State of the speech: Our view

The most encouraging aspect of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last week was the strong emphasis on job creation and the economy.

We along with others were happy to hear it, but it seems this new emphasis should have come about a year ago, and now we will have to wait and see whether the president can deliver on his promises.

Obama correctly identified the dominant issue for most voters when he said, “One in 10 Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. And for those who had already known poverty, life has become that much harder.”

All true. So what have we gotten so far? A $787 billion stimulus bill that the president attempted to sell as a success. Yes, it did very possibly prevent a bad economy from becoming even worse, and it did include tax cuts, but it can also be viewed as a pork-filled spending bill that did not have the urgently needed impact that it could have had, considering that most of the money hasn’t even been spent yet.

We also got a year’s worth of stitching together a legislative monstrosity now known as Obamacare. Replete with taxes, regulation, spending and a much bigger government, the health-care bills passed by the House and Senate certainly didn’t inspire confidence for job creation and investment on Main Street.

And this is what the president had to say about that: “I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering,  ‘What’s in it for me?’”

The truth is that Obama was explaining health-care “reform” for months in dozens of speeches and interviews, and the more people learned about it the less they liked it.

Again with cap-and-trade energy legislation, the White House and Congress were pushing for uncertainty about the future costs of doing business in the United States. Not good.

The president proposed a new “jobs bill” with worthy provisions such as $30 billion that would be directed at encouraging community banks to ramp up lending to small businesses, along with tax credits for small businesses. Statistically and anecdotally, we know that lending has been scarce over the last year and it has had a strangling effect on job creation. So Obama is on the right track in this area.

However, the State of the Union address and recent statements from the president have been peppered with language about financial regulation, bad behavior on Wall Street, and the need for a bank tax. While reforms may be in order, this comes off as misdirection turning attention toward bogeymen, when in reality Americans’ greatest frustrations are with Washington, D.C., and the federal government. Check any number of polls and Congress is typically at the very bottom, not Wall Street.

It should be appreciated that Barack Obama has raised the stakes on the economy and job creation, and he should not let Congress take the lead in these areas as he did with most other legislation over the last year. We are anxious to see if the administration’s actions match the president’s rhetoric. Let’s hope so.