George Rebane
The speech was delivered in a workmanlike manner by President Barack Obama, one of the best public speakers in the land. But its content was so flawed that I thought it best to not say anything at all about it, primarily because it was immediately dissected so assiduously by so many conservative pundits – secondarily, because I didn’t know where to start in order to say something new. But after letting the sun rise on it a couple of times, I thought ‘what the hell’, and here is my two cents worth.
First and foremost, the President directed his speech at an accepting audience consisting mainly of the pre-educated and the cognitively disabled. I don’t think he belongs to either group, and most certainly neither do his handlers and speech writers. He and his are simply ideologues with a profound misunderstanding of history, and an almost total innocence about things economic. From the litany of defects in the speech, let me just pick a couple to vent on.
The President claimed that his “Sputnik moment” for us today was inspired by our reaction to the Soviets’ October 1957 launch of the namesake satellite – the first to orbit earth. He went on to expound that our science “did not yet exist” to replicate the feat, and that it was the then visionary government which kicked things into gear to launch our first satellite, and proceed on to win the race to the moon. Wrong.
A rudimentary reading of our early space technology history reveals that before Sputnik we had commissioned the Vanguard program to build a new smaller rocket (image nearby) that could place a grapefruit-sized satellite into orbit. This was in 1956 and before NASA was founded in 1958. In the interval the Soviets took one of their large in-service ballistic missiles, stuck a small basketball sized satellite in its nose, and programmed it to go into low earth orbit instead of head for New York.
After our Vanguard rocket exploded a couple of times, one of our engineers asked why we couldn’t do the same thing with one of our existing Redstone (renamed the Jupiter-C) rockets. Bingo, our first satellite was up in January 1958. It turns out that our science was there and waiting all through those years, and it was only government bureaucracy that prevented the practical solution from being used.
For the record, Vanguard did launch our second satellite in March 1958. It was the first solar-powered satellite orbited and distinguishes itself to this day by being the oldest satellite still in orbit, and likely to stay there for the next two hundred years or so (unless we bring it down and stick it in the Smithsonian). So all the bullcrap about starting to play catch-up with the Soviets is just that. But the President did get it right that we used technology originally created by government visionaries – what his people forgot to put in his mouth was that the government Werner von Braun and his team were working for at the time was called the Third Reich. (The other half of that team was kidnapped by the Soviets after WW2.)
Bottom line, this administration has demonstrated itself to be the most over-regulating and technologically blind arm of government we have had for more than a coon’s age. As Exhibit A, just consider their assessments and reaction to the global warming scam, the viability of enforced ‘cleantech’ initiatives (whatever happened to the much-hyped solar panel company that got videotaped and stimulated to the tune of $500M last year?), and now requiring all small businesses to file 1099 forms for every purchase above $600. A cherry on that cake was placed yesterday by the Obamacare actuary again admitting at a Congressional hearing that the new law would reduce neither deficits nor the country’s healthcare costs. (Corroborating video featuring our own Rep Tom McClintock here.)
Finally, in the more critical area of the country’s macro-economic stance, the President simply soiled himself in public by claiming that we will cure our deficit problem (borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend) without touching entitlements. In fact, the Organizer in Chief unequivocally stated that we would climb out of our fiscal ditch “without reducing benefits to current and future generations” of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients. Since these make up the 800 pound gorilla of our federal expenditures, it boggles the mind that he would promise this to a national audience in prime time.
But upon reflection, it is both clear and sad that he continues to assume his constituents to be what we used to call retards (a term now proscribed as politically incorrect). Nevertheless, listening to the chorus of accolades from the left’s more vocal representatives, one would have trouble finding fault with the President’s choice of content for his well-delivered State of the Union speech. This, after all, is the base of support that he must secure in preparation for 2012, and I think he nailed it.
[update] You can’t make this stuff up. AP reports this morning that ‘The Social Security Fund will be Drained by 2037’. This continues to fly in the face of the cynical song Team Obama has been successfully singing to his know-nothing constituents. Sadly, a good fraction of our electorate still believes that the SS Trust Fund is fully funded to take care of our retirees’ needs into the indefinite future. Some of these dodos are even found in Congress as named in the AP article. And a goodly cohort of such believers live right here in the Sierra.
In these pages I have tried to explain that the SS Trust Fund has nothing in it but IOUs in the form of Treasury bonds. The money that we all earned and paid into SS over the decades was confiscated (aka “borrowed”) by succeeding Congresses to fund various social engineering projects under which we are still reeling. So when the time comes to dip into the SS Trust Fund, those bonds will have to be redeemed by someone with real money. And that will just transfer the loan to someone else and add to the national debt. Maybe the Chinese will still be willing to buy those Treasuries, but I, along with others who understand what fiat money is, seriously doubt that.
As most non-progressive people know, the only alternative is to run the printing presses and pay off the nominal SS amounts in future dollars that will buy maybe what a dime or a penny or … buys today. And while the President serves the kool-aid from whatever teleprompter he happens to be standing behind, his acolytes in Congress continue echoing the chorus to the truly disadvantaged among us. And you can bet that come election day, these same people will be picked up and taken to the polls.
[29jan2011 update] Peggy Noonan is one of the most level-headed and discerning commentators in the land. In today’s WSJ she offers her insights to the President’s speech (here). It is a worthy read.
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