W. Todd Akin: “What you're talking about here is really unchartered water for us. What we saw that FDR did back in the Great Depression…”

“What you're talking about here is really unchartered water for us. What we saw that FDR did back in the Great Depression was spending a whole lot of money, and we still had a high unemployment rate. In fact, his top guy, his Secretary of the Treasury said, after 8 years, all we've done is get ourselves into debt. We've got the same level of unemployment. And so one of the things that we've been hearing to some degree is that the President has been claiming is the Republicans don't want to do anything. It is not that we don't want to do anything. It is that we don't want to do the wrong thing. We don't want to do something that historically has never worked. That is crazy. It didn't work for FDR. It was tried by the Japanese where they kept throwing more and more of their money at their economy. And the thing was just absolutely wallowed in the water, and the Japanese economy, for 10 years, was a mess. And yet you look at what is the right thing to do and it is a little bit of discipline, isn't it? It is the idea that the Federal Government should tighten their belt and stop spending so much, and they need to return the money back to the private sector to get it working again. And the ironic thing about this is that when that is done, the bottom line is that the government gets more money in tax revenues. So everybody does well when the economy is strong.”