| Folks, There is hope with President Obama. Vote President Obama for four more years..... President Obama Speaks on College Affordability President Obama calls on Congress to stop interest rates from doubling on student loans, and discusses his Administration's initiatives to keep college affordable for students and their families. June 7, 2012. The trick to the middle class is not to borrow money to go to college. College used to be a ladder up, now you owe the bank on graduation day. If you can't get a good job, the loans default, and a low wage job is not going keep up with the loan interests. If college was free like it was for baby boomers, you got a chance at the middle class. The baby boomers closed the door for the next generation. Colleges are asking for annual costs from students the equivalent of a new Mercedes Benz. Reform hotneo7 3 weeks ago College costs are out of control, I just graduated and I feel sorry for people who have to enroll now. Maybe if interest doubled students would take their academic path more seriously instead of going to college just cause they feel its something they should do. Collage is not always the right path for everyone. MrEastRyder 2 months ago Obama up 4 percentage points over Romney in Ohio Political Reporter The Ticket – 15 hrs ago A new CNN/ORC poll of likely voters shows President Barack Obama leading Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the crucial state of Ohio with less than two weeks before Election Day: According to a CNN/ORC International survey released Friday, President Barack Obama holds a four point advantage over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the contest for Ohio's much-fought-over 18 electoral votes. Fifty-percent of likely voters questioned in the poll say they are backing the president, with 46% supporting the former Massachusetts governor. Obama's four-point advantage is within the survey's sampling error. ... The CNN poll was conducted by ORC International from October 23-25, with 1,009 Ohio adults, including 896 registered voters and 741 likely voters, questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Before the poll's release, Romney's Ohio state chairman, Sen. Rob Portman, had stopped just short of saying Ohio would be a must-win for the Republican challenger. "If we don't win Ohio, it's tough to see us winning the election nationally," Portman had told NBC News. Obama tour wraps with personal touch Political Reporte The Ticket – 5 hrs ago  President Barack Obama in Cleveland, Ohio. (Chris Moody/Yahoo! News)
CLEVELAND, Ohio—President Barack Obama's voice sounded coarse and tired when he delivered the final speech of a cross-country tour that had taken him to eight states in three days. About 12,000 supporters were waiting on the airport tarmac here when Air Force One landed and rolled behind the stage. With the music of U2 blaring into the warm autumn night, Obama hustled down the stairs from the plane and jogged toward the lectern and teleprompters awaiting him. The message he delivered along the banks of Lake Erie was the same one he preached previously that day in Virginia, and before that in Florida, Iowa and Colorado. He spoke about women's health, promoted his agenda to increase federal spending on domestic programs paid for by higher taxes on upper-income families, and he accused his opponent Mitt Romney of favoring the wealthy over the middle class. He gave his standard line about what he calls "Romnesia" and implored the crowd to vote—preferably before Election Day. But before Obama reached the the part of his speech at the end when he usually calls on the audience to share his message with their neighbors, the president paused. His tone changed. His voice, hoarse from three days of rallies and an almost sleepless night, quieted. "Look, Ohio, I know we've been through tough times," Obama said. "Every day I think about everybody out there across the country who's still looking for a job...whose homes may be still under water or at risk of foreclosure. The folks out there who at the end of the month are sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out, How am I going to make all these bills? Michelle and I understand it, because we know what it's like to have a tough time sometimes." The message was meant for the entire nation, but was directed to the inhabitants of the city in front of him, a place still struggling with an unemployment rate above nine percent. Other parts of the state have fared better since the end of the recession, although Ohio faced periods of statewide joblessness of above 10.5 percent during Obama's first term. Since those dark days, parts of Ohio have seen a resurgence, and in a state where one in eight jobs relies on the auto industry, Obama's early support of a federal bailout for General Motors and Chrysler provides him leverage. It also offers an opening to attack Romney, who supported a plan that would have withheld guaranteed federal loans to the embattled companies until they agreed to undergo a managed bankruptcy. "I bet on American workers. I bet on American manufacturing," Obama shouted over the noise of the crowd. "And I would do it again, because that bet always pays off." Obama's post-debate tour had taken him to Florida, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia, California, Illinois and Nevada, mostly states where victory is not yet secure for either candidate but are battlegrounds that will determine the outcome of the race. The driving theme of this trip, which Obama dubbed a 48-hour marathon extravaganza, targeted these key states, all of which allow early voting. At every stop along Obama's tour, supporters were encouraged to vote early so they could spend Election Day focusing their efforts on bringing others to the polls. (Also, history has shown that Democrats are more likely to vote in larger numbers than Republicans if given more than a single day to cast a ballot.) In Dayton, Ohio, where Obama ralliedon Tuesday, the campaign hung a white, all-caps sign that read simply, "Vote Early." Obama campaign officials are placing a special emphasis on getting minorities to vote before Election Day, a strategy to secure more votes among overwhelmingly Democratic groups. The campaign is banking on the early vote to give them a head start, and officials predict more Democrats will come out this time than four years ago. "We are going to enter the election with larger margins than we did in 2008," White House senior adviser David Plouffe said during one of the many bus rides on the trip. While Obama finished his tour on a personal note in Cleveland, his speeches aimed to draw sharp contrasts with Romney. At times it seemed he was talking more about Romney than his own vision for the future, although Obama always took time to share the blueprint for what he planned to do in his second term. The campaign distributed a 19-page magazine-style booklet that described the direction Obama planned to take the country if re-elected, a publication he spoke about at every rally this week. But it was while discussing Romney that Obama's message seemed to resonate most. With mere days before the end of the campaign, Obama sharpened his attacks on the former Massachusetts governor, pivoting from describing the differences of policy to attacking his integrity. Obama expanded on his light-hearted use of the phrase "Romnesia" this week to say, bluntly, that Romney was not only a man with whom he disagreed politically, but also one who could not be trusted. "We joke about Romnesia. But it's not funny," Obama said in Cleveland. "Because it speaks to something serious. It has to do with trust. There's no more serious issue in a presidential campaign than trust. Trust matters." "I don't think any politician in Washington, most of whom are male, should be making health care decisions for women," Obama said in Tampa, warning that Romney would "turn back the clock 50 years for women." Later that day, Obama's official Twitter account posted a series of tweets that focused exclusively on the topic, using the word "rape" six times in the span of about half an hour. Earlier this month, the official campaign Tumblr page declared that women's "lady parts" were at stake in the election. (The post was later removed after being heavily criticized.) The aggressive effort to steer women away from Republicans is a calculated one, since Democrats see female voters as a primary component to their victory strategy. According to Obama campaign data, there are more female undecided voters than males, and it is independents both campaigns are fighting for. "The more we're talking about women's issues, women's health care, the differences between the candidates, the better it is for us," Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. "We feel it's a winning issue." As the final week of the campaign approaches, polls suggest Romney is closing the gap with female voters, although Obama strategists write off the data as sloppy polling. White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer on Thursday said some polls, even those sponsored by national news outlets, are "worth putting in the waste bin." Still, it is hard to deny there does appear to be a growing momentum of support for Romney, even though his path to the 270 Electoral College votes is not nearly as clear as Obama's. To win, he will need to secure Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and then other battleground states. The state of the map is much friendlier to the president, but as his tumultuous campaign schedule suggests, his campaign is taking nothing for granted. Obama camp sees 'comeback' in improved economic growth White House Correspondent The Ticket – 1 hr 31 mins ago  President Barack Obama before his departure on Air Force One at Cleveland Burke Lakefront Airport, Thursday, in …
President Barack Obama's re-election campaign cheered the modestly improved economic growth data released on Friday as "more evidence" that the country is still clawing back from the 2007-2008 global financial meltdown. Republican candidate Mitt Romney called the news a "discouraging" sign of an anemic recovery. "While we have more work to do, today's GDP growth report, showing the 13th straight quarter of growth, is more evidence that our economy continues to come back from the worst recession since the Great Depression under President Obama's leadership," Obama campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher said in a statement. Fetcher's comments came after the Commerce Department reported that Gross Domestic Product grew at a 2 percent annual rate from July to September, compared with 1.3 percent from April to June. It was unclear whether the news—though positive for Obama—would have much of an impact on his political battle with Romney. Aides to both campaigns say they think only a small percentage of voters can still be persuaded to change their minds about which candidate would be a better steward of the economy. Romney responded to the data by saying, "Today, we received the latest round of discouraging economic news. Slow economic growth means slow job growth and declining take-home pay. This is what four years of President Obama's policies have produced. Americans are ready for change—for growth, for jobs, for higher take-home pay. Paul Ryan and I will deliver it." Fetcher also said that Romney had proposed a "drastic plan" that would harm economic growth. "His plans would punish the middle class and take us back to the same failed policies that crashed the economy and created record job losses in the first place" he said. Why the GOP Should Fear a Romney PresidencyBy Jack M. Balkin, The Atlantic | National Journal – Thu, Oct 25, 2012 What kind of president would Mitt Romney be? To answer this question, I'll draw on the work of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who has argued that presidents' fortunes depend on how they establish their political legitimacy in the particular circumstances under which which they assume power. Reconstruction or Disjunction? When new presidents take office, they face not only the country's existing domestic and international problems but also the political regime created by their predecessors. That regime consists of the interests, assumptions, and ideologies that dominate public discussion, and the relative strength of the parties' electoral coalitions. Our current political regime emerged in the wake of Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, and it has continued even through the Democratic presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is politically conservative and skeptical of government, at least in contrast to the New Deal/civil-rights regime that preceded it. And the Republicans have been the dominant party.
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Skowronek's key insight is that a president's ability to establish his political legitimacy depends on where he sits in "political time": Is he allied with the dominant regime or opposed to it, and is the regime itself powerful or in decline? For example, Lyndon Johnson was allied with the Democrats' New Deal regime, while Richard Nixon -- the second Republican elected after FDR -- was opposed to it. And the regime itself can either be resilient or vulnerable. For example, Harry Truman became president when the New Deal regime was robust, while Jimmy Carter took office when it was on its last legs. A president who has the good luck to run in opposition to a political regime that is falling apart is in the best possible position politically. He can sweep away the old and begin a new regime with a new set of political assumptions. Such "reconstructive" presidents seize the opportunity provided by being in the right place at the right political time; they create a new political reality that their successors inhabit. Franklin Roosevelt was able to blame Herbert Hoover and Republican ideology for the country's predicament during the Great Depression, just as Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter and the Democrats during the economic difficulties of the late 1970s. Reconstructive leaders -- Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan -- are generally regarded both as pivotal in American history and among the country's most successful presidents. Conversely, the unluckiest presidents -- like Hoover and Carter -- are those with the misfortune to be associated with a political regime in rapid decline. Skowronek calls these presidents "disjunctive," because they cannot hold their party's factions together, and things fall apart. These presidents are usually judged failures, and they place their successors in the best possible position to pick up the pieces and reconstruct politics in a new way. What Skowronek calls "affiliated" presidents take office allied with a regime that is still relatively strong. George H.W. Bush is a recent example. Affiliated presidents can be quite successful, but their political opportunities are strongly shaped by the interests and ideology of the dominant regime. Ultimately their political legitimacy depends on their ability to meet new challenges and innovate in ways that do not offend party orthodoxy. Lyndon Johnson, for example, sought to complete Roosevelt's New Deal in his Great Society programs. George H.W. Bush's presidency was widely regarded as Ronald Reagan's third term. But when Bush raised taxes, he faced challenges within his own party for violating Republican ideology. The last group of presidents is the most interesting: They take office opposed to a still robust political regime. Skowronek calls them "preemptive" presidents, because they must find a "third way" to establish their legitimacy and forestall opposition. Bill Clinton, the first Democrat elected after Reagan, is a recent example. Preemptive presidents can achieve a great deal if they understand that they face strong political headwinds and must always trim their sails. They can only survive by appearing moderate, pragmatic, and non-ideological, and by finding ways to borrow ideas from their political opponents. It was Clinton, after all, who announced that "the era of big government is over," and who balanced the federal budget, reformed the welfare system, and continually triangulated in order to maintain his political fortunes. (Barack Obama, as I'll discuss, could fall into this category or could become a reconstructive president.) The Last of the Reaganites If Mitt Romney is elected, he will be the fourth Republican president in the Reagan regime. That regime is no longer in its glory days. Demographic shifts have weakened the Republican electoral coalition, while Republican politicians have grown increasingly radical and ideological. At best, Romney will be an affiliated president attempting to revive the Republican brand after it has been badly tarnished by George W. Bush; at worst, he will be a disjunctive president, unable to keep his party's factions together, and presiding over the end of the Reagan coalition. Throughout his career, Romney has presented himself as a pragmatic, data-driven, hands-on problem-solver. In this respect he resembles our two last disjunctive presidents, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter. Yet in order to secure his party's nomination, Romney has had to twist his positions to conform to the most radical demands of the Republican base. Part of Romney's problem is that the Republican Party's policy solutions seem -- at least outside the ranks of the faithful -- increasingly ideological and out of touch. No matter what conditions the nation faces, the Republican prescription is to lower taxes, increase defense spending, and weaken the social safety net. These ideas may have made sense in the 1980s. But by 2012, they seem as irrelevant as the Democratic Party's arguments must have seemed to many Americans in 1979. Romney has been vague about his policy solutions because he rightly surmises that many of them will be quite unpopular. Yet once he becomes president, he will be forced to promote ideological commitments that are increasingly discredited with the public or risk losing political support within his own party. Romney, like Carter and Hoover, has argued that he will be an excellent administrator who will bring special problem-solving skills to the White House. But technocratic expertise is a tenuous strategy for maintaining political legitimacy, especially when a president must make unpopular decisions. Nor will it be enough to satisfy his base. Movement conservatives have pushed Romney to take extreme positions throughout the 2012 campaign; they won't stop once he becomes president. As Grover Norquist explained in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, "We are not auditioning for a fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget .... We just need a president to sign this stuff." If Romney doesn't do as he's told, he will be in the same predicament as Jimmy Carter, who entered office with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and yet found himself unable to move a domestic agenda because of intraparty bickering. Romney's Impossible Task Now assume instead the best-case scenario -- that Romney is an affiliated president carrying forward a still-robust Reagan regime. In that case, a Romney presidency will face two major challenges: factionalism and war. As a regime ages, divisions emerge within the governing coalition. Affiliated presidents must find ways to give each faction something it wants without alienating the others. The difficulty is that, as time passes, the factions become more self-absorbed, insistent, and radical. Pleasing all of them may prove impossible; in that case, affiliated presidents have to choose which parts of the coalition to ally themselves with, risking the defection of the rest. This is the choice faced by presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who ultimately tilted in favor of a civil-rights agenda in the 1960s, alienating what had previously been the Solid South. Affiliated presidents also face enormous pressures -- or temptations, depending on how one looks at it -- to use military force to display strength, both to the outside world and, equally important, to their political base. War hawks helped push James Madison into the War of 1812. James K. Polk avoided a war with Great Britain but ended up taking his chances on a war with Mexico. William McKinley found it politically impossible to resist a war with Spain. Sometimes, the results are politically successful; but sometimes, as in the cases of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, they are not. Romney will face these problems early in his presidency. He will inherit the leadership of a party with commitments to (1) further increasing tax cuts -- especially for the wealthy; (2) reducing deficits; (3) shrinking the size of government; (4) increasing defense spending; and (5) promoting a muscular foreign policy unafraid to use military force to solve foreign-policy problems, for example, in Iran and Syria. At the same time, Romney has promised to "save" popular middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and to replace Obamacare with reforms that keep its most popular elements but jettison the features that make it economically practical. To top it off, he faces a reckoning in January 2013, when the Bush tax cuts expire and a sequester of defense and social programs goes into effect. That combination of tax increases and spending cuts will help solve the deficit problem, but it risks pushing the economy into a new recession, and it is completely unacceptable to the tax cutters and defense hawks in his party. It is very difficult to see how Romney can maintain all of the commitments he has made to the various factions of his party, no matter what he says on the campaign trail. For example, passing the Ryan budget, further reducing tax rates, and repealing Obamacare will exacerbate the deficit problem, not help to solve it. Romney will have to pick and choose among these commitments, and in choosing, he will likely alienate significant segments of his coalition. Moreover, he will face insistent pressures from defense hawks and neo-conservatives in his party to keep the war in Afghanistan going and to use American military force against other targets. (Iran is the most obvious possibility.) The more aggressive his foreign policy, however, the more it is likely to cost, and the more it will increase federal deficits. George W. Bush faced a similar problem in his first term, and simply arranged with Republicans in Congress to fund his military adventures through supplemental appropriations -- abandoning any pretense of deficit reduction. To keep the economy afloat, Romney will likely pursue a Keynesian strategy once in office, goosing the economy through a combination of tax cuts and economic stimulus. He will simply choose a different mix than the Democrats would, and call it by another name. Yet this strategy will probably also increase the deficit in the short run and require Romney repeatedly to raise the debt ceiling, risking the ire of the Tea Party. Romney's advisers have floated the idea that, in order for their leader to make all of the tough choices necessary to solve the country's problems, he should adopt the example of the 19th-century Democrat James K. Polk and be willing to serve for only one term. Comparing Romney to Polk is both telling and ironic. Telling, because Polk was also an affiliated president -- the second Democrat elected after Andrew Jackson's reconstructive presidency. Just as Romney has promised Republicans that he will follow Ronald Reagan's policies, Polk self-consciously modeled himself after Jackson. Ironic, because Polk's legitimacy as president was often precarious. Polk offered himself as a compromise candidate, and announced that he would serve for only one term, because he wanted to assure the leaders of the various factions in his party that his presidency would not prevent their running in 1848. Once in office, Polk was not known for making tough choices. He did not seek to stand up to his party's divided factions; instead, he sought to please them all. Polk tried to buy off the various warring elements of the Jacksonian coalition one by one through a combination of fiscal policy, tariff reform, territorial acquisition, and war. Each move created additional political problems. By the end of his term as president, his political situation had become impossible, and he left office a broken man, dying three months later. His policies of territorial expansion, while undoubtedly successful, also led to the tragedy of the Civil War. If he truly is like Polk, Romney will not be able to make difficult choices in the public interest. Rather, he will find himself hemmed in by the conflicting demands of a radicalized party. Opposition to Barack Obama's presidency unified the Republicans. But once Obama is gone, the various factions of the party will find themselves in fierce competition, and the incoherence of the Republicans' various commitments will emerge starkly. The predicament of a Romney presidency is that he may make George W. Bush look good by comparison. During most of Bush's eight years in office, the Republican Party was united and willing to follow his lead. Romney will not be so lucky. The party he heads has become so rigid, radical, and unrealistic that, despite his best efforts, he may end up as the last of the Reagan-era Republican leaders -- a disjunctive president like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, or Jimmy Carter. Republican partisans have often compared Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, but Obama's situation is quite different from Carter's. Like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is a Democrat swimming against the current of Reagan-era Republican politics. Carter, by contrast, took office as the defender of an exhausted New Deal Democratic regime; he offered himself as a problem-solving pragmatist who would get the country moving again. He tried to fix the New Deal coalition but found it beyond repair. The next Jimmy Carter will be a Republican president -- a Republican who, due to circumstances beyond his control, unwittingly presides over the dissolution of the Reagan coalition. If Obama is reelected, we might decide in hindsight that George W. Bush best fits that description. But if Obama loses, the president who finally unravels Reaganism could turn out to be Mitt Romney. Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, and the founder and director of Yale's Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. Tax Policy Center in Spotlight for Its Romney StudyBy ANNIE LOWREY | New York Times – Thu, Oct 25, 2012 1:36 PM EDT WASHINGTON — A small nonpartisan research center operated by professed "geeks" has found itself at the center of a rancorous $5 trillion debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney. No white paper or policy manifesto put out during the presidential campaign has proved more controversial than an August study by the Washington-based Tax Policy Center, a respected nonprofit that issues studiously detailed tax analyses. That study found, in short, that Mr. Romney could not keep all of the promises he had made on individual tax reform: including cutting marginal tax rates by 20 percent, keeping protections for investment income, not widening the deficit and not increasing the tax burden on the poor or middle class. It concluded that Mr. Romney's plan, on its face, would cut taxes for rich families and raise them for everyone else. The detailed paper proved kindling for a political firestorm. Mr. Romney criticized the center as performing a "garbage-in, garbage-out" analysis and his campaign accused it of partisan bias. The Obama campaign used the center's numbers to argue that Mr. Romney had proposed a $5 trillion tax cut. Economists jumped on the bandwagon too, flinging analyses back and forth and picking apart the projections and assumptions in the report. At the Tax Policy Center itself, responses ranged from irritation at the partisan nature of some attacks to incredulity over the political hysteria. "There was this résumé-hunting, White-House-visitor-log" searching feel to the response, said the center's director, Donald Marron, a former Bush administration economist. "That was unanticipated," he added dryly. In many ways the report did just what the center was created to do: inject some solid numbers into a shifty, accusatory, raucous political debate. The decade-old center — a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, two nonpartisan grandes dames of the Washington world — was founded precisely to "fill that niche," Mr. Marron said. "A lot of tax policy discussions are — how to describe them? — people yelling at each other," he said. "We believe that good information leads to better policy discussions and ultimately better policy outcomes." The center's claim to provide reliable, nonpartisan information comes in part from its staff makeup. It has about four dozen affiliated staff members and scholars — most are economists, several are considered top experts in their fields, and a number have experience in either Republican or Democratic administrations. It also is derived by virtue of its ownership of a highly sophisticated tax modeling system, one that took about two years to build and has a small coterie of specialists to tend it. The model resembles those used by government offices to forecast the effect of changes to the tax code, and it relies on about 150,000 anonymous tax returns and a wealth of data on pensions, education, consumer expenditures and economic growth. "They're one of the few groups that have this very big, very accurate model," said Martin A. Sullivan, the chief economist and a contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a specialty publisher. "What they're doing is just making the best computations available" for others to interpret, he said. That includes so-called distributional analyses that show how changes to the tax code would change the relative burden on high-income and low-income families — a dry tax topic yet one of the most politically potent ones of the campaign, given the broader debate about tax fairness and inequality. The analysis of the Romney proposal has proved highly controversial not just among politicians, but also among some economists. Researchers including Martin Feldstein of Harvard and Harvey S. Rosen of Princeton have argued that Mr. Romney's tax math might work if he raised taxes on families making more than $100,000 a year — not $200,000 to $250,000 a year, as he currently promises — or if his plan gave a strong jolt to economic growth. "Reasonable economists disagree on" the growth effects of plans like Mr. Romney's, said Alan J. Auerbach, a tax expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who added that he did not see the math working out as currently described. "It matters a lot what kind of reductions you're making or how you're paying for tax cuts." Others have argued that the Tax Policy Center filled in too many of the holes in Mr. Romney's light-on-detail proposal — making a full analysis impossible and skewing the center's paper's results. "It is not an analysis of Governor Romney's plan," said Scott A. Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation. a nonprofit research group also based in Washington. "It has been, I think, mislabeled as such and misinterpreted as such. We don't think there are enough details to analyze," he said, adding that he believed that it was possible to devise a distributionally neutral, revenue neutral tax reform that cut rates in the way Mr. Romney described. The Tax Policy Center said that it had sought as many details as possible from the Romney campaign. (Its economists said it has a cordial back-and-forth with the economic policy teams in both campaigns, as it did in 2008.) Given the numbers available, it had tried to perform the analysis in the most generous way possible, and still did not see how Mr. Romney's rate cuts could square with his other goals. "We wrote a technical, accurate paper given the available information," said William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution, one of the paper's main authors, in a recent interview. "The criticism that you can't analyze the Romney tax plan because there isn't one? That hasn't stopped other economists from analyzing its growth effects. I like to have substantive discussions about tax policy. The uproar about the paper has not been substantive." Many economists across the political spectrum have said they found the report's conclusions convincing, like Alan D. Viard, a tax expert at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Sullivan of Tax Analysts said: "I like tax reform. I want to broaden the base. It's something I've devoted my life to. And I welcome Governor Romney and the Republicans' strong push, but the plan doesn't work out. It's not mathematically possible." Ryan sought federal funds as he pushed for smaller governmentBy The Associated Press | Associated Press – Fri, Oct 12, 2012 WASHINGTON - Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan sought more food stamp benefits, stimulus cash and other government support behind the scenes as a member of Congress. An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of documents found he voiced support for the types of government assistance he now rails against as Mitt Romney's running mate. Letters obtained via public-records requests show Ryan asking for cash under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus program or health care law. Ryan has vocally criticized both on the campaign trail. Ryan's spokesman says the letters are nothing more than Ryan doing his job by helping constituents navigate the federal bureaucracy. | 
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