Several years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, our economic recovery is still fragile. The Fourth District has fared better than the country as a whole, with employers adding jobs and new businesses moving to the area. But too many families in North Carolina and across the country are still struggling to make ends meet, and we cannot rest until the economy is back at full steam.

Under Democratic leadership, the 111th Congress acted decisively to prevent an even worse recession and jump-start the economic recovery by passing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which has been credited with creating or saving as many as 2 million jobs, many of them in North Carolina. We also enacted long-overdue new rules for Wall Street to prevent the kind of abuses that led to the financial crisis and passed landmark health reform legislation to protect consumers and make health care more affordable for all Americans.

Unfortunately, the current Republican-controlled Congress has abandoned efforts to boost job creation and ensure our economic success, seeking instead to turn back the clock to the Bush-era economic policies that precipitated the downturn and widened the gap between the richest people in the country and everyone else. Instead of continuing to invest in education, infrastructure, and other vehicles of job creation, the Congress has imposed devastating cuts to these programs, threatening our economic recovery. Instead of providing certainty and stability for our nation's entrepreneurs, the Congress forced the country to lurch from one manufactured crisis to the next, from the threat of a government shutdown to the debt ceiling fiasco.

It's time for members of Congress to start putting what's good for the American people ahead of what's good for their party in the next election. I'm fighting for critical investments in our people that will put Americans back to work today and lay the foundation for our future economic prosperity. Nobody knows the importance of these investments better than we do in North Carolina: in just a few decades, our home state has become one of the leading centers of research, education, and innovation in the world. Drawing on the lessons that have contributed to the our success, I'm confident America can revitalize its economy and win the international competition for the industries of tomorrow.

In the long run, sustainable economic growth will also require us to get back on track toward a balanced budget. There is no better cure for the deficit than a growing economy, and so investments in job-creating industries today will also help our fiscal situation tomorrow. But, having participated in the successful bipartisan effort to balance the budget in the 1990s, I also believe we must take a comprehensive approach to deficit reduction that includes a fairer tax code, reforms to preserve the integrity of Social Security and Medicare, and targeted reductions to defense spending in addition to any further cuts to domestic programs.

As your Representative, I will continue to fight for expanding economic opportunity; continued investment in education, research, and infrastructure that promotes job creation and growth; and a comprehensive, balanced approach to deficit reduction that requires shared sacrifice instead of asking middle- and working-class Americans to foot the bill.

Rep. Price speaks at a growing GE Aviation plant in the Fourth District