these people are doing well, but they are doing well at something they don’t enjoy.

there will be some people in the room that don't like this. We're down to 3.7 percent unemployment — the lowest number in a long time. But think of this: I got all these companies moving in. They need workers. We have to bring people into our country to work these great plants that are opening up all over the place. This was not necessarily what I was saying during the campaign because I never knew we would be as successful as we've been. Companies are roaring back into our country, and now we want people to come in. We need workers to come in, but they've got to come in legally, and they've got to come in through merit, merit, merit.

Usually the relationship between the true unemployment rate and the official unemployment rate is 2:1.

We have, in the whole country, now brought the unemployment rate down, I'd say, about 1 percent below what it was a year ago. And as you've already heard, in Detroit itself in the last 2 or 3 years, the unemployment rate has dropped about 75 percent. But that still means that when you have a 6 or 7 percent unemployment rate nationwide among young men like you, who are black, who have a fairly good education even, the unemployment rate runs 35 or 40 percent, which is entirely too high. What we have tried to do already-and I would say the Congress has cooperated--is to concentrate our efforts on the Comprehensive Education and Training Act among young people themselves. We are now building up those jobs to 725,000. It will take a while to get up to that level. We are adding about, I'd say, in that particular program about 15,000 new jobs per week, which is a fairly big increase. About half those jobs will go to minority young people. In addition, we've got a $1 1/2 billion youth employment bill that the Congress passed, ! signed into law. This has been within the last month or so. And it's just beginning to be put into effect. Another thing that will help you is that in the public works projects that will be built in your area--and we're concentrating them more and more not in the wealthy suburban areas, but in the downtown areas where the need is greatest--at least 10 percent of those contracts in the future must go to minority business enterprises, and we're trying to make sure that the business is actually owned by a minority and not owned by the majority with just a figurehead black person whose name is used to qualify for the funds themselves. Another thing that I'd like to point out to you is this: We've got a better economy than most of the nations of the world, but we've still got a long way to go. My goal, already established, is that before this term of mine is over that we'll bring that unemployment rate down from 8 percent, which it was last December, to well under 5 percent by the time 1981 rolls around. There are not any automatic or easy answers. It's a very tough proposition. But the only thing we can do is make sure the jobs are made available in private industry, first of all, in government, second of all, and to make sure that the discrimination that has existed in the past against minority young people like you is wiped away and that we give 'a first priority in all our programs to the areas of the Nation, the areas of cities that have been hurt the worst. All those things are of substantial change or improvement over what we've seen in the past. But it's going to be a hard, long, tough proposition, and I wish you well.

It appears that we are to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are to have 1,300,000 unemployed in this country. There are no unemployed in the United States of America, no unemployed at all in France. There are hardly any unemployed in Italy. The United States of America, France, and Italy are protectionist countries. We are a free-trade import country.