–Retransmitting Story Published 9:00 ET, Adding NBC, ABC Quotes to CBS
–Unemployment to Continue to Improve

WASHINGTON (MNI) – Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, appearing on
the three major networks’ public affairs programs Sunday, said there is
no risk of the United States becoming another Greece any time soon
despite its long-term debt challenges and, he said, if the economy keeps
improving as the administration expects, so will the unemployment rate.

“It would be a mistake to say the only challenge facing the
country, and the most important challenge facing the country, and the
solution to all our problems are to pull forward right now all those
challenges we have to face in bringing down our deficits,” Geithner told
NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“No risk of that,” he replied to a question about whether Sen. Tom
Coburn, in his December book, is correct in saying the U.S. could be
Greece in two years, crippled by a market loss of confidence the country
can pay its bills.

Geithner renewed administration arguments presented in its latest
budget proposals to Congress that the debt-to-GDP ratio be stabilized
gradually as government spending concentrates on preserving education
and safety net programs.

Asked whether he sees a debt crisis, Geithner replied, “If Congress
over a period of years — Congress would fail to act then we would face
a potential damage to growth.”

Asked about the debt-limit deadline approaching Treasury at the end
of the year into early next year, Geithner said, “It is Congress’s
obligation to do, as they’ve always done in the past, and it would be
good for the country if this time they did it with less drama, and less
politics and less damage to the country than they did last summer.”

At the end of last summer, as Congress deadlocked over raising the
Treasury’s borrowing power, “It was terribly damaging. You saw a
precipitous drop in consumer confidence, business confidence, at a very
fragile time for the global economy,” he said.

“It was very damaging, completely unnecessary, and very avoidable
and it would be good if they don’t put the country through that again,”
he said.

He repeated that of the huge increase in national indebtedness,
crisis aid accounted for only about 12%, with the rest mainly the
product of Bush administration tax cuts.

Growth, he said, “looks pretty broad based. Most of the available
evidence has been pretty encouraging,” he said on CBS’ “Face the
Nation.”

He acknowledged on all three programs that the major risk factors
remain the state of Europe and the effect on the oil market of any Iran
disruption. “You know,” he said, “will still live in a dangerous
uncertain world,” he told CBS.

Europe, he said, “is still going through a really tough economic
crisis and Iran is still a risk factor in the oil markets. Those things
could hurt us still.” He repeated similar versions of those remarks on
ABC. “The available evidence is still, I think, pretty encouraging,” he
said.

On NBC, where he faced the longest questioning, he said that
despite some triple digit losses in the stock market in the past two
weeks, “Americans should feel much more confident today than they’ve
felt at any time in the last five or six years.”

“If the economy continues to gradually strengthen like
it’s been doing then the unemployment rate will be lower and more
Americans will be back to work,” he said on CBS.

Manufacturing has been “pretty strong, energy very strong,
agriculture quite strong, high-tech very strong, exports pretty strong.
And those are encouraging things but we’ve got a long way to go.”

Geithner declined to forecast what the unemployment rate, 8.2% in
April, will be by the end of the year.

April’s payrolls rose by 120,000, less than expected, after
seasonal adjustment. Before seasonal adjustment they were up 811,000.
But despite the weak adjusted payrolls number, the unemployment rate
improved by a tenth of a point, mostly because the labor force part of
the equation, got smaller.

On NBC, on gasoline prices, Geithner said, “You’ve seen some
encouraging signs recently, just this week, more supply coming on to
global markets and that has helped calm some of the price pressures.”

He said that households’ total energy bill, because of lower
natural gas prices and a warm winter, has been lower despite gasoline
price hikes. “The overall costs of energy for the consumer have actually
come down, not risen very much,” he said.

Geithner defended the so-called Buffett rule proposal, which would
impose a 30% tax rate on anyone making over a million dollars a year. He
said there is “no credible basis” for the argument that raising the
capital gains tax and the tax on investment income would hurt the
economy.

“We face a lot of challenges still as a country,” Geithner said.
“We have to get the economy growing, repair the damage from the crisis,
get more people back to work. And we’ve got to make sure we put in place
a balanced plan to bring down our long term deficits. As part of that
we’re going to have to cut spending across the government.”

“I don’t think there is a plausible path to tax reform,” he said on
CBS, “not a plausible path to fiscal reform that doesn’t recognize the
reality that we cannot afford to extend these tax cuts for the most
fortunate Americans. We just can’t afford to borrow to do it anymore.”

Geithner disagreed, also on CBS, that the entire Buffet Rule
discussion is an administration attempt to embarrass Republican
presidential hopeful Mitt Romney whose tax rate is around 15% because
most of it is the result of investment income.

Geithner, on CBS, repeated that he’s serving out the rest of the
President Obama’s first term and after that, will leave the
administration. “The president asked me to stay and I said I’d stay to
the end of the first term,” he said. “That seems like the right amount
of time for me.”

The interviews with Geithner were all recorded late last week and
so he was not faced with the need to react to the reports from Colombia,
where President Obama was attending an Americas summit, that 11 Secret
Service employees were brought back to the U.S. and placed on
administrative leave for engaging the services of prostitutes. Geithner
was also not asked on any of the programs his outlook for Friday’s G20
meeting in Washington he will attend.

Facing virtually identical questions on all three network program
about the Romney charge that more than 90% of the jobs lost since Obama
took office were women “ridiculous.” He said the recession began a year
before Obama took office most of the severe job losses were among men.
Then, as austerity cuts in states and cities spread, many teachers were
laid off, “and a lot of teachers are women,” he said on ABC.

“It’s a ridiculous argument,” he said, “and largely debunked this
week by the people who looked at it,” he said on CBS.

** MNI Washington Bureau: 202-371-2121 **

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