The State of the Union is Bleak

Wednesday evening, January 27, Pres. Obama will deliver his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. He'll have to report to Congress, his cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the justices of the Supreme Court exactly what he's done as president over the last 12 months. And the answer to that is not much.

For the record, here is the president's score card, January 2009-January 2010:

• Nearly a trillion dollars in "stimulus" spending that has generated little to no growth and has only transfered wealth out of the economy to government institutions
• A $1.3 trillion budget deficit
• A continuing budget deficit projected to aggregate to $6 trillion over the next decade, based on current spending rates
• A national debt of about $7.5 trillion, which is more than half the amount of our Gross Domestic Production, or GDP
• A projection that our national debt will grow to $15 trillion by the end of the next decade and will balloon to 67% of our GDP, which starts to put us in the class of third world countries who owe two-thirds to three-quarters of everything they produce (Like the old Tennessee Ernie Ford song, we'll soon owe our soul to the company store. But for us the company store is in Beijing.)
• A 10% unemployment rate that won't budge significantly for several more years

Congressional Budget Office chief James Elmendorf says we won't see a 5% unemployment again until 2014. That means we're not even half way through this thing. Pres. Obama, who continually mislabels the current recession as the greatest economic disaster since the Great Depression, is about to make that a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Look for the president Wednesday night, in his typical graceless manner, to blame Pres. Bush in part for the country's troubles. But, as they say down in Pres. Bush's West Texas homeland, that dog won't hunt. Pres. Obama has had a year to turn around the recession he inherited,  and frankly we're going in the wrong direction. We have nothing to show for for the last year but higher unemployment, a bigger deficit, and a national debit, the payment for which will suck every spare dollar out of the consumer economy.

The president Wednesday night will resort to what boxing impresario Don King called "trickeration," saying that he's ordered an immediate three year spending freeze (Funny, how that brings us right to his reelection year.). But most of the programs lined up for "cuts" have already received healthy increases over the last year. These "cuts" won't even restore those programs to where they were before Jan. 20, 2009.

Maybe it's because so much was expected of Barack Obama that his failures look monumental. Maybe it's the election of Republican Scott Brown in heavily Democrat Massachusetts that's gotten the president a good old dose of foxhole religion-making him a deficit hawk, at least for one night. But I think the issue is that this presidency, by any calculus, is shaping up to be among the worst in history. Massive deficits. Monumental debt. Chronically high unemployment on the order of the European countries the president so admires. Lack of security. No cogent homeland security strategy.  And more concern for the alleged rights of self-admitted terrorists than the rights of the American people to travel safely.

Regardless of how the president spins it, that's the state of our union right now.

Just thought you might like to know.