Obama's State of the Union Address - Profile in Cowardice

As most Americans know, our country is in a severe economic predicament, caused chiefly by exploding entitlement programs such as Social Security, and Medicare, but exacerbated by exploding federal budgets, begun under the Bush II administration, and hyperinflated under the Obama administration.  In the State of the Union address, Obama would call this a "Sputnik Moment", which implied that this moment of economic peril was similar to the call-to-action that occurred when the Russians launched Sputnik, putting a satellite into orbit before anyone else did, and kicking off the US space program.  This would be an economic Sputnik moment, spurring the US to action against this dire economic threat.  But, as is demonstrated in this very well written article, Obama, as is his modus operandi, took the cowards way out.  Again, a read the whole thing article, but here are some good paragraphs:

The thrust of Obama's agenda follows Lenin's. The old jobs are gone. We must prepare for the future by educating our youth. The sturm und drang of the "We Musts" quickly becomes an argument for pandering to the teacher's unions. Only by empowering the teacher's union will we be able to compete with China. But China isn't strong because of its teachers, but because it has no independent unions, no minimum wage, no pollution laws and nothing to get in the way of the terrible machine of its industry. The People's Republic of China is not beating us in science or math, but in manufacturing cheap products with an undervalued national currency.

Handing out free educations to beat China is like going to college to fight a bear. Not only will it not improve your bear fighting skills, it actually gives the bear the upper hand. American math and science degrees are used to do research whose practical applications take the form of products manufactured in China. Even if all 300 million Americans all go to work as researchers, we are not going to "out-compete" and "out-innovate" by "out-educating" Americans. Russia has the highest percentage of college degrees by population in the world. China has the lowest. These figures have little to do with their economic success.

America already has a college degree program percentage rate on par with Sweden and Finland, countries that almost wholly subsidize higher educations. Greece subsidizes 99.7 percent of higher education, and yet has a lower degree rate than America and is in a state of complete economic meltdown. America has higher rates of graduates than many of the European countries which heavily subsidize their education systems. The takeaway is that state subsidized education does not ensure more graduates. And more graduates does not mean more jobs.

Basically, the whole thrust of Obama's speech was pure bull. What he is talking about is pap, not a call to take on the real problems in this country. Again, read the whole thing, I've got to go.