I highly recommend reading & sharing this short piece on Paul Ryan.#tcot #Romney2012http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/08/16/ryan/WEMawbCVyVTq2qi0pyBheK/story.html
In 2010, Paul Ryan denied making appeals for stimulus funds
E-mail | Print | Comments (136)08/16/2012 6:36 PM
WASHINGTON _ After seeking millions of dollars from a federal stimulus program he opposed, Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan repeatedly denied lobbying the Obama administration for home state aid -- first on a Boston radio station in 2010 and then again on Tuesday in an interview with a Ohio television station.
On October 28, 2010, after the Wisconsin Republican penned at least five letters to two federal departments seeking grants under the Obama administration’s economic recovery package, Ryan responded to a caller on WBZ’s Nightside with Dan Rea who asked if he sought any of the money.
Ryan said that he would not vote against something “then write to the government to ask them to send us money.”
“I did not request any stimulus money,” he continued.
Meanwhile, in an interview yesterday with an Ohio television station, Ryan repeated the denial, before quickly adding “I don’t recall.”
Raise Your VoiceClick to contact candidates or elected officials about this issue.“No, I never asked for stimulus,” he told Cincinnati’s WCPO-TV, whose reporter mentioned an Associated Press article reporting on Ryan appealing to two departments seeking stimulus money for Wisconsin projects. “I don’t recall—and I haven’t seen this report so I really can’t comment on it. I opposed the stimulus because it doesn’t work, it didn’t work. It brought us deeper into debt.
Thursday evening, Ryan acknowledged having sent the letters above his signature. “After having these letters called to my attention I checked into them, and they were treated as constituent service requests in the same way matters involving Social Security or Veterans Affairs are handled. This is why I didn’t recall the letters earlier. But they should have been handled differently, and I take responsibility for that.”
He did not explain why he was not alerted to the fact his office had sent a letter asking for stimulus aid from the Department of Labor when the Wall Street Journal reported on this in 2010.
Ryan, who was selected to be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s running mate on Saturday, was one of the most vocal critics of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $787 billion package of government investment designed to bolster the economy in the midst of a deepening recession.
In voting against it he called the legislation a “wasteful spending spree” and warned that it would not provide the right kind of help, instead advocating more tax cuts.
“This trillion dollar spending bill misses the mark on all counts,” Ryan said in a statement at the time issued by his office. “This is not a crisis we can spend and borrow our way out of – that is how we got here in the first place.”
But beginning in the fall of 2009, he sent the first of a series of letters to the Department of Energy on behalf of a pair of Wisconsin energy conservation groups, insisting the funds would help create jobs, the Globe reported on Tuesday.
