The Year Ahead

The second session of the 113th Congress officially convened this past week. And while it may be a new year, I intend to continue finding commonsense solutions to the problems facing our nation using Missouri values as my guiding principles. That starts with our nation's debt and unemployment.

We've begun to make progress on the debt and deficit. Since becoming the majority in the House, we have cut $165 billion in spending. Still, we need further meaningful and serious changes to the spending status quo. Washington must start asking the question: is this program important enough to continue borrowing $17 trillion from China and other nations and loading that debt on future generations?

That's why I have introduced the IMAGE Act to save taxpayer dollars by eliminating dozens of programs across the Federal government that are duplicative or overlapping.

Additionally, on Friday we learned that job creation for December was the lowest in nearly three years – 74,000 jobs added, instead of the 200,000 economists expected. While we always want to see positive job growth, the average monthly job gains in 2013 were nearly identical to those of 2012. In other words, we still need a game changer.

The House passed the SKILLS Act ten months ago to reform our expansive workforce development programs and help the nearly 20 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed find a job. The Senate should join us.

I will continue to work with my colleagues to right our economic ship and get the millions of Americans seeking jobs back to work.