Bachmann: Congress Needs Business Sense

In a speech Friday, Rep. Bachmann touted her business acumen and proposed members of Congress run a business before running for office.

In a speech to attendees of Americans for Prosperity’s ‘Defending the American Dream’ summit on Friday, Tea Party leader Rep. Michele Bachmann touted her business experience and proposed that every member of Congress should have run a business for at least three years before being eligible for election.

“I’m here to say that every person, before you run for Congress, you have to run a business for three years,” Bachmann told the crowd, to wild applause.

Bachmann, who owns a mental health care practice in Stillwater, Minnesota, said that business owners better understand how to create jobs:

My husband and I also started a business. We’re not a big deal. But we did what every American usually does to start a business. We got our capital together, we drew a little bit of money out of our account. We started our business –we’ve got two locations for our one business, fifty employees, we sign both sides of the check. We get it!

Strikingly, Bachmann also has an ownership stake in a family farm, which has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in government subsidies.

Bachmann’s speech also involved a political swipe at Michele Obama’s work on combating obesity:

In less than twelve months time, President Obama increased spending… by a whopping twenty percent. Twenty percent in less than one year’s time. And the First Lady is focusing on morbid obesity? … Let’s have her husband focus on the morbid obesity here in the federal budget!

Much of Bachmann’s speech reflected her frustration with the ongoing economic troubles in the United States. But she had particular disdain for the government’s deficit and debt projections, and why this might lead to an ‘international currency’:

With all due respect, President Obama has foolishly spent us into a debtors’ prison. So much so that the Chinese dumped about $34 billion of our debt, and they’ve been continuing to lecture us about getting our financial house in order.

If you have noticed, if you read the Financial Times or whatever publication is out there, over and over again, between China, Russia and other nations, they’re now calling for a new international currency and a new international means of exchange. This is not a freak story, this is reality.

Bachmann was clearly held in high esteem by the attendees of the conference. Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips introduced her as, along with Sarah Palin, one of the potential ‘next Ronald Reagans’.

There’s been much discussion about who the next Ronald Reagan might be. It’s always an interesting discussion… [Americans for Prosperity New Jersey State Director] Steve Lonegan said, “I believe that the next Ronald Reagan is a conservative woman,” … a leader from Congress is with us tonight, and that’s Michele Bachmann.

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