Issue Position: Economic Recovery and Job Creation

Issue Position

My main policy priority is to ensure that America regains its position as a global economic leader and that its ability to create quality, sustainable jobs while fueling long-term growth is restored. We are paying the price for years of reckless and unsustainable deficit spending while shortsighted and irresponsible fiscal and tax policy has directed a disproportionate amount to a few super-wealthy while the share of our nation's economic wealth to the middle class is lower now than it has been in the last 50 years. Americans and Tennesseans are working longer hours, enjoying less discretionary spending options, changing jobs more often than ever in a volatile economy, seeing their family time shrunk as more households than ever must rely on two full-time wage-earners to simply stay afloat and enjoying less job security than at nearly any other time in our nation's history.

A war that was initially sold to the American public as one to root out weapons of mass destruction and one that would likely incur "shock and awe" and would be over in anywhere between 100 to 300 days has now moved into its seventh year with a staggering accompanying price tag of now nearly $1 trillion US dollars. While I certainly believe that democracy can and should take root around the world I also want to be sure that when the discussion comes around to our efforts as a nation to build needed infrastructure, schools, and other necessary community facilities to promote prosperity internationally, states like my State of Tennessee and my District 7 also get their fair share. I supported what many economists saw was a necessary stimulus to our national economy to help jump-start it. However, our long-term growth as a nation and sustainable prosperity must not be built on continuous deficit spending but upon a rock-solid foundation. This means we must again do the types of things that made our nation an economic giant and a revered engine of capitalism around the globe.

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