W. Todd Akin: “You get into this whole thing, and if you looked at what we have talked about tonight, you kind of start tearing your…”

“You get into this whole thing, and if you looked at what we have talked about tonight, you kind of start tearing your hair out and wanting to go buy some real estate on a desert island somewhere to get away from this huge problem. But there are solutions to this. But you have to realize where the solutions are. The first thing is you have to realize that we're not going to deal with the economic problems of our country until we can reduce the rate and the number of entitlements we've got. Now, somebody could object and say, Wait just a minute Congressman Akin, because couldn't you deal with these entitlements if you just got your taxes up higher? If you could get these taxes here that are running 18 percent, if we could double that, why don't we make it a 40 percent tax rate? Oh, that would take care of this, at least for a while. Let the entitlements grow and tax everybody at 40 percent. The problem is it doesn't work. And I think that's something that we ought to warn people about here.”