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Secretary Herman, who bears a lot of the responsibilities for what we are trying to achieve, for her work.
I'd like to make just a few brief points. has made most of the points that need to be made, and we all know here we're preaching to the saved and trying to get a message out to the country.
But I'd like to point out, as I tried to do in the State of the Union, that the time in which we are living now in terms of our economic prosperity is virtually unprecedented. We had 4.2 percent unemployment last month. I remember a meeting I had and a huge argument I had in December of 1992, when I had been elected but not inaugurated president, about how low we could get unemployment before inflation would go up. And all the traditional economists said, Man, when you get below 6 percent, you know, you will just see what'll happen. And the American people turned out to be a lot more productive, a lot more efficient, technology turned out to be a lot more helpful, we were in a much more competitive environment. So now we have 4.2 percent unemployment, the lowest rate since 1970, the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957, 18 million new jobs. But we still have some significant long-term challenges in this country.
We have pockets of America, in rural America, in urban America, in our medium-size industrial cities, our Native American reservations, which have not felt any of the impact of the economic recovery. We still have substantial long-term challenges to Social Security, to Medicare, and we still have a significant fact of inequality in the pay of women and men.
And the central point I would like to make is that we should not allow the political climate or anything else to deter us from concentrating our minds on the fact that this is a precious gift that the American people have received, even though they have earned it. Countries rarely have conditio to it? That is the messag ngle problem that we c
