Q Dana, you painted a fairly upbeat picture of the economy despite the job losses, and yet most economists say that the kinds of job losses that were reported today tend to be the kind we see in the early stages of a recession. What would it take for the President and the administration to begin considering a second stimulus package?

MS. PERINO: Look, we've gone through the recession thing before. I just told you that the last two quarters showed growth. There's plenty of economists out there and they have -- they're very -- I'm sure they're very intelligent and they have a lot of resources at their fingertips, but I just haven't heard anybody talking necessarily about a recession.

The economic stimulus plan that we put in place is having the strong impact that we wanted it to have. One of the keys of that stimulus package was that it be stimulative, and we don't think that we need to consider a second stimulus right now.

One of the things we were concerned about and we warned about in the last supplemental, where we extended unemployment benefits -- which was not our preference, and we actually were able to shave back from 16 weeks back to eight weeks how much longer those benefits would be allowed -- part of what we were concerned about is that it lengthens the amount of time that people would be out of work.

And I think we're seeing that reflected in some of those numbers today. So we would want to approach any next steps very carefully. We need to do a couple of things in the meantime. One is continue to work through the housing crunch, through FHA Secure, or trying to help people stay in their homes through HOPE NOW. In addition to that, there's the credit market issues, and also the high energy prices.

But there are other things that we can do, which is to -- if we were to be able to work with Congress in a bipartisan way to push forward on these free trade agreements, we could increase the amount of exports that we are -- that are leaving this country and that are really helping us -- helping fuel the economic growth that we have.

But there's no question that a 6.1 percent unemployment rate is absolutely unwelcome. It is too high in the President's mind. Compared to other countries it's relatively good, but when it comes to America, that's never good enough for us. We want to make sure that anybody who wants to find work can find work. And so we'll continue to work with Congress. We'd like to work with them in a bipartisan way. They've got three weeks to do something before they leave for the campaign trail, so we hope we can get something done.

Brianna.

seen at 09:00, 5 September in Whitehouse Press Briefings. Email this to a friend.
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