Republican Vice Presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan warned on Saturday of rising debt and taxes if President Barack Obama is re-elected.

“If borrowing and spending and regulating and money printing and taxing are the path to prosperity we would be entering a golden age along with Greece,” Ryan of Wisconsin said, drawing laughs from the crowd of about 2,000 during his 10-minute speech at Young’s Jersey Dairy outside Yellow Springs.

Ryan listed unemployment, the poverty rate and lost manufacturing jobs as examples of Obama’s failings. Ryan drew cheers when he spoke of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, and self-determination and when he said “the government works for us the people, not the other way around.”

“We are not going to try to transform this country into something it was not intended to be,” said Ryan, whose visit is part of weekend bus tour through Ohio.

The Obama campaign responded with a news conference before the speech and a statement after from former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, national co-chair for the Obama campaign. Strickland said Obama inherited an abysmal economy from Republicans and it is the Romney/Ryan plan that would raise the country’s deficit and boost taxes on the middle class.

“Today in Yellow Springs Paul Ryan seemed to have come down with a severe case Romnesia,” said Strickland. “Now, in the final stretches of the campaign, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are trying to run away from their extreme position that would benefit millionaires and billionaires at the expense of Ohio’s middle class. They both still refuse to tell the truth about their $5 trillion tax plan skewed toward millionaires and billionaires because – as independent, non-partisan analysis confirms – even if Romney and Ryan close every deduction for the wealthy, they would have to raise taxes on middle class families or explode the deficit to make his plan add up.”

Strickland said Ryan is pretending to care about people who are out of work or in poverty.

“Sixty percent or more of the cuts in the Ryan budget are cuts to programs that would affect the social safety net for people. Cuts that would hurt poor people,” Strickland said. “And he’s coming to Ohio feigning concern for poor people.”

Both Ryan and Strickland - who spoke to Obama supporters before sending them out to canvass neighborhoods in Yellow Springs - urged supporters to find every vote they can in Ohio. Polls show this crucial swing state could decide the presidential election on Nov. 6.

“Do we want to wait four more years for real change or do we want to make it 10 more days?” Ryan said, telling people they had a responsibility to vote.

That responsibility to vote appeared to be one thing the campaigns agree upon.

“Ohioans have a special kind of burden, I think, to step up to the plate,” Strickland said at the news conference with Sharen Neuhardt, the Democrat trying to unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville. “Every door you knock on could be the deciding vote.”

Strickland said people need to keep in mind the number “537.”

“That refers to the number of votes that gave George Bush the win in Florida (in 2000), which gave us the war in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, growing deficits, eventually a recession that we have been dealing with,” said Strickland. “Five hundred thirty-seven votes could have changed the history of this country.”

People interviewed after Ryan’s speech said they were impressed by him.

“He’s like a rock star to me,” said Carol S. Johnson, 57, of Kettering.

“I love the Midwestern values, his faith, he’s a family man,” said Phil Scott, 44, a businessman from Enon.

Saturday’s bus tour included a rally at a Sabina high school in Clinton County, where Ryan and Turner met with salaried Delphi workers at a garage next to the school. Those employees saw their pensions dramatically cut when the company went bankrupt, while unionized Delphi employees had their pensions made whole by General Motors in the auto bailout.

“The president likes to go around Ohio talking about how he saved the auto industry, how the auto bailout was such a success,” Ryan said, before saying that the bailout was not a success for the salaried Delphi employees.

“All they want is to have fairness, all they want is transparency and honesty from the federal government and they deserve better than that,” he said of those employees. “And they’re not getting that.”

Obama spokeswoman Jessica Kershaw accused Ryan of “trying to rewrite history” and “shamelessly” using Delphi workers’ misfortune to attack Obama.

“The fact is that when the American auto industry and its workers were on their knees, Mitt Romney turned his back. Had we ‘let Detroit go bankrupt’ like Romney wanted, Delphi likely would have been liquidated and its employees would have lost their jobs,” Kershaw said.