Presidential State of the Union Address
Overall, I thought the speech was pretty good. He spoke with conviction, purpose, and clarity. As a politician, he spoke about issues that concerned the left, the right, and the moderates. I’m glad that he addressed domestic issues first, before talking about foreign issues. Also, good thing he’s got a Republican majority, cause otherwise there’d be much less applause with all the very conservative issues that he presented (faith based initiative, anti-abortion, getting rid of dividend taxation, and human cloning).
I’m also glad that he’s pushing for medical liability reform in order to address health costs. I see that also as a major reason for the high medical costs. The typical liberal response would be, let’s just give medicare recipients more money.
He made his case pretty clear on Iraq. Though, personally, I don’t see it as a conclusive argument to go to war against Iraq. The administration position is, “Iraq has not proved that it DOES NOT have WMD.” And the anti-war position is, “The US has not proved that Iraq HAS WMD.” It seems more a stalemate to me.
And about tax cuts, though I’m fully supportive of having some of my money back, without a cut in government spending, it doesn’t mean much long term. Sometime down the line, there’ll have to be a tax hike to pay for the government debt.