During a keynote address Monday at the 3rd Annual Financial Advisor Retirement Symposium, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush described four actions the U.S. should take to restore stronger economic growth.

Bush told approximately 300 attendees at the conference in Weston, Fla., that the country needs to create a "patriotic energy security strategy," implement a pro-growth immigration policy, reduce regulation and transform its educational system. The conference is sponsored by Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines.

Instead of spending $300 billion net on oil imports with countries that hate us and propping up their dictatorships, the United States should end its "de facto policy to prohibit the exploitation of its own resources," he said. Instead, energy policies that increased use of natural gas could "create billions of dollars of investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs in our own country," he said.

The greatest single innovation in the last decade has been the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to extract natural gas, Bush said. The technology, known as "fracking," uses a mixture of water and chemicals to release natural gas trapped in shale. However, environmentalists and residents in many states say the method has led to water pollution and many companies aren't providing enough information about the chemical they use in the process.

Bush said the U.S. once was spending billions of dollars to import liquefied natural gas, but now the country has more than 100 years of supply and the problem is that the explosion in supply has created a natural gas price too low to allow for continued investment.

Still, the innovation in extracting gas means the United States has a huge source of its own energy, he said. "This is a spectacular occurrence. This should be a time when we pause and celebrate American ingenuity," he said.

"If we created a strategy around natural gas alone we could cut in half the $300 billion in imports that come into our country, and that's 1 percent of GDP right there," he said.

Bush also advocates opening the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve in a smart way to develop known oil and gas resources. The U.S. should also expand permits in the Gulf of Mexico and federal lands, he added, and President Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline. A realistic energy strategy also would end ethanol subsidies, which create higher food prices, he said.

A new U.S. immigration policy was also something Bush stressed. "If you had to pick the one thing that we have apart from energy that other countries desire it's the ability to absorb people who embrace our values in return for the pursuit of their dreams," he said.

If the U.S. is going to grow at 4% a year for the next 10 years, it needs to create an immigration strategy that is true to its heritage and lures aspirational, hard-working people, he continued, and such a policy begins by securing our border with straightforward rules about who gets in and who doesn't. He supports an e-verify system so employers would know when they were hiring someone illegally and would sanction companies that hired illegal workers. An immigration policy should focus on the 20% of people who come to the U.S. legally but stay beyond the length of their visas and should include a guest worker program, he added.

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