One more comment on Obama's Speech

This afternoon I was able to see the speech on YouTube. For some reason I missed a key point when I read the speech. Even if one can buy the religious reconciliation message I was troubled when hearing his discussion of economics.

He describes anxieties facing white americans in these terms "They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense." Part of the reason some Americans think there is a middle class squeeze is because politicians create the impression that there is one. If you look at the data carefully, the claims about the squeeze evaporate. Indeed, wages have been stagnant over the last decade for many americans, but compensation has not.

He goes on to suggest that the source of white resentment should be based on "a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many." Is our corporate culture really "rife with inside dealing?" Do "economic policies favor the few over the many?" Did he support the economic stimulus package which had a very different set of benefits? Of course he did. I would describe that as not benefitting the few over the many, but the short term over the long term.

Finally his shoddy economic analysis suggest "This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit." Anyone who has that limited an understanding of the benefits of globalization has not looked closely at places like South Carolina. Roger Milliken became a bell weather for trying to hold on to the textile industry in South Carolina. But as a 2006 economic outlook conference suggested at the University of South Carolina - the state would continue to grow with the four t's - "technology, talent, trade, and taxes" The textile mills which left South Carolina more than a decade ago were replaced with firms that manufactured more valuable goods and expanding service industries. Reading those passages suggests that Obama would subscribe to the notion that when we moved from horses to autos that he would have preferred to protect the American jobs making buggy whips. That is nonsense and he should understand that.