Sen. Warner Outlines Three Goals at First Mtg of Budget Conference Cmte

Statement

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"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."

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