Senator Bob Corker paid a visit to Smithville Wednesday, addressing a gathering on the first floor of the DeKalb County Courthouse and taking questions from the audience of invited guests.

In his remarks, Corker said that although the country is $19 trillion in debt, and that he considers the growing deficit to be the biggest problem the country is facing, he doesn’t expect either party’s presidential nominee to seriously address what could be an impending disaster.

"One of the things that won’t be discussed, unfortunately, is the deficit issue and the huge amount of indebtedness in our country,” the senator said. “Projections are that in ten years the country will be $29 trillion in debt. We have $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, where we’ve made commitments to people that we don’t have the money to honor. I think this is the number one threat to our country. Military leaders that you talk with will say Russia or China is a threat over time. ISIS is a threat. Certainly Iran getting a nuclear weapon is a threat. But the greatest threat to our nation is our own inability to deal with our fiscal issues. Yet, my guess is that during this campaign there will be zero discussion about that issue, which is disappointing.”

Corker, who is also chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States needs to restore its place as a world leader.

“We’ve had a lot of foreign policy decisions made by people on both sides of the aisle that have turned out to be mistakes, and that has caused a retrenchment to take place in many American’s minds relative to what the U.S. role in the world needs to be,” Corker shared. “A world without U.S. leadership is a world that I don't think that people here would want to live in. We don’t need to be the cops of the world but we do need to continue our leadership in the world. We cannot just focus within our borders. While we’re paying a lot of attention to this Presidential race, people around the world are doing the same thing even if they don’t agree with us on a number of things because they are aware of the tremendous difference that the United States makes in the world in espousing free enterprise and making sure the world moves more in that direction which has made our nation great. We also need to do what we can diplomatically to try and diffuse conflicts before they turn into a great problem.”

Corker’s visit was one stop on a four-week tour of 32 Tennessee counties.