What he said

State of the Union 2013, As Delivered

Over the last few years, both parties have worked together to reduce the deficit by more than $2.5 trillion, mostly through spending cuts, but also by raising tax rates on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

As a result, we are more than halfway towards the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that economists say we need to stabilize our finances.

What economists? Who? Somebody on the editorial page of the WSJ?

He said the sequester is “a really bad idea.”

But he also said this.

Now, some in this Congress have proposed preventing only the defense cuts [in the sequester] by making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training, Medicare and Social Security benefits.

That idea is even worse.

I wonder what this means.

On Medicare, I’m prepared to enact reforms that will achieve the same amount of health care savings by the beginning of the next decade as the reforms proposed by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.

This, anyway, is reassuring.

And I am open to additional reforms from both parties, so long as they don’t violate the guarantee of a secure retirement.

Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep, but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.

And then came this.

To hit the rest of our deficit reduction target, we should do what leaders in both parties have already suggested and save hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and the well-connected. 

After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? 

How is that fair? 

Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits, but not closing some loopholes? 

How does that promote growth?

And his idea of tax reform.

The American people deserve a tax code that helps small businesses spend less time filling out complicated forms and more time expanding and hiring, a tax code that ensures billionaires with high- powered accountants can’t work the system and pay a lower rate than their hard-working secretaries, a tax code that lowers incentives to move jobs overseas and lowers tax rates for businesses and manufacturers that are creating jobs right here in the United States of America.

He then scolded the Republicans, though not by name, for driving the government from one “manufactured crisis” to the next, stressing consumers and scaring investors.

And then he said,

Deficit reduction alone is not an economic plan.

A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs, that must be the North Star that guides our efforts.

He went on for a bit about a jobs program the Republicans have already rejected.

Some of it was either very hi-tech or sci-fi, depending on how look at it.

He spoke about coping with global warming but insisted that would be consistent with the push for economic growth.

He urged more clean energy research, citing wind and solar power in particular, and insisted this is good for the jobs picture.

And a little pie in the sky,

So tonight, I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good.

He went on the some details of his infrastructure rebuilding projects.

And then the holdup of the homeowner refinancing bill, early childhood education, and education reforms generally.

He went on to immigration reform, Democrat style, citizenship and votes and all.

He had a bit more. But that was the gist of it.