W. Todd Akin: “Congratulations. You look good up in the Chair there. We are going to have a chance to talk for just a few minutes about…”

“Congratulations. You look good up in the Chair there. We are going to have a chance to talk for just a few minutes about an interesting topic. It is something on the minds of Americans everywhere, and that is about jobs, about the deficit and about Federal spending and what we have to do in those areas. I think sometimes it is helpful, you hear so much detail that you need to step back at the 30,000-foot view and say what is the big picture of what is going on. So I have here one of those traditional pie-type charts, and it has an overview of the total spending of the Federal Government in the year 2010. So what I want to do is just take a look at that and then talk about what that means relative to the problems we have in overspending in the Federal Government. Also, this connects to unemployment in this sense, that when the Federal Government spends too much money and is too intrusive and takes too much in taxes, all of those things destroy the jobs created by small businesses. So let's just be completely clear. We have heard stories about unemployment and these 'heartless Republicans.' The problem is that if you destroy businesses, you don't have any businesses, you don't have any jobs. And that is what we have been doing.”