At a hearing today on Capitol Hill, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner blamed members of Congress (before 2008) for the economic troubles:
When Geithner is reminded by freshman GOP congressman Tom Graves of Georgia that President Obama was a member of that congressional body, he's forced to admit, "Oh, I see your point. That's a good point. He was a senator for two years. You're right."
Graves then says, "He had an opportunity to be part of the solution."
ABC News reports that during an interview with David Muir yesterday concerning President Obama’s $447 billion jobs bill, “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn’t dispute a Harvard economist’s estimate that each job in the White House’s jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said” — mysteriously —“the pricetag is the wrong way to measure the bill’s worth.”
Despite the repeated attempts to wish away the Solyndra scandal, it appears to be getting bigger. Today, the Los Angeles Times informs us key White House personnel raised concerns the Department of Energy loan program that gave Solyndra $535 million was poorly conceived and managed long before the solar panel manufacturer's bankruptcy:
Why, exactly, do we need to extend the debt limit to the point where the federal government can borrow another $2.4 trillion (hardly a nice round number) — about the same amount of money, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, that we borrowed to fight all of World War II? Because, as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made abundantly clear during his FoxNewsSunday interview with Chris Wallace, $2.4 trillion is the amount of money that the Obama administration thinks it needs to borrow (on behalf of taxpayers, who will have to pay it back) to get Obama through the next election.
Mixed messaging from the Obama administration today on the budget: Spokesman Jay Carney called the president's budget "extraordinary," while Treasury secretary Tim Geithner said "it's unsustainable."
U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, echoed the president's State of the Union speech, acknowledging the need for fiscal responsibility but warning against making deep cuts to government spending.
At Monday's town hall in Washington, President Obama was asked whether his top economic adviser, Larry Summers, and his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, would be staying through the end of this term. Obama's answer makes one think the answer is no:
