W. Todd Akin: “So what you're saying is, one of the things that is affecting this is just the condition of our economy. And I was…”

“So what you're saying is, one of the things that is affecting this is just the condition of our economy. And I was planning to get into this a little bit with you. When we started, I wanted to talk and work in the problem of unemployment and how do we deal with the level of unemployment in our economy today. We've got the government saying it's 9-point-something percent unemployment. And that's an optimistic number, because if you've been unemployed more than a year, they drop your name off the list. You may still be looking for a job. So the real level of unemployment people are saying is well beyond 10 percent. So one of the ways you can--I guess this may be a backwards way of looking at it. What are the things that are creating that unemployment? And I went to, believe it or not, to a Main Street in my district, and I got a whole bunch of businesses there and I said, Now, what is it that's causing this unemployment? And I asked all these different people, and I was encouraged because they told me the very same things that my common sense told me and everybody else is saying. Anybody who has run a business knows what makes the unemployment. The first thing is when you start taxing the owners of small businesses heavily, they can't put money back into their business because they're busy paying taxes.”