2011 State of the Union address: on Budget & Economy

Mitt Romney: America needs less spending and more jobs

"And frankly, he didn't address those issues in a way that convinced people. Almost everything he has done in his first two years has made it more difficult for our economy to grow. It's been the most anti-investment, anti-jobs, anti-growth administration we've seen in a long, long time. I'm inclined to make sure there is somebody in the race that really understands how the economy works and can get jobs back."

Barack Obama: Freeze annual domestic spending for next five years

This freeze will require painful cuts. Already, we've frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I've proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs. The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without.

Paul Ryan: FactCheck:Stimulus spending created between 1.4M & 3.6M jobs

It's true that domestic spending has increased, but not nearly as much as Ryan claims. The 84% figure is the result of a flawed partisan report. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office showed that domestic discretionary spending rose from $485 billion in 2008 to $614 billion in 2010, an increase of 27%, including stimulus funds.

Also, Ryan said the stimulus "failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs." It's just wrong to say that the stimulus didn't create jobs. Ryan can say that the program failed to keep unemployment at 8%, as projected by the administration when lobbying for the bill. But the nonpartisan CBO says the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million & 3.6 million people in 2010, compared with what would have happened without it.

Steve King: Obama's "investments" really just means "more spending"

Paul Ryan: Stimulus spending spree created debt but few jobs

Our debt is the product of acts by many presidents and many Congresses over many years. No one person or party is responsible for it. There is no doubt the President came into office facing a severe fiscal and economic situation.

Unfortunately, instead of restoring the fundamentals of economic growth, he engaged in a stimulus spending spree that not only failed to deliver on its promise to create jobs, but also plunged us even deeper into debt. All of this new government spending was sold as "investment." Yet after two years, the unemployment rate remains above 9% and government has added over $3 trillion to our debt.