FreedomWorks Responds to the State of the Union Address

Washington, DC- Following the conclusion of President Obama’s State of the Union address, FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe released the following statement:

“As I listened to the President tonight, I wondered if we were discussing the same Union. Has he read our government’s balance sheet?  Has he noticed the Great Recession he resides over? It’s clear the President is still in campaign mode, talking a lot, but saying very little.”  

“Where were his specifics on the issues that threaten our Union’s economic and fiscal security? What is his plan to balance the budget and remove barriers to economic recovery? Where is the budget that the President was required by law to submit at the beginning of this month?”

“The economic policy portions of the President’s State of the Union speech sounded like a book report written by someone who clearly did not read the book.”

“I wish we could have heard more from the President about the 7.9% unemployment, the 35 cents the government borrows for every dollar it spends, the 7 million Americans projected to lose their preferred health care coverage as a result of ObamaCare, or the fact that the economy shrank in the final quarter of 2012.”

“I’d like to know why corporations like General Electric paid zero in corporate income tax in 2011, yet 70 percent of Americans woke up this New Year’s Day to smaller paychecks because of the tax increases hidden inside the midnight fiscal cliff deal.”

“Regulating small business owners into the ground and taxing American families into another recession is no way to strengthen the middle class.”

“If the President is serious about giving individuals a fair shot at the American Dream, he should start with laying out specifics for fundamental tax reform and closing the existing corporate loopholes in our tax code. Corporate welfare is unfair and harmful to all of us regardless of political party, and President Obama should make ending the collusion of big business and big government a top priority for his second term agenda.”

“The President claimed that additional investments in infrastructure, manufacturing, clean energy and education would not increase our deficit by a single dime- but we’ve heard this song before. The government added over $6,364,803 in new debt under his watch since 2008. Washington is spending too much, and no amount of debt ceiling and tax increases is going to solve America’s long-term problems with debt and massive unfunded entitlement liabilities.”

“To borrow some of the President’s speech jargon, a truly ‘smarter government’ is a smaller government that empowers people to control their own destiny and make economic choices on their own terms.”