By Kim DixonWASHINGTON, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Money is not flowing from people on Wall Street to U.S. presidential candidates as freely as in the last White House race, with Republican Mitt Romney outpacing President Barack Obama in the chase for a shrunken pot of cash.Donations from executives and others in the financial sector are down sharply in the 2012 race compared to the same point in the 2008 race won by the Democrat Obama.By this point in 2007, $72 million had been donated to White House hopefuls by this group, compared to just $15 million this year, data compiled by the nonpartisan group Center for Responsive Politics showed.Gaining support from people on Wall Street could be play a key role in determining the financial strength of a candidate in a presidential race expected to be the costliest on record.Romney has attracted nearly twice as much money as Obama. He is well acquainted with Wall Street, having co-founded Bain Capital, a private equity firm that executed leveraged buyouts and corporate turnarounds.Romney has taken in $7.5 million this year from those in firms such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others in the financial sector and related businesses, compared to about $3.9 million for Obama, the Center for Responsive Politics said.At this point in the last election cycle, both Romney and Obama had raised about $12 million from people in this sector.Companies themselves cannot by law give directly to candidates, but individual campaign donors list their employer when donating in increments of $200 or more.Among all the business sectors in the United States, the financial industry — banks, securities firms, insurance companies and the like — represents the biggest source of cash for presidential candidates.”Romney may be Wall Street’s favorite candidate at the moment but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Wall street is enamored with the candidates overall,” said Costas Panagopoulos, director of an elections project at Fordham University in New York.There are varying theories for why the cash is not flowing like it did last time around, including the relentlessly bad economy and lack of enthusiasm about the candidates.’LEVEL OF MISTRUST’Obama had success drawing donations from Wall Street types in the 2008 election. Duplicating that feat may be tough. Many on Wall Street were dismayed over the financial regulation law that Obama signed after being elected, and others took exception to the president’s reference to “fat cat” bankers.Obama also has expressed sympathy for protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement who have decried the practices of the U.S. financial sector.”The level of mistrust between him (Obama) and the investment community may be the greatest in our lifetime,” said Greg Valliere, an analyst who follows Washington for investors at Potomac Research in Washington.The president is facing a tough fight to win a second term in office in the November 2012 election, struggling with low job approval ratings with U.S. unemployment stuck above 9 percent and discontent among his liberal base.Thus far, Obama’s overall fundraising has far outstripped the Republicans seeking their party’s nomination to run against him next year — pulling in $156 million so far this year.Obama set a record in 2008 when he raised about $750 million for his campaign.Romney ran unsuccessfully for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. He has been near or at the top of the Republican field so far in this campaign. The Romney campaign has pulled in about $32 million this year. The Wall Street cash has accounted for nearly a quarter of his fundraising.Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, also has outpaced Texas Governor Rick Perry, the best-funded of the other Republican White House hopefuls, in cash from the finance world. Perry has drawn nearly $2 million in such money.The edge in Wall Street cash may be a double-edged sword, given public frustration with the financial sector and other parts of the business world.”The last thing you want in the current political climate is to give the perception that your campaign is bankrolled by Wall Street,” Panagopoulos said. “Voters know that donors give to candidates expecting something in return.”Obama enjoys support of some influential Wall Street leaders. Hedge fund executive Orin Kramer and investment bank Evercore founder Roger Altman are among those raising funds for his re-election.Romney has been most successful with Goldman employees, raising at least $292,000 from then, according to a separate analysis done for Reuters by the Sunlight Foundation.Obama has raised at least $14,000 from Goldman employees. In 2008, Goldman employees were his second-biggest source of campaign cash, after workers at the University of California.

Now, the similarity of the plan to one used in a version of hit video game SimCity is drawing cheers from Redwood City, Calif., videogame maker Electronic Arts.SimCity4, released in 2003 by Electronic Arts, allows players to create and control virtual societies complete with playgrounds, stadiums and subways, and then destroy them by ordering up an earthquake or other natural disaster.As first reported by HuffingtonPost, the default tax plan for the game hits virtual citizens with three flat taxes of 9 percent, like Cain’s proposal.”As game designers we tried to keep taxes as a simple function of running your virtual city so the player can focus on having fun,” Kip Katserelis, a producer of the game for Electronic Arts’ Maxis unit, told Reuters.Lowering taxes in the game increases a player’s approval rating, while raising them brings in revenue needed “to fend off typical SimCity municipal issues like crime, pollution and giant lizard attacks,” he said.Cain has proposed scrapping the federal tax system and instituting a 9 percent national sales tax, 9 percent income tax and 9 percent tax on business profits.The video game plan sets a 9 percent housing tax, 9 percent commercial tax and 9 percent tax on factories.Mocked at last week’s Republican debate by rival Jon Huntsman as the price of a pizza and compared by Rep. Michele Bachmann to an upside-down version of the numerology representing Satan, the origin and ramifications of 9-9-9 plan have been the matter of debate.Cain has said the idea for his proposal came from Rich Lowrie, an employee of a branch of Wells Fargo Advisors near Cleveland. Lowrie is the only economic adviser that Cain has identified.A message to Lowrie’s Wells Fargo e-mail address generated a response from a co-worker, directing queries to the Cain campaign.”Rich serves as a volunteer on Mr. Cain’s campaign, and does so on his own behalf using his own time and his own resources,” the co-worker wrote.Cain’s campaign did not respond to messages seeking comment.Electronic Arts, which has sold more than 100 million units of the Sims franchise, is taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to the game’s association with Cain’s meteoric rise.”The team here is glad that he chose to build a platform off of our tax system, but there are so many other serious issues in SimCity that I would love to see a politician construct a game around,” said Katsarelis.”Is anyone looking at an alien invasion plan?

By Thomas FerraroWASHINGTON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Republicans, having rejected President Barack Obama’s jobs bill, offered a sweeping and largely repackaged plan of their own on Thursday.Their “Jobs Through Growth Act” features a fresh call for tax reform and cuts as well as a number of components previously proposed, but stalled in the Democratic-led Senate.They include steps to: require a balanced budget; repeal Obama’s overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system; lift prohibitions on offshore energy exploration and promote U.S. trade.”This is a pro-growth proposal to create the environment for jobs that stands in contrast to the short-term sweetener approach of the Obama administration, an approach that simply hasn’t worked,” Senator Rob Portman, a chief sponsor of the measure, told a news conference.Republicans unveiled their measure after complaints by Obama that they haven’t offered a jobs-creation plan.”We just thought it was time to put this all into a package,” said Senator John McCain, another sponsor. “Part of it is in response to the president saying we don’t have a proposal.”McCain said all but a few of the Senate’s 47 Republicans had embraced the measure, whose third and final chief sponsor is Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party favorite.But Democratic Senator Charles Schumer called the Republican plan, “a political fig leaf that would likely add to the deficit while doing nothing to create jobs.”The bill was unveiled two days after Republicans used a procedural move in the Senate to block Obama’s $447 billion jobs package.Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Obama touted the new strategy he and Senate Democrats have crafted to bring up parts of his bill for individual votes, likely beginning next month.”We’re going to say, let’s have a vote on putting teachers back in the classroom,” said Obama, whose re-election next year may hinge on how much he can revive the sagging economy and boost the jobless rate that has been stuck above 9 percent since May.”Let’s have a vote on rebuilding our infrastructure.”If Republicans vote no, Obama said, they will have to explain their actions to the American people ahead of next year’s elections.A new Wall Street-NBC poll shows that the public, by a 2-to-1 margin, backs Obama’s plan to create jobs through a mixture of stimulus spending and tax cuts. It would be financed by a 5.7 percent surtax on millionaires.Obama called House Speaker John Boehner, the top U.S. Republican, on Thursday to congratulate him for helping pass three free trade bills expected to help create jobs.During the call, Boehner office said, the speaker rejected Obama’s comment that Republicans had not offered a jobs creation plan, noting that House Republicans offered one in May.In fact, the House has passed 11 bills to ease regulations on business and make it easier to drill for oil and gas. None have come up for a vote in the Senate.Democrats have painted Republicans as obstructionists who care more about defeating Obama than boosting the economy.Republicans say the president would rather campaign on the issue of jobs than find a bipartisan solution.

The Red Cross said 44 people in the south of the island suffered injuries, some with head injuries and broken bones from falling ceilings, with one person in a critical condition. It said one school and house collapsed .The epicentre of the quake was about 160 km (100 miles) southwest of the island’s capital Denpasar, the U.S. geological survey said.Caroline Mercier, a 40-year-old tourist in the island’s cultural centre of Ubud, said she was used to feeling quakes in California, but never like this one.”It started at my feet and went all though my heart and head — it made me nauseous. My first reaction was to get out of the house. I was very confused when the roof started shaking,” she told Reuters.Novotel Bali Benoa, one of many resorts in the luxury southern beach area of Nusa Dua, evacuated its guests as the hotel shook for a minute.”The funny thing is that the foreign guests who were sitting in the lobby did not feel the shaking. They started running when hearing people say ‘there’s an earthquake’ while running down the lobby,” hotel worker Ariyanti told Reuters.Nusa Dua will be the venue for a meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders next month, including U.S. President Barack Obama, and an aftershock disrupted preparatory meetings as officials ran outside again.”It’s hard to continue, moreover with two quakes. The mood must have been changed. And many members of delegations must return to their countries tonight,” the website of newspaper Kompas quoted an ASEAN director Djauhari Oratmangun as saying.Some sunbathers in bikinis on the southern white sand beach at Kuta, popular with surfers and Australian tourists, also started running, though swimmers appeared not to notice, local website Detik said.Endro Tjahjono, head of information at Bali’s meteorology agency, said there was no tsunami potential. He said cracks appeared in the walls and glass lobby windows of his office in Kuta, where cracks also damaged a Carrefour supermarket.The sprawling Indonesian archipelago is on the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire” and gets regular earthquakes.