2013 State of the Union address: on Jobs

Barack Obama: FactCheck: Yes, 500K manufacturing jobs since 2010, but...

Overall, there has been a net loss of more than 600,000 manufacturing jobs since Obama took office in January 2009, and manufacturing job growth during his tenure has stalled since reaching a peak of nearly 12 million jobs in July 2012.

Over the past three years--since January 2010--the U.S. economy has added 490,000 manufacturing jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 11,950,000 manufacturing jobs in January 2013--up from the 11,460,000 jobs recorded in January 2010. However, there were 12,556,000 manufacturing jobs in January 2009. So overall, there has been a loss of 606,000 jobs since Obama took office. More recently, "manufacturing growth has been stuck in neutral," as the National Association of Manufacturers said in a Feb. 12 press release.

Mitt Romney: FactCheck: Briefly supported tying minimum wage to inflation

It's true that during a campaign event on Jan. 7, 2012, Romney remarked: "My view has been to allow the minimum wage to rise with the [Consumer Price Index] or with another index so that it adjusts automatically over time." But just two months later, Romney hedged on that position, saying that in the midst of a recovery, "the way to deal with the minimum wage is this. Every two years we should look at what's happened to inflation. Right now, there's probably not a need to raise the minimum wage.

Barack Obama: Make America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing

There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend. Last year, we created our first manufacturing innovation institute in Youngstown, Ohio. There's no reason this can't happen in other towns. So tonight, I'm announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs, where businesses will partner with the Departments of Defense and Energy to turn regions left behind by globalization into global centers of high-tech jobs. And I ask this Congress to help create a network of fifteen of these hubs and guarantee that the next revolution in manufacturing is Made in America.

Barack Obama: Raise federal minimum wage to $9 per hour, and tie to COLA

Working folks shouldn't have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up while CEO pay has never been higher. So here's an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on.

America is not a place where chance of birth or circumstance should decide our destiny. And that is why we need to build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class for all who are willing to climb them.

Marco Rubio: Grow the middle class; don't grow the government

Hard-working middle class Americans who don't need us to come up with a plan to grow the government. They want a plan to grow the middle class. Economic growth is the best way to help the middle class. Unfortunately, our economy actually shrank during the last three months of 2012.

But if we can get the economy to grow at just 4% a year, it would create millions of middle class jobs. And it could reduce our deficits by almost $4 trillion dollars over the next decade.

Tax increases can't do this. Raising taxes won't create private sector jobs. And there's no realistic tax increase that could lower our deficits by almost $4 trillion. That's why I hope the President will abandon his obsession with raising taxes and instead work with us to achieve real growth in our economy.