Sunday Sound: Heard on 'This Week'
The most notable comments made Sunday on "This Week"
— -- Below are some of the notable comments made Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
The Economy and Job Creation Confidence
1) GEITHNER: Well, it's obviously still a very tough economy out there. And I think it's not surprising, given the scale of the damage the crisis caused and how much damage you still see out there. But if you look at the evidence, the economy is getting stronger. We have a ways to go still, a lot of challenges still ahead. But the broad indicators are pretty encouraging. They show an economy still growing. We'd like it to be stronger and we've got a lot of work to do. But it's getting better.
2) STEPHANOPOULOS: So, but does that mean you're not confident that we're going to keep creating jobs this year?
GEITHNER: No. I would say that, you know, the economy, again, is gradually getting stronger. And [we] have more people going back to work and those are sort of good, encouraging signs. Obviously, we've got a lot of challenges ahead and some risks and uncertainty ahead. And some of those risks are, of course, Europe is still going through a -- a difficult crisis. And Iran and oil still pose some risks to us. But the available evidence is still, I think, pretty encouraging.
3) GEITHNER: Well, you know, again, unemployment is still very high. And until that comes down, income growth is going to be very -- very soft, very weak. That's the tragic legacy of a crisis this bad. But, again, if you look at broad measures of the basic resilience and dynamism of the economy, they're -- they're pretty encouraging. We've got to work to reinforce them.
4) STEPHANOPOULOS: But last month's job report was much weaker than people had hoped for. Only about 121,000 jobs created. And the weekly unemployment claims took a big jump last week. Are we seeing the pattern of the past couple of years repeated, a strong start to the year but then a stall-out in the spring?
GEITHNER: We can't tell yet. But if you look back at what happened in 2010 and 2011, you're right that you saw some early strength in the beginning of the year. But then what happened was, the crisis in Europe in 2010 and 2011 and then the crisis in Japan and then the oil shock caused growth to slow. And then in '11, it was made worse by the -- by all the political drama around the debt limit, which was very damaging to confidence.
Geithner Reacts to Romney's Claims that the Obama Administration's Policies Hurt Women and Caused Major Job Losses for Them
5) GEITHNER: It's a -- it's a ridiculous way to look at the problem. And this is a political moment and you're going to be seeing -- just to borrow a line from Mario Cuomo -- you're going to see a lot of politicians choose to campaign in fiction. But we have to govern in fact. And this crisis was a very damaging crisis, hurt everybody. And it began in, as you know, in early 2008. And a lot of the early job losses in 2008 affected men, because they affected construction and manufacturing. And as the crisis spread and state and local governments were forced to cut back on services and fire a lot of teachers, that caused a lot of damage to women, too.
6) STEPHANOPOULOS: But you completely reject his argument?
GEITHNER: Oh, it's a ridiculous argument. Ridiculous. It's been largely debunked this week by the people who have looked at it.
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