CBS "Face the Nation" - Transcript

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

BOB SCHIEFFER: And we're back now with Virginia Senator Mark Warner who is part of what
they call the Gang of Six. This is a group, a bipartisan group--three Republicans, three
Democrats, who have been working behind the scenes for about four months now to try to come up with some sort of compromise that can get through both the Senate and the House. Let me just start with the-- raising the debt ceiling. You just heard what Congressman Ryan said. What is your reaction to that?
SENATOR MARK WARNER (D-Virginia): Well, Bob, I think it's dangerous to kind of roll the dice
on the debt limit. I mean, frankly, unlike the government shutdown which I've got to tell you I
was embarrassed for the Congress and for the country that we allowed us to get to that
eleventh hour with the back-and-forth tit for tat. We can't do that with the debt limit. You get
close to that debt limit and you could actually scare the bond markets. They could end up
raising interest rates which would dramatically cut back on the recovery not just in terms of the government spend but somebody going out trying to get a loan, trying to close on a house, a company trying to hire a new employee. This is literally, potentially, lighting the match that could burn down the house. So I hope our colleagues on both sides will go ahead and raise the debt limit. Some I know, Congressman Ryan and others have said that we need some level of down payment on spending cuts. We're looking and trying to include that in our bipartisan approach. And if there's one thing we've seen particularly looking at the government shutdown proposal is if both political parties start at either end of the spectrum and fight, the only people who really lose in that are the American people. We're saying on this big issue of debt and deficit we need to start out of the center, start with a bipartisan plan and build out.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, what I thought was interesting about what Congressman Ryan said
this morning-- because Treasury Secretary Geithner was on two television shows this morning
and said flatly that Republican leaders had assured the President behind closed doors that they
would vote to raise the debt limit ceiling. And yet, Mister Ryan, who is a key player over there in the House, said no way, no how. And he said nobody had told him that. And I find it hard to
believe that they might have said that and-- and not tell Congressman Ryan.
SENATOR MARK WARNER: Well, it's hard to imagine anybody that responsibly understands
the consequences of dealing or failing to-- to raise the debt limit particularly with the uncertainty in Europe in terms of the sovereign debt crisis going on tho-- in countries like Ireland and Greece and now Portugal with the uncertainty in the Middle East. The idea that we would-- you know, in fact, roll the dice with the world economy by-- by getting into this brinkmanship, I think would be beyond the pale. Now there clearly are members, particularly a number of the new members in the House who've said they will draw the line and not raise the debt limit. My only hope is that saner and cooler heads would prevail.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Let's talk about your group. You've been meeting now for--
SENATOR MARK WARNER: Right.
BOB SCHIEFFER: --for months. Are you anywhere close to having something that you think is
a-- is a solid plan that could be taken seriously in both Houses?
SENATOR MARK WARNER: Well, Bob, we're very close. I mean, I give Congressman Ryan
credit for a-- a serious plan, but I think what you saw, what you've seen in the reaction to
Congressman Ryan's plan is he basically says no new revenues of any kind. He says defense
spending is walled off. That means the only place that he can go to get the-- his deficit reduction is really this massive transfer of more responsibility on to our seniors in terms of paying for health care. Now that's one approach. It's not an approach I think that the vast majority of Americans would want. What we're doing is we're saying everything has to be on the table entitlement reform, dramatic spending cuts. Looking at tax reform, yes, the way he talked about lowering rates, excluding and getting rid of some of the tax expenditures. But we'll-- we'll actually raise some additional revenues. And I think if we start with a bipartisan plan I think there's a whole host of folks in both parties that want to be for something, that's something that would actually start as a bipartisan effort. And I think the importance of what we're doing is not only to take on the issue of debt and deficit but I think to once again demonstrate that actually Congress can work.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Oh, senator, you are a Democrat. You are a conservative Democrat from a
very conservative state, Virginia. Do you think that we can solve the do-- the deficit problem
without raising taxes in some way?
SENATOR MARK WARNER: Bob, I think you've got to look at both sides of the ledger. Long
before I was in politics I spent twenty years in business. I built companies. And you've got to
look, the revenue side, you got to look at the spend side. We're looking at a ratio of about three
dollars in cuts for every additional dollar in revenues. And the revenues we're talking about
literally are coming from lower rates where we can lower our rates on individual and on
corporate rates, back to where they're much more competitive on a worldwide basis. But we're
getting rid of a number of the tax expenditures. I mean, a fact that I'm not sure most Americans realize. We collect about one trillion dollars a year in income taxes, yet we have 1.2 trillion dollars a year in income tax expenditures, deductions many of them that are popular--charitable deduction, home mortgage deduction. If we would cut back on some of those, we could actually lower rates and still increase revenues.
BOB SCHIEFFER: So that's where you would get the additional revenues by eliminating
deductions not necessarily by--
SENATOR MARK WARNER (overlapping): We--
BOB SCHIEFFER: --raising taxes.
SENATOR MARK WARNER: --we're not talking about raising taxes. We're--
BOB SCHIEFFER (overlapping): What about the-- Congressman Ryan's plan of course to, you
know, he not only wants to keep the Bush tax cuts in place but he does talk about-- he says it's not a tax cut. He talks about reducing the rates. Will that fly?
SENATOR MARK WARNER: Well, Bob, I gu-- I guess, we ought to disagree-- be able to
disagree about our solutions but we shouldn't be able to disagree about the facts. The facts are right now we are spending at an all-time high, close to twenty-five percent of our GDP being spent on the federal government. But our revenues are at an almost all-time low at about fifteen percent. You know, it doesn't take a math wizard to figure out that delta can't be sustained, so we need both a way to have the tax code generate more revenues. We need to bring spending down. And we have to do it in a way that still protects certain investments where we can grow our economy. One of the things that Congressman Ryan's plan did, it cut back about twenty-five percent of our investments in education. It cut back about seventy percent of our investments in alternative energy and with gas approaching four dollars a gallon, I'm not sure if that's in the best interest of a long-term economic growth. We've got to have all three legs of the stool. We've got to have a tax code that's more efficient. We've got to cut back on spending but we still got to have an economy that is going to grow.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think that President Obama's speech help or hurt the effort to get a
bipartisan solution? I know it caught your-- the folks working with you a little bit by surprise. But was it a help or--
SENATOR MARK WARNER (overlapping): Well, listen--
BOB SCHIEFFER: --did it hurt?
SENATOR MARK WARNER: --I think the President laid out his vision and in real stark contrast
to where Congressman Ryan laid out his vision. And I think what we've got now is we've got two competing visions. What I hope is that this doesn't devolve into just the Democrats versus the Republicans again. We saw what happens when that had-- takes place when we got to the
eleventh hour on the government shutdown and most Americans kind of scratched their heads
and said why can't these guys get their job done? What we're trying to do with a bipartisan
group is say let's actually start with something that takes a lot of the ideas from the Simpson-
Bowles commission, puts everything on the table. And let me assure you, we're going to make
everybody mad with our approach--Democrats, Republicans, independents because we're
touching every part of the problem. All the entitlement programs looking at how you make Social Security more sustainable and we're going to lay this out. And our hope and prayer is that then the people of goodwill from both parties will basically check their Democrat hat and check the Republican hat and say let's take this on because my belief is this debt and deficit crisis is our single biggest national security issue.
BOB SCHIEFFER: And I did hear you say, you're going to have to reform Social Security to do
it.
SENATOR MARK WARNER: You know, it's-- part of this is just math--sixteen workers for
everyone retiree fifty years ago, three workers for every retiree now.
BOB SCHIEFFER: All right. Thank you very much, senator.
Back with some final thoughts in just a second.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source