When it comes to critics who warned that the Obama administration would kill jobs, the facts “have proven them wrong,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said following Friday’s strong jobs report.
“I think that the critics who said all these things, we’re going to hurt the economy, have been proven wrong,” Lew told CNBC’s Steve Liesman in an interview airing Monday.
On Friday, the Labor Department reported that the past three months have been among the strongest of the past decade for job creation, with job gains averaging 336,000.
Together with a falling annual deficit and low oil prices, Lew said, those gains show that the U.S. economy is doing well.
“I think that it is time to say that we’ve really turned the corner and we’re now in an economy that’s growing,” Lew said, later adding that “I’m feeling pretty confident that we’re looking at a good period ahead.”
Lew said last week before the favorable jobs report came out that the U.S. recovery was now “self-sustaining.”
Sounding overconfident in the economy is a risk for an official of Lew’s stature. He cited the “middle-class economics” agenda laid out in President Obama’s State of the Union address as a way to improve on the current growth.
The economic recovery that officially began in 2009 has been the slowest of any since the Great Depression, but it appeared to pick up through the end of 2014.
Lew left Washington, D.C., on Sunday evening and was slated to arrive at the G-20 Meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Istanbul, Turkey, on Monday.
