W. Todd Akin: “I was trying to explain that to some--because I give some of these talks to my constituents, and one of the ways I try…”

“I was trying to explain that to some--because I give some of these talks to my constituents, and one of the ways I try to explain it is let's say that you're king for a day and your job is to tax a loaf of bread and you want to get as much tax revenue as you can by taxing bread. And so you go through this little exercise in your mind and say, I can tax the bread $10 a loaf or one penny a loaf. If I taxed at one penny a loaf, nobody would notice, and I would get a penny times all of those loaves of bread. But if I got $10 on a loaf, wow, I could make a lot of money, but then maybe nobody would buy any bread because it's too expensive. So common sense would say somewhere between a penny and $10 you're going to come to an optimum place where you can get the most tax on it and people will still keep buying bread. If you increase it, you actually lose revenue; If you decrease it--so there's an optimum spot. And what's happening is the government is taxing people so much, by increasing the taxes, it basically stalls the economy and so their revenue drops.”