Lew For Treasury? Not
Posted: January 22, 2013
Critics of President Obama’s choice of former Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defense secretary have labeled this an “in-your-face” nomination. Mr. Hagel, after all, made his chops not as a Republican, but as a maverick Republican.
Though we’ve questioned the bona fides of Mr. Hagel in this space, of greater concern, though, may be Mr. Obama’s selection of Jack Lew as his new Treasury secretary. Talk about “in your face.”
How so? Mr. Lew, if memory recalls, was budget director when the White House put out a real screamer of a 10-year spending plan — one labeled “the most dangerously irresponsible plan we’d ever seen” by mild-mannered Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
How “irresponsible”? Try nonstop deficits to the point of adding $13 trillion to the national debt over a decade — according to budget tables formulated inside the West Wing.
Mr. Lew, nonetheless, had the audacity to say, during a nationwide media blitz, that the plan — his plan — “would not add to the debt.” What’s more, he defended this statement as “accurate” during Senate testimony. In other words, he compounded one lie with another.
So there you have it: Jack Lew — sufficiently undesirable to make us wish the execrable Tim Geithner would stay on at Treasury.
Though we’ve questioned the bona fides of Mr. Hagel in this space, of greater concern, though, may be Mr. Obama’s selection of Jack Lew as his new Treasury secretary. Talk about “in your face.”
How so? Mr. Lew, if memory recalls, was budget director when the White House put out a real screamer of a 10-year spending plan — one labeled “the most dangerously irresponsible plan we’d ever seen” by mild-mannered Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
How “irresponsible”? Try nonstop deficits to the point of adding $13 trillion to the national debt over a decade — according to budget tables formulated inside the West Wing.
Mr. Lew, nonetheless, had the audacity to say, during a nationwide media blitz, that the plan — his plan — “would not add to the debt.” What’s more, he defended this statement as “accurate” during Senate testimony. In other words, he compounded one lie with another.
So there you have it: Jack Lew — sufficiently undesirable to make us wish the execrable Tim Geithner would stay on at Treasury.