The State of our Union reaction

My first impressions and thoughts of tonight’s State of the Union speech was when did White House senior staff attend the address and walk in with the members of the cabinet? I can’t remember if the Bush Administration’s White House Senior staff watched the speech from the floor of the Congress. I can understand having the chief of staff attend and am pretty sure that Secretary Card or Josh Bolton did in fact watch from the floor, but did the head of the domestic policy council attend? I can’t recall….

I am not sure if it is just my television, but does the President look a little orange? I don’t know much about makeup, but I think that whoever did the President’s tonight needs to start looking for a new job. He and Speaker Boehner seem to be competing for who can look the strangest. It is also pretty funny that VP Biden is as pale as a ghost.

The President has continued to base his economic growth plans on clean, renewable energy sources. While I do support the development of certain clean energy, the US does not have the infrastructure set up to handle electric cars by 2015 and the goal of 80% of America’s energy coming from clean energy. Also, by eliminating the “tax breaks” for oil companies to pay for the expansion of renewable energy sources, what you are doing is taxing the American public every time they turn on their cars to go to work, to the store or to school. Oil companies are an easy target since they make profits and the environmentalists believe that it is a huge pollutant.

Another focus of the early portion of the speech was on infrastructure. “China is developing faster trains…” Americans don’t use Amtrak currently and won’t use the “new” high-speed trains especially since high speed is still slower than a car. Giving 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail sounds potentially interesting in theory, but Americans are not going to use this type of travel since it likely won’t be as economical as auto transportation. While I try and use the DC Metro system as often as possible, the system does not encompass all of the Metro DC area. For example, I can’t take Metro to Dulles Airport. Another problem with Metro is that it is so poorly run, that last year there were numerous fare increases and yet the system still lost money. If the government can’t run a single city’s train system, how is it going to run a national system? There is no chance that they will ever be able to do that effectively. Already states like Ohio and Wisconsin have already decided against accepting federal funds to begin the building of a regional high-speed rail system in the mid-west.

The President offered his support for free trade by promoting the recently re-negotiated Korea Free Trade Agreement. This is an important step but it should be taken in conjunction with the pending agreements with Colombia and Panama. All three of these agreements will reduce tariffs on US produced goods and services and making these products much more competitive in the global economy. Economists have estimated that for each $1 billion in exports, 6,000 new jobs are created here in the US. Those jobs typically pay higher than non-trade related manufacturing jobs. Trade is needed for our economy to grow and create the much-needed jobs.

The President also mentioned ObamaCare. He mentioned that almost everyone agrees that the bill could be improved. He mentioned the bookkeeping challenges for small businesses as a result of ObamaCare. One might think that if any member of Congress had actually read the bill before being forced to vote on it, they might have been able to eliminate this obvious problem. In the Democrats rush to get the bill passed quickly before the public actually was able to understand exactly what was in the bill and therefore complain, they passed a bill that was poorly written and included many unintended consequences. The President stated that Congress should just fix what needs to be fixed within the bill. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that almost the entire bill is a problem and unless there are major changes to the bill, America will be paying for this mistake the rest of our history.

The President also spoke on his proposal to freeze annual domestic related spending for the next five years. This proposal would reduce the federal deficit by an estimated $400 billion over the next five years. This is an interesting proposal but it pales in comparison to the Republican proposal to reduce the federal deficit by $1.2 trillion over the course of the next ten years. With the rapid growth of spending over the past few years, unless the federal government dramatically changes the way it operates, current and future generations of Americans will be burdened with an enormous amount of debt and it will likely slow our economy.

The President finished his speech with a reference to the greatness of America. He spoke of how a kid growing up sweeping the floor of his father’s bar in Cincinnati could grow up to be the Speaker of the House and that a kid from Scranton, PA could grow up to be the Vice President. America is the greatest country in the world and it should provide every citizen the opportunity to live the American dream. Americas elected officials have a large job in front of them and unless they are willing to challenge the status quo, a year from now when all of us are reviewing the President’s 2012 State of the Union we will still be facing many of the problems that we all face today. Let’s hope that these elected officials remember this past November’s election and work together to start to fix many of the challenges facing the country.