President Barack Obama gestures while giving his State of the Union address on Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)In an uninspiring State of the Union address Tuesday, President Barack Obama resorted to his standard class-warfare approach, calling for higher taxes on millionaires.
That lets the president argue that he is on the side of “the little guy” — while ignoring the fact that the Americans he condemns for supposedly not paying their “fair share” already pay a disproportionately high percentage of the taxes and provide a great many of the jobs held by “the little guys” he claims to defend.
Confiscating more of the earnings of higher-income Americans will do nothing to help them grow the small businesses that provide so many of the jobs in this country. But pitting Americans against each other, rather than creating the jobs we need in this time of 8.5 percent unemployment, seems to be the president’s priority.
Obama also said he wants to see an extension of current payroll tax relief for 160 million Americans. Fine, but his party has resisted efforts by Republicans in Congress to pay for the short-term loss of revenue from the payroll tax cut with cuts in federal spending. Can anyone seriously argue that our federal government, $15.2 trillion in debt, couldn’t use some massive spending cuts?
Among Obama’s other proposals:
* A “path to citizenship” for some illegal aliens. That’s in addition to his already having ordered that potentially hundreds of thousands of deportation cases be halted.
* More “investment” in infrastructure. The president wants more money for things such as high-speed rail. Yet it was recently determined that a partially federally funded rail project in California will cost not the original estimate of $34 billion but around $100 billion! The work will be finished more than a decade later than first thought, and there are big doubts about whether it will attract enough riders. How much of that kind of “investment” can we afford?
* A requirement that the Defense Department make a huge purchase of costly “green” energy. Defense is already facing vast funding cuts; does it need to spend money on impractical renewable energy? And doesn’t the collapse of the solar company Solyndra after it got half a billion dollars from taxpayers give Obama pause?
* Bigger investigations into lending practices that led to the housing crisis. Will investigators look into the role of government-run mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the housing collapse?
It will be interesting to see what Congress does with Obama’s ideas. But it is discouraging that, as Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said in the GOP response, “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others.”