CENTRE — Congressman Mike Rogers was in town recently. After meeting and dining with local residents, Rogers stopped by The Post to talk about what he's hearing from voters as he makes his way through District Three.

“Obviously jobs is the number one issue but people everywhere I go are worried about the debt,” Rogers said. “People are so frustrated and want to know why we can't stop the spending.”

Rogers said the answer to that question is an easy one, one that voters know deep-down, but sometimes forget about.

“What I spent a lot of time at each of these town halls doing is explaining that we have a divided government right now, and apparently that's what the people wanted because they gave the House to the Republican party and the Senate to the Democratic party,” he said. “I was also trying to remind people that, even though it's pretty ugly in Washington now – and people are disgusted – it's always been that way.”

Rogers concedes that many believe the current level of division is unprecedented. But he says history tells Americans of another time when there was plenty of back-and-forth in the nation's capital.

“Go back to our Founding Fathers, when they were hammering out the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, that was worse by many magnitudes than what's happening now,” he said.

Rogers said he understands the need to control spending, and he is passing along his concerns as he travels across the district.

“If we don't start getting our deficit spending under control we'll never be able to pay down on the debt,” Rogers said. “Right now, the debt is 40 percent of what we spend. We've got to get the deficit eliminated and then we can take the surplus that we will hopefully have and put it towards the debt – that $14.5 trillion balance.”

Rogers said there has been some confusion about his party's stance on extending the payroll tax deduction that President Obama successfully sought last year and hopes to extend when it expires in 2012.

“I don't think our party is going to take a position against that,” Rogers said. “We view it as a tax cut and favor keeping it the way it is. But some other things have to be done to stimulate to job creation.”

Rogers said the number one thing Congress must do to create jobs in America is “get the regulators off our local banks”.

“After 2008 and the crash on Wall Street, the FDIC and OCC started heavily regulating every bank in the country,” Rogers said. “They didn't cause the crash, Wall Street did."

He said moving bank regulators where they really belong will be good for job creation, nationwide.

“Seventy-five percent of the jobs in America come from small businesses,” Rogers said. “And they are having a nightmare right now with their local banks trying to borrow money to expand their businesses because of all these regulators.”