Jack Lew must never be Secretary of the Treasury. His testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so outrageous and false that it alone disqualifies.
On the most important question of our time, the unsustainability of our national debt course, Lew, as the President’s budget director, appeared before Congress and continued to insist that President Obama’s budget—which Lew had crafted—would not add to the debt of the United States. His original statement, to a national television audience, was as follows:
“Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. I have called it the greatest financial misrepresentation in history. His budget, according to his own OMB analysis, would have never produced over 10 years an annual deficit of less than $600 billion. Overall, as reported in the White House budget tables, the plan would have added $13 trillion to the gross debt by 2021—never putting us in a position to “bring down our national debt.”
To “look the American people in the eye” and make such a statement remains the most direct and important false assertion during my entire time in Washington. He stuck to this position in his testimony—although Sec. Geithner before the Committee later did not—and the President continued to make this assertion even in the last months of the campaign. To confirm Mr. Lew would be to acquiesce in a policy of dishonesty to the American people.