In State of the Union, Obama to return to jobs and the economy

The Broke, Retreating State of Our Union
The Editors, NRO
February 13, 2013

It is terribly appropriate that President Obama gave his halting and graceless State of the Union address on Mardi Gras: He spent the evening shouting “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” at every liberal constituency in sight, promising new spending for public-sector unions (“Fix-It-First”), demanding (yet again) that banks renegotiate mortgages on politically driven terms, offering handouts to Al Gore–style enviropreneurs (reviving cap-and-trade, offering yet more subsidies to politically connected energy firms), and promising a $9-an-hour minimum wage.

In the real world, Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday and a season of fasting and penance. For the free-spending Barack Obama, Fat Tuesday is followed by Fat Wednesday, Fat Thursday, Fat Friday, fat federal spending the whole way through. (Don’t tell the first lady.) Austerity is reserved for the taxpayer, the so-called rich on whom the president just secured tax increases before demanding, two minutes later, yet more tax increases. That includes new taxes on Medicare recipients (“ask more from the wealthiest seniors”).

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The high-income may sigh at the tax proposals, but the president’s proposals weigh particularly heavily upon the low-income young. They will have to pay his debt. They will also be the ones most affected by the proposal to raise the minimum wage: The result of artificial wages increases, as economists have documented over and over, is fewer jobs. The president proposes to cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder, which is of much more concern to those born at the bottom.

The president has a strange sense of language. The word “economy” used to be a synonym for “thrift.” Barack Obama has managed to turn that on its head. His speech gave every indication that he remains a hostage to the superstition that we can spend our way to national prosperity — or that we can pass laws that will force employers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other businesses to spend our way to prosperity for us. That has failed for four years because it is bad economics and wishful thinking.

In reality, the state of our union is this: The United States is today $6 trillion deeper in debt than it was before Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. That represents an increase of 57 percent in just four years. Put another way: Out of every dollar the country owes in government debt, 36 cents was acquired under the Obama administration.

The state of our union is this: Today there are more than 4 million fewer Americans working than there were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president — not including those who have retired. The work-force-participation rate is at a historic low. Never before have so many Americans simply abandoned the hope of a job.

The state of our union is this: Economic growth is weaker than it has been during any recovery in recent memory; in fact, the economy shrank in the last quarter. Those figures may be revised, but in any case growth is so weak that the difference between what President Obama calls a recovery and what economists fear is the beginning of a new recession is within the margin of measurement error.

The state of our union is this: Incomes are lower today than they were when Barack Obama was first sworn in as president. True, he became president during a recession, and incomes dropped 2.6 percent during the recession. Since the end of the recession, they have dropped another 4.8 percent — which is to say, incomes have fallen almost twice as fast during President Obama’s so-called recovery than they fell during what he (inaccurately) called “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

How strange, then, that the president declared during his annual address: “A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts. Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” That is a remarkably brass-faced assertion for a president whose policies have neither achieved strong growth nor attracted more jobs to our shores nor improved the ability of workers to secure high-skilled jobs nor strengthened the relationship between hard work and a decent living. Barack Obama is incapable of grappling with his own record.

He further promised that his policies would not add “a single dime” to the national debt when he already has added some 60 trillion dimes to it, and while the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the president’s 2013 spending blueprint would add another 64 trillion dimes to the deficit in the coming years. That on top of the tax increases he already has demanded and secured.

But there is more to the state of our union than the feeble state of our economy. The president boasted that a decade of war is coming to an end. It is, and a new decade of war is beginning. He boasted that al-Qaeda is decimated, but that news has not reached Bengazi or most of North Africa. So the state of our union also is this: North Korea sets off nuclear weapons with impunity. Iran seeks them without fear. Islamists slaughter our diplomatic personnel while the president’s national-defense team keeps bankers’ hours. Our allies are unsure, our enemies are emboldened. Our troops may be coming home, but it is not clear that we have secured the objectives for which we dispatched them. It is even less clear that President Obama has any intention of doing so.

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The State of the Unions

Really, a team of the best comedy writers couldn't dream this up. The obtuse union bosses are finding that many of the law's provisions are driving up costs on health plans union members have and making union members even less competitive than they already are.


In particular, ObamaCare ends the caps on benefits and has other mandates that raise the prices of union-run plans -- namely, the "Multiemployer Plans."


So what are unions now going to push for? Perhaps for repealing this stupid law and replacing it with something more sensible? Quit dreaming! No, the unions are now pushing to get their lower-paid workers covered by the subsidies the law intended for just those who have no health care insurance at all.


In other words, the unions are once again trying to rip off the taxpayer to cover the mess they themselves caused.


We are talking about a potentially huge new expense to this already obscenely costly bill. There are 20 million workers covered by these multiemployer plans, which are managed by both the unions and the companies and are common in those industries (such as construction or trucking) in which unionized workers work varying hours for different companies.


Early on, the Obama administration rejected the idea of giving subsidies to union workers already covered by health care, but it is now open to the idea -- it will now be "subject to regulations still being written."


The unions are now doing what they do so masterfully: threatening. They are pushing the already compliant Obama administration -- which got elected with the help of tens of millions of dollars from unions -- with the threat of dumping all the workers on these multiemployer plans onto the government subsidy system by terminating the employee insurance and letting the employers pay the mandated yearly fine.


As Ken Hall, the Teamsters' treasurer, so delicately put it, "[w]e are going back to the administration to say that this [not allowing workers on a union-run health plan to get the subsidies intended for those without any health insurance] is not acceptable."


The prospect of tossing their members onto the government program and accordingly looking like the plutocrats they portray business CEOs as being is concentrating union bosses' minds wonderfully.


For example, John Wilhelm, chairman of Unite Here Health (the plan that covers over a quarter-million casino and hotel workers), said of Obama: "I heard him say, 'If you like your health plan, you can keep it.'" After saying that he expects Obama's administration to protect existing employer health plans, he added, "If I'm wrong, and the president does not intend to keep his word, I would have severe second thoughts about the law."


The administration is totally forked here: if it doesn't give the unions the subsidies, the unions may turn on it...but if it does, then businesses will want the same deal.


And that latter option spotlights the gorilla in the room. In a recent analysis of ObamaCare, the Economist reports on the threat the law poses to citizen's existing health-care plans.


Almost 150 million Americans have their health care provided by their employers. These citizens have little if any idea how much these plans cost their employers, that these costs are considered by their employers just another form of compensation, and how much it would be for them to negotiate a similarly priced plan with the same benefits on their own. But it appears that the citizens are in for an unpleasant education.


By January 2014, all employers with 50 or more employees (who work 30 or more hours a week) will have to provide dramatically more expensive health insurance to their employees, or pay a $2,000 penalty per employee for dropping/not insuring them. Considering that the average family plan at large companies already costs nearly $16,000 a year per employee, it is obvious that many if not most companies will do what the unions who supported this idiotic law are already threatening to do: dump the employees on the government-subsidized state exchanges.


A survey last year by McKinsey (a business consulting company) found that 30% of employers would "definitely or probably" drop their programs by 2014. The CBO pooh-poohed that survey last year, but the CBO itself now estimates that 7 million Americans will lose their health care plans. Given that the CBO's past cost projections for ObamaCare have been ludicrously low, it is a good guess that the McKinsey survey will be proven accurate.


In sum, Big Labor (which represents only a small percentage of American workers) shoved down the country's throat a law that even it is having trouble with -- one that will cost many workers (union as well as non-union) their existing plans and throw them onto much worse ones. The law will also cost workers their full-time jobs as they are converted to part-timers -- or lose work altogether as employers offshore or automate -- to escape the law.


People are becoming aware that Big Labor will be responsible for losing their insurance, losing full-time work, or losing their jobs entirely. I suspect that it is this growing awareness that is responsible for Big Labor's plummeting popular support.

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Gary Jason



You get to keep your health insurance! You get to keep your doctor or a reasonable facsimile thereof like a nurse practitioner or a technician with a computer program...



... it's not a tax, it's a fine, no wait, it's a tax...

everything he says is a LIE

EVERYTHING

Remember way back when the "new healthcare plan" was first suggested.. and it was mentioned that people receiving federal benefits would be required to volunteer, give back, contribute what he or she could?"

I now have more patients than ever on disability (by placing them on disability we've taken them out of "unemployment" because they no longer count in jobs statistics) and all they're volunteering is, "I'm going to turn your ass in if you don't call for me to have more ice cream."

hahaha.. progress!

forgive me if I'm skeptical following this whole "jobs and equality" presentation.

But he's not a progressive/socialist/marxist!


He's a pragmatic centrist!


We just have a paying problem, so in Orwellian fashion, he proposes spending to reduce our deficits from 5 trillion to 6 trillion!

vetteman said:

He's a national embarrassment. Pitiful dummy, high school cheerleader.

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It will be remembered that on his watch the €PIIGS got wrestling kicked out of the Olympics...




... maybe that is the price Chicago is willing to pay to host the Pentathlon...



... their Utes are already practicing...

vetteman said:

He's a national embarrassment. Pitiful dummy, high school cheerleader.

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And he still beat the best the GOP could put up against him. That has to hurt.

Oh, by the way, he's not a tenth the national embarrassment that the previous incumbent was.

How corrupt is this nation's capitol?

It is ringed by the five richest counties in the nation and its favorite sport is not the "REDskins" but cheating on their spouses...

No wonder nobody bats an eye as tax-cheat after tax-cheat is nominated to be Secretary of Treasury.

Why should the state of the Treasury be any different than the state of the Union?

vetteman said:

We'll be lucky to survive the wacko we have now.

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Yeah, but an even bigger whackjob is waiting in the wings: Joe Biden.

Obama seems to be setting himself up as the 'cornucopia' from which all blessings flow. Now we're going to see exactly how much political capital he has to spend on making these pipe dreams come true.

At the peak of WWII Roosevelt subsumed 40% of the economy to support the war effort. I doubt that anyone here remembers much about that period but wages were essentially frozen and virtually everything was rationed. Considering the effort that was required to prevail in that conflict the citizens suffered these deficiencies for the survival of the nation. The economy wasn't truly unleashed until after the conflict and war industries returned to peace time production. The WWII debt was paid off by 1952.

Currently the government is subsuming 38.9% of the economy. We aren't at war so there is no real end in sight. Inflationary pressures are mounting daily which in the end threaten to impoverish the greater percentage of the populace. There is no plan to retire any of the debt, merely to incrementally reduce it over an extended period of time and even that is merely a proposal.

Virtually all of the presidents proposals will not only add to the debt, they will further inflame inflationary pressures. If this trend is not reversed, and soon, will will begin to look more like Argentina or Zimbabwe than the United States. The path that the president has chosen is the path that a multitude of nations have taken going back over 4000 years. A path that has impoverished those nations and lead to a general collapse of society. Yet somehow this president believes he can escape the inevitable end that those policies have produced. Not in the interests of the general betterment of the nation, but in the interest of populist politics.

The candy store is running out of sugar.

Ishmael

How do you get that 38.9% figure of government subsuming the economy?

You don't know that virtually all of the president's plans add to the debt since you don't know how they're funded. You're just assuming they'll be on borrowed money even though Obama likes funding things.

more government is not the solution. By adding more people to the government payroll, well that has a negative ROI on the economy.

what cracks me up is how so many here are stuck in 1930-1950. get over it. your job security is for today, and today only. jobs for life, well that is a thing of the past.

the straw-man argument most of the left wing liberal nuts use here is insane. why do you liberals want to bring back the blacksmith? those skills are no longer useful, adapt.

another example, you liberals want to bring back the steam locomotive. again, that technology is obsolete and you people need to come up and into the 20th century.

we need less government, those in government need to do more. what we need is an investment to improve government efficiencies.

more taxes is not the solution. more taxes is like giving SeanH crack...a negative ROI

4est_4est_Gump said:

How corrupt is this nation's capitol?

It is ringed by the five richest counties in the nation and its favorite sport is not the "REDskins" but cheating on their spouses...

No wonder nobody bats an eye as tax-cheat after tax-cheat is nominated to be Secretary of Treasury.

Why should the state of the Treasury be any different than the state of the Union?

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The Beloved Redskins are far and away the favorite sport, here in the capital of the free world. But, I didn't watch the SOTU show last night because the CAPS were on (and every SOTU show is pretty much the same - empty promises offered up to appease the masses, but which will never be introduced much less implemented).

Not to worry though, in another month we will be getting our NATitude on!

vetteman said:

You mean this clown?

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In a normal society

He would be a national disgrace

boyNextDoor2010 said:

If Rubio is the hope of the GOP they are worse off than I thought.

Nothing he is saying about student loans jibes with all his supply side shit he lead with. Then he goes on to make statements long since reported on Politifact to be lies that were repeated with hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising and Obama still won reelection. WTF - ? Get a new shtick.

Plus he looks like a deer in the headlights!

glug-glug-glug

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STFU with the DEMONIZATION shit!

STFU with the BS................lies lies

STFU!

and just say

NIGGER UBER ALLES

WhoSane Obama is a FUCKING LYING SCUMBAG



FACT CHECK: Overreaching in State of Union speech
By CALVIN WOODWARD | Associated Press – 6 hrs ago...
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama did some cherry-picking Tuesday night in defense of his record on jobs and laid out a conditional path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that may be less onerous than he made it sound.

A look at some of the claims in his State of the Union speech, a glance at the Republican counterargument and how they fit with the facts:

OBAMA: "After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over 6 million new jobs."

THE FACTS: That's in the ballpark, as far as it goes. But Obama starts his count not when he took office, but from the point in his first term when job losses were the highest. In doing so, he ignores the 5 million or so jobs that were lost on his watch, up to that point.

Private sector jobs have grown by 6.1 million since February 2010. But since he became president, the gain is a more modest 1.9 million.

And when losses in public sector employment are added to the mix, his overall jobs record is a gain of 1.2 million.

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OBAMA: "We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas."

THE FACTS: Not so fast.

That's expected to happen in 12 more years.

Under a deal the Obama administration reached with automakers in 2011, vehicles will have a corporate average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, twice the 27 miles per gallon, on average, that cars and trucks get today. Automobile manufacturers won't start making changes to achieve the new fuel economy standards until model year 2017. Not all cars will double their gas mileage, since the standard is based on an average of a manufacturers' fleet.

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OBAMA: "Already the Affordable Care Act is helping to reduce the growth of health care costs."

THE FACTS: The jury is still out on whether Obama's health care overhaul will reduce the growth of health care costs. It's true that cost increases have eased, but many experts say that's due to the sluggish economy, not to the health care law, whose main provisions are not yet fully in effect.

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OBAMA: "Real reform means establishing a responsible pathway to earned citizenship — a path that includes passing a background check, paying taxes and a meaningful penalty, learning English and going to the back of the line behind the folks trying to come here legally."

THE FACTS: The seemingly stern admonition that illegal immigrants must go to the back of the line, often heard from the president, doesn't appear to have much practical effect except in the most obvious sense. Everyone who joins a line, whether for a movie, a coffee or citizenship, starts at the back of that particular line. It's not clear he is saying anything more than that illegal immigrants won't get to cut in line for citizenship once they've obtained provisional legal status.

Like those living abroad who have applied to come to the U.S. legally, illegal immigrants who qualify for Obama's proposed path to citizenship will surely face long waits to be processed. But during that time, they are already in the U.S. and will get to stay, work and travel in the country under their new status as provisional immigrants, while those outside the U.S. simply have to wait.

Sending illegal immigrants to the "back of the line" is something of a distinction without a difference for some legal immigrants who dutifully followed all the rules before coming to the United States.

For instance, some legal immigrants who are in the U.S. on an employer-sponsored visa can't easily change jobs, or in some cases take a promotion, without jeopardizing their place in line to get a green card. In other cases, would-be legal immigrants in other countries wait for years to be able to settle in the U.S.

Obama is using "back of the line" somewhat figuratively, because there are multiple lines depending on the applicant's relationship with family already in the U.S. or with an employer. Generally, a foreign-born spouse of a U.S. citizen or someone with needed skills and a job offer will be accepted more quickly than many others.

But even as a figurative point, his assertion may cloak the fact that people who came to the U.S. illegally and win provisional status have the great advantage over applicants abroad of already being where they all want to go.

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OBAMA: "Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. ... And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. ... Every dollar we invest in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime."

THE FACTS: Dozens of studies have shown Head Start graduates are more likely to complete high school than their at-risk peers who don't participate in the program. But a study last year by the Department of Health and Human Services that found big vocabulary and social development gains for at-risk students in pre-kindergarten programs also found those effects largely faded by the time pupils reached third grade. The report didn't explain why the kids saw a drop-off in performance or predict how they would fare as they aged.

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OBAMA: "I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy."

THE FACTS: Obama failed to get a global warming bill through Congress when both Houses were controlled by Democrats in 2010. With Republicans in control of the House, the chances of a bill to limit the gases blamed for global warming and to create a market for businesses to trade pollution credits are close to zero. The Obama administration has already acted to control greenhouse gases through existing law. It has boosted fuel-efficiency standards and proposed rules to control heat-trapping emissions from new power plants. And while there are still other ways to address climate change without Congress, it's questionable regulation alone can achieve the reductions needed to start curbing global warming.

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FLORIDA SEN. MARCO RUBIO, in the Republican response: "The real cause of our debt is that our government has been spending $1 trillion more than it takes in every year. That's why we need a balanced-budget amendment."

THE FACTS: That statement may reflect the math behind recent debt, but it doesn't get directly to the cause — the worst recession since the Depression and its aftereffects. The deficit is not only caused by spending, but by reduced tax revenues. And during the recession, revenues from both individual and corporate taxes fell markedly.

The steep increases in debt and the measures that should be taken to ease the burden are central to the debate in Washington. But there is no serious move afoot to amend the Constitution to prohibit deficit spending.

The ability to take on debt has been used by governments worldwide and through U.S. history to shelter people from the ravages of a down economy, wage war and achieve many other ends. An effort to amend the Constitution for any purpose faces daunting odds; this would be no exception. Most state constitutions demand a balanced budget, but states lack some big obligations of the federal government, including national defense. And Washington's ability to go deeper into debt provides states with at least a minimal safety net in times of high unemployment.

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Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Dina Cappiello, Andrew Taylor, Christopher S. Rugaber, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Alicia A. Caldwell and Philip Elliott contributed to this report.

EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story.
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I support President Obama who has laid a course of prosperity and unparalleled success for the United States not just for the next four years but for the next forty.

Thank you, Mr. President!

Obama Says Sequester A “Really Bad Idea” Hours After Carney Admitted It Was Obama’s Plan…




From Obama’s speech last night:


In 2011, Congress passed a law saying that if both parties couldn’t agree on a plan to reach our deficit goal, about a trillion dollars’ worth of budget cuts would automatically go into effect this year. These sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts would jeopardize our military readiness. They’d devastate priorities like education, energy, and medical research. They would certainly slow our recovery, and cost us hundreds of thousands of jobs. That’s why Democrats, Republicans, business leaders, and economists have already said that these cuts, known here in Washington as “the sequester,” are a really bad idea.

His spokesman earlier in the day:


JAY CARNEY: What I will concede is that we were looking and the Republicans were looking for a trigger around which to build a mechanism to get us out of default possibility and the sequester was one of the idea put forward, yes by the president’s team.