GREGG TO GEITHNER: BUDGET FORECAST A LIE

Interesting tone by Gregg to Geithner who was edified by President Obama for his qualifications as Commerce Secretary. Gregg really showed his character.

MSNBC reported:

It was obvious to most Capitol Hill insiders why President Obama wanted Republican Judd Gregg as a member of his cabinet: He's one of the sharpest money-minds in Congress.

But instead of getting Gregg's counsel within the administration, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner found himself today [Thursday] of the receiving end of Gregg's fiscal conservative wrath.

In a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee Gregg dressed down Geithner with facts, figures, and charts. While always keeping his cool, the exchange was somewhere between a mother's scolding, a drill sergeant's questioning and an attorney's cross examination.

In his opening statement, Gregg politely called the administration's budget forecast a lie.

"The argument that it cuts the debt in half in four years is, ahh, is truly spurious," he told Geithner.

President Obama himself gives Gregg's comments a sense of stinging credibility.
When the president introduced Gregg as his nominee for Commerce Secretary last month, he said Gregg is known for is fiscal discipline.

"He shares my deep-seated commitment to guaranteeing that our children inherit a future they can afford," Obama said.

Today, the president's compliment of Gregg turned into an attack on Geithner. Gregg said the budget is essentially "putting on our children's backs a debt they can never get out from underneath."

He added pointedly, "I think we're putting at risk not only our children's future, we're clearly putting at risk the value of a dollar and our ability to sell debt."

When Gregg withdrew his nomination, he said he and the administration were "functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy."
Gregg's opening monologue today would indicate that was a gross understatement.

"The argument that this budget doesn't have tax increases [on everyone] is, I think, an 'Alice in Wonderland' view of the budget," he said. He challenged the budget's math on cutting the debt: "When you take the deficit and quadruple it and then you cut it and half, that's like taking four steps back and two steps forward. That's not making any progress; you're still going backwards."

Gregg questioned why any foreign country would continue to buy up U.S. debt:

"Because if I'm in the international marketplace, and I'm looking at this budget, I'm saying to myself, ‘Where's the discipline? Where's the containment?' There isn't any."
Read on.

Here is an excerpt of Geithner's opening statement to the committee from Treasury website:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner Senate Budget
Committee Hearing Opening Statement

Chairman Conrad, Ranking Member Gregg, and members of the Committee, thank you for providing me the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the President's Budget at this moment of economic crisis, but also of real possibility, for the United States.

What I propose to do in the remarks that follow is to:

• Describe the economic and financial challenges that greeted us upon our arrival in office, and discuss how we are addressing them;

• Lay out the intermediate and long-term threats to our fiscal condition, and explain how the President's Fiscal Year 2010 Budget will return the nation to a sustainable fiscal position; and

• Explain how this Budget puts the nation on a path towards energy independence, better educational outcomes, and a reform of health care that both lowers costs and expands access