Thoughts on Obama's speech to congress

Tonight President Obama made a speech to the joint session of congress. The overarching theme was dealing with the current economic recession. He had three main areas of interest: energy, health care and education. I had many thoughts running through my brain as I listened to the speech. I will list them below in three categories.

What I liked about the speech

• I felt President Obama did a good job of being optimistic, reassuring, and then patriotic (love of country) towards the end of his speech
• Fiscal transparency of the budget
• College tax credit
• "No one messes with Joe" comment was funny
• Web site to track spending of the "Stimulus bill"
• Congress has to sacrifice worthy programs in order to lower the budget
• Improve the power grid with more power lines
• Allow all stake holders to take part in planning his health care reform
• Promise of not just more money thrown at our school system problems, but reform also (sounds good by I'm skeptical because the teacher union is the strongest of any union in the U.S.)
• Calls on all Americans to get one more year of education / job training (I like the call for self-improvement)
• 2020 goal that the U.S. will have the highest proportion of college graduates
• Call to parents to be more involved in their children's education

What I didn't like about the speech

• I believe that President Obama overly simplified the reasons for our current recession, such as blaming lack of government regulation, etc.
• "The flow of credit is the life blood of our economy" (I believe that profit is the life blood of our economy and that a culture of living on credit is a major contributor to our current economic problems)
• 95% of the population will get a tax cut (This is impossible because only about 60% of the population pays any federal income tax. You can't cut what you don't pay. What he really means is that the 40% who don't pay federal income tax will get a "tax credit" a.k.a. a government welfare check payed by those who do pay federal income tax a.k.a. taking away money from one group of citizens and giving it directly to another group)
• The $1,000,000,000,000+ dollar stimulus package will create 3-4 million jobs of which 90% will be private sector (these are very dubious numbers with all kinds of variables and confounders, plus, doing the math, that's about $250, 000 per job created)
• Carbon cap and trade will be extremely expensive, treating a hypothesis of global warming that is not well understood (it really is just one more way for government to grab more power over the economy and society)
• There was no mention of nuclear energy, which is a huge solution to our energy problems
• End "tax breaks" for those who make over $250, 000 (a.k.a. punish those Americans who already pay most of the federal tax burden and are the ones who run most of the businesses that make the economy in the first place)

What didn't make sense about the speech

• "We should not protect the auto industry from their bad practices", but then promises he won't let the American auto industry fail
• "We've done more to advance healthcare refrom in the past 30 days , than was done in the past decade" (please don't insult our intelligence)
• Wants to bring down the deficit by 50% mere days after signing a $1000000000000 spending bill of money the government doesn't have for tons of programs that pay back the special interests of the constituancy that elected him (can you say ACORN?)
• Force banks to refinance the mortgages of "responsible" home owners, but not those "neighbors down the street who bought a house they knew they couldn't afford" (there is no way that government can practically tell the difference between these two groups)
• "Responsibly end the war" (what does that mean?, and besides, it's the same goal that President Bush stood for, this is political pudding that all politicians love to serve up during speeches)