I thank my friend from Missouri for giving me time to speak here. As we talk about American competitiveness and growing jobs, private sector jobs in this country, coming off the heels of this recession where we still have high unemployment, there are two aspects to it: One is cutting back on government spending, as you've already suggested with the pie chart you have there. We have to get our debt under control. This is imperative because it's going to strangle private investment in the form of higher taxes on the American people. But the other side of this is the growth side of the equation, stimulating economic growth. And if you look at how to do that, we want economic growth in the private sector which will help spur job growth. The way we have to do that is we have to look at an energy strategy for the United States because so much of what we do depends on cheap, affordable energy to fuel our plants, our factories, transportation, you name it. So it's critical that we have an energy strategy for the country, which we don't have, and we never have had one. In fact, what you're seeing now, instead of the lack of an energy strategy, we're actually seeing energy proposals that are detrimental to the country that are being proposed by this administration. Let me list what's going on. First of all, the moratorium on drilling for American energy in the Gulf of Mexico has been in place since May.…
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