Obama's Proposals

Finally, three years into his term and three years into a devastating recession, President Obama took on the jobs issue for real. It is what he should have done at the beginning of his term, instead of wasting time and political capital on the healthcare issue.

As usual, President Obama was eloquent in his speech last night. But as usual, it offered nothing new.  It was clearly a re-election speech, designed to maneuver Republicans into damaging positions ahead of the upcoming election, rather than a problem-solving speech aimed at really solving the nation's problems.

As usual, his solution was to throw more (borrowed) money at the problem rather than address any of the underlying structural problems. The word "stimulus" was assiduously avoided, but that is in fact what he proposed.  Since a "stimulus" twice that big had almost no measurable effect except to dramatically increase the national debt, it is not clear how one half that size can be expected to have much effect.  He proposed tax cuts, but since he didn't propose cutting federal spending at all the reduced revenue just increases the deficit.

I didn't really expect anything new from the president's team, and I see most pundits didn't expect much either.  The coverage of the speech this morning is remarkably sparse, even from the pundits who usually think he walks on water.

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PS - I see that the world's stock markets have taken a steep nose dive in the wake of President Obama's speech (the Dow is down 338 points as I write this). Last time he gave a speech the stock market dropped a hundred points even as he was speaking. One might think this was a message...............