The College Fix

If you listened to the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening, you may have been confused. The rosy picture he painted of America as a thriving, secure, prosperous, and upwardly mobile nation doesn’t match reality, as you and I know it. In fact, Obama’s reckless deficit spending has taken this country to the edge of financial collapse, leaving us jobless, economically stagnant, lacking in innovation, and weak in our national defenses.

The president’s speech was pure fantasy: “Think about the America within our reach,” he said. “A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.” Presumably, if we stick with Obama, all of these wonders will be ours.

Reality Check: We spend more on education than any one else, yet we barely rank in the top ten in educational achievement. Companies are moving high-tech jobs to India, where a vast pool of smart, skilled, and low-cost labor awaits.

We’re not in control of our own energy future because we haven’t built a nuclear power plant in this country in more than thirty years. This means our rising energy demands cause us to be increasingly dependent on oil imported from our sworn enemies. Meanwhile, Obama says he wants to raise taxes on people who take risks, start businesses, and create jobs.

This economy isn’t built to last; it’s on its way to being last. We are headed toward a Greek-style economic collapse. Yet the president spoke as if we are just four more Obama-led years away from a government-engineered utopia.

“We’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion,” he said. But Obama has done nothing to curb the explosion of entitlement spending, which will eventually cause our economy to implode under the weight of an aging, government-dependent population.

“The state of our union is getting stronger,” the president said. But saying it doesn’t make it so. How can he offer solutions if he can’t even acknowledge the seriousness of the problems we face? Last night Obama made it clear why he is not the man to lead this nation for the next four years.

A Dose of Reality

The only thing resembling a true State of the Union speech came from Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, in his response to the president’s address. Unlike Obama, he acknowledged just how dangerous our current big-government economic policies are: “The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends.  No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.”

In his speech, Obama wasn’t describing the land you and I live in. Instead, he was describing a fictional country — the United States of Obama — a place where our $15 trillion national debt and 8.5 percent unemployment rate don’t exist, a place where spending trillions more than we have doesn’t indenture young people to a lifetime of servitude under a crippling government debt.

Last night Obama didn’t tell us about the state of the union, he told us about the state of his imagination.

This article originally appeared in the International Business Times, and is reprinted here with permission. Follow Nathan on Twitter @nathanharden