ABC "Topline" - Transcript

Interview

Lankford Talks Spending Cuts and Entitlement Reform on ABC's "TopLine"

On Cutting Spending:

"No I don't think we are going as far as we need to go but I also don't think this is the final statement on it. Speaker Boehner has said multiple times that this is the beginning point and we're going to have an open process. Which has been unusual; the last two years there hasn't been any open process on dealing with bills. So now it's a matter of opening up the process and everybody bring in their spending cuts."

On Entitlement Reform:

"There is really three issues we're dealing with right now and that's the difficult thing to be able to track. The first one…is this year's budget. So much has been made of trying to make cuts but we're dealing with the current year that we are in right now. You're not going to make entitlement changes to the current year that we're in. So that's the first launch of proposals that are happening here. Then you have to deal with the debt ceiling and you have to deal with 2012. Those should be beginning points for entitlement reform and I do think we can get there."

On Joint Legislation With Senator Tom Coburn to End Unemployment Benefits for Millionaires:

"It's the beginning point of it. This is part of that stone soup, it's not a large bill, it's just one more piece and we're doing a lot of these. We're looking at individual pieces and saying "where can we save money?' Right now, if you made a million dollars in the previous year on your income tax, you can still file for unemployment insurance for this year. It's not much, about $6,000. But if you're talking about 2,800 people did that in 2008. That's about $20 million in our budget. If you start extrapolating that out and saying someone who made a million dollars last year, "do they really need to get $6,000 in unemployment this year on it?' We probably need to better stewards of our dollars on that."

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