Sen. Tom Coburn on Sequestration: 'The Crisis Is Made Up'
Senate leaders on budget issues, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), appeared on Fox News Sunday to discuss the $85 billion dollars in spending cuts set to kick in on March 1st. Coburn made it clear that he did not support sequestration as a policy.
“The crisis is made up, it's been created” he said. “I didn’t support the sequester because
that’s a stupid way to cut spending. And I didn’t support increasing the debt limit because there is no such thing as a debt limit in this country because we always raise it.”
Coburn said President Obama doesn’t recognize that the problem is “an excessive, bloated, big, federal government that’s highly inefficient and highly ineffective.”
As far as the dangers sequestration cuts may bring to defense and middle class Americans, Coburn said, “There’s easy ways to cut this money that the American people will not feel. What you hear is an outrage because nobody wants to cut spending. […] It will be somewhat painful, but not cutting spending is going to be disastrous for our country.”
McCaskill said she’s confused about the Republican position and it appears that Speaker John Boehner (R) doesn’t have any bill to put on the floor of the House that could pass in his caucus.
Wallace noted that the House has passed two measures to replace the sequester cuts with other spending cuts equal in size, but the Senate has not. McCaskill countered that those bills were from last year and have no effective law now. She said the Senate “will vote on something this week and it will be a balanced approached.”
