Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner recently addressed a group of people, including many county supervisors, at the Fluvanna County Library. Warner, who is a former Virginia governor as well, was there to answer questions about health care reform, the economy and jobs creation and other ideas from the audience.

“Richmond is a lot more logical than Washington,” Warner began. “I remember when I ran for this I said if I get elected senator I’d be a bipartisan radical centrist because I think that’s where the good policies come from.”

He’s hopeful that after the mid-term elections Congress will seek out ways to find more common ground.

“There is plenty of blame to go around—in both parties—on how we got to where we are today and maybe after this elections, chances are Congress will be a lot closer, we’ll get more done,” he said.

Warner noted he’s actually feeling hopeful about the economy.

“You know, I’m not happy where we are, obviously,” Warner said. “Although I do think—my background is 20 years in business—I do think it’s improving and I do think all of us have short memories” in relation to how bad the economy was 15 months ago.

“Whether it was what Bush did at the beginning of his term, or what Obama did at the beginning of his term with TARP and the stimulus..they were messy and could’ve been designed better and a lot were poorly explained, but I think they prevented something that could’ve been worse,” Warner said.

The stimulus is “perhaps the most poorly explained piece of legislation in modern American history. I think the administration did a dreadful job of overpromising,” he added.

He said the stimulus is really three buckets: tax cuts, spending and finding new areas to invest in. Warner said a lot of constituents come to him and say they never received any tax cuts with the stimulus.

“The stimulus was the third largest tax cut in American history,” he said. “If you make $150,000 a year or less, you got $1,000 off your payroll taxes over the whole year—it was built in. People didn’t feel it because it didn’t come in a big check.”

Additionally, he cites Cash for Clunkers as a tax cut that was part of the stimulus, as well as the new homebuyer tax credit. There are “a lot of them in there but it was never explained very well.”

Virginia received a couple billion dollars, he said, through the stimulus.

“If we hadn’t gotten that money to maintain your schools, your property taxes would have gone up. If we hadn’t gotten that money our state’s budget would’ve looked like California’s and that’s not what we want to look like,” he noted.

Finally, the stimulus also noted new areas of spending and set aside funding for that, including high-speed rail, smart grid, broadband, especially for rural communities, and healthcare IT.

“This might have been good policy, but probably not very stimulating,” he explained. “These were new areas of spending that I think most of us would probably agree we might want to invest in but most of this money still hasn’t been spent.”

But, Warner cautioned: “Government can’t keep spending at these levels; we’ve got to cut back dramatically.”

He said he feels the government needs to get out of the way of the economy and also try to give the business community some certainty so they’ll start spending again.

“There is one very good bright spot in our economy today. That is large companies—Fortune 1000s—their balance sheets have never been healthier. Large American corporations are healthier today than they were before the crisis,” he said. “But small businesses are still hurting and coming out of a recession two-thirds of new jobs created—historically—come from small businesses. The problem is today small businesses can’t get the capital.”

Warner said he hopes a new bill being discussed this week in the senate will help jump start small business loan programs.

Warner cautioned that the government is going to have to look at the revenue side again.

“I personally believe that we ought to let the Bush tax credits on all middle class continue forever, make them permanent,” he said. “But I do think for people like me, the top 2 percent, you can convince me to continue for a year because we’re in a recession, but let the rates go up for me to what they were under Clinton and Bush Sr. and find ways to lower business taxes to make America more business competitive.”

The senator said he’s going to spend a lot of his time after the election starting “an honest conversation with the American people. We have to put everything on the table. I believe if the American people are told the truth, they’ll do the right thing.”

Warner said the nation needs to lower healthcare costs, perhaps by changing the way insurance is used or how healthcare professionals receive payment: outcome based versus volume based.

“Healthcare without any regard to what works or doesn’t work will financially bankrupt this country,” he said. “We have to make hard choices.”

Rod Manifold, executive director Central Virginia Health Services, said “I want to thank you for creating the Virginia Health Care Foundation years and years ago…it’s a wonderful thing for those of us who are serving as the safety net. I want to thank you for the stimulus, despite all the bad concerns, we were able to put an addition on our health center in Buckingham with geothermal heating and cooling for the facility and laid pipes for the entire 20,000 square foot facility to be geothermal as we go forward. It employed a lot of people in Buckingham and Fluvanna. And we were able to use for other sites as well.

“I want to thank you for health care reform,” Manifold continued. “Still all know it’s still working its way through. I see people with terrible health problems because they don’t have health care and what we have to do it take care of people. Everybody pays at community health center, even on a sliding fee if they have to.”

Warner said, “This health care bill was really imperfect. I thought long and hard about whether to vote for it. Wouldn’t be the way I would’ve designed it. I finally voted for it because as imperfect as it was it was going to shock the system. It will force the American public and politicians to acknowledge” the system is flawed.

“It did a lot on coverage but didn’t do near enough on cost containment. We punted on a lot of hard questions and if we don’t come back and do cost containment the healthcare bill will be disastrous,” Warner continued.

Dick Koepsell, co-chair of the Fluvanna County Democratic Committee, said he thinks the United States has become much less competitive than other countries in the world.

“We should have been investing more money all this time on United States infrastructure,” he said. “It would be nice if we didn’t have a government who thought of the bottom line this year, but would think 50 years down the road and think this is what we got to do for the good of our nation.”

Warner said he supports high-speed rail and changes to the efficiency of our electrical system.

He added, “If I don’t make both parties mad I’m not doing my job.”