Reason Magazine: Nick Gillespie- U.S. Senator Tom Coburn: 'How Both Parties Bankrupted America'

Source:Reason Magazine- U.S. Senator Tom Coburn (Republican, Oklahoma) talking to Reason Magazine about his book The Debt Bomb.

"Both parties have equally participated in abandoning the limited role of the federal government," says Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), whose new book, The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting Our Economy, argues that Republicans and Democrats together have brought the U.S. to the brink of fiscal calamity.

First elected to the house in 1994 as part of the "Republican Revolution," Coburn is a staunch fiscal and social conservative, who's been outspokenly critical of members of his own party for compromising their principles out of political expedience. Coburn has publicly taken former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to task for lacking leadership and resolve during his battles with the Clinton White House to cut spending in the mid-90s.

Coburn, who's known in the senate as "Dr. No" for vetoing almost all new spending initiatives, says the federal budget is rife with "waste, fraud, and duplication." In 2006, Coburn co-sponsored legislation that created USASpending.gov, which makes publicly accessible a list of all recipients of government funds. In 2010, Coburn was instrumental in getting the Government Accountability Office to undertake researching and documenting wasteful government programs.

A supporter of a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, Coburn was a co-author of the Partial-Birth Abortion Act of 2003, and he supported a 1996 law requiring that "V-chips" be placed in all television sets to allow parents to block programming deemed unsuitable. In 1997, Coburn criticized NBC for airing the Holocaust-film "Schindler's List" on the grounds that it included "vile language, full-frontal nudity and irresponsible sexual activity." NBC characterized Coburn's views as "frightening."

ReasonTV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Sen. Coburn to discuss wasteful spending, cutting entitlements, the need for free-market health care, and whether he's losing faith in the government's ability to enforce values." 

From Reason Magazine 

If people want to know my political affiliation: yes, I'm a Democrat, but I'm at best an Independent Democrat. And what I mean by that is I'm not a politician, I'm not a member of the Democratic National Committee, I'm not even a Democratic politico who even works for Democratic politicians or Democratic political activists. I don't even have a Democratic leaning radio or TV talk show who talks about why it's great to be a Democrat and why the Republican Party sucks. I vote for Democrats who believe in progress and who are better than their Republican opponents. 

My point here is when I hear Senator Tom Coburn (Republican, Oklahoma) whose a member of the Senate Finance Committee, whose been in Congress for almost 18 years now, whose served in both the House and Senate, say that both Republicans and Democrats are equally responsible debt and deficits situation, I mostly agree with him. 

Democrats tell their voters that they can have all sorts of government services and new government services for free. Or they'll say that since interest rates are now low, we can just borrow all the money to pay for those government services. 

Republicans today will flat out tell you that deficits and debt doesn't matter. Or that's what they were saying when George W. Bush was President and they had complete control of Congress in the 2000s. Now that there's a Democratic President, their fiscal talking points have changed dramatically. Except they don't have any real plan to actually get the budget deficit under control and at the very least get the economy growing faster than the national debt, at least. 

So yes, I agree with Senator Coburn that Democrats and Republicans are both at fault when it comes to our national debt and budget deficit. I just think that they're guilty for different reasons. Neither party wants to take on their base and say: "We can no longer afford that, or we're going to have to cut it, or make you pay more for it."