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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Prof lists the low lights of the SOTU.
Obama gave his State of the Union address almost a week ago, and there’s been time to identify the real lowlights. It is tough to rank them, but these three stood out:
1. Obama almost completely ignored the most important threat to the state of the Union: its parlous fiscal situation. He mentioned the issue almost in passing, and then primarily to flog his idiotic tax proposal (more on this below). He completely ignored any discussion of entitlements, and entitlement reform. This should be the overriding priority: addressing this issue, or not, will largely determine the future state of the Union. It borders on the criminal for a president allegedly giving the country an honest appraisal of the state of the nation to give such short shrift to the most crucial political and economic issue of the day. Alfred E. Newman couldn’t have done any worse.
2. He flogged his fairness and justice theme. Get ready for a hugely divisive campaign based on these issues. I was hoping there would have been a camera on Valerie Jarrett during these parts of the speech, just to see whether her lips moved when he gave it.
This was yet another paean to the European welfare state model, though of course he didn’t frame it that way. But his was the “social model” rhetoric that is standard in Germany, for instance.
Which is truly staggering, given that the European model is on the brink of extinction. They may stagger on for awhile, but that model cannot be sustained. …
WSJ editors say rather than a Buffett rule, perhaps Obama should call for a Solyndra rule.
President Obama keeps pushing the (Warren) Buffett rule that nobody making more than $1 million a year should pay less than 30% in taxes. He’d do better by the economy if he adopted a Solyndra Rule, in which no commercial energy company should receive millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.
After the demise of Solyndra (with its $535 million loan guarantee) and Beacon Power ($43 million loan guarantee), last week saw the bankruptcy of Indiana-based lithium-ion battery maker Ener1. In 2009 an Ener1 subsidiary was awarded a grant worth up to $118 million from the Energy Department, with Vice President Joe Biden touring and touting its factory a year ago.
Like Solyndra, Ener1 was a foolhardy bet for taxpayer cash. Founded in 2002, Ener1 had not turned a profit by the time of its grant and has proceeded to hemorrhage the $55 million of the DOE money it has received to date. Its losses in fiscal 2010 were $165 million. …
Debra Saunders thinks the president has decided to do nothing.
Toward the end of his State of the Union speech, President Obama observed that Washington politicians should learn from the example of the U.S. military: “When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.”
Obama recalled the successful Navy SEAL mission, which under his watch took out Osama bin Laden, and observed, “the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.”
At first blush, it seemed like a stirring call to action. But when you look at the speech as a whole, and in context, it was a sad admission. Obama constantly carps about his lack of support from the Republican-led House. I think the president has decided that he cannot succeed in the face of political opposition. So he is not charging up those stairs.
Unless Washington walks in lockstep behind Obama, he’s not going to try to get anything done. …
And Mark Steyn has a SOTU column.
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state – its unprecedented world-record brokeness – was not even mentioned.
If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings – and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the Government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday, Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than 3 million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. …
Thomas Sowell columns on CA high speed rail.
California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.
Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people’s money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.
The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an analogy for California.
Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population density — and population density is the key to the economic viability of mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.
It so happens that I have ridden on Spain’s high-speed rail system. It was very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.
While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain. …
Next month Queen Elizabeth will mark 60 years on the throne. The Economist reviews five new books on her.
… as a constitutional monarch, ruling with the tacit consent of the majority, she is not the only judge of the trade-off between necessary display and indispensable discretion. The public have a say as well. Some of the queen’s closest brushes with disaster have involved a lack of visibility, most painfully in 1997 when she remained in Scotland with the royal family after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. She only returned to London after pleas from her new, young prime minister, Tony Blair (and lynch-mob demands to “Show Us You Care” from the tabloids).
The double nature of the queen—an unusually private woman with extraordinary public duties—poses a test for all who try to write about her. Including Mr Marr’s book, five new biographies have been prepared for 2012, the queen’s diamond jubilee year. The authors boast of watching the queen at work, interviewing officials from the royal household and of trawling through archives. They quote family members, friends and people with a claim to know the queen.
In the process, all five biographers wrestle with the question neatly framed by their subject herself: if to see the queen is to believe in her, what vantage point allows the most authentic experience of faith? Which queen is the most “real”, the private woman or the public figure? Each offers a different answer. …