Tom Coburn Accuses People of "Sucking Off" Government Programs, While Trying To Re-Privatize One Of The Most Wasteful
Multimillionaire Sen. Tom Coburn [net worth between $1M and $4.6M ] really has a lot of damned nerve talking about “government fat”, since his own plan, released this week, would privatize student loans for 15 million college students — you know, the very wasteful and expensive thing we successfully stopped last year? Instead, he wants to put it back in the greedy hands of campaign contributors – and even fewer students will get the loans they need. “Sucking off the programs”? Look in a mirror, fat cat: This week, the so-called Gang of Six — composed of Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) [worth less than $446K ], [multimillionaire] Mark Warner (D-VA) [net work between $65-284M ], Dick Durbin (D-IL) [net worth $258,038 to $1,700,998 ], Mike Crapo (R-ID) [net worth - $245,427 to $988,566 ], and [millionaire] Kent Conrad (D-ND) [net worth $1,456,035 to $3,376,000 ] — released the outline of a plan that would reduce deficits by about $3.7 trillion over the next 10 years, with about $3 trillion of that coming from spending cuts. The plan closely mirrors that of the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission. The plan includes many odious measures, including changes to Social Security that would cut benefits by $1,300 per year. It would institute caps on discretionary spending through 2015, and lays out the amount by which individual agencies need to reduce their budgets (without identifying particular programs). But according to Coburn, it doesn’t really matter which programs get cut, because, as he told Al-Jazeera English, it’s only people who are “sucking off the program” that are going to feel any change: COBURN: The point is, where’s the efficiency in that? The actual service going to people isn’t going to decline, the people sucking off the program are going to be the ones that lose. *All net worth information from OpenSecrets. As I’ve stated previously, we sometimes forget that the agendas of the very wealthy members of Congress may not intersect with our own.
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on July 23, 2011. Filed under