Home / Geithner
Showing posts with label Geithner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geithner. Show all posts
Obama doesn't understand economics, continued

Obama doesn't understand economics, continued

Suppose that it costs you $200,000 to create a job that pays $50,000. Will that make the economy stronger? Hardly. If the job produces $50,000 worth of wealth but it costs you $200,000, that job will destroy $150,000 worth of wealth. The economy and the standard of living will be lower. Personally, I don't believe Feldstein's numbers for a second. From ABC News:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner didn't dispute a Harvard economist's estimate that each job in the White House's jobs plan would cost $200,000, but said the pricetag is the wrong way to measure the bill's worth.

And he also pointed out, in an interview today with ABC News' David Muir, that there is no other option on the table for getting the economy moving and putting more people back to work.

"You've got to think about the costs of the alternatives," Geithner said when asked about Harvard economist Martin Feldstein's calculation that each job created by President Obama's American Jobs Act would cost taxpayers about $200,000.

"If government does nothing, it does nothing now because they're scared by politics or they want to debate what's perfect, then there will be fewer Americans back to work, the economy will be weaker," he said.

"We can borrow money for 10 years as the government of the United States because people have confidence in this country at less than 2 percent," he said. "The responsible path now is to take advantage of the unique position we're in as a country. People have a lot of confidence in us. Let's take advantage of that now to do things that help growth in the short-term." . . .


Monster.com did this analysis of the jobs created by the Stimulus:


. . . Weatherization

“There are any number of buildings that need to be weatherized, and that employment will be there for a long time,” Shatkin says. “In this job, you install insulation either with equipment or by hand.” You need only a GED to do this work, and the pay is about $31,000 a year. Don’t apply if you’re claustrophobic because the work sometimes takes place in confined spaces.

Infrastructure Construction

Stimulus spending on road construction, upgrading telecommunication lines and infrastructure repairs will boost jobs for construction managers, welders, pavers and iron workers. The line workers who extend broadband access to rural areas earn about $47,000 a year.

Rail Track Layers

Some stimulus funding targets the repair and expansion of the rail network. While there’s plenty of long-term money in this field, you may work far from home as you follow the tracks. Average salary is $42,000 a year.

Electricians

Several stimulus spending areas are creating work for electricians. They’re needed to repair highways, modernize schools and connect new solar power equipment. “If you specialize in solar power, you can get in on the ground floor and be one of the industry’s pioneers,” Shatkin says. While you can train to be an electrician at community colleges and trade schools, Shatkin recommends union apprenticeships, where you earn while you learn the craft. Average salary for electricians: $45,000.

Civil Engineers

If you like math and are willing to attend four years of college, civil engineering can be a great career path. The civil engineers who will make sure the stimulus-funded construction projects are built correctly earn an average of about $72,000.

Steel

Manufacturing may be on life support, but the stimulus will boost companies that support alternative energy. For example, steel wind turbines are too heavy to ship from overseas, so they’re manufactured as close as possible to where they go up, Shatkin says. “That will create jobs for structural steel workers and welders,” he says. “There’s also a big demand for computer-controlled machine tool operators, who earn about $32,000 a year.” Jobs will also open up for mechanical engineering technicians, who help design mechanical parts and devices and earn $47,000 with an associate’s degree.

Industrial Engineers

Any industry that gets stimulus funding is going to need industrial engineers to help spend that money wisely. “They’re efficiency experts who apply the scientific method to optimize energy or work flow, and they earn $71,000 with a bachelor’s degree,” Shatkin says.

Teaching

Classroom teachers get great pensions and time off every summer. If you already have a four-year degree, you may be able to gain certification in just over a year by going to school full-time. Some areas allow teachers to start with a bachelor’s in another field while they seek certification, Shatkin says. Preschool, one of the areas the stimulus targets for expansion, pays the least, averaging only $23,000. However, secondary-school teachers average $49,000.

Don’t like kids? Try teaching literacy, English as a second language or a GED class to adults. “There’s a lot of growth in this field because of immigration and the need for more basic skills as the economy becomes more technical,” Shatkin says. Average pay for adult educators is $45,000.

Physical or Respiratory Therapy Assistant

Armed with an associate’s degree, you’ll earn an average of $44,000 a year as a physical therapy assistant helping develop physical therapy plans, setting up equipment and assisting a physical therapist. Respiratory therapist assistants, who average $40,000 a year, help respiratory therapists treat breathing problems of patients in hospitals, specialty practices and nursing homes.

Medical Records Experts

The shift from printed to electronic medical records will create jobs for health information technicians who earn about $29,000 a year with an associate’s degree as well as systems analysts who make $70,000 a year with a four-year degree.

Managers

As the health, education, construction and alternative-energy fields grow from stimulus spending, they’ll need more managers to handle back-office functions such as accounting (average salary $57,000), as well as general managers and operations managers (average $89,000). To break into either field, you’ll need a four-year degree.
Obama's complicity in two financial crises?

Obama's complicity in two financial crises?

Stanley Kurtz has this interesting piece linking Obama to ACORN to the financial crisis. The article is available here.

As America teeters on the brink of a second financial crisis, I think back to 2008, and the irony of a suprime mortgage fiasco propelling to the presidency a man who’d spent a career abetting the folks who’d caused the crisis to begin with. Despite releasing an Internet ad on ACORN, Obama, and the subprime meltdown, the McCain campaign was unwilling or unable to pursue the issue. The Clinton administration’s gutting of credit standards in the name of fair housing, in close cooperation with ACORN and Fannie Mae, laid the foundations of the mortgage crisis of 2008. Yet in the second presidential debate, McCain did nothing to combat Obama’s claims that the crisis was strictly a product of under-regulation. In the third debate, Obama flat-out lied about his longstanding ties to ACORN. The media, of course, let him get away with it.

While many conservatives know the real story well, the country as a whole has still barely heard it. The important new book by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner has begun to break the fuller truth about the 2008 financial meltdown into public awareness, yet even there the focus is on Fannie Mae, while the ACORN connection is given short shrift. Fannie Mae would never have gone south if ACORN hadn’t pulled it into the subprime business in the first place. ACORN’s national banking campaign was coordinated by Obama’s close political allies at the group’s Chicago office, which Obama was heavily funding through two foundations at the time. . . .

I think of Bell Federal’s naive and noble–but doomed–resistance to ACORN, and Fannie Mae’s equally bitter battle to hold ACORN at bay–well before the horror story recounted by Morgenson and Rosner played out. It took a lot of heavy lifting by ACORN and its supporters to break down years of prudent business practice, embodied in the credit standards all sane bankers once rightly insisted on. Only after those standards were compromised did we reap the whirlwind. . . .

Obama was intimately familiar with the battle to undermine America’s credit standards, and in full philosophical sympathy with it. It took a one-two punch of Alinskyite intimidation and federal regulatory pressure to create the preconditions for the subprime crisis of 2008, and Obama was on board for all of it. . . .

Now we are flirting with a second crisis, brought on by overspending, debt, and excessive regulation. Dodd-Frank, a banking bill named for Barney Frank, another abettor of the Fannie Mae fiasco, depresses business. . . . .


Kurtz has this information here linking Obama to ACORN.

Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's new book extensively discusses Jim Johnson's role in creating the mortgage crisis, but they also mention Obama's close ties with Johnson (e.g., see page 11, 54, 187). Many of Obama's important appointees had big roles in creating the financial crisis (e.g., Timothy Geithner, Tom Donilon).

Newest Fox News piece: The S&P Downgrade Is a Wake Call for All Americans

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:



When Standard & Poors downgraded Spain's bonds from AAA to AA+ in January 2009, its interest rates increased from 4.1 to 4.3 percent.

When the same ratings agency downgraded Ireland's from AAA to AA+ in March 2009, their interest rate rose by about 0.4 percentage points.

So what does that mean for Standard & Poors in terms of downgrading the U.S. bond rating?

With our $14.6 trillion in national debt, raising the U.S. government interest rates by the same amounts would eventually add about $29 to $58 billion a year in increased interest costs -- small change when we are already facing a $1.63 trillion deficit this year. And not all of that increase would be immediately felt since we only face the higher interest rate on newly issued bonds.

The problem with these downgrades is that they have a tendency to quickly spiral out of control. . . .












UPDATE: From The Hill newspaper:



Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday there is "no risk" the U.S. will lose its top credit rating amid a new analysis that revised its outlook on American debt to "negative."



Geithner took to the airwaves of financial news networks to push back against a report Monday by Standard & Poor's that lowered its outlook on U.S. debt to "negative," reflecting political uncertainty over whether lawmakers will reach an agreement to address long-term debt.





There is no chance that the U.S. will lose its top credit rating, Geithner said, forcefully disputing the notion that S&P or other ratings services might downgrade U.S. bonds from their current AAA rating.



"No risk of that, no risk," Geithner said on the Fox Business Network. . . .




Obama got what he wanted on the length of the deal to raise the debt ceiling, but we still got the downgrade of the credit rating.







Transcript from Obama's July 25, 2011 address to nation:

First of all, a six-month extension of the debt ceiling might not be enough to avoid a credit downgrade and the higher interest rates that all Americans would have to pay as a result. We know what we have to do to reduce our deficits; there’s no point in putting the economy at risk by kicking the can further down the road. . . .
Geithner explains why we need to increase taxes on small businesses to reduce the deficit

Geithner explains why we need to increase taxes on small businesses to reduce the deficit

Growth will be increased by raising taxes on small businesses because reducing the debt would help growth more than the higher taxes on small businesses would hurt growth. From CNS:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday that the Obama administration believes taxes on small business must increase so the administration does not have to “shrink the overall size of government programs.”
The administration’s plan to raise the tax rate on small businesses is part of its plan to raise taxes on all Americans who make more than $250,000 per year—including businesses that file taxes the same way individuals and families do. . . .
“No, that's right. I agree with that,” said Geithner. “But just to put it in perspective, it's important to recognize why are we doing this. You know, our deficits are 10 percent of GDP, higher than they've been since any time in the postwar period really. We have a big hole to dig out of, and we have to figure out how to do that in a way that's balanced, good for growth, fair to people as a whole.”
Geithner, continuing, argued that if the administration did not extract a trillion dollars in new revenue from its plan to increase taxes on people earning more than $250,000, including small businesses, the government would in effect “finance” what he called a “tax benefit” for those people. . . .


Republicans less than convinced by Geithner's push for debt ceiling increase

Republicans less than convinced by Geithner's push for debt ceiling increase

Can the Democrats really explain why failure to increase the debt limit is so bad? OK, so not increasing the debt limit cuts spending by about one-third in August and September and by about 29 percent for next year.

Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who sat through most of the hour-long meeting, told The Hill that Geithner said “absolutely nothing” to convince him of the urgent need to increase the current $14.3 trillion limit by the August 2 deadline.
If Congress does not raise the borrowing authority for the Treasury secretary by August, Chabot predicted that “we’ll have to reduce the level of spending, which I’m in favor of.”
“It just looks to me like we’re moving towards that [deadline], and the administration just assumes that we’re going to raise it, and they’re sure not going to do it with Republican votes in the House unless there was dramatic changes in the level of spending. And I don’t see this White House being willing to compromise on that,” Chabot said.
In fact, last Tuesday, the House defeated a resolution that would raise the national debt limit by the administration's requested $2.4 trillion without spending cuts or reforms, on a strong bipartisan basis. The resolution failed 97-318. . . .


Geithner didn't exactly produce a lot of credibility when he made obviously false statements.

“There were a lot of groans,” from GOP freshman lawmakers when Geithner told them he didn’t ask for a vote on the doomed resolution, despite the fact that President Obama and Geithner had sent letters to Congress and “made demands” that the legislative branch vote on a clean increase, for months, according to Rep. Frank Guinta (R-N.H.).

Guinta continued, “He backed off on that statement, and he did allude to the fact that that was political in nature. Our response was: ‘no that was not political in nature, you asked for it, the president asked for it, we gave that to you and in a bipartisan fashion Republicans and Democrats said no to a clean raising of the debt ceiling.'” . . .
New Fox News Op-ed piece: Bernanke Doesn't Deserve a Second Term

New Fox News Op-ed piece: Bernanke Doesn't Deserve a Second Term

My newest Fox News piece starts this way:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been warning that a refusal by the Senate to reconfirm Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will be "very troubling" for financial markets. But this is just the lawmakers usual scare tactics: do as they like or else we are in for a disaster. We are getting tired of hearing it. Looming imminent “disaster” has been conjured up to motivate us to fund bailouts, massive government spending programs and huge increases in the national debt. Those fears weren't justified then, and they aren't justified now.

Despite Mr. Bernanke's obvious academic expertise on the Great Depression, he shouldn't be reconfirmed. The Federal Reserve's extreme powers have rarely been as overused and misused as they have been by Mr. Bernanke.

To name just one example, his mishandling of the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch merger is very disturbing. . . .
Bipartisan calls for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to resign

Bipartisan calls for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to resign

These first questions are from an interview that the WSJ had with liberal Democrat Peter DeFazio (D, Oregon).

Is this going to pose problems for Democrats going into the midterm elections?

Rep. DeFazio: “There was a very interesting slide shown to the caucus on Monday night, and I don’t know who the guy was, some economist. He had polling data. And he said the American people‘s opinion of what we’ve done so far for economic recovery, 90% think its been way too much Wall Street and that’s pretty overwhelming, and only 10% felt it was oriented toward helping real folks with real jobs in the real economy. That is a very troubling number, especially for a Democratic administration and a Democratic Congress. I just think that pretty drastic steps are necessary to change direction of the policy. We’ve been fighting with the President’s economic team for months…They don’t believe in infrastructure. They don’t seem to believe in investment. They want a borrowed money, consumer driven recovery…that ain’t happening.”

Why do you think Geithner should resign?

Rep. DeFazio: “I just do not feel that his orientation is other than Wall Street, and has not been other than Wall Street, and will not be other than Wall Street. And quite frankly all the gambling on Wall Street is doing nothing to put people back to work in America and rebuild our economy.” . . .


From the WSJ:

At a Joint Economic Committee hearing in Congress, in which House and Senate lawmakers sit on a panel, Mr. Brady opened up his questioning by telling Mr. Geithner Republicans, Democrats, and the American people had lost confidence in the Treasury Secretary and asked him to resign.

“It is a great privilege to serve this president,” Mr. Geithner responded. “I agree with almost nothing you said.”

Mr. Geithner then took it a step further: “You gave this president an economy falling off the cliff.”

Mr. Brady wasn’t done: “Remind me, Mr. Secretary, what post were you holding when President Obama took office?”

Geithner: “I was the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

Brady then accused him of “shirking responsibility for the design of this bailout.”

Mr. Geithner said the government’s steps were “absolutely necessary to break the back of this financial panic.” He said without the Obama administration’s steps, “you would have an economy still falling, not growing.”

Brady wasn’t done. “The public has lost all confidence in your ability to do the job.”

Geithner wasn’t done either. “If you look at any measure of confidence in the financial system, it is substantially higher today than when the President of the United States took office.”

Brady: “This is your budget! This is your bailout!” . . .
More discussion by Democrats on raising middle class taxes

More discussion by Democrats on raising middle class taxes

First it was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and economist Larry Summers who discussed the topic on the Sunday talk shows. Now Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) chimes in saying: "it is very possible that we would still have to raise taxes, but it is not our intention to do that."

The amazing things to me that he claims: "there is over $2 trillion worth of waste out there in the health care delivery system." I suppose that this fits in with Larry Summers' claim that there is over $700 billion dollars of unneeded surgery occurring.
Geithner is losing it

Geithner is losing it

This is comforting. From the NY Times:

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner blasted top regulators in an expletive-laden tirade amid frustration over President Barack Obama’s faltering plan to overhaul financial regulation, Reuters reported, citing a Monday story in The Wall Street Journal.

A person familiar with the meeting said that Mr. Geithner told regulators “enough is enough,” the newspaper said. The meeting took place last Friday with Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Schapiro and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairwoman Sheila Bair.

The Treasury secretary said regulators had been given a chance to air their concerns, but that it was time to stop, the newspaper said, citing the person.

A Treasury Department representative had no immediate comment. The Fed, the S.E.C. and the F.D.I.C. did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Mr. Obama in June unveiled a financial regulatory overhaul, sometimes called the biggest since the 1930s. Among other things, the plan would give the Fed added powers, award the government more power to break up troubled companies and create a new agency to oversee consumer finance.

Many major banks and industry trade groups have criticized the plan, as have some regulators wary that any redistribution of power would reduce their own.
According to the newspaper, Friday’s roughly hour-long meeting was unusual because of Mr. Geithner’s repeated obscenities and his aggressive posture toward regulators generally deemed independent of the White House.

The newspaper said Mr. Geithner told attendees that the administration and Congress set policy. It also said the Treasury secretary, without singling out officials, raised concerns about regulators who have questioned the wisdom of giving the Fed more power.

Ms. Schapiro and Ms. Bair have argued that more authority should be shared among a council of regulators.
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)