Show Me the Money!

As America struggles with a 10 percent unemployment rate, stubbornly refusing to go down even as other economic numbers seem to rise, the public will no longer believe in speeches -- only in results. As Cuba Gooding Jr. says to Tom Cruise in "Jerry Maguire," Americans are saying, "show me the money."
It was truly agonizing, watching Obama’s first State of the Union Address, for more than an hour as Obama extolled the need for jobs but only offered government as the solution. A job "created" by the government will only last as long as tax payers are paying for that job. Is that a real job? What about promoting an economic climate so that businesses can hire more people?
Obama railed against the spending, yet it was his socialist plan that exploded the budget and put more power in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. His proposal to "cut spending" after his massive spending is just silly. He talked about not wanting to burden a few generations of Americans with debt, but his policies have led to several generations being burdened.
One of the most stunning moments of the entire speech was when Obama addressed the members of the Supreme Court directly. I have never seen this before. He blasted their recent ruling on election spending by advocacy groups. Not only was this an extreme breach of protocol in my opinion, it was also wrong. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito couldn't sit stone-faced while Obama went on and muttered the words "not true" to Obama's attack. You can see this below:


The very notion of a "jobs package" that underpins Obama's newly announced program is oxymoronic. The president still seems not to have grasped the essential point that borrowing money to spend it to create jobs in fact costs our nation jobs. Or that increasing the deficit decreases the opportunities for businesses and consumers to borrow and cuts the number of jobs.

Ultimately, the fate of the Obama presidency depends on whether he is right or his conservative critics are. If he's correct, more spending will bring down unemployment and put people to work. If he's wrong, the deficit that results from his spending will keep joblessness high.A lot of last night's speech was, in effect, an apology for his own policies. His lamentation of partisanship and division; his appeals for unity -- it all seemed almost to disregard his own record of polarization.

His allusion to the deficit "in which we find ourselves" was disingenuousness -- at best. He has to hope that nobody was reading the newspaper as he proposed a stimulus package costing nearly $800 billion.When he seemed at a loss, he lapsed into easy, populist applause lines -- almost a parody of partisanship. His campaign speech, dressed up as a State of the Union, seemed irrelevant to the economic experience of our past year.

Even his forays into patriotism ("I do not accept second place for the United States of America") sounded like a return to his rhetoric of the campaign -- irrelevant to our current situation.His threat to "send back" to Congress any regulatory reform which does not meet his specifications was reminiscent of Clinton's threat -- as he brandished a pen -- to veto any health-care reform that didn't seem sufficient. The fact is that Congress isn't about to vote to give him the power to seize any corporation that he deems is "too big to fail" and "potentially insolvent." His threat to veto is irrelevant.
But even as Obama stumbled in embracing spending as the cure for joblessness, he failed even more in his comments about the War on Terror. Accumulating evidence is leading independents to demand that terror trials be handled by the military, not the civilian, justice system -- and without Miranda warnings.Getting intelligence about the next attack has a priority over criminal prosecution in the minds of all Americans . . . except perhaps those of the attorney general and the president.

I prefer an earlier “State of the Union Speech”, one that was given by Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts as his acceptance Speech.