W. Todd Akin

I would like to slow you down just a minute because you are smart in this stuff, and what you're saying is historically accurate. But I would like to take that apart, slow it down just a little bit so people can see the logic of why this…

Now, a year and a couple of months later, you're a regular economic genius because you saw that it wasn't going to work. You understood the principle of why it wouldn't work. They went ahead on a one-party rule, without any Republican…

What amazes me, Congressman, is if you looked out at the average guy in America that runs a family, okay, there's all these families all over the place, all over America. How many of them would be dumb enough to think when they're in hard…

You know, sometimes we use words, and you're talking about being heartbroken because you can connect the policy with how it's going to hurt people.

It's a treat to join you and my colleagues once again this evening and talk about a subject that has been troublesome to all of us for some number of months now, that is the state of the economy, the problem with unemployment, and the…

The true engine of job creation in this country will always be America's businesses, but government can create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand and hire new workers. This statement is completely true. Unlike a lot of…

And you say people are losing jobs. Sometimes I think it's helpful to put a picture in your mind. When I think about losing jobs-- and maybe this is one of my worst fears--I picture a house and a family that's not in the house and a big…

You know, the thing that was interesting to me, about December of last year there was a guy who is one cool businessman, he is the CEO of Emerson Electric--which is not a big household name to a lot of people, but Emerson is a gigantic…

The thing that got me was, think of the logic: they have to come up with a bill and they wanted to come underneath $1 trillion. So how do they do it? Well, what they do is they say we're going to tax people over 10 years, but we're really…

Well, gentleman, you had some of those bills, and hats off to you because in spite of the fact that the President said we didn't have any bills, then later on he claimed that he had read all of our bills, which seems a little hard to…

Okay, so it seems to me we have got a couple of different issues here that you brought up. The first question is, does it even make sense for us to do the ``what if'' question? If somebody does this, this, and this, well, we are not going…

Assurance to our enemies. But the second thing was the idea that somehow we are going to move toward this world without nukes, and the way we are going to do it is to reduce not only our number of nuclear weapons but reduce our development…

So we are reducing weapons, but these other nations are going to want to increase, so that doesn't really compute with the logic of this thing. Now let's go to the next class of nations, third-world nations, maybe some of them that are…

So the bottom line should be about U.S. security. I mean, that's what we should be focused on. Yet how does it get us more security if we reduce our nuclear capabilities and other nations than become encouraged to increase theirs?

So there is a fundamental disconnect in the logic here somewhere. Understand that it's all for glorious and super ends and supposed to be a good deal and all, but how does it specifically help us and how does it increase U.S. security…

That is really, really a frightening prospect. The thing that I find interesting about this, what we are doing is we are reducing our defense spending. Here is a chart of the budget that would reduce our national defense spending. These…

Well, I thank you, gentleman. I'd like to just pick up on a couple of the themes that you've mentioned. You've used this phrase frequently. I don't know if you coined it, but I think of it as something that you authored. I guess you could…

You know, I thought it was on the front page of the paper today, the idea that scud missiles had been given, I think it was, from Iran to Hezbollah or something like that.

We are talking about two different things that have been going on in the news. The first is the question of the Nuclear Posture Review, or the NPR, which is an overall document released by the U.S. Government, talking about what we're…

Well, I really appreciate your perspective, gentleman, and particularly the little historic lesson of the bag of nails. It seems to me sometimes our leadership is getting so grandiose and it's saying what we're going to do is provide a…

Well, the thing that strikes me about this whole situation is, first of all, if you want to deal with the nuclear proliferation thing, that's one thing, but to connect it to missile defense seems to be the height of stupidity, just really…

So let me just recap what you're saying. If you don't have the industrial base to produce the kinds of missiles that we need for missile defense, the way that that can work is, one, you're not going to have the rocket scientists. In other…

The history of missile defense goes back quite a ways. It goes back to Ronald Reagan, who proposed the whole idea of missile defense; and people, liberals, tried to make fun of it. They said it was Star Wars, and it will never work, and it…

But shouldn't the focus be on U.S. security? Shouldn't that be the question? And are we going the wrong way?

From Syria to Hezbollah, scud missiles. So there was a weapons transfer to a group that is a pretty known terrorist group. They're not all part of this deal. So even if you could trust Russia, which I don't and which we have no historic…