tweet at 10:00am: YELLEN SAYS U.S. ECONOMY WELL ON THE WAY TO ROBUST RECOVERY tweet at 10:03am: *Treasury's Yellen: Now Is Fiscally Most Strategic Time to Make Long-Term InvestmentsTestimony of Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen to the Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate Chairman Wyden, Ranking Member Crapo, it’s a pleasure to be with you. When I took office back in January, the first – and most urgent – problem confronting our economy was obviously the pandemic: helping people make it to the other side of the crisis and ensuring they were met there by a robust recovery. Thanks to this Congress – and its passage of the American Rescue Plan – I believe we are well on our way towards that goal. But we have to be clear-eyed about something: The pandemic was not our only economic problem. Long before a single American was infected with COVID-19, millions of people in this country were running up against a series of long-term, structural economic challenges that undermined their ability to make a good living. For instance, wage inequality. In healthy economies, we see wage growth across the distribution – for workers making the highest incomes and those making the lowest. But over the past several decades, that has not been the case in our economy. While the highest earners have seen their income grow, families at the bottom end of the distribution have seen their pay stagnate. Gender and racial pay gaps also persist. At the same time, labor force participation has been dropping. Even before the pandemic, the share of American women in the workforce lagged far behind many other wealthy nations.