Kaine kicks off tour of Virginia with stop in Charlottesville
Congress must adopt a more civil, collaborative approach to budgeting and policy to eliminate economic uncertainty for businesses, U.S. Sen. Timothy M. Kaine said Monday.
He kicked off a two-week tour of Virginia with an appearance the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce’s Commonwealth Breakfast.
“We would all acknowledge that the [economic] recovery has not been as fast as we would want,” Kaine told about 200 people gathered at the Holiday Inn on Emmet Street. “The unemployment rate is still too high. And if you look at the real unemployment rate and take into to account the discouraged workers who just have given up, it is too high.”
As a powerful source of job creation, Kaine said legislators must work to sustain private sector business development.
“I think the private sector does a really good job of creating jobs if we give you some certainty,” Kaine told the group. “There are specific things we can do that will help create jobs at the governmental level.
According to Kaine, those things include investments in education, specifically career and technical education, which he described as “about the best thing you can do.”
In office for about 15 months, Kaine — a Democrat who serves on the Senate’s Armed Services, Foreign Relations and budget committees — said he was elected to Congress at a time when legislators were looking for solutions in three areas: the budget and the economy, foreign policy, and civility.
“Of the three challenges, the last one might be the most intense because without progress there, it’s hard to get progress on the others,” he said.
Kaine said his past legislative experiences, including a term as Virginia’s governor, has shaped his approach in seeking collaboration rather than cultivating conflict.
As governor, Kaine said he disagreed “about 80 percent of the time” with Republican House Speaker William J. Howell, but they were still friends.
“And by talking, we found out that there are some important things we agreed on. What I learned from dealing with [Howell] … is that differences are obvious, similarities take time to discover,” Kaine said.
Del. David J. Toscano, D-Charlottesville, one of several local and state political leaders present at the breakfast, said he took Kaine’s message on legislative civility to heart.
“Gov. Kaine so inspires people to look for common ground,” Toscano said. “Sometimes we have a difficult time doing that at the state level. I wish that every delegate and senator could have been in the room today to hear what he had to say. … If you find common ground and bring some certainty to the funding process, you help businesses in that process,” Toscano said.
In a follow up interview with The Daily Progress, Kaine said he’s co-sponsoring a bill to permanently shift federal budgeting to a two year process.
“It’s just always odd that states have two-year budgets to give certainty and the feds have always had one-year budgets,” Kaine said Monday afternoon. “I believe we are seeing the economy start to tick up,” Kaine continued. “We’ve provided two years of budget certainty, so Congress is trying to step away from some of the foolish things we were doing that were slowing it down.”
But now, Kaine said, “We are still seeing a skills gap between an unemployment rate that is sort of too high, but also jobs that are going unfilled, because we’re not appropriately focusing people’s training on the skill areas of today and tomorrow.”
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