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.”
Mister President, just 72 hours ago, a bipartisan majority of the members of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform endorsed a package of proposals to reposition our nation on a more responsible fiscal course.
I want to commend my legislative colleagues who served on the Commission -- Senators Baucus, Coeburn, Conrad, Crapo, Durbin and Gregg.
I also want to thank the other economists, policymakers and thinkers who invested the time and effort and courageously grappled with these difficult choices.
On Friday, 11 of the 18 members of the Commission voted to support a tough, bipartisan prescription for fiscal health. I regret that the 11 “yes” votes fell just short of the 14 votes required to forward this plan to Congress for our consideration.
In the hours leading up to Friday’s vote, I was proud to work with 13 of my Senate colleagues to draft a joint letter to the White House and to the bipartisan Congressional leadership.
This letter, ultimately signed by 14 Senators and distributed before the Commission’s final meeting on Friday, requested that the panel’s recommendations come to Congress for our consideration regardless of the outcome of the Commission’s final vote.
Mister President, I ask consent to place a copy of this joint letter in the Record.
I have a reason for coming here to the floor today and drawing attention to our letter once again, and it is this.
The seriousness of our nation’s fiscal challenges – the compelling need to address these issues in a responsible and bipartisan way -- did not suddenly dissipate or magically disappear over the course of the weekend that just ended.
In fact, since the Commission’s final meeting ended on Friday afternoon, the national debt – the running tally of what the U.S. government owes -- has increased by at least $15 billion - and our national debt totals a staggering $13.8 billion.
Let me repeat that: our national debt is now approaching $14 trillion.
Remarkably, we’re still writing checks. That we’re still allowed to have a checkbook may be even more remarkable.
You know, every day you can listen to a lot of talk from people in this town about deficit reduction.
But as I said when the Commission first unveiled its proposals one week ago, while I would have made some different choices, we were being presented with a unique opportunity to finally get real about deficits and debt.
Actually, I was more blunt than that: I said that the time had come to put up -- or shut up.
This Commission earned credibility by describing our fiscal challenges in stark and honest terms.
They deserve our respect for crafting a clear roadmap to help steer our nation back to a more responsible fiscal path.
The Commission’s leaders and its members made difficult decisions, and they did not shy-away from examining both expenditures and revenues.
They concluded, correctly, that our nation’s fiscal challenges are too serious, and the fiscal hole we’ve dug for ourselves is too deep, to be solved by looking at only one side of the ledger.
To be sure, there is something for everyone to dislike in these recommendations, but that is simply a reflection of how large the problem really is.
Whether you look at this report and are concerned about the viability of Social Security, or tax rates, levels of defense spending or any other specific government program or service, it becomes clear our options ultimately only get worse with time.
Nonetheless, the Fiscal Commission produced a bipartisan plan that could strengthen our economic recovery today -- and help stabilize our long-term debt tomorrow.
They came forward with a framework for improving our country’s global economic competitiveness while still maintaining our shared commitment to protect our most vulnerable citizens.
And they deserve credit for recognizing that the hard work of getting our nation’s fiscal house in order also is an urgent matter of national security.
Because it is clear that America cannot be a leader in the world, projecting strength and promoting democracy, if we are weakened at home by our own deficits and debt.
Mister President, ever since this economic downturn began, individual Americans and their families have been required to make tough choices of their own about how to make ends meet.
It is time for those of us here in Washington to do the same.
Many of you know that I came to public service after a pretty successful career in business. In the business world, investors and shareholders have a reasonable expectation that, at the end of the day, a healthy company’s books will be balanced.
I also had an opportunity to serve as Governor of Virginia, where I worked in a bipartisan way with an opposition legislature to make the tough choices required to balance our state budget during tough economic times.
Now, I’ve only served in this body for about two years so far, but one thing I’ve already learned is this: if Washington can find an excuse to punt on a difficult decision, it almost always will.
And, most days, it’s a lot easier to just retreat to our partisan corners and default to the political gamesmanship you see every day on cable TV.
But Mister President, as the current economic upheaval in Europe so clearly demonstrates, we cannot simply ignore this challenge because it’s inconvenient -- or because the choices are just too tough.
Our competitors around the world certainly are not waiting for America to get its act together.
Now is the time to make these tough choices – not when the bond markets finally lose their patience, and their confidence, in our long-term economic viability, which is what recently happened to Greece and Ireland.
The fact is, if interest rates were not at historic lows today, we truly would be in a world of hurt right now. As it is, if we do not take action soon to stabilize our debt, we could be spending upwards of one trillion dollars a year just on debt service by the year 2020.
So now is the time for us to agree that we will not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
And our own political discomfort should not be used as an excuse to delay holding an honest and long-overdue discussion about the complicated fiscal choices confronting us today.
Every day, every week, every month that we put-off that discussion, our options become more limited and the choices get even tougher.Resolving America’s fiscal problems must be our top priority.
Yes, it will require difficult decisions. No, there is no quick fix, no easy way out.
But those of us who are sent here to serve must be willing to step-up and lead the way.
Thank you.
