Reflecting on rhetoric and reality
In listening to a State of the Union address, there is always hope and anticipation that you will hear the president utter these words: “The state of the Union is strong.”
On Tuesday night, we did not hear those words. Instead, the president told the world that “we have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our Union is stronger.”
Presumably, the president was referring to the economic crisis known as the Great Recession, and yes — to some extent — the nation has grown stronger as we have recovered from the worst of that crisis.
But there was also the sense — in listening to the president — that the larger crisis our nation faces is being ignored — the crisis of deficit spending, of over-promising and of political pandering.
The most frightening statement in the president’s speech was this: “Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep — but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.”
This is feel-good rhetoric that throws reality on its head. The fact of the matter is this — we HAVE made promises that we cannot keep. Indeed, there are well over $100 trillion in unfunded mandates floating around out there. Those are promises for Social Security, prescription medicine and Medicare that the federal government has made that it can’t actually afford.
Throw that on top of the promises made to college students, veterans, federal retirees, the unemployed, welfare beneficiaries and numerous other classes of citizens, and you reach the point where keeping “the promises we have already made” is utterly impossible.
And proclaiming that we will do so anyway — that we will keep those imprudent promises, regardless of our financial ability to do so, makes us the equivalent of Greece — except that Greece has actually had to adopt austerity measures and move toward fiscal reality.
In a sense, the United States is about to do so as well.
On March 1, the across-the-board spending cuts authorized by the president and mandated by Congress in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect. When he signed that bill, President Obama said that while not perfect, “this compromise does make a serious down payment on the deficit reduction we need.”
But in the State of the Union address, the president was whistling a different tune, and clearly wanted to avert those cuts rather than risk the political fallout of proceeding with them. He was using such words as “sudden,” “harsh,” and “arbitrary” and saying that the cuts brought about by sequestration would “devastate priorities like education, and energy, and medical research.”
Well, no, what will devastate those priorities is our inability to balance a budget and our failure to live within our means.
- We understand that the president — any president — wants to be able to inform the country that the future is bright, and President Obama in many ways did just that Tuesday night. But it was difficult to hear him propose investments in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure and housing and promise that none of it would increase the deficit “by a single dime.”
Instead of the president’s proposed “Fix-It-First” program that would spend billions on admittedly overdue infrastructure repairs, we are desperately in need of a “Fix-It-First” program that gets serious about patching the hole in our purse. Until we do that, we are just kidding ourselves if we claim that the state of the Union is strong.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.