State of the Union

I can't believe I missed the chance to see Obama repeat the same proposals I've been reading about for weeks but with soaring rhetoric, a very determined tone of voice, and the occasional humorous aside.

President Obama's community-college plan

The Washington Post Editorial Board is unimpressed with Obama's plan to subsidize community-college tuition, which he's going to announce in tonight's State of the Union address. The plan would supposedly save an average of $3,800 per student for 9 million students a year, three-quarters of which would be paid for by the federal government, with the rest covered by state governments. Here's what WaPo has to say:

[U]nder Mr. Obama’s plan, taxpayers would pay even for those who could pay for themselves. If additional money can be found for education, why not direct it to those who face the highest barriers? Further increasing the size of Pell Grants, for example, would be a more progressive way to help very needy students. Larger Pell Grants would also be usable at four-year colleges and universities, which could give some poor students a better chance at success, and not just at community colleges. The government should at least make Pell Grants available year-round, so that students could study over the summer, rather than just during the school year. These are all higher priorities.

If the president wants to help those who earn just too much to qualify for Pell Grants, he could consider means testing community college tuition assistance some other way. The White House, however, hasn’t gamed out how means testing would affect the proposal, in part, apparently, for philosophical reasons. “The president believes that it is time to make college education the norm, and that about 100 years ago this country decided that high school would be the norm and that now is the time to make sure that all Americans, regardless of age, have access to higher education,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Friday. That’s a fine goal. But in an era of constrained resources, there are better ways of improving access to higher education than establishing a new middle-class entitlement.

State of the Union ad infinitum

"[A]n almost-plausible speech taking one sentence from each SOTU since 1961."

Why President Obama is wrong on the minimum wage

In tonight's State of the Union address, President Obama said:

We know our economy’s stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages. But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year. Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong. That’s why, since the last time this Congress raised the minimum wage, 19 states have chosen to bump theirs even higher. Tonight, let’s declare that, in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty -- and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.

No, let's not. No matter what we "declare," there is going to be some amount of poverty in a country of 300 million people — and Obama's proposal would increase that amount. Raising the minimum wage creates more poverty by preventing people from being able to find employers who are willing to pay them. The law can only force employers to pay the minimum wage to the workers they do hire; it can't force them to hire anyone. Make it more expensive to hire workers, and not as many workers will get hired. The difference between $7.25 an hour and $9 an hour is tiny next to the difference between having a job (which can lead to getting better jobs) and not having a job.

Also, why should the question be whether you could single-handedly support two children on the minimum wage? The minimum wage applies to everyone. Not everyone is single-handedly raising two children! To forbid workers in other circumstances from getting a job paying a certain amount just because someone would want to earn a higher amount is simply cruel.

Did Obama's State of the Union abandon his focus on income inequality?

I didn't watch President Obama's speech last night, so I have no comments of my own. But I recommend reading what Mickey Kaus, Matthew Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan have to say about it.

Here's one of Kaus's points:

In his allegedly table-setting, voice-finding December Kansas manifesto, Obama made a big deal about rising money inequality, citing statistics on the relative growth of the ”average income of the top 1%,” referencing the Occupy movement, etc. There was none of that in Tuesday’s speech. Obama only wants “an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” He didn’t say everyone “gets their fair share.” That’s not money-equalizing populism[.] It’s moderate Republicanism. Looks like Walter Russell Mead was right – [the Kansas speech] was just a ploy to stroke Obama’s left base, quickly abandoned when more Americans were paying attention. Or else it polled as badly as he suspected it would. Sorry, E.J. … (Don’t tell me about the Buffet Rule: Obama pitched his higher top tax rate for “millionaires” as a way to ensure equal sacrifice (as anticipated by W. Galston) not as a way to help reverse the growing income inequality trend.)

Yglesias writes:

Obama pledged to support “every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” perhaps making him the only person in America who didn’t read the New York Times story over the weekend about how Apple’s products are all built in Asia.

The right lesson to take from Apple might be that an economic agenda whose “blueprint begins with American manufacturing” is misguided. South Korea, Taiwan, and China all have us beat as builders of electronics. But the world’s leading mobile electronics maker is headquartered in the United States of America and it’s insanely popular. That’s because the greatest value in the electronics business is in the industrial design, the software engineering, the marketing, and the combination of research and intuition that help you figure out what products people will want. Manufacturing, as a statistical category, is more arbitrary than people realize. There’s no inherently greater virtue in putting tuna into a can . . . than in preparing a seared tuna appetizer . . . . If people aspire to remodel kitchens or teach yoga or treat illness or be hair stylists or be chefs or, God forbid, Internet columnists . . . there’s nothing wrong with that.

Does Obama's "'Sputnik' moment" idea from the State of the Union speech make any sense?

Nope, says my mom, and I agree. That whole post is worth reading, but here's the gist:

If you remember how Sputnik felt — and I do — you'll probably say, but there is no equivalent of Sputnik. There are just a lot of countries, full of human beings, trying to get ahead economically, like us — not against us. There's no race with dramatic consequences for the winners and losers, and there's no impressive physical object that signifies that bad guys are winning the race. If you don't remember Sputnik, you're like: Sputnik?

I found last night's speech very dull, and I turned it off less than an hour into it. The idea that we're supposed to be alarmed that other countries are making too much progress relative to us, and that this is going to be our motivation to make economic and technological progress, leaves me cold. I wonder how many people honestly share this view (as opposed to people who are merely willing to echo Obama's point because they support Obama).

I don't care if we're #1 or #2 or #10 out of 200 countries, by whatever metric has been agreed on by experts. In fact, being #1 is a burden. I'd like to try being #2 for a while. Let another country take on the role of being officially at the top, and see how they like it. It hasn't been uniformly wonderful for the United States to have that distinction. I care so much more about whether this is a nice place to live.

UPDATE: Over on my mom's blog, a commenter named "Revenant" makes a good point:

Sputnik was launched by a genocidal Communist dictatorship that was not only our sworn enemy, but capable of destroying all life on Earth. That's why Sputnik was shocking. We were "losing" to an enemy that had the capacity to obliterate us.

Our biggest modern rival, China, is a mere regional power whose economy relies on exporting goods and services to... er, us and our allies.

How many times will President Obama say "invest," "investing," or "investments" tonight?

23, by my count from this wrongfully obtained draft text.

The New York Times shows how many times "invest" and other words have been used in every State of the Union address from 1939 to last year — in this interactive graphic.

You can move your pointer over the graphs to see the specific numbers for each year. For instance, which speech had the most uses of "invest"? Clinton's in 1993 — 29 times! (I don't know if that includes "investment.")

Obama last year said "small business" far more than anyone else.

Two words were used much more often by George W. Bush than by anyone else: "terror" and "enemies."

Some of the Times' descriptions don't even seem supported by its own data. It says, "Historically, Democrats use [the word 'invest'] more than Republicans." But that's only accurate as to Obama and Clinton, not the other Democratic presidents. Republicans Ford, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush said "invest" more than Democrats Truman and LBJ. Another example: the Times says, "Compared with Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama has limited his use of the word ['Afghanistan']." But the only year when Bush said "Afghanistan" significantly more than Obama was 2002, just a few months after the war started.

The fact I found most significant: "recommend" was used frequently by Truman, Eisenhower, and LBJ, but it's rarely been used since Ford (aside from Clinton's first State of the Union, for some reason). The Times explains:

This term, redolent of civics-class advice and consent, has gone the way of the Edsel.

Apparently, American presidents used to aim for some degree of precision in describing the actual limitations of their power. How quaint.

Live-blogging President Obama's 2010 State of the Union speech

Here are some other people who'll be live-blogging:

Jon Cohn (of The New Republic, on Twitter)

Chris Cillizza (of the Washington Post, on Twitter)

Ann Althouse

Talking Points Memo

9:08 - As Obama is walking through the crowd, an MSNBC announcer tells us that "we don't expect a repeat" from a year ago, when Representative Joe Wilson shouted out, "You lie!" Well, that doesn't mean anything -- we didn't expect it a year ago either.

9:11 - Obama, as usual, draws a sweeping historical parallel to the present day: we've often been uncertain in the past, but we prevailed because we came together as a nation. This seems besides the point, at least when it comes to health-care reform, since we know the country isn't going to "come together"; at best, a bill might pass by the smallest possible margin.

9:14 - People are distracted by Biden's and Pelosi's matching purples.

9:17 - "If there's anything that has united America ... it's that we all hated the bank bailout."

9:23 - An unfortunate slip of the tongue: "Slowly slum are starting to hire again." He used the good strategy of continuing as if he hadn't made a mistake.

9:29 - My mom pithily sums up the fallacy of so many politicians' rhetoric on businesses:

Small businesses are good. ... Big business sucks though. We want to help small business grow... so it can become big business and then we can hate it.

9:31 - "Meanwhile, China's not waiting to revamp its economy. ... India's not waiting." He flashed some uncharacteristically brusque anger here.

9:43 - "By now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn't take on health care because it was good politics."

9:47 - On health care, Obama concedes: "The longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people." (I should mention that my quotes here may be imprecise since I'm transcribing on the fly. I know that the prepared text has been released, but I have more trust in my own ears.)

9:49 - Obama appropriately puts most of the blame on Bush (without naming him) for the country's slide from a surplus to a deficit over the past decade.

9:54 - There's some awkward cackling from the audience when Obama says his spending freeze won't take effect until next year because the economy will be better then. He sternly responds: "That's how budgeting works."

9:58 - Obama proposes that all members of Congress post their requests for earmarks online. Isn't this counterproductive? Politicians want their constituents to know they're trying to get special benefits for their districts.

10:16 - He bluntly admits there's a disconnect between the "Change We Can Believe In" slogan and his actual administration. His explanation, on the face of it, is fairly banal and predictable: "democracy can be noisy," etc. But I find this part of the speech surprisingly poignant, and it seems that some members of the audience do too. The prolonged absence of applause is striking.

10:19 - Obama's equivalent of Bill Clinton's building a bridge to the 21st century: "A new decade stretches before us. We don't quit. I don't quit."

UPDATE: Jonathan Chait, who's generally a strong supporter of Obama, was unimpressed by the substance of the speech:

Obama suggested that we should embrace alternative energy sources even if you doubt climate science. (I’m pretty sure that, if carbon dioxide were harmless, we’d be better off sticking with the cheap energy.) He embraced some hoary populist tropes, in which “Washington” and “us” are homogenous, mutually exclusive categories, and he belongs to the second. (“Washington has been telling us to wait for decades.”) And his rationale for a budget freeze made no sense whatsoever. “I am absolutely convinced that [the stimulus] was the right thing to do,” he said, “But families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Um, why?