Tom Coburn: “We did pay off some Treasury bills. But the way you know when we pay down our debt is to look at our total debt and…”

“We did pay off some Treasury bills. But the way you know when we pay down our debt is to look at our total debt and whether it declined at the time we did that. It did not. The total debt of the country rose every year we were paying that off. We still had a deficit. We were stealing from trust funds such as the inland waterway trust funds--that is publicly held debt. We transferred that. So the true debt of the country has not declined since 1972. Even though we were in a period of great times, we spent it all; we didn't pay it down. We actually spent it, and the actual debt of the country rose during the time when everybody in Washington said we were in surplus.”