Grassley: 'I've Lived Off The Public Tit' As A Congressman (VIDEO)

Here's a new and weird mental image to add to the health care debate. On C-SPAN Tuesday morning, in a discussion over whether the Senate health care reform bill amounted to socialism, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged that he "lived off the public tit" as a congressman.

After Grassley said he didn't think the bill was tantamount to socialism, a viewer called into the program and argued that as a public official Grassley himself was, in some ways, living off the government. Grassley admitted that he was.

GRASSLEY: For the first 16 years I made $3,000 every other year as a state legislator. Now do you expect me to live on $3,000 every other year? No I was a factory worker for 10 years and I was a farmer for that period of time and I farm with my son now. So if you're trying to make a case that I've lived off the public tit all these years, I think you're saying correctly in the years I've been in the Congress but not the years before I came to Congress.