President's Weekly Address

In his weekly address to the nation this week President Obama started out by patting himself on the back for signing the “historic” economic reform bill passed by Congress, and pegged my bullshit meter by trying to pass that off as a measure to improve the economy and reduce unemployment;

Wall Street reform is a key pillar of an overall economic plan we’ve put in place to dig ourselves out of this recession and build an economy for the long run.

Even Chris Dodd admitted on Hardball that the reform which Obama signed and which bears his name is not going to do much about the present recession, but is designed merely to deal with future crises down the road.

Obama also outlined what government has done prior to this reform on his watch toward restoring the economy;

Already, we’ve given small businesses eight new tax cuts, and have expanded lending to more than 60,000 small business owners. […] Our economic plan is also aimed at strengthening the middle-class. That’s why we’ve cut taxes for 95% of working families. That’s why we’ve offered tax credits that have made college more affordable for millions of students…

So the Democratic plan is tax cuts, tax credits and lending to business, tax cuts to individuals and tax credits to students; as opposed to Republicans whose policies consist of… Oh, right; tax cuts, tax credits, and lending to pretty much everybody. I’m glad we got that straightened out.

Student tax credits, of course, fail to offset the mountain of debt that those students incur in the form of student loans to get degrees which turn out to be useless in terms of employment opportunities. So we have a lot of really well-educated unemployed people.

But I am confident that we are finally headed in the right direction. We are moving forward.

Uh huh, tell that to the 460,000 who filed unemployment claims last week, and the average of 460,000 per week who have been filing unemployment claims for weeks and weeks before that. Tell it to the millions who didn’t file unemployment only because, even with the extensions, they’ve used up all of their eligibility.

I don't expect him to preach doom and gloom, but...