Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said Thursday night that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), should come clean about their earlier support for the bailout and subsequent stimulus.
“Well, that is when a mea culpa comes in quite handy and everyone who voted for TARP and stimulus, and the six trillion dollars additional in debt that we hand to our kids and grandkids to have to pay off, which totals now $16 trillion in debt by growing government these last four years under Obama, now everybody needs say, 'hey, I’m sorry man, for voting for that, sorry for supporting these bailouts and the Cash for Clunkers and all these goofy programs where centralized government planners tried to plan our economy and they failed.'" Palin said in an interview with Fox News.
Ryan voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program under President George W. Bush, though not Obama's initial stimulus package. Romney has similarly drawn the ire of fiscal conservatives for supporting TARP. He has spoken out against Obama's stimulus repeatedly, though passages from his book, No Apology, suggest that he wasn't opposed to the general concept of a large scale stimulus.
Palin says they can both move beyond their pasts if they promise to go cold turkey when it comes to spending.
"Say, sorry shouldn’t have done that," Palin said. "We learned our lesson, we will not repeat this and we will not continue to incur debt. Period. We will engage in austerity measures; they need to start actually using the 'a' word. We will live within our means in America to let the private sector grow.”
As for Ryan, whose votes on the bills makes it harder for him to simply duck the issue, Palin said his work in Congress since lending support to TARP and the stimulus should give him an effective pass.
"He opposed, but then he proposed. He opposed additional failed policies of Obama's, additional spending and ignoring of common sense economic 101 principle plans, time-tested truths based on free markets to get us out of the rut that we're in and Paul Ryan did propose a budget, Obama hasn’t even had a budget passed in his 4 years," she said. "At least Paul Ryan has been able to propose on paper a plan that people can look at and say well that’s better than what the other guy did to us for 4 years.”
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