Newt Gingrich Offers Game Plan for House Republicans

With Republicans about to take control of Congress, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich --who is considering running for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 --weighed in on what the new majority has to focus on.

Next week when House Republicans are sworn in as a new majority, they will have a greater opportunity to enact real change than any House majority since the Democrats took over in 1930, insisted Gingrich in an e-mail sent out to supporters on Wednesday. The American people know we are at both a values and performance crossroads.

This is not 1995, when the economy was strong, unemployment was relatively low, and we were not at war. It is a very different era with a very different set of challenges, Gingrich continued. The great opportunities today are to reassert classic American values and to develop a clear alternative to Obamaism.

Gingrich insisted that the House Republicans needed to focus on job creation, repealing new federal health-care laws and streamlining government.

Jobs should be the top priority because the first step to balancing the budget is moving from 9.8 percent unemployment back to the norm of the late-1990s, when I was speaker, of 4 percent, wrote Gingrich. Getting this 5.8 percent of workers (about 9 million Americans) off unemployment, Food Stamps and Medicaid, and back to work, earning paychecks and paying taxes, will shrink projected deficits dramatically.