Thoughts on the State of the Union [speech]

I was going to not write anything about the SOTU, political drivel as it primarily is, but as usual in reading the text a few things jumped out, and motivated a sort of response. I'm not going to cover every point, of course (most of which are vapid and well-trod by this point), but a few bear mentioning.

Obama on "progress" over his term:

It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations.

... yeah, if by recovered you mean stringing the economy along in a strange sort of limbo, where the Fed keeps housing affordable and stocks mostly positive after printing roughly $3,000,000,000,000 of additional money to buy up all the junk bonds the government created during the housing bubble. The recovery which has brought us to the precipice of another crash, which you're desperately hoping to postpone until you're out of office. Oh, and you has to create another roughly 7 trillion in national debt so that people in the middle class still cannot afford housing. Great job there.

It’s how we reformed our health care system...

First, you didn't reform the healthcare system, you reformed the health care insurance system. Second, it wasn't so much reform, as create a gigantic new entitlement and tax the working middle class to pay for it. Third, it wasn't a beneficial reform, measured against all the promises of cost reductions and overall savings which have not materialized (and never will, of course). Forth, although Obamacare does do some good things (in my opinion), it has made the healthcare system worse on balance. But, to be fair, it is reform.

... and reinvented our energy sector

Huh? We're still dependent on foreign oil, last I checked. You didn't build any more nuclear plants, or substantially move the needle on clean energy. About the only thing energy-related which got reformed was using the EPA as a power-grabbing unconstitutional bludgeoning policy tool, but that's really only temporary, until SCOTUS gets around to slapping it down again. Elon Musk has done more for energy sector reform than you, and he doesn't run the entire country. No points for that item.

... we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans...

I'm pretty sure Jon Stewart might have something non-flattering to say about that point; feel free to ask him the next time you do his show (whatever the next one may be) while in office. I don't think you want to be using that as a talking point, though, what with the abysmal VA situation and all.

... we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

 If by "we" you mean the SCOTUS, then you would be accurate... but you would still be a self-serving sycophant for taking credit for someone else's victory. But, in fairness, that is the one positive progress item you could point to in the whole list, and actually the one most likely to be associated positively with your term in office.

On the state of the economy:

... an unemployment rate cut in half.

... by conveniently forgetting to count all the people who have been out of work so long that their prospects of ever becoming employed again have decayed beyond the threshold of being considered "looking for employment." Which is a distinction that most politicians ignore, and I'd be willing to overlook, except for the last sentence follow-up:

And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.

Wait, WTF? Oh, right... there was a massive "stimulus" handout program in 2009, which raised the "normal" deficit of ~$450B to something much higher, as a one-time abnormal deficit. Obama has reduced the structural deficit to only ~$485B... oh, wait, that's not even a decrease, that's an increase!

But wait, it gets even more ludicrously disingenuously stupid. That's the structural deficit, or the deficit which is built into the budget, not including extra spending. Obama has increased the national debt by roughly ~$8000B while in office, or just over $1000B per year. And even that amount doesn't include the ~$3000B the fed printed to buy junk bonds to prop up the housing and stock markets. Obama has presided over the largest increase of national debt in history, and created massive new entitlements for which the full cost has not even yet been accounted for. The deficit statement is quite possibly the most asinine, insulting sentence ever uttered by Obama during his terms, and that's saying quite a lot.

On the economy, and education, and energy plans, and climate change, and foreign policy, and the "middle part":

Honestly, I don't have much to say about these topics. There are some reasonable ideas, some expected exaggerations, some agenda items, and a lot of boilerplate rhetoric. There really just isn't much "interesting" there.

On partisan divide and distrust on politics:

Finally, a point which is absolutely correct, even as Obama totally ignores his central role in fostering the very problem he's articulating. Everybody wants government to be better, politics to be less fractious, and the system to be less rigged (except the people gaming the system for their own benefit). Unfortunately, nobody knows how to get there from where we are, and Obama offers no clear path either.

Overall, I guess, it was a fine SOTU: long on flowery rhetoric and embellishments of accomplishments, short on actual plans to accomplish vague goals, and a few huge whoppers to cover up monumental failures while in office. It will be interesting to see what Obama will be remembered for, and how much that perception is altered by how negatively the next president is viewed.