If we did not have Obamacare, we could've addressed the healthcare crisis in a comprehensive but segmented fashion - meaning that we could have promoted a health savings plan. We could've pushed for tort reform, which added so much more cost to healthcare.

Employers should overcome a myopic quarterly earnings posture and focus on long-term strategies for growth that include investing in their own skills-training efforts to enable a broader pool of applicants.

For significant job creation to occur, prospective entrepreneurs and current business owners must not fear the future or be under assault from their own government in the present.

When there's change, people are always anxious.

The expenses of complying with Washington's torrent of mandates and regulatory overreach are costing American workers jobs and income growth.

America's competitive advantage lies in its human talent. All of us should be doing everything we can to cultivate and develop our work force.

My parents were very, very strict parents, and they were not used to this new, you know, American custom of letting your children sleep in someone else's house.

It's not coincidental that America's vigorous recovery in the early 1980s was led by a president who worked hard to unshackle growth in the private sector.

The borrow-spend-and-centralize agenda that has been so destructive to job creation elsewhere in America has been a gravy boat inside the Beltway.

I'm the first secretary of labor in the 21st century, and the competitiveness of the American work force and the modernization of decades-old regulations have been among our top priorities.

Confidence, capital, and credit fuel entrepreneurship and economic expansion.

When my mother, sisters and I arrived on the shores of America when I was 8 years old, the boat on which we came, a freighter, passed the Statue of Liberty.

The Obama administration's zeal to not 'waste a good crisis,' as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, has been stunning even for Washington insiders to behold.

Government at all levels has kicked the fiscal can down the road for far too long.

Confidence, capital, and new markets fuel entrepreneurship and job-generating expansion of existing businesses.

As I looked up at the Statue of Liberty, I thought at that time, 'What a wonderful country.'

The OPPA route is nothing new. It follows the decades-old liberal agenda on trade, health care, global warming, and mass unionization. That agenda has never brought prosperity to workers.

What out country is facing right now is a skills gap.

Around the time President Lyndon B. Johnson was declaring a War on Poverty in the 1960s, federal, state and local governments began accelerating a veritable War on the Private Sector.

Even a healthy economy and labor market would have struggled under the additional expenses enacted and proposed in 2009 and 2010 - from healthcare mandates and higher taxes, to carbon cap-and-trade and delay in extending the last decade's tax reforms.

Typically, after moving backwards, the economy takes even more steps forward.

My husband has an outstanding record in promoting opportunity for women and the women that he surrounds himself in his staff and the women that he has promoted throughout his career. He's the father of three daughters. He's obviously a husband who's been very supportive of a very active wife with her own career.

Our country needs to produce 250,000 net new jobs every month just to keep even with population growth.

In campaigns, lots of things will be said, and what they have said about my husband is just simply not true.

Our private-sector work force is the most industrious, innovative, productive, and ambitious in the world.

Outside of Washington, D.C., most Americans aren't concerned with doing things 'big.' They're looking for less government spending, lower taxes, and good jobs.

We want to make sure that workers know their rights and that employers know their obligations. That is the best way to protect workers.

I know what it is like to feel vulnerable and fearful during a difficult time.

We're a robust democracy here. That's the wonderful thing about this country.

People can voice their different points of view. We are also a country where there will be criticism.

I can tell you I love California - and no more.

Those memories of living in a developing nation are part of who I am today and give me a profound understanding of the challenges of economic development - an understanding which will make my tenure as Peace Corps director, I hope, a very special one.

My first port of call was Los Angeles. That's where I laid my first foot on America.

I am not seeking any position in a Dole Administration.

Every person - we want to make sure that every person who wants a job will indeed get one.

Even if it's a national issue, the federal government cannot provide all the answers.

The ingenuity and creativity of the private sector is essential to meeting American's needs for a skilled work force.

We are a Republic with different branches of government, and so the Senate and the House are going to be full partners in working with the White House.

For any trade deal to move forward, there has to be agreement.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

My parents were very supportive.

I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.

We have a lot of employers who are looking for skilled workers and not being able to find them. And we have workers who lack the requisite skills to access these good-paying jobs in high growth industries.

The majority of the new jobs being created require higher skills, more education.

I love working in the garden.

In normal times, laid-off workers are unemployed an average of eight weeks.

Washington policymakers have to understand the adverse implications of their actions on job creation, and they must reorder some of their priorities.

In the best of years, millions of jobs are lost.

401k savings accounts have become so important in the landscape of retirement planning that their security and expansion became a top priority in formulating and implementing the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that was enacted during my tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Labor.

Deep in the heart of Kentucky's rugged Eastern Mountain region, there lives a woman who has fascinated and inspired me for two decades. She is known locally these days as 'Mayor Nan' - the octogenarian chief executive of Hazard and advocate for its 5,467 residents.