State of the Union

Anyone who hasn't yet should watch the President's State of the Union speech. While I'm pretty split on Obama's policy ideas, I really liked the positive tone and was very optimistic at the end. My biggest criticism of the address is on its scope. The United States has many challenges but what we need now is a national focus on one or two issues. Here is a non-exhaustive list of topics covered in the hour long speech: budget/debt, medicare, tax reform, manufacturing, energy, climate change, infrastructure, mortgage refis, education, college financing, immigration, domestic violence, minimum wage, Iran, Syria, trade agreements, AIDS, voting process,and gun violence. All important, but none addressed long enough,with enough emphasis or with enough singular focus to make it a truly national issue.

"Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race. And today, no area holds more promise than our investments in American energy."

America needs a new space race. We need an issue to unify Americans because that's the only way something will get done right. As opposed to stop-gap measures that don't fix the problem but simply postpone it. My top priority to unite the country around would be entitlement reform. Our national debt is worrisome, and Social Security and Medicare have the largest long term implications for the national debt. My second priority would be education. Our failing education system will have dire affects long term and we can't tackle the long list of problems from the speech along with those to come in the future with smaller and smaller percentages of the citizenry receiving world class education.

While this critique is not unique to this year's address, now is a critical time to "be authors in the next great chapter of our American story."