Politics and the US Economy

[mercury14]

Of course it's the liberal lack of education that allows them to dismiss the ramifications of the deficit and the debt.

For eight years under Bush we were told by Republicans that the debt didn't matter. It wasn't worth addressing. Please explain how these "educated" Republicans could have told us this with a straight face.

 

[mercury14]

He calls the Wall Street Journal "right-wing propaganda". Isn't that alone enough to dismiss any integrity he might have claimed?

Of course I never said that at all.

If you should happen to C&P a link from WSJ somewhere in your sea of lying propaganda, don't hold me accountable for finding it. It's not my job to itemize that crapstorm.

 

[RightField]

The "freeze" on discretionary funding is a joke. More than 1/3 of the total current government expenditures is deficit spending. That's what needs to be addressed. The Republicans, in contrast to Obama and the Democrats, have said that everything in the budget is fair game.

The problem is that spending has increased at a huge level. Before anyone entertains the thought of new taxes, lets reign in the profligate spending and then start talking about other means. The $770 Billion in new taxes included in the Obamacare bill have to be eliminated to start with, then the rollbacks in other federal programs has to start right afterwards. Realistically, social security and medicare have to get rolled back a little also, but in order for that to work, it has to be a bipartisan effort and right now the Republicans are willing to talk, but the democrats aren't.

Deaf on debt:
Returning to old liberal ideas, President Obama ignores the American people
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 28th 2011
New York Daily News

The November election sent a clear message to Washington: less government, less debt, less spending. President Obama certainly heard it, but judging from his State of the Union address, he doesn't believe a word of it.

The people say they want cuts? Sure they do - in the abstract. But any party that actually dares carry them out will be punished severely. On that, Obama stakes his re-election.

No other conclusion can be drawn from a speech that didn't even address the debt issue until 35 minutes in. And then what did he offer? A freeze on domestic discretionary spending that he himself admitted would affect a mere one-eighth of the budget.

Obama seemed impressed, however, that it would produce $400 billion in savings over 10 years. That's an average of $40 billion a year. The deficit for last year alone was more than 30 times as much. And total federal spending was more than 85 times that amount. A $40 billion annual savings for a government that just racked up $3 trillion in new debt over the last two years is deeply unserious. It's spillage, a rounding error.

As for entitlements, which are where the real money is, Obama said practically nothing. He is happy to discuss, but if Republicans dare take anything from granny, he shall be Horatius at the bridge.

This entire pantomime about debt reduction came after the first half of a speech devoted to, yes, new spending. One almost has to admire Obama's defiance. His 2009 stimulus and budget-busting health care reform are precisely what stirred the popular revolt that delivered his November shellacking. And yet he's back for more.

It's as if Obama is daring the voters - and the Republicans - to prove they really want smaller government. He's manning the barricades for Obamacare and he's here with yet another spending - excuse me, investment - spree. To face down those overachieving Asians, Obama wants to sink yet more money into yet more road and bridge repair, more federally subsidized teachers - with a bit of high-speed rail tossed in for style. That will show the Chinese.

And of course, once again, there is the magic lure of a green economy created by the brilliance of Washington experts and politicians. This is to be our "Sputnik moment," when the fear of the foreigner spurs us to innovation and greatness of the kind that yielded NASA and the moon landing.

Apart from the irony of this appeal being made by the very President who has just killed NASA's manned space program, there is the fact that for three decades, since Jimmy Carter's synfuel fantasy, Washington has poured billions of taxpayer dollars down a rat hole in vain pursuit of economically competitive renewable energy.

This is nothing but a retread of what used to be called industrial policy, government picking winners and losers. Except that in a field that is not nearly technologically ready to match fossil fuels, we pick one loser after another - from ethanol, a $6 billion boondoggle that even Al Gore admits was a mistake, to the $41,000 Chevy Volt that only the rich can afford (with their extended Bush tax cuts, of course).

Perhaps this is all to be expected from Democrats - the party of government - and from a President who from his very first address to Congress has boldly displayed his zeal to fundamentally transform the American social contract and place it on a "New Foundation" (an Obama slogan that never took). He's been chastened enough by the election of 2010 to make gestures toward the center. But the State of the Union address revealed a man ideologically unbowed and undeterred. He served up an insignificant spending cut, yet another (if more modest) stimulus and a promise to fight any Republican attempt to significantly shrink the size of government.

Indeed, he went beyond this. He tried to cast this more-of-the-same into a call to national greatness, citing two Michigan brothers who produce solar shingles as a stirring example of rising to the Sputnik moment.

"We do big things," Obama declared at the end of an address that was, on the contrary, the finest example of small-ball Clintonian minimalism since the days of school uniforms and midnight basketball.

From the moon landing to solar shingles. Is there a better example of American decline?

 

[unregistered]

 

[hogjack]

How many pages will this thread be if RightField copies & pastes in the entire Internet? Over 200 is my guess.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[RightField]

You know that there's something seriously wrong in Fort Democrat when the Washington Post is critisizing Obama and the Democrats (they're usually blind with support - one of the few ultimate cheerleaders). This article points to the impotent and almost child-like response of Obama and the democrats to this problem facing our nation. The title is great...the State of the Union is.....Leaderless.

January 28, 2011
The State of the Union Is... Leaderless
By Ruth Marcus
Washington Post

DAVOS, Switzerland -- The state of the union is ... leaderless.

Sounds harsh, but when it comes to digging America out from what President Obama calls its "mountain of debt," I'm becoming increasingly worried that this assessment is accurate.

The president talks the talk about fiscal responsibility. But the evidence suggests he's not willing to spend the political capital to translate that talk into action.

Judge Obama by his own standards. "We have to signal seriousness in this," he told The Washington Post just before the inauguration, "by making sure that some of the hard decisions are made under my watch and not under somebody else's."

So what hard decisions has the president made? On the plus side of the ledger, the president worked to ensure that the costly expansion of health coverage was coupled with potentially cost-saving measures to control Medicare spending. Emphasis on potentially.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, he proposed a five-year freeze on discretionary spending, two years longer than his previous offer.

But as the president himself recognized, this kind of nibbling around the edges of the budget is entirely inadequate.

"To make further progress, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough," he said. "It won't." Except the president then offered nothing else of substance about what else he envisioned -- and would be willing to push for.

Some serious people with unquestioned bona fides on fiscal responsibility grasped at wispy tendrils of seriousness in the president's remarks. He mentioned Social Security! He talked about tax reform! I hope they are right but fear they are deluding themselves.

Examine the president's words, and you see nothing new or specific. It hardly constitutes bravery to call for a bipartisan Social Security fix that doesn't slash benefits. At that level of generality, who would disagree?

The health care law -- if implemented as planned -- is merely a down payment on cost containment. But the president's only specific was to repeat his offer to join with Republicans on medical malpractice reform. This is attacking a mountain with a teaspoon.

Corporate tax reform is a great idea but not a solution to the fiscal problem. The president's opening bid was to fix the corporate tax code without adding to the deficit.

As to the individual income tax system, the president repeated his stale complaint that "we simply can't afford a permanent extension of the tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans." No mention of the affordability of the tax cuts for everyone else.

In fact, when the president discussed income taxes, he cited the need to "simplify the individual tax code" without daring to whisper that the real goal needs to be more revenue. "Members of both parties have expressed an interest in doing this, and I am prepared to join them," Obama said. Joining up is not my definition of leadership.

Administration officials insist that proffering more in the State of the Union would have been self-defeating. Negotiating in public does not work, this argument goes. Do corporate tax reform first and the larger overhaul will come more easily.

This would be more convincing if the president's behind-the-scenes track record were more reassuring. Obama put little muscle behind the legislative effort to create a fiscal commission. Then, having established one by executive order, he did nothing to assure its success, according to sources close to the process. The commission was tantalizingly close to getting the super-majority needed for congressional action -- former Service Employees Union President Andy Stern had promised to be the 14th vote, the sources said -- but the administration did not lift a finger to help by lobbying other Democrats.

On Tuesday, the most Obama could manage to choke out about his own commission was that "I don't agree with all their proposals, but they made important progress."

Into this disturbing vacuum of leadership come Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who have assembled a bipartisan group pushing for tax reform and other deficit reduction this year.

When I spoke with them after the speech, they emphasized two points: that nothing would be accomplished without presidential involvement, and that it would be a mistake to let things slide into the election year or, inevitably, beyond.

"Every one of these painful choices gets harder every day we don't do anything," Warner said.

Wise words. If only we had heard more of that from the president himself.

 

[RightField]

Maybe you can provide me with a link to a Republican making such a statement. The Republicans did try and out democrat the Democrats with wild spending, but I still didn't hear any of them making those statements...and neither did you.

In the early years of Bush's Presidency, he had to deal with the aftermath of the attack on our country on 9/11 and spending (rightfully) increased. However, after that he steadily whittled it down until Bush brought the annual spending overrun down to $172M in the year before the dems took over the house of Representatives (where spending bills originate). After that the democrat spending has increased in unconsciounable ways. The deficit this year alone is almost 10 times greater than in the year before the dems took over the house of representatives.

We need a Newt-like approach to bringing down spending again.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RightField]

It's simply astonishing after all the hand wringing and gnashing of teeth by the wet legs here concerning the Bush 400 billion deficit, we are confronted with a deafening silence from the same sector in regard to the 1.5 trillion conjured up by Obama and the economically insane Democrats.

The last Republican President/Republican Congress overrun was $172M...The $400M overrun in the last year of Bush's Presidency was from a Democrat Congress.

 

[RightField]

Has "centralized planning" ever worked effectively?

Who Are We in This 'Sputnik Moment'?
By David Harsanyi
Denver Post

One of the difficulties progressives face is trying to make centralized planning sound like a good idea. Even the president, with all his rhetorical genius and majestic vagueness, can struggle with the task. So from time to time, it's important to mold history a bit to, you know, make a point.

Early on in his State of the Union, for instance, President Barack Obama reminisced of an age when "good jobs" meant "showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown." A time when you "didn't always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors," and if you "worked hard, chances are you'd have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you'd even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company."

Way to dream big! Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and -- if you're lucky -- an "occasional" promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you'd want your offspring to escape, tout de suite.

Luckily, in the real world, history tells of a story filled with dynamic movements of people, class climbing, churning innovation, booms and busts, and widespread embrace of risk taking.

Now, as the president explained, "painful" changes have crashed down on his revisionism, and Americans have been forced to compete, find India on a map, move from town to town and study.

How do we deal with this daunting future? Obama says that "none of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from." And by "none of us," he means you. Because Obama proceeded to give a speech that laid out exactly what needs innovating, which sectors will be innovative, where new jobs will be found and how we are going to get to those jobs. Can you say high-speed rail? The president can. He mentioned railroads six times, because how else are we going to win the 19th century back?

Actually, this fixation with building an extraordinarily expensive, outdated and tax-funded rail system is a great example of why central planning undermines progress.

By the time the president's promise of high-speed Internet for everyone comes to fruition, we'll probably be teleporting like Sulu. But at the very least, let's not re-fight the battles of the early 20th century. Someone already invented airplanes and cars, which, unlike trains, can be pointed in any direction we want, whenever we want, as often as we want.

Maybe that's the problem. Blame capitalism. Sure, the president says our "free enterprise system is what drives innovation," but it doesn't seem to play much of a role in his plan to "win the 21st century."

Obama, for example, used the word "invest" -- a well-known euphemism for more spending and subsidizing -- 13 times in the speech. Didn't he just get through telling us we don't know where modernization will emerge? Didn't he just explain that free enterprise drives innovation? True, but government knows how to guide the markets in the right direction. Just think of it as an ethanol additive for capitalism.

I know, this is a "Sputnik moment," and being cynical is unpatriotic. And maybe the Sputnik analogy can be instructive in other ways. Yes, the Soviets were the first to send junk and animals into space -- a race they lost in impressive fashion when it was all over. But were we really ever "behind"?

Of course not. The Soviet Union's intense effort to erect a facade of accomplishment was achieved by investing in an unnecessary, costly, symbolic, ideology-driven project that did nothing for the aspirations of its citizens or its stagnant, dying economy.

Let's be sure we're not on the wrong side of the Sputnik moment.

 

[unregistered]

 

[RightField]

Obama's Robust Defense of Statism
By Andrew Cline on 1.28.11
New Hampshire Union Leader

On Tuesday night, we, the American people, were swindled by our own president, not merely out of cash, but out of our most cherished national ideal: independence.

The deception was deliberate. With all the charm he could muster, the president who spent the last two years elongating the tentacles of the leviathan delivered an aria of adoration for the symbol of global prosperity and ingenuity: the American entrepreneur.

"At stake is whether new jobs and industries take root in this country, or somewhere else," he began." It's whether the hard work and industry of our people is rewarded."

He continued, "…the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again."

My god…Barack Obama is delivering Mitt Romney's speech.

"No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs…. What's more, we are the first nation to be founded for the sake of an idea -- the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny… We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world."

The man who bore the law that compels each of us to buy health insurance says the very foundation of our nation is "the idea that each of us deserves the chance to shape our own destiny."

The incompatibility of Obama's signature legislative accomplishment with what he identified on Tuesday night as the founding idea of our country is as plain as the nose on George Washington's face. Obama's goal on Tuesday: blur the line. Make the two seem closer than they really are.

So he spoke with enthusiasm (summoning passion for the topic was beyond even his considerable gifts) of America's independent spirit, the father of our robust innovation culture.

"What we can do -- what America does better than anyone else -- is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We're the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook."

Yet just when it appears that this is a speech made in tribute to the independent American entrepreneur, Obama reveals the real hero: the state.

"Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But [with Obama, there is always a "but"] because it's not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That's what planted the seeds for the Internet. That's what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs."

Bait… and switch.

Save the introductory lines about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Obama spent the first 19 percent of his speech praising American entrepreneurship and individualism. The remaining 81 percent? A sales pitch for breaking the individual to the saddle of the state.

In Obama's narrative, the individual is not the source of America's success and prosperity -- the state is. In every sector of the economy -- from health care to energy to technology to transportation -- Obama set this scene: Idea men and financiers are this close to moving us forward; all they need is the nudge, and that nudge can come only from the government.

For instance: "Within the next five years, we'll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans."

We? In Obama's world, without Washington's help not even the great American telecommunications companies can find ways to saturate the market with their most expensive product.

Within the grand swindle of the speech were many smaller swindles, all structured the same way: a statement sounding vaguely conservative, followed by a "but" that transitions into a robust defense of government activism.

If President Obama's trust were in free enterprise, would he have delivered as his one piece of advice to young people, these lines: "If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child -- become a teacher. Your country needs you."

The president's true goal with Tuesday night's speech came in these 16 words: "In the coming year, we'll also work to rebuild people's faith in the institution of government."

One year from now the people of Iowa and New Hampshire will begin the process of selecting Obama's challenger in 2012. He has a year, a year-and-a-half at most, to "rebuild people's faith in the institution of government." Tuesday night's speech was the opening salvo in that long campaign.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Dear Reader

They dont believe its over.

 

[RightField]

I agree. I think the democrats are thinking "If we put in a few words that conservatives and independents like, even if we don't mean it, we might be able to fool enough of them to keep the Presidency".

 

[RightField]

Obama needs more "investment" in all sorts of things. After all, we need government to "lead the way" along the lines of the Sputnik response. This vid link below shows a department that got started with "Stimulus" money and now they're looking for additional "investment" because of it's great success so far. Check out it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZlBUglE6Hc&feature=relmfu

 

[Sean Renaud]

No, the efficient allocation of resources can only be accomplished by a free market. Command order economies are historical failures.

You call a bunch of farmers becoming a world power a failure? I gotta redefine failure so that second place in the entire world should be called epic fail. Guess China is an epic failure too.

The reality is that you have to mix and match neither strategy works in its purest form long term.

 

[RightField]

Here's an example of "education" investment that the dems are looking for. It's a simulation of a required course for all incoming democrat freshmen congressmen. They must master the material and gain a certification to operate in clinics such as this. It's really too bad that there are so few incoming democrat freshmen because this truly is a valuable skill which they frequently use on the house floor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQFKtI6gn9Y&feature=relmfu

 

[mercury14]

Maybe you can provide me with a link to a Republican making such a statement. The Republicans did try and out democrat the Democrats with wild spending, but I still didn't hear any of them making those statements...and neither did you.

Why look for a statement when their actions speak so much louder than words? Republicans have spent most of the last ten years utterly ignoring the federal debt. They might have said that they wanted to pay down the debt, but they spent eight years ignoring it. Or rather adding to it while watching interest accumulate. What does that tell you?

 

[mercury14]

Obama needs more "investment" in all sorts of things. After all, we need government to "lead the way" along the lines of the Sputnik response. This vid link below shows a department that got started with "Stimulus" money and now they're looking for additional "investment" because of it's great success so far. Check out it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZlBUglE6Hc&feature=relmfu

First of all, congratulations on another beautiful partisan C&P-gasm. It shows how much of a thinker you are.

Secondly, we need more doctors with or without the new health care law. Meanwhile our education system is crumbling and producing proportionally fewer college-able students every year. But since you're rabidly opposed to investment in things like education, please explain how you would increase the number of doctors in America. I'll wait.

In the early years of Bush's Presidency, he had to deal with the aftermath of the attack on our country on 9/11 and spending (rightfully) increased. However, after that he steadily whittled it down until Bush brought the annual spending overrun down to $172M in the year before the dems took over the house of Representatives (where spending bills originate). After that the democrat spending has increased in unconsciounable ways. The deficit this year alone is almost 10 times greater than in the year before the dems took over the house of representatives.

We need a Newt-like approach to bringing down spending again.

Um, too bad adding hundreds of millions onto the deficit each year isn't the same as paying down the debt. Thanks for proving my point that Republicans didn't give a shit about the debt. If Republicans can float a plan today to cut $250 billion per year, why didn't they do it when they had total control? It's because they believed that the debt didn't matter. Arguing about this stuff with you and Vette is too damn easy.

And I love how the Republican deficit after 911 "rightfully" increased while the current deficit which started during the worst economic crisis since the 1930s isn't rightful at all. In that case there are no excuses. Only Republicans get to use excuses.

 

[RightField]

Below are Peggy Noonan's comments on the speech. She makes some great points. She references Tom Coburn who noted that the Government is twice as large as it was 10 years ago and has grown by 27% in just the last two years and all Obama can offer is to "freeze" this huge growth into our budget. I thought that the huge increases in spending were supposed to be temporary to just get us through the economic doldrums...not a permanent new state of spending that will "sacrifice" by not growing for a short period of time. Cuts are what we need, and significant cuts.

As far as Republican spending is concerned, the Republican House and Senate of Bush's first several years held a tight line on discretionarey spending after the first year when we had the shock of 9/11 until the year before the dems won Congress when the deficit was $172M.

That first year saw economic slowdowns from Clinton's taxes rippling through the economy and the shock from 9/11 and the ensuing government reorganization that took place afterwards. It saw in increase in war spending and in intelligence (that Clinton had emasculated in his terms). After that point, the deficit decreased due to financial discipline until the dems took over and it went from $172 to about $445 very quickly (the dems had to pay their loyal minions for their support in slinging mud at Republicans). The dems can't help wasting money, its what they do. If they don't come up with crazy spending schemes, how will they ever be able to skim enough off the top (or the bottom) to fund their friends and their own campaigns?


An Unserious Speech Misses the Mark
The audience found it tiresome. Here’s why it was irksome as well.
The Wall Street Journal: January 27, 2011

It is a strange and confounding thing about this White House that the moment you finally think they have their act together—the moment they get in the groove and start to demonstrate that they do have some understanding of our country—they take the very next opportunity to prove anew that they do not have their act together, and are not in the groove. It’s almost magical.

The State of the Union speech was not centrist, as it should have been, but merely mushy, and barely relevant. It wasted a perfectly good analogy—America is in a Sputnik moment—by following it with narrow, redundant and essentially meaningless initiatives. Rhetorically the speech lay there like a lox, as if the document itself knew it was dishonest, felt embarrassed, and wanted to curl up quietly in a corner of the podium and hide. But the president insisted on reading it.

Response in the chamber was so muted as to be almost Xanax-like. Did you see how bored and unengaged they looked? The applause was merely courteous. A senator called the mood on the floor “flat.” This is the first time the press embargo on the speech was broken, by National Journal, which printed the text more than an hour before the president delivered it. Maybe members had already read it and knew what they were about to face.

The president will get a bump from the speech. Presidents always do. It will be called a success. But it will be evanescent. A real moment was missed. If the speech is remembered, it will be as the moment when the president actually slowed—or blocked—his own comeback.

The central elements of the missed opportunity:

• An inability to focus on what is important now. The speech was more than half over before the president got around to the spending crisis. He signaled no interest in making cuts, which suggested that he continues not to comprehend America’s central anxiety about government spending: that it will crush our children, constrict the economy in which they operate, make America poorer, lower its standing in the world, and do in the American dream. Americans are alarmed about this not because they’re cheap and selfish but because they care about the country they will leave behind when they are gone.

President Obama’s answer is to “freeze” a small portion of government spending at current levels for five years. This is a reasonable part of a package, but it’s not a package and it’s not a cut. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who called it “sad,” told a local radio station the savings offered “won’t even pay the interest on the debt we’re about to accumulate” in the next two years. The president was trying to “hoodwink” the American people, Mr. Coburn said: “The federal government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. It’s 27% bigger than it was two years ago.” Cuts, not a freeze, are needed—it’s a matter of “urgency.”

• Unresponsiveness to the political moment. Democrats hold the White House and Senate, Republicans the House, the crisis is real, and the next election is two years away. This is the time for the president to go on the line and demand Republicans do so, too. Instead, nothing. A freeze.

• An attitude that was small bore and off point. America is in a Sputnik moment, the world seems to be jumping ahead of us, our challenge is to make up the distance and emerge victorious. So we’ll change our tax code to make citizens feel less burdened and beset, we’ll rethink what government can and should give, can and should take, we’ll get our fiscal life in order, we’ll save our country. Right?

Nah. We’ll focus on “greater Internet access,” “renewable energy,” “one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015,” “wind and solar,” “information technology.” “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80% of Americans access to high-speed rail.” None of this is terrible, but none of it is an answer. The administration continues to struggle with the concept of priorities. They cannot see where the immediate emergency is. They are like people who’d say, “Martha, the house is on fire and flames are licking down the stairs—let’s discuss what color to repaint the living room after we rebuild!” A better priority might be, “Get the kids out and call the fire department.”

• Unbelievability. The president will limit the cost of government by whipping it into shape and removing redundant agencies. Really? He hasn’t shown much interest in that before. He has shown no general ideological sympathy for the idea of shrinking and streamlining government. He’s going to rationalize government? He wants to “get rid of the loopholes” in our tax code. Really? That’s good, but it was a throwaway line, not a serious argument. And he was talking to 535 representatives and senators who live in the loopholes, who live by campaign contributions from industries and interest groups that pay protection money to not get dinged in the next tax bill.

On education, the president announced we’re lagging behind in our public schools. Who knew? In this age of “Waiting for Superman” and “The Lottery,” every adult in America admits that union rules are the biggest impediment to progress. “Race to the Top” isn’t the answer. We all know this.

As for small things and grace notes, there is often about the president an air of delivering a sincere lecture in which he informs us of things that seem new to him but are old to everyone else. He has a tendency to present banalities as if they were discoveries. “American innovation” is important. As many as “a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school.” We’re falling behind in math and science: “Think about it.”

“I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories. . . . I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans.” But our deterioration isn’t new information, it’s a shared predicate of at least 20 years’ standing, it’s what we all know. When you talk this way, as if the audience is uninformed, they think you are uninformed. Leaders must know what’s in the national information bank.

He too often in making a case puts the focus on himself. George H.W. Bush, always afraid of sounding egotistical, took the I’s out of his speeches. We called his edits “I-ectomies.” Mr. Obama always seems to put the I in. He does “I implants.”

Humor, that leavening, subtle uniter, was insufficiently present. Humor is denigrated by serious people, but serious people often miss the obvious. The president made one humorous reference, to smoked salmon. It emerged as the biggest word in the NPR word cloud of responses. That’s because it was the most memorable thing in the speech. The president made a semi-humorous reference to TSA pat-downs, but his government is in charge of and insists on the invasive new procedures, to which the president has never been and will never be subjected. So it’s not funny coming from him. The audience sort of chuckled, but only because many are brutes who don’t understand that it is an unacceptable violation to have your genital areas patted against your will by strangers.

I actually hate writing this. I wanted to write “A Serious Man Seizes the Center.” But he was not serious and he didn’t seize the center, he went straight for the mush. Maybe at the end of the day he thinks that’s what centrism is.

 

[mercury14]

Below are Peggy Noonan's comments on the speech. She makes some great points. She references Tom Coburn who noted that the Government is twice as large as it was 10 years ago and has grown by 27% in just the last two years and all Obama can offer is to "freeze" this huge growth into our budget. I thought that the huge increases in spending were supposed to be temporary to just get us through the economic doldrums...not a permanent new state of spending that will "sacrifice" by not growing for a short period of time. Cuts are what we need, and significant cuts.

Nobody reads your C&Ps.

So you're wasting your time kissing the authors' asses.

The phrase "Government is twice as large as it was 10 years ago" is of course a lie. Government spending might be larger largely because of the stimulus and bailouts (that got paid back), but saying that government is twice as large is pure deception. And of course a lot of the reason for growth is Medicare and social security for the retiring baby boomer generation - mandatory expenditures. And the military budget keeps growing each year.

And oh, I heard there were two wars in the past decade which are still going on. Way to ignore even the most basic pieces of reality. This is just horribly disingenous of you.

As far as Republican spending is concerned, the Republican House and Senate of Bush's first several years held a tight line on discretionarey spending after the first year when we had the shock of 9/11 until the year before the dems won Congress when the deficit was $172M.

Nobody cares much about discretionary spending since that's not where the real budget-busters lie . And of course pork was rampant during the time you're talking about, as it grew every single year when Repubs were in charge. And just think if there were no Bush tax cuts. We'd have a much lower debt. Hell, just think if the tax cuts for the rich weren't just extended. That would be $900 billion back in the budget right there over just two years.

That first year saw economic slowdowns from Clinton's taxes rippling through the economy and the shock from 9/11 and the ensuing government reorganization that took place afterwards. It saw in increase in war spending and in intelligence (that Clinton had emasculated in his terms). After that point, the deficit decreased due to financial discipline until the dems took over and it went from $172 to about $445 very quickly (the dems had to pay their loyal minions for their support in slinging mud at Republicans). The dems can't help wasting money, its what they do. If they don't come up with crazy spending schemes, how will they ever be able to skim enough off the top (or the bottom) to fund their friends and their own campaigns?

1) Too bad you can't show any evidence (other than your partisan opinion rants) that Clinton-era taxes hurt the economy. And of course Republicans controlled the House and Senate during Clinton's second term and they didn't lift a finger to change the tax rate, did they?

2) Stop bitching about Clinton cutting intel spending. Bush and the Repubs had plenty of time to bump it back up prior to 911 but they chose to ignore it. Not only that but they could have come up with a budget during the Clinton years with their preferred level of intel spending. They did control the purse you know.

3) All you're saying is that Republicans slapped hundreds of billions of dollars onto the debt each year. That's not financial discipline. That's called ignoring the debt and growing it. So again, all this "Republican discipline" was nothing more than growing the debt.

 

[RightField]

First of all, congratulations on another beautiful partisan C&P-gasm. It shows how much of a thinker you are.

Secondly, we need more doctors with or without the new health care law. Meanwhile our education system is crumbling and producing proportionally fewer college-able students every year. But since you're rabidly opposed to investment in things like education, please explain how you would increase the number of doctors in America. I'll wait.

I'm all for improving education across America. Many times you've probably noted that I also support equal opportunity. I want all the schools to excel and for those that don't excel, I want parents and students to have a choice to go to a different school. However, I don't support throwing endless piles of money at the teacher's unions. It hasn't worked and it won't work. We spend a ton of money on education now and it hasn't really helped has it?

There was an article in Southern Living a few years ago that isn't an academic piece, just a few notes at the back that carried wisdom without a bibliography. It was an old guy who was reflecting on his one-room school in the old south with 27 students (in all grades together) and noted that the graduates from his class of 3 ended up being a judge, a colonel and a doctor and he marveled how they were able to lead such productive lives without the benefit of a school without a taxpayer-financed indoor pool and field house.

That's the extent of my interactions with you today. You continually try to belittle anyone who takes a different point of view than you and I prefer not to waste my time with such sour, unpleasant and dogmatic people like you.

 

[mercury14]

I'm all for improving education across America. Many times you've probably noted that I also support equal opportunity. I want all the schools to excel and for those that don't excel, I want parents and students to have a choice to go to a different school. However, I don't support throwing endless piles of money at the teacher's unions. It hasn't worked and it won't work. We spend a ton of money on education now and it hasn't really helped has it?

There was an article in Southern Living a few years ago that isn't an academic piece, just a few notes at the back that carried wisdom without a bibliography. It was an old guy who was reflecting on his one-room school in the old south with 27 students (in all grades together) and noted that the graduates from his class of 3 ended up being a judge, a colonel and a doctor and he marveled how they were able to lead such productive lives without the benefit of a school without a taxpayer-financed indoor pool and field house.

That's the extent of my interactions with you today. You continually try to belittle anyone who takes a different point of view than you and I prefer not to waste my time with such sour, unpleasant and dogmatic people like you.

Okay so you just want to have the last word.

No, you are not for improving education unless you're having a major attack of backpedaling. You've said many times that you're against investing in it.

Your "solution" is fraught with problems. Failing schools fail largely because they're in districts with rampant poverty, crime, and absent parents. Kids that come from those districts overwhelmingly make terrible students (when they don't dropout) and the teachers that try to educate them have poor results compared to those in suburban schools.

Please explain how sending kids from these areas to weathier suburban schools will address the problem.