Remarks in Jackson, Ohio

It's time to get America's economy moving again. Companies like Merillat and families across Ohio face challenges in their businesses and around the kitchen table. And obviously, energy prices are too high. We're losing jobs. Our housing market is on the decline. And the cost of everything is going up. And in the face of this, Washington is on vacation.

In the face of a severe energy crisis, the Congress decides to go on a five-week vacation. When I'm president of the United States, I will call the Congress back into session and tell them to act and not to leave town, to take their vacation or their pay raise until they address this energy crisis. And now is the time for action.

We need an all-of-the-above plan to address our energy crisis, with alternative energy, drilling, and nuclear power. That means drilling here, drilling now, in the United States of America and off the United States of American's coast.

Everybody knows that drilling is a very vital part of bridging our gap between our dependence on foreign oil, which is transferring $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much. And we have the -- we have the resources to be explored and exploited, and we could obtain some of the benefit of that within months.

My opponent, Senator Obama, opposes both storage and reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. He opposes offshore drilling immediately, and he's out of touch.

And we need to crack down on those who have abused our credit market and caused this housing decline. We need to take action to support American businesses so that we can stop jobs from going overseas and create more jobs here at home.

America has the second highest business rate in the entire world. It's any wonder that jobs are moving overseas. We're taxing them out of the country. Unfortunately, Senator Obama's plans would raise taxes on businesses even more. He's promised tax increases on income, tax increases on investment, tax increases on small businesses. That's exactly, exactly the wrong strategy. Raising taxes in a bad economy is about the worst thing you can do, because it'll kill even more jobs when what we need are policies that create jobs.

What we need today is an economic surge. Our surge has succeeded in Iraq militarily. Now we need an economic surge to keep jobs here at home and create new ones. We need to reduce the tax burden on businesses that choose to make their home in the United States of America. We need to open new markets to U.S. products. And we need to reduce the cost of healthcare. And we need to end the out of control spending in Washington that's putting our debt on the backs of our children.

Now's the time for action, and when I'm president, we are going to get it done.

I want to say again to the people here at Merillat, thank you for your hospitality. Thank you for your hard work. Thank you for your obvious dedication to safety. I'm very impressed by your industrial safety record and your teams that have made such an outstanding record possible. And obviously, Karen Strauss and John Lewis and the entire team here, thank you very much.