BY THE EDITORS
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”).
Exhibiting the new liberal vogue for jingoism, the president blamed our
economic straits on China three times in the first part of the speech, turned up
his nose at imported cars, and abominated the always-popular scourge of “foreign
oil.” (Blast you, Canada!) But a $9-an-hour minimum wage is a boon to a Chinese
manufacturing sector still dependent upon cheap labor, and expensive emission
controls make overseas industries relatively competitive, while one of the
biggest threats to U.S.-made cars and U.S.-produced oil is the raft of new
environmental regulations the president says he wishes to see enacted.
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
theCongressional
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.
The president’s confrontational, hectoring, and highly ideological speech
ought to be a wake-up call to the country. The Republican majority in the House
is the only real check on his power. Supplementing that check with a Republican
majority in the Senate is imperative. Even through all of President Obama’s
obfuscations, that much is clear.
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