Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn told The Daily Caller in a video interview that the federal government is in the “midst of committing murder to our republic” and predicted that the U.S. faces a financial meltdown in 2-5 years.
“I wanted people in this book, in ‘The Debt Bomb’ to be able to see what’s coming,” Coburn said on Capitol Hill, referring to his book. “In 2022, less than 10 years from now, unless we make major changes that everybody’s saying they know has to be made but none of the politicians have the courage to make, the entire federal budget will be made of only three things: interest, Medicare and Social Security, nothing else.”
“It’s very honorable to speak honestly to the American public about what the problems are. It is dishonorable to lie to them about it not being. Talk to any politician up here, they all know Medicare’s in trouble, they’ll say it privately so tell me, when you will speak something privately but not talk about it publicly, what’s that say about your integrity? That you just really want to win an election rather than fix our country.”
Coburn explained what he thinks would be “the best thing that could happen” to America.
“Everybody to stand up and say, ‘deal’s off, we’re going to fix the country. We know we’re all going to get fired. It’s okay, lets go do it.’ That’s the honorable thing except we don’t have much honor here because people are refusing to address the very real problems that will undermine the core values of this country,” he told TheDC, before referring to a quote from John Adams.
“There has not yet been a republic that did not murder itself. We are in the midst of committing murder to our republic,” he said.
Coburn, a member of the Judiciary and Finance committees, also said that interest rates are going to rise.
“Think about what will happen to us. We have $16 trillion worth of debt right now and we’re paying less than 2 percent on that debt – that’s 4 percentage points less than our historical average for our debt,” he said.
“Interest rates are going to come back up. We’re not going to be able to borrow money at a quarter of one percent or two percent overall on our debt because people are going to quit loaning us money because we continue to build up an unsustainable debt and until they see us make the hard choices, those interest rates are going to rise.”