James Pethokoukis offers U.S. senators — through a National Review Online column — some suggested questions for U.S. Treasury Secretary-designee Jack Lew’s upcoming confirmation hearing.

Lew knows one big thing, the budget. And by all accounts, especially those from John Boehner’s negotiating team, he knows it, hedgehog-style, inside and out. He’ll be a tough opponent in the debt-ceiling and sequestration talks. Assuming he’s confirmed, that is. In the upcoming conformation hearings, the Senate needs to grill Lew on all things fiscal, not only on the budget’s nuts and bolts, but also on how Washington’s tax and spending decisions affect economic growth. And senators should push him out of his comfort zone and press him to answer the broader economic questions that Obama avoided answering in his first term and during the presidential election. Here are some that senators should consider asking:

1. “Mr. Lew, much of the president’s first term was spent dealing with, first, the Great Recession and financial crisis, and then their aftermath. To avoid a repeat of these economic catastrophes, it’s important to fully understand their causes. In the past, the president and vice president have suggested that Bush-administration policies were to blame. As Mr. Biden declared at the Democratic National Convention, ‘[The recession] came from [Republicans’] voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription-drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the very wealthy.’ Does that explanation sound right to you? And do you realize that after the Great Depression, economists first blamed banks and speculation and greed but later realized it was Fed policy? Might that analysis hold some explanatory power again today?”

2. “Mr. Lew, in their research on financial crises and sovereign debt, economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have found that high levels of debt are bad for economic growth. To be specific, when a country’s debt level exceeds 90 percent of its gross domestic product, it reduces the country’s economic potential. The president’s most recent budget would stabilize publicly held debt at around 76 percent of GDP through 2022. But, according to Rogoff, when you take into account unfunded federal liabilities and state debt, U.S. debt equals around 120 percent of GDP — which is easily in the danger zone. Is it enough to merely stabilize publicly held debt, or should we begin reducing it as soon as possible?”