U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), a member of the Fiscal 2014 Budget Conference Committee, outlined his goals during today’s first meeting of House and Senate budget negotiators. Sen. Warner said he wants to end the recent fiscal practice of lurching from crisis to crisis, find a way to replace the damaging, across-the-board spending cuts mandated by sequester, and look for opportunities to make responsible investments that will strengthen the economic recovery and promote American competitiveness. Negotiators have until December 13 to find a budget compromise.
The text of Sen. Warner’s prepared remarks is below, and video can be accessed here.
“There are three touchstones that I hope come out of this effort:
First, do no harm -- which would mean that acknowledging that another government shutdown, or threatening the full faith and credit of the United States, does no good and presents enormous economic crisis. We all have the numbers on what the price was. We all have fun factoids. Mine is the fact that during the shutdown we furloughed three American Nobel Prize winners in physics. You wonder what the governments of Russia, India, China and around the rest of the world were thinking when we furloughed these kinds of American assets. I can assure you, they did not put their research on hold during our period of dysfunction.
Second, sequestration was supposed to be so bad that no rational group of people would let it happen. I think there is a way that we cannot only protect savings but find ways to replace sequester. I know some of my colleagues think it hasn’t been that bad, but I believe it’s almost like a cancer inside. I can tell you, in Virginia, we are a little bit like Ground Zero because of the federal workforce and military personnel that live here. What we are doing in terms of hurting military readiness, costing taxpayers money because we the Department of Defense cannot do long-term purchase contracts, is totally irresponsible.
I know a lot of us around this table like to cite our business experience. I am proud that I have been a business guy longer than I have been a political guy. My time in business was mostly spent as an investor. When you are an investor looking at a business plan, you look at the company’s plan for its workforce, its investments in plant and equipment, and how they plan to stay ahead of their competition. Countries have a business plan, too: it’s called the federal budget. We have those three items, too: ‘workforce’ is called education and training – ‘plant and equipment’ is infrastructure – and ‘staying ahead of the competition’ is research and development.
And while I strongly believe most of our job growth is going to come from the private sector, the government does provide a framework in those three areas which allows the private sector to prosper. Unfortunately, if we go forward with an approach that indiscriminately cuts those areas of investment in infrastructure, education and R&D, we are not going to have a business plan that allows our country to prosper over the long-term. So I hope we can find common agreement to replace the sequester and make investments in those areas.
Third, and I know this may be a bit off-script, but I hope that we actually might be able to exceed expectations. I think we’ve done an appropriate job of lowering expectations, so that simply avoiding a crisis may be viewed as a success. But I think that while we may not be able to get to the so-called grand bargain, we ought to use this opportunity to recognize that if we keep coming back to the discretionary bucket, whether it’s on the defense side or the non-defense side, it becomes a zero-sum game after a period.
I would say, as somebody who acknowledges we need to look at entitlements, when we hear these constant references to 50-year revenue totals, I just think it refuses to recognize some of the fundamental changes in our economy right now. I’ll just cite two: the dramatic transfer of research and development from the private sector to the public sector. That’s not just happening in America. It’s all across the world. There is no such thing as Bell Labs anymore. And increasingly, for us to stay competitive, the public sector is going to pick up R&D. And because we’ve been blessed with a much longer lifetimes, entitlement costs – even with entitlement reform – are going to be greater than we’ve seen in the past because life expectancy now exceeds 80. So we all know what we’re going to have to deal with: Democrats are going to have to deal with entitlement reforms, and Republicans are going to have to deal with revenues, and we ought to be willing to at least approach those areas.
I would close by simply saying we all have lots of ideas about how we can build our economy. I think there would be nothing that would do more for job creation and economic growth than removing this fiscal overhang of governing by crisis.
I hope that we can exceed expectations and do that.”
Mr. Warner: Mr. President. I rise today in support of the legislation that the Chairman of the Finance Committee talked about and talking about it from a slightly different direction. We’ve spent a lot of time talking in this body about the necessity for us to focus on jobs and how Americans feel about that search for jobs. We read about unemployment numbers at 9.7 percent, and while we say with some relief that the numbers didn’t pop up during February, those numbers are still way too high.
I had a personal experience that I wasn’t planning on speaking about on the floor, but I wanted to share with my colleagues and others in the hall, an event that is actually still happening about 45 minutes south of this chamber. My office had decided to sponsor a jobs fair, where we would bring together more than 30 federal agencies and we located this jobs fair down 45 minutes south of here at the University of Mary Washington, at their Stafford Campus.
For those of you who don’t follow the ins and outs of Northern Virginia, we are blessed in Virginia with a rather low unemployment rate. Statewide, our unemployment rate is actually 7 percent, and in Northern Virginia our numbers are even much, much lower than that. As we put together this jobs fair, we were well represented with over 30 federal agencies from TSA to the Peace Corps, to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
We put out the word not knowing what kind of response we were going to get. This was the first jobs fair I had hosted as a U.S. Senator and at first we were a little worried. Last Wednesday, we had only about 75 R.S.V.P. for this jobs fair on this college campus south of Washington. But by Friday night, we’d had nearly 3,000 folks sign-up. By yesterday afternoon, we realized that our numbers were topping out over 5,000. We were warning people that perhaps all the accommodations we put in place weren’t ready to handle this many folks, so we extended the hours of the jobs fair from 12 noon to 4 o’clock today.
When my staff started showing up this morning at 6:30/7, there were 500 people waiting in their cars, many of them who’d been sleeping there for hours. By 9 o’clock, when the jobs fair was supposed to stat, 3,000 people were in line.
I showed up there about 9:30, and regrettably by noon we had topped out over 5,000, probably closer to 7,000, with folks clogging the roads trying to come to this jobs fair in Stafford County, Virginia. Unfortunately, we had to cut if off at that point and put out the word that we would try to have another jobs fair with these federal agencies and some private-sector partners within the next few weeks.
The response was overwhelming. As I mentioned earlier, I spent about an hour simply going up and down the line of folks who were waiting. Many of these folks were people who had graduate degrees -- almost all of them had college degrees. They looked like any of the kind of workforce we’d see crossing any parts of the nation’s Capital today. I heard stories after stories of folks who’d never, ever expected to show up at a federal job fair, folks who never, ever expected to see their lives turned topsy-turvy by unemployment, or by folks who were still unable to change jobs because of their constraints on health care.
None of these folks were looking for a handout; they were just looking for that opportunity to talk to some of the 35-plus representatives from federal agencies about the possibilities of getting a job. All they wanted to do was try to do a better job for themselves and for their families.
So as we return to debate on the so-called tax extender bill, when we work with the Presiding Officer on efforts to free up credit for small business owners, when we talk about how we can provide other kind of incentives to the private sector to jump-start the economy. While it was great to provide the possibility of these jobs in the public sector, the vast majority of jobs will and should be created in the private sector.
As we think about this piece of legislation right now and make sure that our tax code is supportive enough of these private sector efforts, I saw the reason for these efforts in the thousands in one of the most prosperous parts of our whole country, here in Northern Virginia. I came back more charged up than ever that what we do here is more important than ever, that the folks there in that line didn’t understand rules about filibusters or holds or all the other procedural back-and-forth that sometimes seems to dominate the floor here. What they did want us to do here is put that aside -- put our partisanship aside – and get the job done of trying to create more and more jobs all across the country.
It’s my hope in the coming weeks when we have this next job fair -- I'm sure we’ll have the same kind of response. I look forward to the day hopefully in the not-too-distant future, when we have a jobs fair that we get a few folks, but that we don’t get overwhelmed with the kind of literally unprecedented numbers of the 7,000 folks we see today.
