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Subscribe to RSSThe New York Times: President Obama pledged on Tuesday night to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic collapse.”
The Washington Post: The economy continues to struggle and Americans are largely pessimistic, but dueling events Tuesday showed why in politics it's good to be the incumbent.
“Already down, Congress got kicked by President Barack Obama in the last State of the Union of his first term Tuesday night. Republicans, wracked with worry about a soft agenda and dim prospects for escaping the “do nothing” label, sat fuming. Democrats clearly loved it. The takeaway: Congress can’t — or won’t — do anything about its sorry state, even if the gridlock plays directly into the president’s political strategy,” Politico writes.
The New York Times’/CNBC’s John Harwood looks at how even as President Obama’s State of the Union embraced campaign-style populism, he can still claim the center on deficit reduction.
PolitiFact: Fact-checking the State of the Union.
Leave a Comment:
I support every plan the President put forth, I'm especially encouraged by the "buffett rule", millionairs should pay 30% with no deductions and no tax breaks, flat tax for those folks, nothing filed, nothing returned - their reward for living here is because they get to be rich, money made off the backs of hard working middle class Americans. Most of us are sick and tired of working to make the wealthier even more wealthy. We don't envy the wealthy, but sure would like them to treat us with more respect and care more about us, you'd think they would since they would not be wealthy without us!
NBO (Nobody but Obama) 2012!
Hope and change are working very nicely for me and my working middle class family, thanks for asking!
Never happen. You start raising the Capitol Gains Tax, why invest. Oh and by the way, since you support every plan Obama put forth, how exactly to you propose we pay for them? I mean he did say we are reducing the defecit by the tune of 2 Trillion over the next 10 years, but we borrow 3 Trillion each year.
i agree, but it bothers me to hear about social security and medicare reform? these are two programs we rely on since the crash and its my wish he is going to increase the benifits under these programs. this prez is a guy you cant out guess.
So if you can't make a fortune, you don't want to make any money at all, right. Have you ever taken into consideration what is required for investors to get a good "return"? A lot of it falls on corporations paying lower wages to have a better bottom line and paying higher dividends. You don't mind working for less so someone else can have more? Sounds like redistribution of wealth to me.
If Republicans had kept the "loyal" in loyal opposition, Americans would be more inclined to listen to them now. The nastiness with which they have attacked President Obama since his inauguration has been a stain on history. In 2010 they were given a huge gift , when they took the House and many governorships, and what did they do with that? Nothing positive, that's for sure.
Amy,
there have been unfair attacks on Presidint Obama, as their have been on every President. But for you to whine about political attack dogs is laughable
Real nastiness and viciousness is found in these comment threads, where your moonbat pals endlessly and viciously attack the personal , family and sex lives of Republicans. Anything goes.
Was it OK for fesity to call Bachman's husband, and Rick Perry , gay? Or make endless fat jokes about Christie? Or snark about Newt's divorces?
Hang out with the dogs, you get fleas....you are a hypocrite of the first degree..
That is just too rich coming from the likes of you Bob. How many planks have you pulled out of your eyes today?
Hey Bob, it's not my fault the Republicans used their First Amendment rights to call for President Obama to release his birth certificate, instead of making rational arguments over how to improve our economic situation, thus completely damaging their credibility.
Last time I checked, posters on First Read were not running for office.
I have several comments about last nights SOTU speech. The first two:
“For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.”
The killing of bin Laden, which Obama used to open and close his speech, is an achievement that few partisans would quibble with. But the story about Iraq and Afghanistan is much more muddled.
Yes, U.S. troops have left Iraq, in part because the Obama administration was unwilling or unable — take your pick — to extend a security agreement with Iraq. Since the U.S. departure, Iraq has descended into violence as the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has targeted Sunni opposition figures. The country at times appears to teeter on the edge of a new outbreak of sectarian violence.
Meanwhile, the president’s claim that the Taliban’s “momentum has been broken” is a highly debatable claim. U.S. intelligence agencies, for instance, recently concluded in a secret assessment that the war in Afghanistan “is mired in stalemate” and that security gains from an increase in American troops “have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Other U.S. officials have dissented from the report’s conclusions, but the dispute is an indication of how fragile any momentum may be.
“In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect. Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.”
Here, Obama tries to inoculate himself from the inevitable charge by the eventual GOP presidential nominee that he has the worst job-creation record of any president since World War II. (Let us stipulate that all of these job-creation claims are fairly bogus, given how every president is at the mercy of the business cycle, but it appears to be central to our politics.)
As Obama noted, some 4 million jobs were lost at the start of his administration, putting him in a deep hole if he wants to show positive job growth in his presidency. But the nearly $1 trillion stimulus was passed into law in February, and so the carefully phrased claim of “we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect” is a stretch.
That’s because it took a full nine months to run up 4 million in job losses, some eight months after the stimulus was passed into law—and some four months after the official end of the recession, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (The 4 million in losses before Obama took office occurred in the previous nine months, not six months as the president stated.)
Trying to change the focus from his overall job-creation record, the president focuses on private-sector jobs created since the recession ended. Those numbers are largely right, but they are relatively anemic given the depths of the recession. (Note that he describes a loss of 8 million jobs and then mentions a gain of only three million.)
Obama does not mention that Republicans forced him to accept $2 trillion in budget cuts during the debt-ceiling impasse. And he says “we’ve put in place” new rules on Wall Street, glossing over the fact that it had little Republican support and the GOP candidates have all vowed to repeal the Dodd-Frank law.
Dont confuse the liberals with facts!
Miked:
I find your logic interesting. It seems to be that because Obama inherited an enormously rotten economy - with a loss of 8 million jobs (which started in a year before he took office), the trajectory of the improvement should have been steeper. You make this argument despite the fact that the bank failures were still ongoing as he took office and the housing crisis was only just beginning to roll. And despite the fact that record job losses turned into job gains - within 9 months of him taking office - you just roll your eyes and say: "Anemic, uninspiring, Reagan could have done better, the stimulus didn't work, etc." The truth is that the stimulus DID work - it just jumpstarted a slow painful recovery. When your manufacturing base has been badly damaged and nobody has confidence in the banks, and Europe is still on the brink of disaster, 150,000 jobs a month and growth at near 3% for the last quarter looks pretty good. Did you know the economy under W. rarely created more than 200,000 jobs a month in any of his eight years?
Bob- especially at First Read! I've never seen such a large group of biased and closed minded folks in one place before, lol! Here's a couple other notes on the speech:
“On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.”
Here the president appears to celebrate a bailout, which actually was started under his predecessor George W. Bush. The claim that “some” wanted the auto industry to die is a bit of a straw man, though Obama appears to be really aiming at Mitt Romney’s call at the time for the auto industry to go through a pre-packaged bankruptcy, which Democratic attack ads have turned into heartless-sounding proposal. (Ford, incidentally, did not accept a bailout.)
Some 200,000 auto workers were laid off during the recession, bringing the industry to a low of 550,000 workers; forecasts suggest it will climb back to the pre-recession level by 2015.
“Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years. Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.”
The first statement is a great statistic but not especially noteworthy because there has not been much change in the annual barrels produced in the United States since 2003; it essentially has been steady though it is slightly higher now than in previous years,according to the Energy Information Administration. Production is projected to increase in coming years.
The second claim made it into Obama’s first campaign ad, and as we have noted, it is lacking context. The Energy Department cited a host of reasons why foreign oil imports have declined, noting the main reason was “a significant contraction in consumption” because of the poor economy and changes in efficiency that began “two years before the 2008 crisis” — ie, before Obama took office.
Try as hard as you can Miked but you cannot change history or facts. We'll always be here to set you straight.
Biased and closed minded? Are you that weak?
lol, king of nothing, miked was correct in each of his comments. Obama is the king idiot in Obamaville and you must be one of his lead dummies. You are incapable of 'setting anyone straight' until you pull your head out of your a$$! Even then you may not make much sense!