Last week, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission released a report outlining their recommendations to reduce the budget deficit. Since then, a raucous debate has erupted over the proper measures that should be taken to rein in the U.S. debt.

Yesterday morning, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) appeared on CSPAN’s Washington Journal to discuss his thoughts on the commission and the proper steps to reduce the deficit in general. At one point, the senator explained that even though he “has said we don’t need increased taxes, I’ll take increased taxes if we cut spending. We have to look down the road and solve problems for everybody, no matter what their label is”:

HOST: The debt commission, the deficit commission rather. What is your take on their recommendations, and how realistic is it?

COBURN: Well, let’s set the stage for it. We have to do something. [...] Even though I’ve said we don’t need increased taxes, I’ll take increased taxes if we cut spending. We have to look down the road and solve the problems for everybody, no matter what their label is.

Watch it:

Coburn’s words are admirable at a time when literally hundreds of conservative legislators across the country have signed pledges to not raise taxes under any possible circumstances, whatsoever. The senator has been bold enough in the past to call for cutting the Pentagon’s “sacred cows” and has taken aim at defense spending. Given the upcoming battle over tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it’s particularly important that Coburn is demonstrating a willingness to raise taxes.

But because Coburn is insisting that these tax increases be tied to spending cuts, ThinkProgress would like to present him with a list of cuts that would reduce government waste and favors to special interests without hurting job growth:

- Defense Spending: As previously noted, Coburn is already an advocate for defense cuts, saying that “taking defense spending off the table” for waste-cutting is “indefensible.” The senator can look to the Sustainable Defense Task (SDTF) report released earlier this year. The SDTF — which was assembled by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) was composed of some of the nation’s leading defense and budget experts — identified nearly $1 trillion in waste that can be cut from the defense budget over the next ten years simply by eliminating outdated Cold War-era programs. He can also reference a recent report by Center for American Progress (CAP) experts Lawrence Korb and Laura Conley that lays out $108 billion in defense cuts in the current 2015 budget forecast.

- Ending Giveaways To Big Oil: The government has currently set up a network of tax expenditures and other subsidies to Big Oil that cost the American taxpayer billions of dollars every year. Ending these subsidies would save an estimated $45 billion over ten years.

- Streamlining Federal Education Funding: The CAP paper “Education Transformation: Doing What Works in Education Reform” outlines inefficiencies in how the federal government handles its education funding and lays out ways we can save nearly $100 million simply by streamlining the process.

- Reducing Or Eliminating Wasteful Tax Expenditures: The CAP paper “Cracking the Code: A Closer Look at Tax Expenditure Spending” notes that “special credits, deductions, exclusions, exemptions, and preferential tax rates provide more than $1 trillion in subsidies intended to support public objectives,” yet are ineffective and should be reduced or eliminated. Eliminating this tax expenditure could save $100 billion, for example.

- Reducing or Eliminating Subsidies To Big Agribusiness: The federal government “paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009.” “Just ten percent of America’s largest and richest farms collect almost three-fourths” of these subsidies. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) has proposed — as a part of her progressive deficit reduction plan — a fifty percent cut in federal direct support for agriculture, which would save $7.5 billion in 2015.

It’s refreshing for a Republican senator to admit that there may be a need to raise taxes in order to deal with the deficit. Now it’s up to Coburn to examine smart cuts like the ones outlined above to couple with any revenue-increasing measures.

For the last 56 days, Office of Managagement and Budget director nominee Jack Lew has been held hostage by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).  Landrieu’s first ransom note to President Obama demanded that his administration lift the temporary moritorium on new deepwater drilling which was in place during the Gulf oil disaster, but that moritorium has since been lifted.  Landrieu responded with a new set of demands, saying that she will not release her hostage until she is certain that the “lifting of the moratorium is actually putting people back to work.”  Now that it’s clear that the moritorium had little impact on jobs, however, Landrieu has a third set of demands:

In September, Landrieu, D-La., blocked the nomination of Jacob Lew to head the Office of Management and Budget to protest the administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Even though the moratorium was lifted Oct. 12, Landrieu said she remained displeased with new rules for drilling operations.

The new drilling rules are meant to prevent another catastrophic blowout like the April 20 explosion at a BP oil well off the Louisiana coast that led to the release of more than 200 million gallons of crude. . . .

But Landrieu said she would continue to block Lew’s nomination until the Interior Department fixes “the regulatory nightmare” hindering deepwater drilling. She said companies were struggling to interpret what the new rules required.

“I’m not asking to be easy on the oil and gas companies, I’m not asking to give blanket permits, I’m asking for clarity of the new regulatory regime,” Landrieu said during a teleconference with reporters upon her return from a trip to the Netherlands, where she looked for lessons to take home to Louisiana from the Dutch model of living below sea level.

Sadly, this kind of hostage taking happens all the time in the United States Senate — earlier this year, for example, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) placed a hold on over 70 nominees in an attempt to force the federal government to award a $35 billion defense contract to Northrop Grumman.  But it’s unclear what Landrieu thinks she going to accomplish by playing Calvinball with her demands.  Why should the Obama Administration deliver her a suitcase full of small, unmarked bills when she is simply going to turn around and demand a helicopter and free passage to a non-extradition country?

Moreover, as John Griffith explains over at the Wonk Room, Landrieu is playing a particularly dangerous game by targeting the official in charge of drafting the annual federal budget.  OMB must present its initial draft of the next year’s budget at the end of November each year, and Lew could have contributed a great deal of expertise to this draft.  Lew headed OMB from 1999 until the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, leaving office with a $200 billion federal budget surplus.

In other words, America needs Lew’s fiscal guidance a whole lot more than it needs Mary Landrieu looking out for big oil.