Republican Senate candidate Brad Jones in his own words

Unemployment and energy independence, which go hand-in-hand. We need to embark on a 10-year plan to become energy independent. It is critical to both our economy and national defense. To do so, we must turn our oil and gas giants loose to recover our massive known oil and gas reserves in a clean manner and allow them to begin the search for additional deposits to be recovered when needed. At the same time, we must turn additional private enterprise loose to build additional oil refineries throughout the country and link them together with a pipeline grid so as to prevent future spot shortages due to weather, equipment downtime, etc. Finally, it should also be a part of this 10-year plan to construct sufficient nuclear power plants to replace most of our current coal-fired plants. All of this will lead to millions of jobs directly related to energy independence and additional untold numbers of jobs in support of the thrust for energy independence.

See the answer, above. The U.S. government cannot create jobs; private enterprise and individuals must create jobs and wealth. The best thing the U.S. government can do to enable private enterprise to do its thing is get out of their way. Our current economic malaise is directly due to unnecessary and misguided government intrusion in areas where they shouldn't be involved and have no idea of the damage they are doing. We need to return to a government of common-sense individuals, not career politicians who have never really worked.

We must reduce spending, freeze the federal budget and begin decreasing it annually, and rid our nation of unconstitutional and unnecessary federal agencies such as the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), just to name a few for starters. The IRS can be 95% removed once the 16th Amendment (Federal Income Tax) has been repealed and replaced by a simpler method of taxation such as a Consumption or Flat Tax, either of which will be fairer to one and all rather than the manipulative, social-engineering monster (i.e., Tax Code) we now have in place.