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And those of us who are old enough to remember what the economy was like in the 1970s with the long gas lines; what it was like in the 1980s when we had the so-called "bicoastal" economy and my state and Senator Harkin's state had double-digit unemployment in county after county.
I'm telling you, times get tough and then you go around and try to talk to people about problems like this, their eyes glaze over because even the people who would benefit, they're just trying to keep body and soul together. They're worried about holding on to what they have. We have an opportunity now to make a better America for our children; for all of our children.
And the second point I want to make is the one I made jokingly in the story about Tom and me having the privilege of living with women who made more money than we did, and that is that this is not just a woman's issue. The women who are discriminated against often are in families, raising children with husbands who are also hurt if their wives work hard and don't have the benefits of equal pay.
A lot of the women who are single mothers are out there working, and they have boy children as well as girl children. This is not just a gender issue, and men should be very interested in this.
I can say, furthermore, that I believe that it would be good for our overall economy. You know, you hear all these problems that they say it'll cause the economy if you do this. All this stuff is largely not true. I mean, every time we try to make a change to have a stronger society, whether it's raising the minimum wage or cleaning up the environment or passing the family leave law, the people that are against it say the same thing. And we now have, you know, decades of experience in trying to improve our social fabric. And America has had a particular genius in figuring out how to do these things in a way that would permit us to generate more economic opportunity and more jobs and
