Our Senator in D.C. on the State of the Union

Reaction to President’s State of the Union Address

“We Need to Get Serious on Entitlement Reform”

By U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas

The President’s annual State of the Union address is an opportunity for our country’s elected leader to put aside partisan politics, talk to Congress and the American people about our country’s direction, and outline his priorities.  This speech to the nation has carried even greater weight during the trying times, when Americans look to the President for unifying and inspiring leadership.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address missed this mark.  Our economic recovery is still very fragile.  Nearly one-half of the 13 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the highest proportion of long-term unemployed since the Labor Department started tracking the statistic in 1948.

How to boost economic recovery and spur businesses to invest and create more jobs remains our country’s most critical priority.  For the past three years, the higher taxes and ongoing threats of new taxes, skyrocketing government deficits, and over-regulation have put a wet blanket on new hiring.  But rather than offering a new, more hopeful direction, the President’s State of the Union speech focused on familiar calls for higher taxes and even bigger government.

In 2009 and 2010, a Democrat-controlled Congress approved the President’s priorities, including sweeping changes to our health care system that have already begun. These priorities produced an unprecedented surge in spending and bigger government, including nearly $1 trillion in economic stimulus that has raised the national debt to $15.2 trillion.  But the situation today is worse by any measure that is important to ordinary Americans:  unemployment is higher, the rate of foreclosures is higher, gasoline prices are higher, and 46 million Americans are living in poverty.  For the first time in our history, our national debt is larger than our Gross National Product.

Rather than championing fiscal responsibility, reining in over-regulation, and promoting tax reforms to support sustained economic growth and job creation, the President in his State of the Union speech instead focused on repackaging many previously failed policies.  Rather than focusing on bipartisan approaches to strengthen our country and put Americans back to work, the President spoke as if his audience was at a political rally.