U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson's recent legislative update to the Marietta Rotary Club could be summarized in three words: recession, water and war.

"I went through the recessions of '68, '74, '80-'81 and '90-'92 and they were all bad, but they were nothing like this one," he began. "It's been a difficult recession and it will take a while for us to pull ourselves out of it. But what will pull us out is what has always pulled America out. That is free enterprise, private business and risk capital being invested and employees being hired so we can go back to work as a country."

If we can reduce unemployment, now at 9.5 percent, to 5 percent, we will see home sales pick up, home values rise, the recovery of the stock market and the overall economy.

"But you're not going to get jobs coming back until we have a predictable regulatory environment and a predictable tax environment in this country," Isakson said to applause from the crowd of business people.

The uncertainty of regulation and taxes keep capital in the bank and when capital stays in the bank, people don't go to work, he said. There's more capital in the bank today than in the history of this country.

"But if you talk to boards and CEOs about why they are not investing, they'll tell you it's because they don't know what's going to happen with regulation and they don't know what the tax consequences are going to be of what they do," Isakson said.

Top priority should go to making regulation and tax policy predictable, he argued.

"OSHA regulation is important to ensure you have a safe workplace and you need an FDIC to insure that banking is run fairly, but you don t need for them to become the people that make the business decisions and run the businesses that they regulate," the senator declared. "They should create an environment for those businesses so they can compete fairly, and so that if one of them competes unfairly, there are consequences. But what has been happening too much in Washington is that it has gone too much down the regulatory route."

As an example, he cited the changes coming thanks to the health-care reform bill pushed through by Obama, which he said are ominous.

"The taxes to support the bill take effect this year but it doesn't take effect policy-wise till 2014," he said. "There are 762 references in the bill to boards to be created to carry out the rules and regulations created in the bill. And that's where you run into great difficulty and great uncertainty.

"We need to empower business to invest capital and take risks," not be snared in regulations, he reminded.

And what about the national budget?

"The worst way to solve the deficit problem is to raise taxes," he warned. "The best way is to solve the spending problem. Then if you need revenue down the line, you can talk about doing something. We don't have a revenue problem in Washington, we have a spending problem."

Isakson said he has been "an equal opportunity person on spending. I voted against two of President Bush's budget bills and I voted against one last year (Obama's) because both had too much spending too much debt."

We're running a $1.6 trillion deficit, which is unsustainable," he said. And the national debt has now exploded to $13 trillion.

Isakson told the group about a speech earlier in the week in Albany at which he was asked by a farmer how much a trillion is.

"I tried as hard as I could to explain it, but I just couldn't," he said. "I was stumped."

When he got back home in east Cobb he explained his problem to his wife, Diane, who suggested he calculate how many years have to by for a trillion seconds to go by.

"So I multiplied 60 (seconds) times 60 (minutes) times 24 (hours) times 365 (days), and then divided it into one trillion," Isakson said.

"The answer is that it would take 31,709 years to go by to equal one trillion. And we're talking about $13 trillion in debt." "We're on a cataclysmic course toward runaway inflation and devaluation of hard assets," he warned. "We've got time to fix it, but people in D.C. need to understand that unless we get our arms around it, there is nothing we're going to be able to do to stop that runaway train. If we can keep regulation and tax policy where it's unpredictable when you do business, we're going to continue to have the high unemployment you see today."

As for water, the senator thinks the 20-year water wars between Georgia, Florida and Alabama are near a settlement.

"I think we're in reach of a favorable ruling from the courts on that," he said. And as for war, he thinks Gen. Petraeus will soon have a grip on the War in Afghanistan.

"To leave without victory would restore a home base for terror, and would restore the Taliban to power," he said. "They are evil people and would have a free hand in that region."

"Terrorism is the ultimate battle between good and evil. And as difficult as it is to experience the losses that we have in Afghanistan, to turn our backs and allow terrorism to claim victory would be a decision the US would regret for a long, long time."

Well put, senator.

Bill Kinney is associate editor of the Marietta Daily Journal.