Former lawmaker blasts Congress: America doesn’t trust you
Former budget hawk Sen. Tom Coburn visited some of his old colleagues on Wednesday to talk about something with which he’s very familiar: How wasteful congressional spending is killing the country.
Coburn, famous for the annual government waste reports he produced in Congress, joined the head of the Government Accountability Office to talk about the massive amount of money currently being wasted on duplicative federal programs.
More on that here: Common sense could save taxpayers billions
“In 2015 I spent my time in 21 different states,” Coburn said during his opening remarks. “And America doesn’t trust you anymore. That’s the truth. Because they don’t see the actions coming out of Congress that should be coming out.”
The retired lawmaker went on to note that a huge part of the problem is Congress’s failure to force federal agencies to comply with the recommendations of GAO reports which routinely unveil ways that boneheaded bureaucrats are wasting tax dollars.
“You’ve lost their confidence,” he said. “And that’s not one party, that’s both. And so when you have hundreds of billions of dollars that could be saved and aren’t, and they know it. You know, they actually read your reports. People online, and then they use social media, pass it around.”
Coburn noted that median family incomes, stifled by “too much government” and “too intrusive government,” haven’t budged since 1988.
The lawmaker added that Congress’s failures to shrink the size of government are going to cause the stagnation to continue.
“The unfunded liabilities of this country, with its debt, is $142 trillion,” he said. “That’s $1 million per family, or that’s $1 million per taxpayer. Nobody knows what a trillion is but when you’re telling a young family with small kids, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s the debt burden that’s coming to you over the next 25 years, you better be prepared for it.’”
Coburn told the lawmakers that it’s time to stop worrying about offending different groups of voters and get busy correcting economic problems.
“Here’s what I’ve discovered, all this waste, all this duplication, all this fraud has a constituency. And so a lot of people don’t want to take a vote to eliminate it because it will offend a group of voters or a group of contributors.”
“I think you ought to offend them all,” Coburn said.
Coburn is currently working with an organization calling for a Convention of the States to force Congress to balance the budget. Learn more here.
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