Tag Archives: Jacob Lew

January 15, 2013 · 7:56 AM

Paul Krugman Explains Why He Really Didn’t Want That Treasury Job, Anyway

A new commenter inadvertently led me to this article.  Thank you and welcome, Ed Darrell  for your   original suggestion to read You need to watch this: Paul Krugman, ‘Jobs NOW, the key to our recovery’ .

Washington Monthly

In a fascinating and sprawling interview with Bill Moyers, airing this weekend on the PBS show, Moyers & Company, New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman explained why he didn’t want to be nominated to the post of Treasury secretary, even after 235,000 people signed an online petition urging the president to appoint him, and offers his take on Jack Lew, the president’s nominee:

PAUL KRUGMAN: …I probably have more influence…, doing what I do now, than I would if I were inside trying to, you know, do the court power games that come with any White House — even the best — which I don’t think I’d be any good at. So no, this is fine. And what the president needs right now is he needs a hardnosed negotiator. And rumor has it that’s what he’s got, so.

BILL MOYERS: In Jack Lew?

PAUL KRUGMAN: That’s right. The president can’t pass major new legislation. He can’t formulate major new programs right now. What he has to do now is bargain down or ride over these crazy people in the Republican Party. And we what we need now is not deep thinking from the treasury secretary. If the president wants deep thinkers, he can call Joe Stiglitz, he can call other people. What he needs from the Treasury secretary is somebody who’s going to be very effective at dealing with these wild men and making sure that nothing terrible happens.

But that’s not the most interesting part of the interview. Believe it or not, where it gets really fascinating is in Moyers’ discussion with Krugman on the difference between a recession and a depression. (As the title of Krugman’s new book, End This Depression Now!, he thinks what we’re in is the latter.)

While he concedes that the current depression, as he sees it, is not as horrific as the Great Depression of the 1930s, Krugman asserts that it’s likely worse than we perceive, because things that once made a depression obvious to all — breadlines, “will work for food” signs and the like — have take new forms in the the electronic age, and at a time when some public welfare, however meager, is available, and all acting in concert to hide widespread suffering from view:

KRUGMAN: Somebody said that food stamps are the soup kitchens of the modern depression. That there’re a lot of people who would be standing in line to get that soup, who are instead, and it’s a good thing, who are instead getting — I guess it’s now called SNAP, Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program — but who are getting those debit cards, and are getting essential food stuffs. And they’re at the grocery store and they look like anybody else. But the fact of the matter is they are still as desperate, they’re getting by day to day with the aid of a trickle of government aid, just like the people who were standing in line at the soup kitchens in the ’30s, but they’re not visible. They, we don’t have guys selling apples in street corners partly because, you know, the city licensing wouldn’t allow that anymore.

I totally buy that. I know lots of people of all generations who consider themselves middle-class, but are living hand to mouth. The young people working marginal jobs with no prospects and an unimaginable pile of college debt. The middle-aged people short-selling homes that were theirs for years. The old people who never earned enough to invest in mutual funds.

I know them. Don’t you?

The complete Moyers interview:

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January 11, 2013 · 8:22 AM

5 things Republicans hate about Jack Lew

The Week

President Obama’s nominee for Treasury secretary used to be well-regarded on the Right. Not anymore

“There was a time when Republicans liked Jack Lew,” President Obama’s chief of staff and nominee to replace Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary, says Ezra Klein atThe Washington Post. “That time is no longer.” Senate Republicans, already gearing up for a fight over Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) for defense secretary, are now promising a battle over Lew, also: Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, is even threatening to filibuster the nomination,vowing in a press release, “Jack Lew must never be Secretary of Treasury.” What do Republicans have against the quiet, slightly nerdy Orthodox Jew who brings his own lunch — a cheese sandwich and apple — to work at his West Wing desk and still resides in the Bronx? Here, five reasons behind the GOP’s newfound hatred of Jack Lew:

1. He’s a tough, wonkish negotiator
Lew has worked in Washington since 1973, and until 2011 he had a reputation as “a committed progressive who Republicans liked and thought they could do business with because he’s also a pretty hard-boiled numbers guy,” says Matthew Yglesias at Slate. Then came the budget wars of 2011, when Lew — then director of the White House Office of Management and Budget — used his deep knowledge of budgetary math against them, refusing to let Republicans offset spending cuts with vague tax-reform “flim-flam.” Don’t let Lew’s “nerdy exterior” fool you, says Massimo Calabresi at TIME. He’s a fierce negotiator and “a passionate progressive on the issue of wealth disparity and programs for the poor” — Democrats credit him with saving Medicaid from GOP scalpels. Republicans simply don’t want to face such “a formidable opponent as Washington heads into more tough negotiations over the budget.”

2. Republicans feel he’s condescending and wily
It’s not just that Lew is a “wonk Zelig” — he has “played a role in every big budget deal since 1983,” says Joshua Green at Bloomberg Businessweek. Republicans chafed at “his insistence on explaining in detail the impact of the cuts Republicans were proposing” during the 2011 negotiations. In fact, “Republicans found Lew condescending, inflexible, and a bit sneaky,” saysThe Washington Post‘s Klein. Democrats dismiss these complaints as “sour grapes,” but as the GOP sees it, Lew “often seemed to be trying to trick them into agreeing to complicated policies that ultimately redounded to the administration’s benefits.” And in at least one case, he did outfox the GOP.

3. Lew is a Democrat’s Democrat
Geithner, the outgoing Treasury secretary, is also wonkish, but he’s mostly a financial technocrat. Lew is a partisan Democrat, and his résumé is impressively full of liberal lore: During his one year at Minnesota’s Carleton College, Lew’s academic adviser was Paul Wellstone, who would go on to become a progressive icon in the U.S. Senate; Wellstone convinced him to enter politics, and his first big job in Washington was budget analyst and negotiator for legendary House Speaker Tip O’Neill, alongside MSNBC star Chris Matthews; and he was Bill Clinton’s OMB director and later Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary of state before joining the Obama White House. Given the extreme polarization in Washington, this history doesn’t exactly endear him to Republicans.

4. He agrees with Obama
“When it comes to worldview,” says Noam Scheiber at The New Republic, “Lew is Obama in coke-bottle glasses.” That actually makes some Democrats nervous, given both men’s ”romantic [views] about the virtues of a deficit grand-bargain.” But it makes even more Republicans livid, given their hatred of Obama, says Jonathan Chait at New York. It’s absurd, but “Lew’s disqualification,” according to Sessions and other Republicans, seems to boil down to “that he doesn’t agree with Republicans on public policy issues.” This is Obama’s cabinet, and it should reflect his policy views, of course. But I guess in today’s Washington “Lew is unacceptable because Republicans want to pick the person on both sides of the negotiating table.”

5. Republicans are just jockeying for leverage
Among the real sense of being burned by Lew is at least an element of crass political theatrics. The looming confirmation fight is a rare opportunity to grill the president’s chief of staff, and “Republicans say Jack Lew will have to answer for what they view as the president’s bare-knuckle tactics,” says Alexander Bolton at The Hill. The GOP is especially “flummoxed… by Obama’s blunt refusal to even negotiate legislation to raise the debt ceiling,” unlike in 2011, when Bill Daily was chief of staff, and they blame Lew for the change in tactics. Republicans might also use Lew’s confirmation hearings as leverage to extract steep spending cuts in the upcoming budget fight. “They would be foolish not to use this opportunity to lay the foundation for their strategy on the debt ceiling,” political scientist Larry Sabato tells The Washington Examiner. This is one “high-profile hearing that they don’t want to let go to waste.”

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February 14, 2011 · 9:45 AM

Obama Budget Cuts Target Poor, Students and Middle Class

Ok, somebody tell me, is this what Americans who voted for Barack Obama expected from him?  In the words of John Boehner, HELL NO!

Huffington Post

President Barack Obama, less than two months after signing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans into law, is proposing a budget to congress that attacks programs that assist the working poor, help the needy heat their homes, expand access to graduate-level education and undermine that type of community-based organizations that gave the president his start in Chicago.

Obama’s new budget puts forward a plan to achieve $1.1 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade, according to an administration official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity in advance of the formal release of the budget.

Those reductions — averaging just over $100 billion each year — are achieved mainly by squeezing social programs. A deal struck to extend the Bush tax cuts for just two years, meanwhile, increased the deficit by $858 billion dollars. More than $500 billion of that bargain constituted tax cuts, with billions more funding business tax breaks and a reduction in the estate tax. Roughly $56 billion went to reauthorize emergency unemployment benefits.

The president’s budget was expected to mostly target “non-defense discretionary spending,” which makes up less than one-quarter of the overall budget, making balancing the budget with such cuts mathematically impossible.

Indeed, the driver of the deficit is tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that as a result of the tax cut deal, the projected deficit in Obama’s budget will reach a “record” level of $1.6 trillion this year, though that figure, relative to the size of the American economy, is far lower than many other governments around the world, according to data compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency. And the relative deficit is well below the levels of the 1940s, a time of economic prosperity. “President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposal projects this year’s deficit will reach $1.6 trillion, the largest on record, as December’s tax-cut deal begins to reduce federal revenues, a senior Democrat said Sunday,” the Journal reported Sunday evening. (The deficit is only a record if it is neither adjusted for inflation nor considered relative to the size of GDP.)

A closer look at surveys suggests that when people say they are concerned about the deficit, they are actually worried about the economy.

Updates…

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