Clap. Clap. Clap. Once again, President Barack Obama, with the help of trusty speech writers, lies and half-truths, and an unyielding determination to grow already intrusive government involvement in our lives has managed to deliver another State of the Union address rich in rhetoric and sound bites, but hollow in real substance.
The 2014 SOTU rehashed many ideas from the president’s former speeches, which have overwhelmingly faltered. According to the Wall Street Journal, since 2011, Obama has made 31 proposals and promises in his SOTU addresses. Of those 31 proposals, only five have found any success. And of those five, what revolutionary changes were made to benefit the American people? He created a website that directs people looking for job training information to CareerOneStop.org, extended a pre-existing tuition tax credit, raised taxes on the wealthiest Americans and banned insider trading for members of Congress, something that was already illegal. Well done, the future looks bright.
Obama has not passed a climate change bill, has not passed jobs proposals, has not strengthened social security and has not made sizable infrastructure investments, as he said he would in previous years. He did, in fact, pass a health care reform bill, which has grown increasingly unpopular, even with members of the Democratic Party, each day.
If Obama could not drive the rest of his bills through Congress in prior years when he had their support, what makes him think he can do it this year? Oh, that’s right, it’s because he has no interest in working with Congress anymore. During the SOTU, Obama lauded his plans to use executive orders to act unilaterally without any real discussion in Congress or any representation of what the American people want.
Yes, Congress is an absolute mess. Politics across party lines are running rampant, all politicians seem to be more concerned with their ideological war than with the betterment of the country they call home, and our representatives are no longer interested in even pretending to have our interest at heart. But as president, Obama cannot continue to shove his ideological agenda down the throat of an American public skeptical of his policies, especially without congressional support.
In keeping with the general tone of self-importance in the SOTU, Obama spun facts in a way that made it sound like America has rebounded under his time as president. “And for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.” Well that depends on which business leaders are talked to. In his speech, Obama cited a 2013 A.T. Kearney Survey. But according to Forbes’ annual report, the best country to do business with is Ireland. The United States landed at number 14 due to its excessive tax burden, the highest statutory corporate tax rates and the complexity of tax codes. Thanks Obama.
Furthermore, as a president with an unwavering ideology to grow an already intrusive government, Obama continues to emphasize that “Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” But according to a group of economists led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, the U.S. isn’t any less socially mobile than it was in the 1970’s. Obama’s method of shrinking this supposed inequality is by growing regulation, not the economy. He cannot keep speaking in generalities while never actually offering up any realistic specifics about his solutions to a slew of problems.
I understand the approach Obama took with this year’s SOTU. With an incredibly low approval rating hovering around 43 percent, a waning party support, and growing pessimism among the American people, Obama faced a tough task of delivering a SOTU address that would quell worries among the American people. But Obama has shown once again that he is more interested in self-preservation and that he is more concerned with his personal legacy and ideological agenda than he is with the state of our nation.
It’s about time he takes some responsibility for the mess he has helped create.