"Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt."
Lew’s statement was deemed “false” by the nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.com.
Cf. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/15/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-white-house-budget-would-not-add/
“The contention that ‘we will not be adding more to the national debt’ after the middle of the decade seems incorrect on its face,” reported PolitiFact. “So what is the administration thinking?”
On interest payments alone, Obama’s budget would have accrued $884 billion, and in the end, Obama’s budget was considered so misguided that it was unanimously rejected by the U.S. Senate in a 97-0 vote.
Lew’s false statement did not escape scrutiny and came under fire when he questioned by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL):
Emmanuel, Obama's first chief of staff once sat on the board of Freddie Mac. Daley, whose departure was announced today (9 January 2012), was previously a top executive at J.P. Morgan Chase. Obama's latest chief, Lew, was a former COO of Citibank. Lew got $900,000 after Citigroup bailout; The payout came on top of the already hefty $1.1 million Citigroup compensation package for 2008 that he reported last year.
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