W. Todd Akin

It sounds like the people from Georgia got their nickel's worth out of their Congressman. Thirty-one separate meetings?

The trouble is really the government can't stimulate the economy. The whole assumption is silly, because all the government does is takes money and spend it. But if you hire a government employee, does that create a job? The answer is no…

Now wait a minute. Let's get this straight. This is a little confusing. A panel of, more or less, experts is put together. They're asked to come up with a recommendation. They come up with a recommendation, and the administration says…

I very much appreciate your starting off on a very sobering kind of note because I wanted to get to that question about, well, maybe budgets sound boring, but what does it mean? And I think you put that in graphic terms. You are saying…

This doesn't say Rush Limbaugh here. This says: The New York Times. This is the New York Times. Not exactly a conservative newspaper. September 11, 2003, the headline is: The Bush administration today recommended the most significant…

This is Congressman Hoyer. And now we don't have a budget, and he is one of the leaders. Here we have the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, and he says, ``If you can't budget, you can't govern.'' Well, that's what they are…

Unusual. And what are the implications of all of this? You know, the Congress didn't pass a budget, but the administration sent us a budget. This is kind of a complicated looking chart. But this isn't very complicated in a lot of ways…

Well, that's convenient, because then anything that doesn't work you can continue to blame BP. The problem is, there's all this oil all over the place, that little detail. You know, I agree with you entirely. BP was wrong. What I'm not…

if you're a family and you make $100 a week and your credit card bill is $100 a week, you're in trouble. That's what you're saying. In fact, you're more than in trouble.

I think that Congress has tended--our job is to spend money. That's what Congress is designed to do. Of course we do too good a job of it. And the question is we have been overspending for a long time. We overspent when President Bush, we…

Gentleman, you have illustrated the very point that I was trying to make. You instinctively think in terms of fixing the problem, not fixing blame. And you're a member of the Armed Services Committee, along with myself, and I don't know if…

Let's get this straight. So what we're going to do is, we've got a hole in the ocean that's pouring out this really sticky, yucky oil. I mean, we're counting on BP to clog that up. We don't really have that good of a solution on the…

You know, the thing that strikes me is most people that I know--I am an engineer. Engineers are kind of geeks anyway, but we have such a predictable sort of thought pattern, and that is, now we've got this great big hole that we've just…

I think it was 140,000 direct jobs. These are not the barbers and the restaurateurs and stuff. This is just the hard jobs that it's going to kill.

So did this plan, first of all, stop the oil that's coming out of the floor of the ocean?

You know, the funny thing is that we need to learn something from history, and the Democrats have got something they could learn from. It's Henry Morgenthau. He was the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR. They had a recession, and by his…

Yes, your whole idea about little Lord Keynes and his idea about spending one's way into prosperity strikes me about like grabbing your boot loops and trying to fly around the room, you know?

I think he also promised that nobody making less than $250,000 would be taxed, right? Yet, if you flip on a light switch, you are going to get taxed. How do you square those?

This then resulted in Republicans in the House passing a bill. Where's it go then? We sent it to the Senate. What happened in the Senate? You needed 60 votes to pass it. And so what happened? The Democrats killed this in the Senate, just…

We're going to talk about an interesting subject here this evening, and one that might seem a little boring to start with but actually has tremendous ramifications, and that is the question and the subject of budgeting. Now, budgets are…

You're a pilot. I think we used this analogy the other day on the floor, because I remember as a kid the biplanes and the early days of flight. My science teacher flew glider planes and designed some of the glider planes that were used in…

I thought it would be appropriate to talk about what these bars mean. It's pretty straightforward. These were Republican years under Bush, and this shows the deficit. We're not proud of this deficit. Shouldn't be any. The worst year under…

Yes. And that's one of the factors that totally destroys jobs--and that is the uncertainty factor. So if you want to ruin jobs, raise taxes a whole lot, create a lot of uncertainty, and then spend way beyond your means. That's what we're…

And that tradition very much reflected the mindset of my parents' generation, the people that fought World War II. My father is 89 and was with Patton in the Army. But there was a general way of thinking in that generation. And the mindset…

I really appreciate you mentioning Star Parker. She is really a fun person. She has a great personality, is a lot of fun. She's cute, and she is very articulate. And she has an amazing story about how the government tried to trap her into…