Remarks with Paul Ryan at a Campaign Event in Vandalia, Ohio

RYAN: Hey — [inaudible] — appreciate it. [inaudible] — buddy. [cheers and applause] Wow.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you! [cheers and applause]

REP. RYAN: O-H! [cheers]

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [inaudible]

REP. RYAN: O-H!

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [inaudible]

REP. RYAN: Works every time. [chuckles]

[laughter] I got my lucky buckeye. [cheers] My buddy Rob Portman gave me this lucky buckeye.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off mic.)

REP. RYAN: It means we're going to win Ohio. [cheers]

I'll tell you the other reason why we're going to win Ohio. We are going to give you, our fellow citizens, a clear choice. We owe you that.

You see, our choice is do we stay on the same path we are on, the one that Obama put us on, a nation in debt, in doubt, in decline —

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!

REP. RYAN: — or do we reclaim those founding principles that made us so great in the first place and get this country back on the right track? [cheers and applause]

Look, after four years, the recovery that President Obama promised is nowhere in sight. He said that if he just could borrow a bunch of money and spend it on his friends, unemployment would never get above 8 percent. It's been above 8 percent for 43 months! We have 23 million Americans struggling to find work. Fifteen percent of our fellow countrymen and -women are in poverty today.

Look, President Obama — the economy is barely growing. He's run out of ideas. And just the other day on TV he said that he can't change Washington from the inside. [boos]

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, get him out! Get him out!

REP. RYAN: Why do we send presidents to Washington in the first place? [chuckles] I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do?

Don't we send them to fix the mess in Washington?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yeah!

REP. RYAN: Look, if he can't change Washington, then we need to change presidents. And we need to elect this man, Mitt Romney, the next president of the United States. [cheers and applause]

The choice before us is very clear. We are offering real reforms for a real recovery. We cannot afford four more years of President Obama's failed policies.

Now, what Mitt Romney is offering, what we are saying is here are big ideas, big solutions that are designed to get people back to work, proven pro-growth policies to get our country back on track. Number one, right here in Ohio, all across America, we have a lot of our own energy; let's go get that energy, use that energy and put people back to work! [cheers and applause] Gas, oil, coal, renewables, all of the above. It's here. It's ours. And on day one, you know what he's going to do? He's going to say yes to the Keystone pipeline so we can get that oil coming to our country. [cheers and applause]

Number two, you know, in our states, in our Midwestern manufacturing states, we've lost a lot of work. A lot of people in the prime of their lives, in their 40s and their 50s, they're in between. You know — [inaudible] — is a great example. And we have to have a system so those people can get the skills they need to get back on track, to get back into a career of the 21st century so that American dream can be placed back within their reach.

We need skills. We need to fix our schools. We need to honor the parents and the children and not the special interests that are standing in the way of these educational reforms. [cheers and applause]

We need trade that works for America so we can make more things in America and sell them overseas, and Mitt will get more into that.

But there is one thing that we — that the four of us have talked about, we've worked on, we have fought for. It's a really simple idea. We can't keep spending money we just don't have.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yeah!

REP. RYAN: We have got to balance this budget. We got to get this debt under control. It is our duty to save the American dream for our children and our grandchildren and to save it for our economy today.

We also have to remember — let's never forget this — that most of our jobs in this country come from those small businesses in this country, from those successful small businesses in this country. We need to reform our tax system so it's fair, simple and competitive. We need to re-acknowledge the idea that if you have a small business, you built that small business. [cheers and applause] You get the credit for that.

Friends, the Obama economic agenda failed not because it was stopped, but because it passed. [chuckles] (Scattered laughter.) Let's not forget that in his first two years, he had total control of government. You ever heard of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? [boos] I'll take that as a yes. [chuckles] (Scattered laughter.) He got almost everything he wanted.

And then the next two years he spent regulating. This is killing jobs. This is plaguing our businesses with uncertainty.

We have specific ideas and plans to get people back to work, to get this economy growing again, to create 12 million jobs, to get job security, to get better pay — take-home pay, to get people back on the path of opportunity. You see, we know that the genius of this country is the worker, it's the small-business person, it's the entrepreneur — it's the person that's not our government.

[cheers and applause]

So after four years of getting the runaround, what America needs is a turnaround. [cheers] And this is the man who knows how to do turnarounds. [cheers and applause]

You know what we also believe, and especially here in Dayton? We believe in peace through strength. And that means not gutting our military, not compromising Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, not shutting down that tank plant in Lima. That means a peace-through-strength doctrine.

I see a Marine right there. I see Army right there. I saw a Navy guy right over here. And I know there is somebody from Air Force here. Thank you for your service to our country. We will honor you. And we will have a strong national security. And that means job security in Ohio as well. [cheers and applause]

This is the moment where the moment and the man are meeting. We need leadership. We need someone who'll be honest with us about our problems, who will not blame other people for the next four years, who will take responsibility, who will not duck the tough issues but will actually fix things. That's this man right here. [cheers and applause]

When his country called, and when they asked him to save the Olympics, he left what he was doing, and he beautifully served, and he saved it. This is a man who knows how the economy works because he's created over 10,000 jobs. [cheers and applause]

You know what, by the way? I think it's a good thing that he's a successful businessman — [cheers] — because being successful in business is something we want. [cheers and applause] We're proud of people's success.

We want more of success in this country. [cheers and applause] And when this man was governor —

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [chanting] Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney! Romney!

REP. RYAN: — and as governor, when this man was governor, he didn't blame, he didn't duck, he didn't demagogue; he got things done. Unemployment went down. The credit rating was improved. Household income went up. He reached across the aisle. He didn't compromise his principles. And he balanced the budget without raising taxes. That's the kind of leadership we finally need in Washington. [cheers and applause] That's not what we have. And ladies and gentlemen, he has not only succeeded, but he succeeded where others could not.

This president is not succeeding.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!

REP. RYAN: This president cannot run on his record.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!

REP. RYAN: This president is going to say anything and everything to try and blame, to try and duck, to try and distort, to try and divide, to try and distract, to try and win by default. And you know what, Ohio? We are not going to let them, because are going to elect Mitt Romney the next president of the United States.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mitt Romney. [cheers and applause]

MITT ROMNEY: Wow! That's quite a guy, isn't it? Paul Ryan! Isn't that something? [cheers and applause]

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [chanting] Romney! Romney! Romney!

MR. ROMNEY: Wait a second. Wait a second. Romney-Ryan, Romney-Ryan, Romney-Ryan. There we go. All right.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: [chanting] Romney-Ryan.

MR. ROMNEY: That's great.

Thank you, Senator Rand Paul, for being here. And you're a great senator. [cheers and applause]

Rob Portman. Thank you, Rob Portman. He's campaigned for me all over the country. Do you know what he does on weekends? Do you know what he does?

He plays Barack Obama. Can you believe that? [laughter] He does — he plays Barack Obama. He plays him well too, I hate to tell you. We get the chance to debate one another. After the, you know, hour and a half or so is over, I like — I want to, you know, kick him out of the room or something. [laughter] He's so good. But he doesn't convince me. Actually, when he gets finished, he said, you beat me again, you beat me again. [cheers] Now, he likes my arguments, you see. He's a better debater, but he likes my arguments better, he knows they're right.

Lee Greenwood — where is Lee Greenwood [cheers and applause] Lee? I don't know where he is, but I heard him. There he is, right there, proud to be an American. Thank you, sir. Thank you one more time. This guy, he sang it right, he said it right. I'm proud to be an American.

I'm proud to be here with so many who serve our country. Wright-Patt, what a contribution that makes to our country and has over the years. I've been to that base, met with the leaders there and members of our armed services there. How many members of the armed services are veterans here? Would you raise your hand?

Wow, look at that. Look at that. [cheers and applause] I love that national hymn, one of our national hymns: "O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife who more than self their country love and mercy more than life." Thank you to our veterans and our members of the armed services. [cheers and applause]

If I'm president of the United States — [cheers] — nah, correct that; when I'm president of the United States — [cheers] — I will not cut our military budget or our commitment to keep America's military second to none in the world. [cheers and applause]

This — this is an election which is a dramatic choice for the American people. It's the question about the soul of America. What is America going to be? We know the course the president has laid out his plan for the next four years. If you — if you watch their convention or read about his speech, you know what he said. He said, we're going to go forward, he said. More of the same. I think forewarned is a better term, by the way.

But he had no new ideas. He had no plan for how he's going to get the economy going, how he's going to create jobs or rising take-home pay. Instead, it was a repeat of what he said four years ago. He's going to bring the deficit down. Of course he didn't; he doubled it. He's going to get more people working; of course, he didn't. We still have, as Paul indicated, over 8 percent unemployment.

His plan is another stimulus. How'd that first one go? All right? About $800 billion. How much of that did you get?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: None!

MR. ROMNEY: Well, there was cash for clunkers. Did you get help from that?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No.

MR. ROMNEY: No. His idea now — he's got one new — he's got one new idea. I admit this. He has one thing he did not do in his first four years, he said he's going to do in the next four years, which is to raise taxes. And is there anybody who thinks that raising taxes will help grow the economy?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!

MR. ROMNEY: No, his plan is to continue what he has done before. The status quo has not worked. We cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama. We're not going to have four more years of Barack Obama.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No! [applause]

MR. ROMNEY: His plan and his approach says fundamentally that government knows better than you how to live your life, how to pick winners and losers, how to choose companies that can be successful and products that have a future; that government, that a group of bureaucrats, of real smart people working hard — I mean, there are good people who work in Washington, but he has this view that somehow they know better than free people. So he's going to put them in the most important, or one of the most important, relationships that you have, and that's the relationship between you and your doctor. He's going to put government between there if he has his way.

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: No!

MR. ROMNEY: He wants a government that's more and more expansive and intrusive. He — do you know how much money he spent in one year putting money into companies that he thought had a bright future, green companies? He spent $90 billion, $90 billion — [booing] — and sent it into companies, in many cases, that were — were owned by campaign contributors of his.

Look, this is a — this is a vision of government that's entirely foreign to anything this nation has ever known, the idea of a larger and larger government taking more and more from the people, intruding itself in your relationship with your doctor, investing, so to speak, in companies, picking winners and losers or, in his case, losers. [laughter]

Look, that is not the America I know. That is not the America that built Ohio. That's not the America that we're going to restore. We're going to return America to the principles that made this nation the hope of the earth. [cheers and applause]

I have an entirely different course. I will restore the principles that the founders described when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. The foundation of our nation said this, that our rights did not come from government; our rights came from God himself. [cheers] And among those rights were life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. [cheers] We are free in this nation to pursue happiness as we choose.

And now and then there is a person out there that has some idea and goes out and pursues it, not because the government told her to do it, but because this idea came into their mind, and they said I'm going to go out there and try this idea. Most of the ideas don't work. It's the nature of starting something up. But now and then they really do. And what they do, they lift other people who get to work there. And if they're successful beyond their dreams, many, many people get great jobs and a bright future. That's how our economy works. (Murmurs of approval.)

It does not — it is not driven by government; it is driven by free people. And if this president persists on the road of making it harder and harder for small businesses to grow and thrive, he's going to slowly but surely weaken our economy and turn us into Greece, and we must not let it happen. [cheers and applause]

I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to restore that principle of free enterprise, that principle of people pursuing their dreams as they wish. We're a nation of dreamers. We want our kids to get an education that will give them the skills so they can dream and build their own future.

That's the nature of how America works.

He just can't do that because he gets his largest single funding from the teachers' union. Nothing wrong with the teachers' union, but I just think the president of the United States should be focused on the deeds of the kids, not focused on the needs of the teachers' union. [cheers and applause] I want to put our kids — I want to put our kids and the teachers themselves and the parents first and the union behind. [cheers and applause]

Small business — Paul Ryan said, we got to help small business. Boy, is he right. It's tough out there getting a business going. I want these people to make the investment and start opening doors and hiring people. I've seen these entrepreneurs across America. It's — it's extraordinary to see what's happening.

I — I met a woman who — she has her own business. And I said, how did you get going in business? She said, well, my husband lost his job, and he took a class in upholstering. And she — because she was a better business mind, she said, in the family, she decided to start her own company. So she did and hired him as her first employee. [laughter] And then she went on to hire 39 more people as upholsterers. And she has a leading upholstery company. And that puts people to work. That's kind of how America works. [cheers and applause]

And then I met a guy named Jim Leotaud in central Illinois. Jim graduated second in his high school class, second from the bottom. [laughter] And he concluded that college was not part of his future. And he went to his dad and said, would you float me a loan, start a business together? He was going to do the work, and his dad would put up the money, and they agreed to split it about 50-50. And Jim was going to start a food business. And he went out to buy one of those hamburger griddles, you know, on those — those hot-dog rollers and that — you know, the ventilation hoods. And — and by the time he costed it all out, it was a lot more money than he had from his dad.

He concluded the only thing he could do in the food business with the money he had was make sandwiches because sandwiches don't take much equipment, all right? So he got some tables, you know, and set them up in a garage and started making sandwiches and then he would deliver them to people at work or at school and in colleges. And now Jimmy Johns has 1,500 restaurants — [cheers and applause] — and employs 60,000 Americans! [cheers and applause]

Look, this is the — this is the fundamental question Americans have to ask. Do we believe that government bureaucrats are better at telling us what kind of health care we ought to have and what kind of insurance we ought to have? Do we believe that they're better at telling us which businesses to invest in, like Solyndra and Fisker and Tesla and Ener1, or do we instead believe that free people pursuing their dreams will build a stronger economy? That's what I believe. [cheers and applause]

This president has a plan for small business. He's got a plan for small business. He's going to raise their taxes. I was with a — an entrepreneur in St. Louis who's in the electronics industry in a small way. He has four employees. And he said, you know, my son and I calculated how much tax we send to government. And, you know, I had a number in mind as he began saying that to me, as to what I thought he was going to say. And then he went through. He said, I calculated my federal income tax, my federal payroll tax, my state income tax, my state sales tax, my gasoline tax and my real estate tax, and by the time I added it up, more than half of what we make in my business we give to government.

And I thought — now, you think about this. You think about taking the risk of starting an enterprise that's going to hire other people when you know you haven't even got a 50-50 chance the business will succeed, because most small businesses, they struggle, they don't make it. So you know you might lose your money. But if you're successful, if you make it, the government wants half of what you make. And what's the president's plan for small business? Raise taxes further.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No!

MR. ROMNEY: For a million small businesses in this country, he wants to take the federal income tax rate from 35 percent to 40 percent.

And what that will do is kill jobs.

This is a president who is bent on growing government. I am bent on growing jobs and raising take-home pay and will do it! [cheers and applause]

Now Paul — Paul Ryan described the five things we're going to do: Number one, take advantage of energy, and number two, fix our schools and training programs, and number three — I'll come back to number three, not that I forgot it. Number four — [laughter] — number four, we're going to balance our budget, because you're not going to invest in America if you think we're headed to Greece. And number five, we're going to champion small business.

But coming back to number three, that's trade. Look, trade is good for us. The people in Ohio can sell products anywhere in the world, and we can compete with anywhere in the world. I'm not afraid of trading with other nations. I understand that when we trade and when other nations trade on a fair basis, we will compete, we will win, we'll raise wages here, we'll create jobs.

But I also understand that when people cheat, that kills jobs. China has cheated. I will not allow that to continue. [cheers and applause]

And it — it's not over. I mean, how does a nation cheat? How do you pull that off? Let me tell you how you pull it off. One way is to artificially hold down the value of your currency, to make sure it doesn't trade openly around the world. And you — what — what does that do? Well, let me tell you what it does. It makes your products artificially less expensive.

The estimates are that China has held down the value of its currency anywhere between 15 and 30 percent, and so their products will be 15 to 30 percent cheaper. Guess what that does to the American companies that are competing in those industries. They lose sales, and so they have to lay off people. And ultimately they go out of business, and that's been happening. They've been manipulating, holding down the value of their currency.

What else do they do? They steal intellectual property. What do I mean by that? Patents, designs, know-how, even counterfeit our goods.

I was with a — a — a company in the Midwest that — that said that they had some products that were coming back, valves. These are industrial valves, great big heavy industrial valves — said they were getting warranty claims on these — these valves of theirs that were breaking. And they were their product. They had their packaging on it. They had their serial numbers on it. And then they realized they're counterfeit; these aren't actually our product; they've been sold as our product, under our brand name, with our — with our bar codes, everything else associated with them.

And these — these products are coming into this country, being counterfeited overseas. That kills jobs. That's what they've been doing. There's an Apple Store in China. Have you — you read about that one? They got a store, Apple Store, selling Apple, you know, iPads and iPhones, except it's not an Apple Store. It's all counterfeit. Look, this kind of practice has to stop. They even have hacked into our computers. Our government, with the F-35 and the designs for the F-35 — they've looked at computers of our corporations.

This cannot be allowed. We cannot compete with people who don't play fair, and I won't let that go on. I will stop it in its tracks. [cheers and applause]

You guys, I love this country. And I know it's based upon — this — this — this nation is — is a nation that makes me proud. I love the people of this country. I've had the chance during this campaign to see folks from — from all over this great state and from all over this great country. I know what it's going to take to bring us back. Paul and my plan will create 12 million jobs and will cause take-home pay to go up. Look, it's gone down every year for four straight years.

How in the world can people say they want four more years of President Obama? We can't afford four more years of President Obama. [cheers and applause] We will turn this country around and create good jobs again. And let me tell you, it matters. It really matters. It matters for 23 million people who are struggling to get a good job. It matters for the 50 percent of our college graduates coming out of school that — that can't find work.

How in the world these kids think they ought to vote for Barack Obama is beyond me. It's, like, look at your friends, half of you can't find work. Don't you understand where he's taking this country? (Murmurs of approval.) It matters for our kids — for the next generation. Where we pass along trillion-dollar debts, it's not just bad economics, it's immoral for us to pass on debts like that to our kids. So it matters. It matters what direction we take.

And it also matters for the world. I — I was lucky enough to be in Poland a few weeks ago, got to meet with a — a hero, a world hero, Lech Walesa. What a guy. [cheers and applause] Shipyard worker. You know what, in that country, the Soviet Union, as they came in, executed some 20,000 Polish leaders, executed them, wrote down their names and so forth. This is not — this is not conjecture. And yet despite that history, that man a shipyard worker, said no to the Soviet Union. And by virtue of what he did, he helped change the world.

So I got a chance to sit down and talk to to him. And I came in to meet with him. And he — he looked at me, and he said, you must be tired, you came from the United States. He said, you sit. I'll talk. You listen. [laughter] He was a serious guy, so I did. [laughter] And — and then he said this, he said America is the only superpower on the planet. We need American leadership. And then he described a place in the world, the Middle East, for instance. And then he'd say, where is American leadership? We need American leadership. Then he'd go to another place in the world and talk about a problem and say, where is American leadership?

This doesn't mean that we send our guns there. This means that we stand up with our economic power, our soft power, our diplomatic power, our principles. We fight with people we believe in. It means that when people in Tehran take to the streets protesting an illegal election of Ahmadinejad, we have a president that says something, that doesn't stay silent. [cheers and applause]

It means that with the developments in the Middle East these days, when we have — when we have a — an ambassador assassinated, when we have 20,000 people killed in Syria, when we have a Muslim Brotherhood leader become the new president of Egypt, when we have Iran moving closer and closer to a nuclear weapon, we — we don't have a president calling these things bumps in the road; we have a president who takes this serious and gets America on track to shape world affairs.

[cheers and applause]

And so it matters. American leadership matters. And I can tell you this: For us to have leadership, we have to have strong homes and strong values and a commitment to our principles. We also have — have to have an economy second to none. And finally, we have to have a military no one would ever think of testing. I will bring those three things back to America and keep America strong. [cheers and applause]

If you agree with Paul and me and with these two great senators that we can't afford four more years of Barack Obama, that we can't afford more years of wondering whether our kids can find a good job when they get out of school, if we can't afford more weeks wondering if we can put food on the table at the end of the week — if you agree with me, then I need you to find people who went out there and voted for Barack Obama and convince them to join our team, because together we're going to strengthen this country, we're going to make sure it provides the jobs we need, we're going to keep it the hope of the earth. The world needs American leadership. We do, and we're going to bring it. [cheers and applause]

Thank you so very much. Thank you. [cheers and applause]