Neel Kashkari, newest candidate for GOP gubernatorial nomination: As an assistant U.S. treasury secretary ran the Treasury Department’s controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program — better known as TARP — to bail out the nation’s free-falling financial sector in 2008 and 2009.
Proud that Congress worked across partisan lines to enact and maintain TARP, he says the program not only saved the banks but even made a $13.6 billion profit for taxpayers.
“If we had listened to the naysayers in Washington, we would be in the Great Depression,” Kashkari said.
He claims that Brown hasn’t adequately tackled California’s biggest problems: the nation’s highest poverty rate, the fifth-highest unemployment rate, and schools that rank toward the bottom. “The narrative that ‘California is back’ is outrageous,” he said. “The people on the street definitely know better.”