President Barack Obama laid out a wide-ranging policy agenda when he delivered the State of the Union on Tuesday night. Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour, fixing the voting system, comprehensive immigration reform, action on climate change, transforming early childhood education and enacting tougher gun control measures. The president once again, underscored the importance of deficit reduction that must be undertaken in a balanced way and repeated his commitment to tackling entitlement changes, including Medicare.
But would President Obama’s proposals really tackle the deep-seated problems facing America? Would they make a difference for the 46 million who live at or near the poverty line? Or the millions that are stuck in low wage jobs or to the many families who lost their homes to foreclosure and have seen their wealth vanish?
David Coates, Worrell Professor of Anglo-American Studies, Wake Forest University argues cogently that, because of the scale of the problems in the U.S., President Obama’s policy proposals fell far short of what’s required.
“…Mainly what we got from the president last night, even in the most populist moments of the Address, were superficial proposals that at best could only scrape the surface of problems so deeply embedded in our society that their solution clearly requires root-and-branch reform. It was not so much that problems were ignored in the Address. It was rather that the solutions offered to them were sufficiently modest as to seem at times almost derisible.”
Added Coates, “Last night there was poverty aplenty in the state of the union: poverty in policy and vision in Washington, to match the poverty of so many of our neighbors in the rest of America. Last night was an opportunity lost.”
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