Tom Coburn: “I have a couple points as to Senator Schumer's statement. First, with an unemployment rate six-tenths percent lower than…”

“I have a couple points as to Senator Schumer's statement. First, with an unemployment rate six-tenths percent lower than the national average and lower than New York's average, by the way--lower than New York's average--it is hardly in the dire consequences of what we see around the rest of the country. The second point is, we have 60-some million dollars out there for competitive grant competition on museums for which the museum administration does a great job. In other words, everybody in the country who wants to have a museum has to compete against everybody else, and the ones who are most meritorious--by the way, they are also audited to see that the money is actually spent in a proper way; this will never be audited--they have to compete. The major problem with Senator Schumer's argument is that Sullivan County can never be healthy if the country as a whole is not healthy. That is the problem with the argument. We can say we want to make XYZ healthy. It is akin to saying your finger is healthy when you are having a heart attack. The fact is, the country as a whole is at the precipice--D day comes January 1, 2008. That is the demographic day on which all the baby boomers, the 'Woodstockers' start taking Social Security, and 3 years later they start taking Medicare, $79 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities. How in the world can the American people ever trust us to fix those big problems if we don't even get it on the small problems?”