W. Todd Akin: “Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate a moment here to get our charts lined up and to talk about a subject that…”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I appreciate a moment here to get our charts lined up and to talk about a subject that we have been talking about for some time but which is very much on the minds and hearts of people in America, and that is the situation of jobs, the economy, and the condition of our solvency as a nation, and the challenges to leadership and the way forward. Now in order to try to get a perspective on where we are, it's helpful to look back a little bit and to see where we have come from. Those of us perhaps who have been paying a little attention to what has been going on over the last couple of years, there have been some changes, changes of a recession that has come, changes in terms of unemployment, people having trouble making their mortgage payments, people having trouble keeping or getting jobs, and also a sense that the economy is not all that it should be. These things didn't happen just by accident. They were a result to a large degree of government policy.”