Obama's State of the Union Speech

"The suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd," writes Peter Huber.
I listened to the President's speech last night. What I heard is the same promises he made 3 years ago, 2 years ago and 1 year ago and several points in between except now he really intends to do it. You remember transparency, honesty, no earmarks, budgetary restraint etc. Why do I have a problem with believing him. Could it be because his actions are almost opposite of his words? Didn't he recently sign a bill containing 900 earmarks? Didn't he lie about the eligibility of illegal aliens for Obamacare (Page 50/section 152)?

Of course he is going to spend even more money on alternative energy but call it investment. See the quote above. Either our President believes we are stupid or he is seriously deluded. In either case we are in deep kim chi. This is a classic St Augustine problem - he wants a balanced budget but not now, just as the world wants to see the American current account deficit eliminated but not yet(adapted in part from The Economist).

The US has bought the world a year in 2011 by extending the fiscal stimulus, and by extending Quantitative Easing (QE)(More cheap money to buy more kim chi we don't need.) As the US current account deficit shrinks, in the face of austerity, that will be bad news for the export-led models of China, Germany and Japan.

In a sense, developed world governments have a stark choice. They can prop up their economies in the short-term at the risk of making the long-term debt and trade problems worse; or they can try to be prudent, at the risk of damaging growth in the short-term and incurring electoral unpopularity.

One viewer pondering the Obama State of the Union address, stated, "
I repeat myself and the old Star Trek series, 'Beam me up Scotty, there is no intelligent life down here'."

He recommendede Matt Ridley's book, "The Rational Optimist" as an antidote to the out of body experience of listening to all the pessimistic 'experts'.