Obama’s State of The Union speech was filled with soaring rhetoric, and teleprompter reading worthy of a Oscar winner, but we must make a real effort to see beyond campaign year rhetorical flourishes and take a hard look what was actually being proposed. We should seek to look beyond the cult of personality distractions/Kabuki Theater we witnessed in the SOTU and actually listen to what was being said. The substance of the speech made it abundantly clear that Obama, along with his administration, continues to be committed to a huge central government that controls every aspect of our lives, including the economy, energy, financial, health care and education sectors, with little regard for property/privacy rights or individual liberty. Let’s take a closer look at what Obama is actually proposing.

The Economy, Taxes and The National Debt
Obama began the discussion on our economy by asserting..

We can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

We must ask ourselves; Is it “fair” that 50% of citizens in the United States pay no federal income taxes? Is it fair for the government to bailout financial institutions and corporations with trillions of dollars of taxpayer’s money? Is it fair to favor one industry over another, with government subsidies (in the form of borrowed money), while enslaving future generations to pay back that enormous debt? Is everyone really getting a fair shot and playing by the same set of rules? What seems “fair” to one person may seem very unfair to others. In this case, it appears the term “fair” is intentionally meant to be nebulous.

Obama continued to blame financial institutions for making housing loans to individuals who couldn’t afford to pay them back. What Obama failed to mention is that government meddling, and policies he supported, was the root cause of the housing bubble and the crash that followed. He failed to mention that one administration after another has pressured banks into handing out these kind of loans, culminating in the Community Reinvestment Act, a progressive idea embraced by both parties, pushing a misguided concept that everyone has a “right” to home ownership, whether they can afford it or not. It was this unholy alliance between big government progressives and greedy Wall Street bankers that caused the housing bubble, and the depression that followed after the bubble burst. This is a CLEAR example of how government meddling and central planning can have a devastating effect on the private sector and our economy, whether they had good intentions or not. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Obama went on to suggest that “they”, have agreed to cut the deficit by more than 2 trillion dollars. This is outright lie. As previously reported on UV, there are no cuts on the table, there never was, only increases in spending and increases in the national debt. By the end of Obama’s four year term as president, our national debt will have exploded, from an already massive 10 trillion dollars, to over 16 trillion dollars, which is a 60% increase. In his SOTU address, Obama clearly stated that he believes the solution to fix our economy is more big government programs, combined with increased taxes on the so called “rich”. He proposed more unaccountable bureaucracies and agencies, more central planning and control, more borrowing, printing and spending, which of course, leads to more debt.

Obama has never offered any real proposals to cut our national debt. On the contrary, his plan is to continue to grow government, spend money we don’t have and increase the debt to over 20 trillion dollars by 2016. If re-elected, Obama and his administration will have incurred more debt than all of the other presidents before him, combined. This almost criminal debt, debt that Obama once called unpatriotic, is the most dire of states the union finds itself in today. Yet, that fact was conveniently and purposely omitted from the State of the Union address.

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