Top 10 Reasons to Oppose Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary

Originally posted at FreedomWorks.org.

President Obama has nominated his Chief of Staff, Jack Lew, to replace Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary. If Jack Lew is confirmed by the Senate, it would be bad news for the U.S. economy. Lew is just another tax-hiking, big-spending beltway insider that is just as bad as Timothy Geithner. Listed below are the top ten reasons to oppose Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary:

1. Jack Lew Played a Key Role in Fiscal Cliff Negotiations

Jack Lew acts as a prime negotiator for Obama behind the scenes. Most recently, he negotiated the disastrous fiscal cliff deal that contained tax hikes, corporate welfare, and no spending cuts. Most Americans saw their payroll taxes increase because of the terrible deal that was crafted behind closed doors.

2. Jack Lew Worked for Citigroup

Jack Lew is the former chief operating officer of Citigroup’s Alternative Investments unit—the group that invested in and profited off the housing and financial collapse. He was there when the bank nearly imploded and lost aroundfive hundred million in one quarter in 2008 as the bank’s bets turned south.

3. Jack Lew Has Ties With Corporate Welfare

After Citigroup received a $45 billion dollar taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department, he received a $945,000 bonus from the bank in 2009. President Obama has even called the Wall Street bonuses “obscene” and referred to recipients as “fat cats who are getting awarded for their failure.” 

4. Jack Lew Has Confessed That He is Not a Financial Expert

During Lew’s previous Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Bernie Sanders asked whether deregulation contributed significantly to the financial collapse. Lew answered: “I don’t consider myself an expert in some of these aspects of the financial industry.” He then recommended that Senate Sanders speak to someone who understands the financial industry better: “I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.”

5. Jack Lew Drafted Health Care Reform under Clinton

From February 1993 to October 1994, Jack Lew served as special assistant to President Bill Clinton. He was responsible for drafting the overly bureaucratic and costly “HillaryCare” health care reform legislation that would have declined the quality of health care.

 6. Jack Lew Designed AmeriCorps

As a special assistant to President Clinton, Jack Lew helped design the deeply flawed AmeriCorps national service program that costs taxpayers over $1 billion annually. While AmeriCorps is often touted as a volunteer program, all individuals are paid with taxpayer dollars to “volunteer” for government-approved service programs.

7. Jack Lew Drafted Obama’s Massive Budget

As director of the Office of Management and Budget, Jack Lew helped draft Obama’s budget that notoriously received zero votes in the Senate. He dishonestly said that the budget would not add to the debt. However, the Congressional Budget Office found that the budget would add nearly $10 trillionto the national debt over the next decade.

8. Jack Lew Makes Misleading Excuses to Why the Senate Has Not Passed a Budget

The Senate has neglected its basic duty by not passing a budget in nearly four years. When asked about the Senate’s failure to pass a budget on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lew incorrectly claimed that, “you can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes.” False—it only takes 51 votes to pass a budget.

9. Jack Lew Played a Significant Role in 2011 Debt Ceiling Negotiations

He played a significant role in the failed 2011 debt ceiling negotiations – which resulted in a credit downgrade, a $2 trillion debt hike, and spending cuts that were promised but never materialized. This was a bad deal for Americans that was crafted behind closed doors.

10. Jack Lew Advocates Raising Income Taxes

As director of the Office of Management and Budget, he created a budget that would raise taxes on the top 2 percent of incomes. Raising taxes is never a good idea—especially in these tough economic times. Jack Lew is just another beltway-insider engaged in class warfare against working Americans.

Click here to call your senators and tell them to vote NO during Jack Lew’s confirmation hearing!

Please visit NotJackLew.com!

Rand Paul Schools Tim Geithner

Watch Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) teach Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner a thing or two about basic economics in the video below. Rand Paul explaining what F.A. Hayek called “the Pretense of Knowledge” is music to my ears. Geithner should take some notes.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner Deserves to be Fired

Originally posted at FreedomWorks.org.

To put it mildly, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has a miserable track record. His fingerprints are all over the current fiscal disaster. Geithner has been grossly wrong on everything from the bank bailouts to the trillion-dollar “stimulus” plans. Under his watch, the U.S. credit rating was recently downgraded from AAA to AA+. He has had a direct role in bailing out the auto industry and spendthrift nations such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars through the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The dynamic duo of Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner wrongly thought that simply printing more money could get out of this mess. Geithner should immediately resign or President Obama should kick him out of cabinet position. Either situation is a win for the American economy.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) have recently announced their intention to introduce a vote of no confidence in the Treasury Secretary. According to Sen. Paul, “the stock market gave a vote of no confidence to Timothy Geithner yesterday and for the past 11 days. Geithner has shown no acumen in predicting, diagnosing, or treating America’s economic woes. The time has come for him to resign.” Similar calls for Geithner to resign have been echoed by House Speaker John Boehner, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and other prominent members of Congress. It seems like Geithner is an unpopular figure in Washington as well as the rest of the nation.

A congressional vote of no confidence against Geithner will send a strong message to President Obama. With the Labor Department’s unemployment rate still over 9 percent — the real unemployment rate is likely significantly higher— and inflation running rampant, it’s hard to believe that anyone could possibly have any confidence in Geithner whose job is to manage the nation’s finances. Just a few months ago, Geithner said that there was “no risk” of the U.S. losing its AAA ratings. You might even remember his New York Times article titled “Welcome to the Recovery” back in August 2010. Real recovery is still nowhere in sight a year later.

Anyone who believes we’re on the right path to economic recovery might be living under a rock. In a recent NBC interview, Timothy Geithner criticized S&P’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating by saying, “S&P has shown really terrible judgment and they’ve handled themselves very poorly…They’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about basic U.S. fiscal budget math.” But the truth is that it’s odd that S&P didn’t downgrade our top-tier credit rating a long time ago. The United States, the world’s largest debtor nation, is over $14.5 trillion in debt. It’s maddening that the Obama administration has the nerve to question S&P’s knowledge on fiscal budget math when the U.S. deficit and debt are at all-time highs.

Timothy Geithner has shown himself incapable of facing economic reality. Noted investor and firm believer in Austrian economics Jim Rogers recently said, “it seems to me it’s physically, humanly impossible for the U.S. to ever pay off its debt. They can roll it over and continue to play the charade, but the U.S. is bankrupt.” Unlike Geithner, Jim Rogers was one of the few to predict the current financial crisis.

The former New York Federal Reserve Chairman has no shortage of scandals. Geithner played a key role in the over $170 billion taxpayer bailout of American International Group (AIG) during the height of the financial crisis. The multinational insurance giant used a significant chunk of the money to pay bonuses to executives despite the fact that the money-losing company was severely mismanaged. It was revealed that Geithner even urged AIG executives to keep quiet about the $105 billion of payments made to banks, which AIG had insured against losses, including Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. Geithner surely didn’t want taxpayers to know that their hard-earned money went to bankers who made bad investment decisions.

Tim Geithner has zero credibility in diagnosing and solving our current economic woes. He is determined to maintain the same failed status quo policies. Someone who has a clue about the economic situation we face would be preferable to Tim Geithner. He’s got to go—for the sake of our future prosperity.