New social contract needed for America’s ailing middle class

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), at the Opening General Session, argued that the changing business environment demanded an updated and more flexible safety net.

The former governor and tech investor, who considered a run for the presidency in 2007, described himself as proud capitalist, but admitted that the current capitalist system in America wasn’t working for enough people.

“At the macro level, I can give you numbers,” about a strong economy, he said. “All of those numbers, statistics and data points don’t mean squat if you lost a factory in town.

“We need a Capitalism 2.0.”

His proposal focused on three ways the government safety net could be updated from its roots in the 1930s and ‘40s to match current national economic conditions and trends.

Chief among them was the need for portable employment benefits, like worker’s compensation and unemployment, that could follow workers throughout their careers.

“Social insurance programs allowed you to get through bad times, but in Gig Economy, work brings no social insurance,” he said.

He stressed that the local government level was ideal for experimenting with this change.

Warner also said businesses see better returns on investment in worker training than the government, and finding a way to incentivize private spending on training, possibly with a tax credit versus a tax deduction, would lead to better results.

“We can’t just give someone a voucher for training and no direction and be surprised when they don’t have a job in the end,” he said.

The shift to a short-term approach to corporate management has created a dynamic Warner likened to renting versus owning a house and the amount of care and commitment to the investment in companies and employees.

“CEOs don’t have owners, they have renters,” he said. “Something is wrong when 95 percent of earnings are spent on share buybacks and dividends.”

He suggested mandating a longer timeframe, possibly three years, to earn breaks from capital gains taxes.

Warner is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and called out the Russian manipulation of the news media Americans were viewing, not in support of the Republican party but to generally weaken American interests for Russia’s gain.

For residents of certain Midwestern states, he said, “If you searched for “hacking in the election,” you wouldn’t get Fox News, or NBC or CNN; you would literally get — for the first five stories — Russian propaganda...You’d get stories about Hillary Clinton being sick.”

He advised county leaders to take a stand and speak out if they saw those kinds of manipulations and “fake news” taking root on their communities, echoing a warning by Jim Vandehei, who spoke before him.

“If we don’t get our arms around it, it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “People (in your counties) still know you as human beings and you can push back.”