We must address entitlement reform (editorial by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson)
CORPUS CHRISTI — The president's annual State of the Union address is an opportunity for our country's elected leader to put aside partisan politics, talk to Congress and the American people about our country's direction and outline his priorities. This speech to the nation has carried even greater weight during the trying times, when Americans look to the president for unifying and inspiring leadership.
Unfortunately, President Obama's 2012 State of the Union address missed this mark. Our economic recovery is still very fragile. Nearly one-half of the 13 million unemployed Americans have been out of work for more than six months, the highest proportion of long-term unemployed since the Labor Department started tracking the statistic in 1948.
How to boost economic recovery and spur businesses to invest and create more jobs remains our country's most critical priority. For the past three years, the higher taxes and ongoing threats of new taxes, skyrocketing government deficits and over-regulation have put a wet blanket on new hiring. But rather than offering a new, more hopeful direction, the president's State of the Union speech focused on familiar calls for higher taxes and even bigger government.
In 2009 and 2010, a Democratic-controlled Congress approved the president's priorities, including sweeping changes to our health care system that will begin next year. These priorities produced an unprecedented surge in spending and bigger government, including nearly $1 trillion in economic stimulus that has raised the national debt to $15.2 trillion. But the situation today is worse by any measure that is important to ordinary Americans: Unemployment is higher, the rate of foreclosures is higher, gasoline prices are higher and 46 million Americans are living in poverty. For the first time in our history, our national debt is larger than our gross domestic product.
http://www.caller.com/news/2012/feb/10/we-must-address-entitlement-reform/
[font color=violet]Different messenger, same message of Republican talking points...[/font]
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Thanks to that stimulus.
Tax cuts for the rich and lack of regulation of Wall St. are what got us into this mess and the stimulus and HC reform are not related, nor has either created "bigger government".
What a buch of horse puckey, meant to distract from the real causes of the mess we're in and to mislead low-information voters. Eight years of Republican rule is what got us into this hellhole. And that included:
unfair over-taxation of the middle class
too many tax cuts for the rich & corprats plopped on the national credit card
endless corprat tax loopholes and subsidies
two unnecessary wars also plopped on the national credit card
lack of regulation, particularly of Wall St.
Jobs? How many damn jobs bills have Republicans introduced? ZERO. Their solution? MORE of what got us into this mess - more tax cuts and more deregulation. More privatization of public money and public services, more gutting of unions, more bleeding of federal and public sector jobs, and ripping huge tears in what few social safety nets are left for those who have been arbitrarily hurled into them due to others' greed in the past 10 years.
And all that's gonna help HOW? Bullshit! 
