Tornado Alley (PROG)

[3Saints]

Ouch >> Erskine Bowles, co-chair of President Barack Obama's budget-deficit commission, had unusual praise for Paul Ryan at a 2011 event, shown in a video posted to YouTube on August 12.

Make sure to listen to the video where he indicated Obama's proposal fudged the numbers and was heavily backend loaded. (my addition)

"I’m telling you this guy is amazing," Bowles said in the video, reportedly taken at a 2011 University of North Carolina event.

The past praise for Ryan and his budget plan is a stark contrast to his recent criticism of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's tax plan. Bowles also criticized Obama's plan at the time, saying nobody "took that budget very seriously":

“I always thought that I was okay with arithmetic. [Paul] can run circles around me, and he is honest, he is straightforward, he is sincere. And the budget that he came forward with is just like Paul Ryan. It is a sensible, straightforward, honest, serious budget and it cut the budget deficit just like we did, by $4 trillion... The President came out with his own plan and the President, as you remember, came out with a budget, and I don’t think anybody took that budget very seriously. The Senate voted against it 97 to nothing. He, therefore, after a lot of pressure from folks like me, he came out with a new budget framework, and in that new budget framework, he cut the budget deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. And, to be candid, this $4 trillion cut was very heavily back-end loaded. So, if you looked at it on a 10-year basis and compared apples-to-apples, it really was about a two and a half trillion dollar cut.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/erskine-bowles-paul-ryan_n_1775313.html