Yes, the Senator from the great state of Oklahoma has decided to save America with a Nine Trillion Dollar Deficit Reduction Plan to be unveiled tomorrow. Guess what’s in it?
Among the proposed cuts in Coburn’s plan include $974.1 billion in cuts from the general government, as well as billions from Congress and the Executive Office of the President. Those reductions would be achieved partially by cutting 300,000 jobs from the federal workforce, and imposing a three-year pay and bonus freeze for federal workers and Congress members.
Because nothing would be finer than upping the unemployment rate.
And then there is this: He proposes rising the age when you can receive Social Security and Medicare Benefits:
Coburn’s plan – the most expansive such proposal put forth so far – also calls for major reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that would amount to more than $2.5 trillion in cuts over the next ten years.
Some of the reforms to Medicare and Medicaid include raising the eligibility age for Medicare recipients, tracking high prescribers and prescription drug users to detect abuse, enrolling low-income seniors in Medicaid managed care programs, and reducing subsidies to teaching hospitals for graduate medical education.
For Social Security, Coburn proposes restraining benefits for high earners, raising the retirement age, and adjusting cost-of-living calculations to more accurately reflect inflation.
Change the COLA to more accurately reflect inflation? They’d have to raise the COLA to do that. Something tells me that’s not what Coburn has in mind.
He also want to cut some tax loopholes and subsidies. Does that mean he will close loopholes that profit the oil and gas industry? Not exactly:<p
Among the proposed tax reforms include the elimination of breaks that are duplicative of government funding for local economic initiatives, the elimination of special interest corporate tax breaks, and cutting what Coburn describes as “misguided subsidies” for some clean energy initiatives.
Yeah, those crazy clean energy subsidies have got to go all right. Oh and he wants to repeal the Health Care Reform Act, raise the age for getting Medicare and Social Security benefits to 67 and ultimately 69, dump the full cost of Medicaid on the states (which means you can wave goodbye to healthcare fro poor people). He’d also raise premiums on Medicare so that those who use it more than others would have to pay more. In total his cuts to Medicare and Medicaid would equal 2.64 Trillion Dollars.
But hey, he’d cut Defense spending by $1 Trillion and closing off tax loopholes (like eliminating the mortgage tax deduction on home equity lines and homes with values in excess of $500,000) would generate almost a Trillion Dollars in savings. So the sacrifice would be shared, sort of.
Hey, Grover Norquist already hates it so that means it must be good.
Yeah, right. All this simply to keep tax rates for the richest 1% of our population low.
