WALLACE: Deese, head of the president's National Economic Council. Brian, welcome back to "FOX News Sunday".
BRIAN DEESE, DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: Thanks for having me, Chris. Happy Easter.
WALLACE: Happy Easter to you, sir. Let's start with the latest jobs numbers. In March, the economy added 916,000 new jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 6 percent flat, and that was before the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill and the spike in vaccinations.Question, given all that, does the country need another $2 trillion in federal spending in this bill and trillions more in another bill that the president is going to lay out sometime in the next few weeks? We're talking about another, at least, $4 trillion in more government spending.
DEESE: Well, the jobs numbers in March were certainly a welcome sign. It's good to see the economy starting to improve and we certainly think that it's a sign that the economic and vaccination strategy that the said administration has put into place from day one is starting to have an impact.But we have a long way to go. We still are down in 8.4 million jobs from where we were a year ago. We have millions of people out of work. More than 2 million women have left the labor force because they had to choose between caring for their family members and their jobs. So we have a long way to go.What our plan says is let's keep the economy going, let's see more job creation. That's a really good thing for the economy. But let's also think to the longer-term but where these investments that we could make that will really drive not just more job growth, but better job growth. Not just job growth in the short term but job growth in the long term by investing in our infrastructure, by investing in our researching and development, in a way that we haven't since the 1960s.If we do that we think we cannot have a job rebound this year, but we could sustain it over many years. That's the goal.
