Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sharply rejected a call to resign from his job Thursday and told Congressman Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican on the House Joint Economic Committee, during heated testimony, “You gave this President an economy falling off the cliff.”
“Again, it’s just a basic fact: A year ago, this economy was falling at the rate of 6 percent a year,” Geithner told Brady after the GOP lawmaker ticked off a list of economic failures he said Geithner is responsible for. “We were losing between half a million and three-quarters of a million jobs a month.”
Brady, who asked Geithner if he would step down, then responded:
“Mr. Secretary, the public has lost all confidence in your ability to do your job. Conservatives agree.. liberals agree… it is time for a fresh start.” The failures, Brady told Geithner, is starting”to reflect on your president.”
Geithner fired back:
“If you look at any measure of consumer and investor confidence today, if you look at any measure of the stability and health of the economy … it is substantially stronger today than when the president of the United States took office,” he said. “And that did not happen on its own.”
“Tell all of that to the millions of American who no longer have jobs because of your decisions,” Brady said. “At some point you have to take some responsibility for your decisions.”
According to a report Wednesday in The Hill, progressive Democrats have also grown wary of Geithner:
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said Wednesday that he and other liberal House members are becoming increasingly tired of Obama administration economic policies that they say are too focused on maintaining the stability of Wall Street firms and largely ignore “Main Street.”
“A growing consensus in the [Congressional Progressive Caucus [believe that Geithner should be removed],” DeFazio said on MSNBC this evening, adding that some lawmakers are “considering questions regarding him and other economic advisers.”
DeFazio said that lawmakers have not yet drafted a plan to remove Geithner. The lawmaker also took aim at top Obama economic adviser Larry Summers for furthering many of the same policies favored by Geithner.
DeFazio’s comments were made during an appearance on MSNBC’s The Ed Schultz Show. A video of DeFazio’s exchange with the Schultz can be seen HERE.
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It’s amazing how the Republicans have this amazing ability to automatically cut off all memory of the Bush administration and their part in the carry out of its policies. I am sure that this Congressman sat in the meeting when Hank Paulson told him and the other members of Congress that Bush would declare Martial Law if they did not approve the TARP bill because our economy (and the world’s,too, btw) was about to crash. And, indeed, it did come within two hours of being knocked back into the Stone Age. That is the one thing that Bush did that I agreed with during his entire eight years. Yet, he has evidently blocked that episode from his memory and all its sequelae.
Considering that this was in October of 2008 and that President Obama was not inaugurated until January 20, 2009, and he STILL inherited an economy in free fall, Pres. Obama has obviously done something right to bring our country to the point where leading economic indicators show that our economy is no longer in free fall and that there are signs of recovery in the distance. He did all that in just….wait, let me count……10 months! I think that his advisers have given him some pretty sound advice. Ours is the largest economy in the world to pull back up over a cliff single-handedly. I think it can safely be said that the Party of No has had no part in it! Although the Stimulus Plan wasn’t what everyone wanted, it appears to have been enough to kick start our great economic engine. Yet, Rep. Brady has apparently had a memory dump for all of these facts.
That being said, Pres. Obama’s economic advisers are an elite Wall Street team who were drafted from Wall Street itself. They have given him sound advice that has saved the underpinnings of our economy. However, Main Street is still suffering while Wall Street takes home record bonuses! Tim Geithner and his ilk have advised the President to retain the rest of the stimulus funds just in case Wall Street runs into more trouble. Yet, Wall Street is carrying out business as usual. There has been virtually no legislation passed to prevent them from doing the same things that led to the first crash – and they are doing it again! Not that the Democrats haven’t tried, mind you. The Party of No has blocked any attempt to place reasonable regulations on the market such as were imposed after the Great Depression and brought us years of economic growth and a wealthy country – until those regulations were repealed one by one, resulting in the recent economic crash! What’s a reasonable party to do? When the economic team advising the President comes from Wall Street and is Wall Street-friendly, the Democratic Congress can look for little help there. We need to spend the rest of the TARP funds on small business lending, which is still almost non-existent, infrastructure projects to generate real jobs, and in helping people with their loans on their homes before even more homes are lost in this debacle. This Wall Street cabal isn’t going to advise the President to do these things, apparently. Although they were the right people for the times when Wall Street was floundering, I think the President needs to appoint a new team who will advise him how to use the rest of those funds on how to help the people now. Wall Street must be made to realize that if they continue to gamble with our money, there will be no more taxpayer bail-outs! That money will not be ear-marked for them. It is the People’s money and will be used to alleviate the suffering of the People!
the People (note caps) this, the People that. wow Angela, spoken like a true communist.
I can’t disagree Geithner needs to go, he is an outright failure and has not created or saved one job as far as anyone can tell, while handing over all the riches and the keys to the kingdom. but blaming Republicans for anything that’s happened under Obama is not only comical, it’s also setting a pretty scary precedent. read this when you’ve actually read this, and try to respond without using the word Republican:
http://pubrecord.org/multimedia/6105/liberal-democrat-calls-geithners/
“Angela Olsen- That being said, Pres. Obama’s economic advisers are an elite Wall Street team who were drafted from Wall Street itself.”
I think that statement marrs your dissenting opinion that the Republicans were responsible for this economic turmoil. Although the first stimulus was passed under the Bush administration it wasn’t approved by the people of America, it was passed under support from both sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, a well known Democratic supporter of the initial funding, from California Dianne Feinstein, voted AGAINST her constituents when informing the congress of the dissenting votes against the TARP funds by claiming she had received over 85 thousand calls regarding the bailout funds, and that 83 thousand of those calls were against it.
“I believe if we care about our constituents we should pass this bill, my vote is yes.”
-Dianne Feinstein
Blame is to be spread all around, not just on one side of the aisle. The RNC has endorsed a stinging resolution that condemns the Bush administrations policies as “socialistic” and vehemently opposes any more such claims of necessity regarding economic stimulus through government regulation. They can rightly be called the party of no, yet the only reason that holds truth is because of their constituents response to bills that are enacted without the American people’s insight, how can you justify not reading a bill and claim it’s needed to alleviate the people’s suffering when noone knows what’s in it? What is it to alleviate us of, the mystical belief that there is a crisis? Something the government helped promote? Have you heard of the “Community Reinvestment Act” or “Sarbanes-Oxley,” or “Bretton-Woods,” I suspect these, and more, are to blame for our current crisis along with the Federal Reserve that intrudes into the private sector, not just to regulate, but to legislate what is and is not acceptable.
When the government plays both the competitor, and referee, within a market, there will not be innovation or progress within that economy.