Republican Address to the Nation
Remarks of Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI)
House Budget Committee Hearing Room, Washington, DC
January 25, 2011

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In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama claimed,

“We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. … That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future.”

“We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time.”

Oh really?

Spending Mr. Obama has substituted the word “investment” for spending as if that will make us all feel better. As proven time and again the Government is not a very good investor.

1. Federal K-12 education spending has grown 219 percent faster than inflation over the past decade, yet student test scores have stagnated;
2. Thirty years of federal energy spending has failed to significantly improve the alternative energy market;
3. Massive increases in federal transportation spending have been diverted into earmarks, bike paths, and museums or allocated to budget-busting transit program.

Government should concentrate on less spending and deficit reduction and allow the private sector to invest allowing for free competition, innovation, job creation and profit.

Deficits

Current government spending is at the crisis stage, unsustainable and unaffordable. Obama announced the creation of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform last year but when he received the commission’s final report he did like the consensus and turned away from implementing its recommendations.

The burden of fiscal responsibility from the federal government now falls on Congress.

Education

No Child Left Behind is broken but Barack Obama still believes the role of the federal government in education is necessary. There was no discussion of school choice or voucher programs so students and families could choose their education venue. The highly effective D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a potential model for school voucher programs that work, is now sputtering and ready to die because Barack Obama announced early on in his administration this success would be canceled. Yet Mr. Obama’s children were placed in the same school less fortunate children will be removed from because of Obama’s choice.

Energy

Last year Solyndra and Evergreen Solar were presented as models as the future in energy independence but only after receiving $535 million in government loans from taxpayer money.

1. Solyndra withdrew its initial public offering because it got a sub-par review from an independent auditor;
2. One year after getting their half-billion dollars, Solyndra closed a factory and got rid of nearly 200 jobs.

Private sectors jobs do not remain sustainable when they have been created on the backs of government subsidies. New energy sources, creation of real jobs, and development of innovative technology comes from a competitive market in the private sector through private investments not government handouts.

Entrepreneurship

Government initially invented the Internet, developed computer chips and GPS based on the need and investment to create more national security not as programs for commercial demand.

When the private sector and entrepreneurs attained access to the basic framework of these government inventions they laid the groundwork for successful commercialization and remain the model that demonstrates free market competition promotes ideas and innovation. Government does not define the free market the private sector does. Mr. Obama doesn’t wish to support research and development but thinks government can drive the forces of commercialization and markets, a false belief.

Central planning is the real dream of Barack Obama and his Progressive ilk and he demonstrated his dishonesty by contradicting himself in his speech in front of the world.

First he said:

“None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from.”

A few minutes later he said:

“We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology … and create countless new jobs for our people.”

“We” is Obama speak for more government not the private sector.

American exceptionalism was founded on the principle that free individuals innovate and compete and profit and create sustainable jobs and a vibrant economy. It’s the people and American free spirit that creates American exceptionalism not energy Czars or government partnerships with the likes of General Electric and their CEO the new Czar of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

In reality, the State of the Union is in a financial mess, a bureaucratic nightmare of disproportionate size only producing debt yet promising what only a free private sector can deliver. Mr. Obama continues his Progressive mantra of big government and continuation of his belief that only government knows better.

Barack Obama, no leadership only promises filled with false hope. Indeed!

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I always claimed Al Gore was a self-serving fraud but this was really easy. Anyone using Hollywood for money and movies to get elected and “prove” to the world that oceans would rise, polar bears would cease to exist in Manhattan and the temperatures would turn the Arctic into a mass desert filled with condos and swimming pools had to be questioned. And who better to use than children to scare with fiction so they would come home from school hysterical that the world was ending and we would all drown or fry like an egg on an Arizona sidewalk in August.

How unusual that Al Gore would visit Greece, a country bankrupt and looking for bailout money, to confess his wayward vision and misconceptions about global warming. Why not visit a Buddhist temple, grab a little cash and repent one’s sins? Mr. Gore enlightens the world with this:

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for first-generation ethanol.”

The benefits of ethanol are “trivial,” he added, but “It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”

Oh yes, those pesky lobbyists who donate so much money to help their favorite politician get elected. Mr. Gore never met a lobbyist he didn’t like even if you had to attend fundraisers with Buddhists in California or the flim-flam Hollywood elites.

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”

But Al, you wrote a book years ago about Mother Earth and the environment just after you invented the Internet. Exactly when did you have this epiphany?

Lobbyists swayed your thinking? You convinced yourself you were a science expert, won a Grammy award, the Nobel Peace Prize, served as a visiting professor at Middle Tennessee State University, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Fisk University, and the University of California, Los Angeles and all based on what? You fooled yourself and many people along the way and I ask, based on what expertise? Where did you learn so much about the environment and science Mr. Gore?

Was it at Vanderbilt University Divinity School? Was it on the night shift for The Tennessean as an investigative reporter? At Vanderbilt Law School? You spent some time at Harvard studying writing and then government but I just don’t see science in your background. I suppose it was only in your imaginative mind similar to thinking your “talent” carried you to that Internet thingy.

Does anyone remember “gasahol” from the 1970s? Democrat’s in Congress began subsidizing farmers way back then and anything else that could be claimed as a substitute for foreign oil. I tried that garbage in a brand new car and couldn’t restart the engine and sat helpless at the filling station island. I had the whole gasoline tank drained and used the real thing to get that new car going again.

The subsidies continued through the 1990s, with the ethanol lobby finding a sympathetic ear in Clinton EPA chief and Gore protégé Carol Browner, who in 1994 banned the gasoline additive MTBE and left ethanol as the only option under clean air laws. When the Senate split 50-50 on repealing this de facto mandate, then Vice President Gore cast the deciding vote for . . . ethanol. That served Mr. Gore well in the 2000 Democratic primaries against ethanol critic Bill Bradley.

Ethanol and Mr. Gore weren’t finished as “Big Ethanol” attached itself to the global warming panic that Mr. Gore did as much as anyone to foment. Even the new tax and spend Republicans formalized the mandate and increased subsidies in the 2005 and 2007 energy bills.

A funny thing happened on the way to the carbon emissions and global warming lie. The greenies turned on ethanol and other bio-fuels as they discovered they emitted more carbon than fossil fuels.

Now some Republicans are wringing their hands for ethanol and the subsidy machine. Major corn energy subsidies such as the 54-cent-per-gallon blenders credit expire at the end of the year, and Republican Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn are encouraging the new Congress to prove its fiscal bona fides by letting them die. Chuck Grassley (R., Ethanol er IA) responded this week on Twitter:

“WashPost reports 2 of my colleagues want sunset ethanol tax credit R they ready sunset tax subsidies oilANDgas enjoys?”

Maybe with Mr. Gore’s sudden realization about ethanol he will join Mssrs. DeMint and Coburn in a bi-partisan effort to bring truth about subsidies, ethanol, global warming and his make believe world.

Although we humans emit carbon when we exhale don’t stop breathing waiting for a full Al Gore conversion. Indeed!

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