President Trump delivered a great speech at the State of The Union. Perhaps one of the best State of the Union speeches I’ve heard since I’ve been watching them. It was definitely better than last year’s address and I thought that one was pretty good. I’ve heard some describe it as the best in our lifetime. I am not going to go that far because there were some things I would have liked to hear and some things on which I would have liked to hear him elaborate. I will get to that in minute. Even though I am not characterizing it as the best of our lifetime, he had some brilliant moments. The one that stands out to me the most was when he called out the socialists and their ridiculous policies after recounting how socialism has destroyed Venezuela:
Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination and control.
We are BORN FREE, and we will STAY FREE.Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will NEVER be a socialist country.
The country is completely divided along ideological lines. The socialists on the left are all in on full term abortion, open borders, punitive taxes and Medicaid for all; while the right is diametrically opposed to all of those things. Despite his jabs at the left for their endless investigations, he was still able to deliver a message that had a strong message of unity.
The President laid out all of his accomplishments including 5.3 million new jobs, wages on the rise, the economy growing twice as fast as when he took office, 5 million people off of the food stamp rolls, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, lowest unemployment rate ever for black and Hispanic Americans, as well as a number of other accomplishments; not all of which were economic. Moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem is a big one which fulfilled a promise that so many other presidents have made before, but failed to deliver. I’m not going to tick off all of the accomplishments that he did in the speech, but it was an impressive list. One for which any other president would be praised by both sides of the aisle. If president Obama had a list of accomplishments like that there would be talk of doing away with presidential term limits. Oh, wait…
By any objective measure, the President is doing an outstanding job. There are concerns about his foreign policy and why he publicly questions his intelligence advisors, but overall, he is performing as well as anyone could have expected. Now, while I believe that the President is doing a great job and the speech was great – it wasn’t perfect. Given the fact that abortion has been front and center in the news lately, I think the subject of infanticide deserved a bit more focus that he gave it. I understand that he was trying to give a unifying speech, but I think he could have tackled it in such a way that minimized the division. When you come right down to it, who is really in favor of infanticide? Don’t answer that.
I would have also liked to hear more about China and what plans he has to combat their aggression. The trade war in which we are currently engaged seems to be succeeding because whether you agree with imposing tariffs or not, the tactic worked. The dramatic slowdown of China’s economy as a result of those tariffs has brought President Xi Jinping to the negotiating table. China has stolen intellectual property from American companies to the tune of a reported $600 Billion a year, they are engaged in a campaign of state run cyber attacks – many of which experts say are targeting our electrical grid, they are holding hostage companies that want to do business in China by demanding that they do a knowledge dump to local companies prior to being allowed to do business there. Also, as a show of support for Nicolás Maduro, China now has a warship in our hemisphere off the coast of Venezuela. China poses a legitimate threat that warranted a mention in the State of the Union address.
Another topic that I wanted to hear him talk about is our national debt. The United States’ national debt recently crossed the $22 Trillion threshold which is about 108% of our current GDP. I talked about this on one of my podcasts about a month ago. That amount of debt is unsustainable. It was unsustainable back when it was just 5 Trillion or 10 Trillion. In fact I seem to recall a certain person calling that amount of debt unpatriotic. Nevertheless, this amount of debt is a looming disaster and unless something is done, it will crash down on us sooner rather than later. If that happens, it will have a global impact. I would have appreciated it if the President had acknowledged this predicament in his address and laid out some kind of plan to help stave off the impending doom of having that much debt called by our creditors. One of which happens to be China.
Despite my criticisms, this was an outstanding speech with a number of memorable moments, both in terms of policy and on an emotional level. Have you ever heard the entire gathering at a State of the Union address sing happy birthday? No, me either.