What I Missed

Having read the text of President Obama’s speech, I’m glad I missed hearing it because I might well have had to be cleaning vomit off the carpet and/or buying a new television set. Joint sessions of Congress are no place to be making a campaign speech.

It was clearly Obama’s usual concept that if he takes a whole bunch of small ideas and puts them in a big box he will get credit for “thinking big.” With the “low information voters” who are enchanted with his personality that will probably work, but many of us will merely be disgusted with the recognition that adding small plus small merely equals a whole lot of small. You don’t solve this nation's big problems with small ideas, not even with a whole lot of small ideas.

As with his previous offers, much of what he is proposing is tax cuts, so he continues to be a Republican in Democratic clothing. If I wanted tax cuts I would have voted for the party of tax cuts, which is the Republican Party. I do not want tax cuts, and I hear him proposing more new tax cuts every time he opens his mouth.

Not only are tax cuts not effective in creating new jobs, but with this proposal he creates a whole shopping list of tax cuts for businesses to take advantage of. They can get money from the government for hiring veterans, for hiring long term unemployed, and for hiring anybody at all. So if a businessman hires a veteran who has been unemployed for a long time he gets no fewer than three tax cuts.

Only the businessman is not going to hire that veteran who has been unemployed for a long time, because he does not have any work for that veteran to do if he does hire him. And, as Obama himself pointed out, small businesses aren’t making any money, so they don’t care about tax deductions because they have no income to pay income tax on.

And, of course, Obama’s plan “is entirely paid for” because he is going to “ask the Super Committee” to make spending cuts “even deeper than the $1.5 trillion” mandated by the debt limit agreement which he made with Congress last month. Not that I care about “having it paid for,” I don’t, but why does that sound like utter bullshit to me? Because it is utter bullshit, that’s why.

This nation has big problems right now and we need big ideas and big actions to solve them. I thought I was voting for that in 2008, but what we have is a small man in a job that is too big for him.