Same Old, Same Old

Barack Obama's SOTU last night was less partisan than I thought it was going to be, but nonetheless, it was still full of straw man arguments, half-truths, and out right falsehoods.  Going through all of them would require a few hundred pages, but since I don't have that kind of time, I will focus on just a couple of the more egregious ones.

Here is a good explanation of the stupidity of the continued use of Warren Buffet's secretary as a symbol for raising taxes on the rich (Mr. Buffet's secretary was of course a guest of President Obama last night):

Warren Buffett’s secretary is reportedly sitting in the box with the First Lady tonight. Obviously, President Obama will repeat the utterly false claim that Warren Buffett bears a lower tax burden than his secretary does. If you understand the varying tax treatment of labor and capital income at the corporate level — the former being deductible from taxable income, the latter a part of taxable income — then you understand why Buffett’s claim is false. If you further understand how screwed up the tax calculation on phantom capital gains is, how taxing the principal of an investment already taxes its return, and how America’s corporate income tax came about in the first place (Congress enacted it as a substitute for individual income taxation, after the Supreme Court declared direct income taxes unconstitutional), then you understand that those who defend Buffett’s false claim about the undertaxed wealthy are either ignorant or dishonest.

Tevi Troy on Obama's health care program, regarding which he hardly said a word:

In addition, Obama devoted only 44 words out of 7,000 to his expensive and unpopular health-care law, his so-called signature achievement. He made the claim that “our health-care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program,” which an AP fact check called only “half true.” Even that may have been generous. The law does in fact create a new program, with multiple new government bureaucracies to administer its subsidies, exchanges, and new insurance regulations.

And here is the full NRO symposium on the speech.

Just in closing, I think it's interesting that President Obama barely mentioned Obamacare or the American Recovery Reinvestment Act, his two signature achievements.  He railed against the idea of government bailouts only about thirty minutes after he touted the great job creator that is GM (which got huge amounts of bailout monies).  Again on the energy front, Obama touted that his energy policy would use all available sources of energy:  it would be an all of the above strategy.  But just last week he halted the Keystone XL pipeline.  And what about all the inactivity on the oil rigs on our coasts?

In case you want to read a good speech, here is the one Mitch Daniels gave in response to the SOTU.