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Pete Buttigieg: “Unemployment was double digits.”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation"

Published January 28, 2026 | Video Starts at 19:34

When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person. This isn't that long ago. It was 2011. Unemployment was double digits. Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities, and people refused to accept that. They stepped up. (19:34–19:37)

CLAIM

Asserts that South Bend had double-digit unemployment when he took office in 2011.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

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“The world [children are] coming into will obviously be so radically transformed.”
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“The most important questions about how AI will unfold...are fundamentally policy questions.”
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“Educational institutions will of course have to develop policies that will support the building of tools that we need to do on our own.”
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“That's no longer available to us, or it's in the process of, we're in the process of losing it.”
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“Few places are more vulnerable to it [AI], but I think also a few places have more value that they might be able to unlock from it than…”
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“The GM facility alone, that's three or $4 billion.”
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“It used to be maybe a dozen union electrical workers in an apprentice class, if you were lucky.”
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“That was ARPA dollars.”
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