Marcy Kaptur: “Too often, Congress and Washington deal with symptoms, not underlying causes. And that's what's going on with this…”

“Too often, Congress and Washington deal with symptoms, not underlying causes. And that's what's going on with this current debate about the debt limit. It's kind of like you have an ill patient that has a fever, and you say, well, they're sick so throw some water on the patient and their fever will go down. But you never deal with the underlying infection, the underlying cause that is tripping the fever in the first place. Let me put a little map on the table here this morning, to look at the nature of current economic challenge. When you have 14 million Americans out of work, and up to 24 million who are working part-time that want to work full-time or others who have completely dropped out of the workforce, none of them are earning a full check. Money is not being taken out of that check to pay their social insurance for Social Security, and they're not going to pay their regular income taxes either. And so the government falls short on revenues. It's quite clear. We have a jobs problem. That's the causal problem that underlies the deficit problem that America faces. Now, if you look just at this year alone, 2011, so far this year the government's taken in over a trillion dollars--$1.2 trillion in revenue. That's not bad for an economy that's just limping along. But we've spent $1.8 trillion. So we've spent already this year over $600 billion that we didn't have. We've had to borrow that money. That borrowing gets added to the long-term deficit.…”