Warner, Kaine to help draft plan for taxes, spending
After years of prodding fellow senators to adopt spending and debt reforms - through personal pleas and unofficial efforts like the "Gang of Six"- U.S. Sen. Mark Warner is joining the inner circle.
Warner, along with fellow Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, was appointed Wednesday to a House-Senate committee that has less than two months to develop a long-term blueprint for adjusting spending and tax policies.
The 29-member panel, made up of the entire Senate Budget Committee and part of the House's budget committee, was given the task as part of legislation approved by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama on Wednesday night to end the government shutdown and raise Washington's borrowing limit.
Their work involves trying to negotiate an annual budget - rather than follow the practice in recent years of funding the government for months at a time with a series of spending resolutions.
The House and Senate each adopted their own 2014 budgets seven months ago, but no negotiations followed because Republicans wouldn't allow them. The competing plans start far apart, with the GOP House plan spending $90 billion less than the Democratic Senate plan.
"Now it's my turn," Warner said Thursday, "along with Tim Kaine and others."
"This is an area that I've spent the last four and half years in the Senate completely focused on. I know these numbers. I think I can add some value. I've got a record of working with both sides of the aisle."
The former governor has argued that getting control the nation's $17 trillion federal debt, which grows about $4 billion a day, will require spending cuts and more revenue. In past years, he's organized informal, bipartisan groups of senators - like the "Gang of Six" senators who met repeatedly to hammer out reforms. But those efforts often stalled over ideological differences.
In a conference call with reporters, he predicted the joint committee will have its own high hurdles.
"At the end of the day, this is going to come down to the two major stumbling blocks: a reluctance by some in the Democratic Party to put reforms in Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security so those programs will be here 30 years from now and a real reluctance of some of our Republican friends to realize you can't run the government on the revenue stream we've got right now."
More money is needed, said Warner, who has proposed limiting tax deductions to increase revenue.
"If we can find a way to get through those issues, the rest becomes easy," he said. "And, frankly, I think nothing would do more to restore the public trust. Nothing would do more to create jobs."
Warner said he hopes that citizens who have been upset with the recent shutdown and divisive debate on Capitol Hill will continue to press legislators to agree on a long-term spending plan. It will be important for business leaders to "put some skin in the game" by accepting the elimination of some tax breaks, he said.
Kaine agreed the committee's task will be a difficult one.
"We've got low expectations but high stakes to try to get a budget deal," Kaine said during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "It's going to take compromise."
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