Tom Coburn: “The three babies I delivered this weekend owed $20,000 at the time I spanked their bottom to get them to start…”

“The three babies I delivered this weekend owed $20,000 at the time I spanked their bottom to get them to start breathing. That is a heck of a legacy for us to leave those children. They are born, they come into this world, and we are going to strap them with a $20,000 debt. I have here a little chart based on what is happening right now under the budget we are under and under the proposal of President Clinton. I want to carefully choose my words here as we go through this. I think the American public can understand. The excess payments in Social Security last year, this year, are expected to be $127 billion. More comes into the trust fund than will be paid out. If we had kept the 1997 spending caps and not, with a gun at our heads, passed an omnibus reconciliation package last year, we would have had a deficit this year of $1 billion. From $220 billion, $350 billion, to $1 billion. But we did not, we gave up $15 billion above the caps in October-November last year. Then we have the proposal from the President to spend a billion dollars for the disaster in South and Central America, which had no recommendation that we pay for it. That money has to come from somewhere. So we will borrow it from the Social Security Trust Fund. So what is happening right now is, already this year $17 billion of the excess has already been stolen for 1999, leaving $110 billion. But that is not the important point of this.…”