Sen. Warren Q&A with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew

[jakeXT]

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[DJ13]

1. He's a slippery one

[Scuba]

2. I was going to use slimey.

[zeemike]

5. slippery, slimy, ...kind of is the same thing.

But they are pros at not being pinned down to an answer...I think they teach that at corporate school.
And as good as Warren is, they have a blow off line for any question she could ask.

[another_liberal]

3. Lew is from Citigroup, right?

Wikipedia notes that: "Lew was named chief operating officer of Citigroup's Alternative Investments unit, a proprietary trading group. The unit he oversaw invested in a hedge fund 'that bet on the housing market to collapse.'"

At any rate, we now have yet another fatcat banker leading Treasury's efforts to keep fatcat bankers under control, for the good of our nation.

Gee, I bet that works out just great!

[OKNancy]

8. He was there less than two years, otherwise he has been a public servant

and probably the most liberal member of the Obama cabinet.

[another_liberal]

11. Three years actually.

And those three years just happened to be 2006 through 2008. A rather momentous time to be Chief Operating Officer of Citibank.

As to his service in government: Even from what little I have so far read concerning Mr. Lew's history, it seems fair to suggest that just whose "servant" he was while in those positions of public trust is still open to some question.

Finally: I would not speak ill of our President, but his is the least "liberal" Democratic administration probably since before the Civil War. To be the "most liberal" member of that crowd is not much to brag about.

[sulphurdunn]

4. That woman is too smart

to be a Senator. She should stay off of small planes.

[midnight]

6. That is how smart we should demand all the rest of them to be...

[Plucketeer]

10. Or maybe...

we should ENCOURAGE Mr. Lew to fly on small planes more frequently. In fact, I'd buy rides for this whole damned administration!

[Iwillnevergiveup]

7. It's time once again

to make another donation to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She needs to stay in office as long as she wants to.

K&R

[OKNancy]

9. I think he did a fine job answering.

DU seems to have a hard-on for this guy, but he has done some really good things.
During the debt ceiling fight, he was the one who kept Medicare and Social Security off the table.

http://theweek.com/article/index/238680/5-things-republicans-hate-about-jack-lew

excerpt:

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.

Edit to add this link too: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/10/the_reason_republicans_don_t_like_jack_lew.html

Lew's reputation, at the time, was as a committed progressive who Republicans liked and thought they could do business with because he's also a pretty hard-boiled numbers guy.

But it emerged over the course of the negotiations that John Boehner and other Republicans kept trying to kick Lew out of the room to make a deal. That's because what Boehner wanted to do was make a deal in which spending cuts would be balanced by flim-flam, and Lew kept saying that the flim-flam didn't work mathematically. To put a balanced package together, Lew insisted that you needed to have real revenue-increasing tax hikes not just "tax reform" and handwaving. This kept spoiling the party...................