by Darrell Castle
Constitution Party Vice-Chairman 

Last night President Obama delivered his constitutionally required State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The speech contained a little bit of hope and a great deal of the Obama kind of change.

The hope occurred in the opening and closing, when he reminded us of the sacrifice of the troops and how he ordered the Navy Seals to kill Osama Bin Laden. The speech also contained some truth — at least in the section that took us back to the Great Depression and WWII — and pointed out that we were once a great nation.

Hope and truth were very scarce for the rest of the speech.

The president listed many problems that confront the nation and then proposed changes for each of them. He failed to point out that virtually all of the problems happened because of government action in the first place. The speech's proposals will make each of the problems, and the pain of dealing with them, much worse when someone finally has the courage to confront them.

His solutions are more government programs, more government spending, more government debt, and more force used against business and even other countries, with no understanding that market forces and not governments decide capital allocation.

The speech addressed taxes, trade, off-shoring of manufacturing, outsourcing of jobs, housing, energy, education, and savings from the winding down of wars.  A brief look at each of these areas follows:

Taxation:

In the area of taxation the president abandoned his bring-us-together approach and said that we should all pay our fair share, and that includes those who make over $1 million per year. Those people should pay a minimum of 30% of income in tax, and he made no distinction as to capital gains or regular income. Perhaps he should have mentioned that they already pay over 30% of regular income as tax. He did not mention, but he must know, that increasing the tax rate on capital gains will actually hurt the economy in the long run by chilling investment and thereby costing jobs and reducing revenue. There is no problem that a government program can't make worse.

Trade, Off-shoring of Manufacturing, and Outsourcing of Jobs:

Problems of trade, off-shoring of manufacturing, and outsourcing of jobs can all be solved or at least helped, the speech said, by simply adding new government programs to pay companies to stay in America or to return to America. The alternative should they not return would be to punish them with minimum rate taxes on overseas profits to prevent other countries from competing for the jobs with low tax rates.

Washington hates nothing like it hates actual competition. Through the passage of various free trade agreements the world has been opened to American companies, and that genie cannot be returned to the bottle by force. America should withdraw from those agreements; but in the meantime, American workers will compete for salaries, education, etc. with the world's workers. A worker in America at $20 per hour will compete with a better educated or at least more technically trained worker in China or India for a fifth the wages.Instead of preparing the US to compete by getting our currency on solid footing and removing regulations and taxes that make us less competitive, the president proposes to force those who will not agree to accept his proposals.

War and Savings:

The president assumes that, like Iraq, the war in Afghanistan will wind down and therefore the US will save money. That is a very big assumption because of what appears to be war coming from the Iranian crises, perhaps on an even wider scale than Iraq and Afghanistan. If the money can be saved, however, it will be used to fix infrastructure and pay down debt. Now let's see€”we have a $1.5 trillion deficit each year, so how can we pay down debt? The very idea that it would happen is really standup comedy.

Energy:

The speech expressed the president's concern for our lack of domestic energy production. He proposed to — guess what — that's right: reward and incentivize his chosen companies and punish the others. What a hypocrite. He just disapproved the Keystone XL Pipeline that would have delivered 700 thousand barrels of crude per day to US refineries. That might have cost one of his friends like Warren Buffet money, so better to rob taxpayers and do it by force.

Education and Housing:

The speech had the expected sections for education and housing, again with no concern or awareness of market forces. He proposed to force students to stay in school until age 18 and pointed out that 20 states already are guilty of forcing such involuntary servitude. Why give the government even more time to indoctrinate your children?

In the housing area, the speech called for more federal control and more money to the banks and mortgage companies who caused the housing problem in the first place.

In summary, the president said the system is unfair in the area of taxes, mortgages, etc. Everybody should pay their fair share, and he decides what that share is.

Well, he is right about the system being unfair and slanted in one direction. It is slanted toward the banks and has been for about 100 years (but is especially slanted now). The Federal Reserve prints trillions to bail out banks that are too big to fail, thus leaving the American people at the mercy of fraudulent or failing financial companies.

How do we now save this economy and get the nation on the road to recovery? We don't, at least not without a great deal of pain. Like a seed that falls to the ground, it has to die and be reborn before it becomes a tree.

Last night, the president did not appear to be much of a €œbring us together€ kind of leader. The nation is wallowing in the terrible problems of debt and war and is desperate for a leader to rise above it all and unite us. Instead of uniting us, the president appears to be divisive and venal. The captain of the ship of state has allowed the ship to hit the rocks on his watch. When we rush to the rails to see the wreckage he says move along folks, nothing to see here, just go back to your cabins and I'll take care of it.

Should we reward him for that with a second term? I don't think so; but what of the Republicans, are they any better? No, with the exception of one man the Republicans are no better.

What if we considered the candidate of  the Constitution Party? Well, that sounds like change I could believe in.