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Sen. Warner: $4T in debt cuts shouldn’t be an ‘ultimate heavy lift’
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is urging the bipartisan supercommittee tasked with deficit cuts to pursue a deal in the $4 trillion range.
Warner, a centrist Democrat, used an interview with Bloomberg to urge the panel to “go big, go bold” when they negotiate this fall.
“We’re not going to solve the problem overnight, but, you know, a 10-year plan to reduce $4 trillion in debt should not be the kind of ultimate heavy lift,” Warner said on Bloomberg’s “Political Capital” airing this weekend. “You know, if we don’t step up and do that, then I don’t think we are doing our country a service.”
“The fact is, even if the supercommittee knocks another $1.5 trillion off our debt, that’s still not going to be enough. Unless we can also take on the issue of entitlement reform and tax reform to generate revenue, I don’t think we’re going to get there,” Warner said.
Warner isn’t on the 12-member, bicameral supercommitee that is evenly divided between the parties.
He was a member of the ad-hoc, bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators that negotiated earlier this year in hopes of crafting a sweeping package of spending cuts and tax revenues to shave trillions from the deficit.
In the Bloomberg interview, Warner said the 11th-hour, $2.1 trillion deal enacted three weeks ago to raise the debt ceiling that created the supercommittee didn’t go far enough.
“The fact that we didn’t step up in a more major way in terms of addressing the debt and deficit, to put a real $4 trillion plan in place that would actually take on both entitlement reform and tax reform to generate revenues, I’ve yet to find anybody that doesn’t agree that we needed to do more and really have a broader approach than what we ended up passing in early August,” Warner said.
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