W. Todd Akin

You get into this whole thing, and if you looked at what we have talked about tonight, you kind of start tearing your hair out and wanting to go buy some real estate on a desert island somewhere to get away from this huge problem. But…

It is a treat to be able to join my colleagues here this evening and to consider this great discussion and debate that is taking place over the past months, but particularly during this week as we approach the question about what are we…

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…

What you are seeing is a very serious attempt to get into reducing the size of the government. I mean, we are stepping on all kinds of political toes just to say, hey, it may be a nice program, but we're in trouble. I was asked by a…

Now you're getting to the second point. You're already ahead of them. The first point is, if you want to kill jobs, take the money away from the owners of small businesses. You could say, Hey, that guy's making over 250,000, obviously…

It's just like I'm stepping back in time to that Main Street in St. Charles, because you're bringing up that fifth point that they always talked about. It is sort of an ironic thing, because you've got Bernanke at the Federal level. The…

Well, now the question is, if the banker is a businessman and he's taking risks and he wants to make a loan and when he makes a loan he gets some interest, and as long as the loan's good, then he makes money that way as a banker; now, if…

In other words, I think your point is, Paul, that in our debate this week, first of all, almost all of the discussion is centered right over in this--it looks like Campbell's tomato soup on my chart here--it's in this section, and it's…

And so if you got taxed a whole, whole lot, are you going to put money into new equipment and expanding your clinic, or is it going to have to go to pay your taxes?

Particularly in manufacturing, if you do that too much in manufacturing, it makes it so expensive to make something in this country, the guy who owns the business says, Hey, I've got an idea. I'll take this machine that makes good product…

One of the things we always used to say, and to me, at least, it paints kind of a picture... we're passing them this tremendous debt. And we're the first generation that's really passing a worse America off to our kids than what we had…

Let's take a look at this problem because you've got all these entitlements. And this represents all the money that comes in in a year. Then things here are beyond. And yet we're thinking that you've got to do defense and you've got to…

But it may be that the people who were not--maybe people in their thirties or forties, you put a different kind of program together and may give them some alternatives: Choose this, this, or this. Those are the kinds of ideas we've got to…

Congratulations. You look good up in the Chair there. We are going to have a chance to talk for just a few minutes about an interesting topic. It is something on the minds of Americans everywhere, and that is about jobs, about the deficit…

So what happened--let me see if I understand this. The sales tax holiday was not a total cutting of all the sales tax; it just reduced it much lower.

Now, the idea of cutting taxes in a recession and cutting Federal spending is not new. JFK understood that principle. He cut taxes when he was President during a recession and put us back on a good economic footing. Ronald Reagan had the…

It is a treat to be able to join you and my colleagues today, and at the beginning of a new year, take on a subject that we have been aware of and increasingly conscious of, the problems relative to our economy, to jobs, but particularly…

This is so important because down here in Washington, DC, there are really two very different schools of thought on this; aren't there? There are some people, and I think they are people probably who come from your background as executives…

I appreciate your thoughts and particularly the direction that you're taking, because my argument would be the problem that we've pointed out with overspending cannot be solved with increasing taxes, and I'd like to talk about that for a…

The point of the matter is if you don't have national security, you don't have any other kind of security.

The Federal Government is spending a whole lot more than we take in. So we've got to deal with that problem. We've been talking about the fact that taxing isn't a good solution because if you raise taxes, you drive your revenues down. It…

What you are saying is most businessmen, if you tell them we are having trouble with overspending so what we are going to do is spend some more, they are going to laugh you out of the shop; is that basically what it boils down to?

In a way, I think you've really framed things. I appreciate your perspective because you're getting a little bit off at a distance and saying look, there's two choices and the two parties really are very, very different in this. One seems…

Oh, boy. Well, we have another gentleman here, coming a little farther from the west, Congressman Bishop, who is joining us. He is also a guy who has had some experience in the business world, and also as a teacher and a leader here on the…

As I recall, gentleman, at that time, weren't there people who said that income tax could possibly get as high as 5 percent and they were laughed off the floor of the Congress, that income taxes could get as high as 5 percent? Am I right…