Showing once again that there are no mature adults in the White House, members of the Obama administration are blaming Standard and Poors for the credit rating drop.
From the Huffington Post: The credit rating agency Standard & Poor's showed "terrible judgment" in lowering the U.S. government's credit rating, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday.
"They've handled themselves very poorly. And they've shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math," Geithner said in his first public comments about the credit rating decision.
Interviewed on CNBC, Geither said that U.S. Treasury securities were just as safe now as they were before S&P announced its downgrade. He predicted that China and investors would remain strong purchasers of U.S. government debt.
Republicans have blamed President Barack Obama for the first-ever downgrade of the government's credit rating.
But Geithner said Congress owns the credit rating because the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend.
Late Friday, S&P announced it was lowering its rating for U.S. debt one notch from AAA to AA+.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/07/geithner-sp-showed-terrible-judgment_n_920648.html
Geithner must be on some serious drugs to make this kind of crack pot statements.
When Geithner says that S&P has a stunning lack of knowledge about basic fiscal budget math, I think Geithner has it mixed up. It is the Administration and Congressional leaders who lack any knowledge of any financing because if they did, they would not have come up with an irresponsible debt ceiling bill.
As far as the Congress owning the lowering of the credit rating, well, let's see now: Who was a major negotiator for the Democrats? Why, none other than President Obama.
Tell, them Johnny, what do we have for our losers in the White House? Why it's a stinking and sinking economy!!
And as far as spending, when will the Democrats come up with a spending bill? Obama and the Democrats have refused to come up with a budget since Obama has been in office, even when Obama and the Democrats controlled both the White House and the Congress.
And once again, it also shows that Obama and his bureaucrats have not accepted reality that most of their plans have not worked and refuse to accept responsibility on anything negative, just like this guy:
It's too bad that Timmy Geithner has decided to stay on at the Obama administration. Apparently, Geithner could not find anybody to hire him, so he fell back on his current job: Screwing up the United State's economy.
Politicians Lie
5 hours ago
The deficit comes from:
ReplyDelete1. Afghanistan war
2. Iraq war
3. Bush tax cuts
4. Medicare Part D
5. Recession
Of those, Obama has:
1. (-) Sent more troops to Afghanistan
2. (+) Withdrawn troops from Iraq
3. (eh) Tried but failed to get the tax cuts rolled back on the top 5%
4. (+) Cut the cost of Part D via HCR
5. (+ barely) Pushed for mixed economic stimuli.
As for the S&P, they so seriously botched things that they removed all numbers from their headline summary. The point of ratings agencies is to crunch numbers in meaningful ways and then show how those numbers justify their conclusions. The S&P simply couldn't come up with numbers that corresponded with their decision. Even the other ratings agencies agree.
Other reasons for the deficit: Less tax revenue because of the economy.
ReplyDeleteFailure to account for less revenue.
Automatic increases in Federal budgets
Increased borrowing and paying the interest.
Bank bailouts and auto bailouts
Stimulus
Extension of Unemployment payments
The 3 wars
Corporate and farm subsidies
In reality, the S&P downgrade should have been a wake up call about our spending problems and ripping on them is just an admission that the the Administration has no clue of what they are doing.
We're saying similar things.
ReplyDeleteScott: recession
Dan: lower taxes & higher unemployment
Scott: wars
Dan: wars
Scott: tea party calls everything a tax increase
Dan: corporate & farm subsidies
So then we're only disagreeing on:
Bank bailouts: We actually nearly broke even on this and stabilized the financial markets. I just wish we'd gotten cram downs out of the deal to mitigate the crushing consumer debt.
Auto bailouts: We'll likely break even here too and we saved a ton of jobs. This was probably the best bang for the buck. That said, I feared disaster when it was announced.
As for the S&P, statistics show that "S&P ratings have almost no correlation with future default risk." Here is a marvelous summary:
http://baselinescenario.com/2011/08/09/sp-ratings-destroy-information/