Joe Hackney is hitting Barack Obama up for money.

The speaker of the state House wrote a Nov. 12 letter to the incoming president asking for an economic stimulus package to include funding for states.

"As you know, 49 states have requirements to balance their budgets each year," he wrote. "During uncertain economic times, the decisions that state legislatures and governors have to make to keep their budgets balanced — cutting spending, raising taxes or both — can have the pro-cyclical affect of deepening and prolonging any slump."

The letter outlines options for a stimulus package that would include increased spending on repairing and replacing infrastructure, boosting Medicaid, food stamps and other social welfare programs, and changing sales and use tax collection.

The letter was sent on behalf of the National Conference of State Legislatures, where Hackney is currently serving as president.

Chelsea Clinton dived into specific programs her mother has proposed.

After a brief introduction at the Young Democrats convention today, the former first daughter began answering audience questions on a variety of topics.

She earned loud applause from the audience when she said that Hillary Clinton has proposed eliminating the Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, which college applicants must fill out in order to receive college aid, in favor of a checkbox on your tax form.

Among other things, she said that Clinton would forgive student loans for people who work in public service jobs, create universal health insurance, end the war in Iraq, expand the AmeriCorps program, reinstate the estate tax for people with assets of more than $7 million, make school lunch programs available year-round, reform food stamps and tie the Earned Income Tax Credit to inflation.

In response to a question about seating the Florida and Michigan delegates, Clinton said that the former has an "unfortunate" history of not counting votes.

"I wish that I were standing here after seven years of President Gore," she said.

Richard Moore and Beverly Perdue each took a quick jab.

At the UNC-TV debate tonight, Moore argued that the Health and Wellness Trust Fund Commission has a spotty record, especially on teen smoking.

"It's been a hit and miss on a lot of different small programs," he said. "It's kind of hard to say that we really have made any substantive improvement."

That echoes Moore's recent attacks on government commissions, which he says are wasteful. 

Perdue serves on the commission and chaired a task force on health run in part by it.

Later, Perdue turned the tables, noting that Moore said during his unsuccessful 1994 Congressional run that he would consider cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid funding to balance the budget.

"If you do that, then the seniors who are moving into this state, certainly have many more challenges than they would otherwise have," she said.

After the jump, what Moore said in 1994.

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A review by the state auditor's office found that North Carolina does a good job of making sure that people don't use invalid Social Security numbers to improperly receive food stamps.

But State Auditor Les Merritt wants them to do even better.

The review, released this morming, found 1,906 food stamp recipients with Social Security numbers that were not within the range of valid numbers issued by the Social Security Administration. The review also found 1,237 food stamp recipients using the Social Security number of someone who was deceased.

In both instances, the error rate was well below 1 percent.

"It is our opinion that the limited number of exceptions found during our review fall within a statistically expected error rate taking into consideration the complexity of administering a program as large as the Food and Nutrition Services Program," the review read. "It appears that the State's procedures built into this program are functioning properly to ensure compliance with the federal regulation with regard to Social Security number validation."

In a separate press release, though, Merritt said "that even one occurrence of SSN fraud or identify theft is too many."

Officials with the state Division of Social Services, which administers the program, said in the review that they would continue to work to improve compliance.