Obama’s Meaningless Speech

It has been well received. It had lots of nice things in it. It might have helped our unemployment problem.

That’s it.

It was a political speech designed to begin Obama’s re-election campaign. We have a year of this pointless stuff to come. Such is the total collapse of our political process that everything said, all the content of the pretty speeches, and all the serious comment in the press, is an adornment of will be an interminable election cycle.

It has very little to do with jobs.

Why?

Precisely because it was an election speech.

That means the Republicans cannot vote for it. Nor can they ignore it. What they can do is to debate it, eviscerate it, and attempt to debase it sufficiently that Obama cannot claim the political win he so desperately needs.

All of which means that, by the time something actually gets passed into law, it will be watered down and far different from whatever we heard yesterday. And it will do precious little to alleviate the plight of our fellow citizens who are unemployed.

This makes it almost an worthless exercise for us to examine the proposal too much. Nice though it appears. The important message for anyone interested in economic policy and the economy in general is that politics now is more important than solving economic problems. We can expect nothing of substance to be decided as the bitter opposition to Obama digs in even more deeply.

His speech can be called a political win. But from our point of view it is meaningless.