Gina-Marie CheesemanBush's State of the Union Address
February 6th 2008 07:47
President George W. Bush gave his last state of the union address on January 28, 2008. Lawmakers and political experts of various political persuasions called it modest, with Bush covering issues from the economy to education.
David Gergen, former advisor to the Reagan and Clinton administrations, called Bush’s address “a modest speech with modest goals.”
The economy
“In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth, but in the short run, we can all see that that growth is slowing,” Bush declared during the beginning of his address.
“I wish that was true,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said about Bush’s remark. “Over three million manufacturing jobs have been lost, including more than 10,000 in my State of Vermont,” Sanders continued.
Bush called for a stimulus package which calls for tax cuts.
“You and I know that a temporary fix is only the first step toward meeting our challenges and solving our problems,” Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius said during the Democratic response to the address.
Since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001 the income disparities between the richest and the poorest have increased. For the first time in 2006 everyone on the Forbes 400 list was a billionaire. The 2005 Forbes 400 list contained 374 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $1.13 trillion. No new editions were added to the 2005 list.
The minimum net worth needed to make the list went from $500 million to $625 million in 1998. In 1999 the Forbes 400 list had as much wealth as bottom half of U.S. population, over a trillion dollars. The average Forbes 400 member increased their wealth by 177 percent in the last decade, and more than 55 percent in the last two years.
A 2004 study by UC Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez reported that the income of the median household in 2004 only increased by 1.6 percent. During the 1998 to 2001 period it increased by 9.5 percent.
The New York Times conducted a study on the 2003 tax cuts. They found that someone earning $26 million paid the same amount of taxes as a $200,000 to $500,000 wage earner. In a time of record federal deficits, when the U.S. military occupies two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) Bush’s tax cuts make little sense.
Health care
Bush vowed to make “health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.” To accomplish that goal Bush proposed “ending the bias in the tax code against those who do not get their health insurance through their employer.” He claimed that would “put private coverage within reach for millions.”
Bush called on Congress to “expand health savings accounts, create association health plans for small businesses, promote health information technology and confront the epidemic of junk medical lawsuits.”
Bush’s proposals to make health care more affordable are out of touch with what the majority of Americans think, according to national polls. Sixty-four percent of those polled in October 2007 said they preferred universal health insurance, even if it meant higher taxes. When 1,229 adults nationwide were asked in January 2006 if health insurance should be guaranteed for everyone, 62% said yes.
The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the U.S. as 27th in the industrialized world for infant mortality. The average life expectancy, according to the WHO, in the U.S. is age 78, ranking 25th among industrialized nations. The average number of good health years is 69, also ranking 25th, and below Slovenia. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 deaths in the U.S. are caused by lack of health insurance.
A 2005 Commonwealth International Survey on Sicker Adults found that one-half of U.S. adults said they did not see a doctor when sick, and could not afford recommended treatment. According to the study, one-third of U.S. patients spent over $1,000 in out of pocket expenses compared to 13% of British patients.
“The gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration has grown to $752 per capita,” a 2003 study published by the New England Journal of Medicine said. The study suggested that “a large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health care system.
A 2007 Commonwealth study titled, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall found that the U.S. health care system is the most costly in the world, but “underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries.”
Free trade
Bush called on Congress to pass trade agreements with Peru, Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. “We're working to break down barriers to trade and investment, wherever we can,” he said as he proceeded to tout the benefits of free trade agreements.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, the first free trade agreement between the U.S. and another nation, established a free-trade zone in North America. Signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico in 1992, it took effect on January 1, 1994, but immediately lifted tariffs on the majority of goods produced by the three participating nations, and called for the gradual elimination of most trade barriers over a 15-year period.
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s 2001 report, “Mexican wages have decreased 27% since NAFTA, while hourly income from labor is down 40%.”
The 2001 report by the Economic Policy Institute also found that when Mexico began NAFTA negotiations it had “noncompetitive production costs… due to higher prices for inputs such as diesel and electricity, higher financial costs, and higher marketing costs (due to deficient infrastructure in highways and warehouse storage…among other factors).”
Economists at the National University in Mexico City wrote a study that cited 13.3 million workers in 2000 earned less than around $3.93 a day. The study also mentions that labor production’s part of the Gross Domestic Product has decreased from 34.16% to 30.66%.
NAFTA is only the beginning of free trade agreements between the U.S. and other governments. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, ratified by both houses of congress during the summer of 2005, includes the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
CAFTA is seen as a stepping stone to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas which would include every Latin American country (except Cuba) and the U.S. The FTAA itself is a stepping stone to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which would include the countries in the western and eastern hemisphere.
Central America and the Dominican Republic make up the second largest U.S. export market behind Mexico, and is the 10th largest U.S. market worldwide. The combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Central America is equal to less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. GDP.
Environment/energy
“To build a future of energy security, we must trust in the creative genius of American researchers and entrepreneurs and empower them to pioneer a new generation of clean energy technology,” Bush said. The clean technologies Bush went on to site include coal and nuclear energy.
“And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases,” Bush proclaimed. “This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride,” he continued.
“Any presumption that the crisis of global warming can be met through voluntary measures is a fantasy,” Karen Wayland, legislative director of the National Resources Defense Council said. “Anything less than science-based, binding reductions in global warming pollution isn't going to meet the challenge.”
The Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, and the Kyoto Protocol on December 11, 1997. There is a distinction between the two: the Framework encouraged developed countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but the Protocol commits them to it.
The Protocol requires developed countries to lower greenhouse gas emissions and meet targets within five year period of 2008-2012. The reductions must add up to five percent of 1990 emissions.
Most countries agreed to the Protocol, but the U.S. and Australia, among other countries, did not. Australia finally agreed to the Protocol on Monday, December 3, 2007.
“While the launch of negotiations and a clear deadline of 2009 to end the negotiations would constitute a breakthrough, anything short of that would constitute a failure,” Indonesian Environment Minister and President of the Conference Rachmat Witoelar said.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) released a report February 2007 which indicated that the amount of carbon dioxide emissions has increased. The U.S. is five percent of the world’s population, but in 2005 was responsible for 22 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report. Bush did not mention that fact.
Iraq
Speaking of the U.S. military presence of Iraq, Bush said, “The terrorists and extremists are fighting to deny a proud people their liberty and fighting to establish safe havens for attacks across the world.”
Bush went on to discuss the troops surge. “One year ago, our enemies were succeeding in their efforts to plunge Iraq into chaos, so we reviewed our strategy and changed course.” He continued, “We launched a surge of American forces into Iraq. We gave our troops a new mission: Work with the Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pursue the enemy in his strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country.”
Bush failed to mention his 2003 State of the Union address in which he made many claims concerning Iraq, namely that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and supported terrorist networks (including al-Qaeda). The previous year Bush made the assertion during a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio that surveillance photos showed Saddam Hussein’s regime were rebuilding factories where it had once produced WMDs.
Scott Ritter, the UN's top weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998 when he resigned because he thought President Clinton was too easy on Saddam, wrote a number of editorials for various American newspapers. In a July 20, 2002 piece for the Boston Globe he cited his experience as a weapons inspector, insisting that Iraq had a “90-95 percent level of verified disarmament.”
Ritter further stated that all chemical weapons Iraq produced before 1990 “would have degraded within five years” except for mustard gas. The same goes for biological weapons which “would have neutralized through natural process within three years of manufacture.” Monitoring of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons from 1994 to 1998 did not produce “any evidence of retained proscribed activity” by Iraq to reproduce chemical and biological weapons.
Charles Duelfer, the man the Bush administration chose to complete the investigation of Iraq’s weapon’s programs, wrote in a report released in 2004 that Iraq’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991, and no “concerted efforts to restart the program” had been discovered by inspectors.
In October 2004 Duelfer told a Senate panel, “We were almost all wrong [on Iraq].” Duelfer’s report concluded that Saddam Hussein “aspired to develop a nuclear capability, but “The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions.”
Greg Thielmann, the top intelligence official at the U.S. State Department until resigning shortly before the invasion of Iraq, considered the stories that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger “bad intelligence…it was something that made no sense, in terms of the structure of the country that was allegedly planning to provide the uranium.”
David Gergen, former advisor to the Reagan and Clinton administrations, called Bush’s address “a modest speech with modest goals.”
The economy
“In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth, but in the short run, we can all see that that growth is slowing,” Bush declared during the beginning of his address.
Bush called for a stimulus package which calls for tax cuts.
“You and I know that a temporary fix is only the first step toward meeting our challenges and solving our problems,” Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius said during the Democratic response to the address.
Since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001 the income disparities between the richest and the poorest have increased. For the first time in 2006 everyone on the Forbes 400 list was a billionaire. The 2005 Forbes 400 list contained 374 billionaires, with a combined net worth of $1.13 trillion. No new editions were added to the 2005 list.
The minimum net worth needed to make the list went from $500 million to $625 million in 1998. In 1999 the Forbes 400 list had as much wealth as bottom half of U.S. population, over a trillion dollars. The average Forbes 400 member increased their wealth by 177 percent in the last decade, and more than 55 percent in the last two years.
A 2004 study by UC Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez reported that the income of the median household in 2004 only increased by 1.6 percent. During the 1998 to 2001 period it increased by 9.5 percent.
The New York Times conducted a study on the 2003 tax cuts. They found that someone earning $26 million paid the same amount of taxes as a $200,000 to $500,000 wage earner. In a time of record federal deficits, when the U.S. military occupies two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) Bush’s tax cuts make little sense.
Health care
Bush vowed to make “health care more affordable and accessible for all Americans.” To accomplish that goal Bush proposed “ending the bias in the tax code against those who do not get their health insurance through their employer.” He claimed that would “put private coverage within reach for millions.”
Bush called on Congress to “expand health savings accounts, create association health plans for small businesses, promote health information technology and confront the epidemic of junk medical lawsuits.”
Bush’s proposals to make health care more affordable are out of touch with what the majority of Americans think, according to national polls. Sixty-four percent of those polled in October 2007 said they preferred universal health insurance, even if it meant higher taxes. When 1,229 adults nationwide were asked in January 2006 if health insurance should be guaranteed for everyone, 62% said yes.
The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the U.S. as 27th in the industrialized world for infant mortality. The average life expectancy, according to the WHO, in the U.S. is age 78, ranking 25th among industrialized nations. The average number of good health years is 69, also ranking 25th, and below Slovenia. According to the Institute of Medicine, 18,000 deaths in the U.S. are caused by lack of health insurance.
A 2005 Commonwealth International Survey on Sicker Adults found that one-half of U.S. adults said they did not see a doctor when sick, and could not afford recommended treatment. According to the study, one-third of U.S. patients spent over $1,000 in out of pocket expenses compared to 13% of British patients.
“The gap between U.S. and Canadian spending on health care administration has grown to $752 per capita,” a 2003 study published by the New England Journal of Medicine said. The study suggested that “a large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health care system.
A 2007 Commonwealth study titled, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall found that the U.S. health care system is the most costly in the world, but “underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries.”
Free trade
Bush called on Congress to pass trade agreements with Peru, Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. “We're working to break down barriers to trade and investment, wherever we can,” he said as he proceeded to tout the benefits of free trade agreements.
The North American Free Trade Agreement, the first free trade agreement between the U.S. and another nation, established a free-trade zone in North America. Signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico in 1992, it took effect on January 1, 1994, but immediately lifted tariffs on the majority of goods produced by the three participating nations, and called for the gradual elimination of most trade barriers over a 15-year period.
According to the Economic Policy Institute’s 2001 report, “Mexican wages have decreased 27% since NAFTA, while hourly income from labor is down 40%.”
The 2001 report by the Economic Policy Institute also found that when Mexico began NAFTA negotiations it had “noncompetitive production costs… due to higher prices for inputs such as diesel and electricity, higher financial costs, and higher marketing costs (due to deficient infrastructure in highways and warehouse storage…among other factors).”
Economists at the National University in Mexico City wrote a study that cited 13.3 million workers in 2000 earned less than around $3.93 a day. The study also mentions that labor production’s part of the Gross Domestic Product has decreased from 34.16% to 30.66%.
NAFTA is only the beginning of free trade agreements between the U.S. and other governments. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, ratified by both houses of congress during the summer of 2005, includes the United States, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
CAFTA is seen as a stepping stone to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas which would include every Latin American country (except Cuba) and the U.S. The FTAA itself is a stepping stone to the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which would include the countries in the western and eastern hemisphere.
Central America and the Dominican Republic make up the second largest U.S. export market behind Mexico, and is the 10th largest U.S. market worldwide. The combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Central America is equal to less than 0.5 percent of the U.S. GDP.
Environment/energy
“To build a future of energy security, we must trust in the creative genius of American researchers and entrepreneurs and empower them to pioneer a new generation of clean energy technology,” Bush said. The clean technologies Bush went on to site include coal and nuclear energy.
“And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases,” Bush proclaimed. “This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride,” he continued.
“Any presumption that the crisis of global warming can be met through voluntary measures is a fantasy,” Karen Wayland, legislative director of the National Resources Defense Council said. “Anything less than science-based, binding reductions in global warming pollution isn't going to meet the challenge.”
The Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted in 1992, and the Kyoto Protocol on December 11, 1997. There is a distinction between the two: the Framework encouraged developed countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but the Protocol commits them to it.
The Protocol requires developed countries to lower greenhouse gas emissions and meet targets within five year period of 2008-2012. The reductions must add up to five percent of 1990 emissions.
Most countries agreed to the Protocol, but the U.S. and Australia, among other countries, did not. Australia finally agreed to the Protocol on Monday, December 3, 2007.
“While the launch of negotiations and a clear deadline of 2009 to end the negotiations would constitute a breakthrough, anything short of that would constitute a failure,” Indonesian Environment Minister and President of the Conference Rachmat Witoelar said.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) released a report February 2007 which indicated that the amount of carbon dioxide emissions has increased. The U.S. is five percent of the world’s population, but in 2005 was responsible for 22 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report. Bush did not mention that fact.
Iraq
Speaking of the U.S. military presence of Iraq, Bush said, “The terrorists and extremists are fighting to deny a proud people their liberty and fighting to establish safe havens for attacks across the world.”
Bush went on to discuss the troops surge. “One year ago, our enemies were succeeding in their efforts to plunge Iraq into chaos, so we reviewed our strategy and changed course.” He continued, “We launched a surge of American forces into Iraq. We gave our troops a new mission: Work with the Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pursue the enemy in his strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country.”
Bush failed to mention his 2003 State of the Union address in which he made many claims concerning Iraq, namely that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and supported terrorist networks (including al-Qaeda). The previous year Bush made the assertion during a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio that surveillance photos showed Saddam Hussein’s regime were rebuilding factories where it had once produced WMDs.
Scott Ritter, the UN's top weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998 when he resigned because he thought President Clinton was too easy on Saddam, wrote a number of editorials for various American newspapers. In a July 20, 2002 piece for the Boston Globe he cited his experience as a weapons inspector, insisting that Iraq had a “90-95 percent level of verified disarmament.”
Ritter further stated that all chemical weapons Iraq produced before 1990 “would have degraded within five years” except for mustard gas. The same goes for biological weapons which “would have neutralized through natural process within three years of manufacture.” Monitoring of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons from 1994 to 1998 did not produce “any evidence of retained proscribed activity” by Iraq to reproduce chemical and biological weapons.
Charles Duelfer, the man the Bush administration chose to complete the investigation of Iraq’s weapon’s programs, wrote in a report released in 2004 that Iraq’s ability to produce nuclear weapons had “progressively decayed” since 1991, and no “concerted efforts to restart the program” had been discovered by inspectors.
In October 2004 Duelfer told a Senate panel, “We were almost all wrong [on Iraq].” Duelfer’s report concluded that Saddam Hussein “aspired to develop a nuclear capability, but “The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions.”
Greg Thielmann, the top intelligence official at the U.S. State Department until resigning shortly before the invasion of Iraq, considered the stories that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger “bad intelligence…it was something that made no sense, in terms of the structure of the country that was allegedly planning to provide the uranium.”
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