From the office of U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski:
MIKULSKI STATEMENT PRIOR TO PRESIDENT OBAMA’S STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
U.S. Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) issued the following statement today in advance of President Obama’s State of the Union address:
“President Obama’s blueprint for rebuilding America by creating jobs today and jobs tomorrow is the right approach for our country. I strongly support a plan for an infrastructure bank, which invests our money here at home and will create construction jobs fixing our roads, bridges, and water and sewer projects.
“I agree with President Obama that America should be a place that supports our middle class, where everybody gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same rules.
“We need a tax code that’s fair and protects middle-class jobs, not one that’s rigged to reward people at the top or ship jobs overseas. At the same time, we must figure out how to reduce our debt without reducing opportunity.
“America does its best when we work together to get things done. We shouldn’t be acting like the Red Party and the Blue Party, we should start behaving like the Red, White and Blue Party.”
Senator Mikulski will be accompanied to tonight’s State of the Union address by Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
She has invited Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett, who has worked with Senator Mikulski on job creating measures, to attend as her guest.
I am so glad to have Senator Mikulski in Washington to look out for our interests. Everyone who has looked at economics theory knows that if we give our government enough money they will be able to have each and every one of us employed. Now we need her to get legislation started to make it mandatory for everyone in this country to hire someone. Just think if we did that nobody would be out of a job anywhere. If we force all business owners (we know that they are the 1% who hoard money) to double their workforce all problems will be solved.
Really why haven’t we thought of this before? Government does a great job of creating jobs, turn it all over to them.
Funny. Are you on the stand-up tour?
Surely you jest. Barbara Mikulski is another one who has had her seat WAY to long.
How can anyone actually make this statement!!! Over the past two weeks Obama turned down the pipeline, which Canada is ready to give to China. The GM Corp announced closing a larger plant here and opening in China. Also, he just gave a defense contract to build the US Armys Hawk plane to Brazil!! (Irans friend) He is chasing Americans away from the US and giving all our jobs oversees!! Does anybody pay attention!!Look at the small business that get affected by these decisions! What about the pipe company that has the pipe, employees and infrastucture to build the pipe line and now will have excess pipe valued at near othing and have to lay off thousands of emloyees!! WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!!
It does help when corporate America can outsource jobs overseas instead of paying what any of you would consider a living wage. Does that surprise you? Should we turn all of our hope to corporate America and their needs? It must be warm and sunny where you live. And everybody smiles. And the air is clean and the water pure.
Can you really blame Corporate America? If you had a choice to pay out of your pocket $2.00 for a loaf of Wonder Bread or $200.00 for the same loaf…what would you do! Our government is chasing Corporate America out of the US!! Businesses are hit with high taxes, high insurance rates, high unemployment rates and cannot effort to be sucessful here. What incentatives has our government given to any businesses? My husband is self employeed, cannot efford to pay employees, we pay over $1000. per month for medical and Obama wants to hit him with more taxes! He cant even collect unemployment being the owner but he sure pays alot in unemployment taxes already! People create the jobs not the government but if the government keeps attacking people, who will want to put their neck on the line and start businesses?
@ VOLUNTEERMOM – Supporting China by buying their imports while they float our debt isn’t the answer either. We are hooked on cheap goods from China, oil from the Middle East and drugs from Central and South America. Career politicians are sucking us dry while they divide this nation with trumped up rhetoric that idiots buy hook, line and sinker.
I agree!! Term limits need o be set for anyone in politics!! We should be taking the deal from Canada for the pipeline and researching other areas to drill and not depend on anyone for oil.and not giving the pipeline to China. We should not be forcing companies to look oversees nor should our government be signing US defense contracts with Brazil!
How about take care of the American people who support this country!! Close the borders coming in and going out until we fix the problem we have here. First thing to do, VOTE!! Say good bye to Obama and his anti-american ways!!
Volunteermom. No one forces US corporations to look or go overseas to establish manufacturing plants. They go own on their own for their bottom line. I’m sure you don’t listen to NPR. If you did you would have heard yesterday that Apple has a 40% profit margin on the iPhone. I do not fault them for their success. But their reliance on Chinese firms to manufacture their phones has enabled them to score substantial profits. And if you cared you could see what the cost is to the environment in China as a product of the toxic manufacturing operations. You would also learn that Beijing actually has days where it is unsafe for people to go outside in the pollution, so Americans living there try to filter their air in their homes and try to go places that are indoors.
Volunteermom,
In addition to David Porters comments, imagine a Chinese manufacturing compound consisting of 250,000 people, living in 500 person dormitories, working 12 hours per day, 2 shifts per day, 6 days per week, for approximately $17 per day, and virtually no additional benefits of any kind. Those manufacturing plants exist in China. Where in America could we compete with that?
@David A. Porter;
We need to stop exporting jobs to foreign countries.
We need to bring back all those automotive manufacturing jobs we’ve sent across the border to Canada. Canadians are sucking the life out of the US economy. It should be illegal for US companies to manufacture anything in Canada.
When will this Canadian vampirism on the American worker be stopped?
Buy American,
It will be stopped when Americans quit buying anything from Canada. The same applies to illegal drugs. If Americans would not buy them they would disappear.
When American workers can compete on a fairly level playing field with foreign workers then manufacturing will return to the US. This is no easy task since our standard of living is so much higher than most of the other countries of the world.
Can you please tell our government that too!!! How can our government actually sign a contract to build the US Armys Hawk fighter planes with Brazil. Remind you that Brazil is a friend of Iran!This stupid decision is not only crazy thinking that some other county is building our defenses but also the amout of job layoffs that means for the US!!t the rate Obama is going, nothing is going to be made in America soon!!
The Army does not fly fighter planes.
Brazil is not manufacturing fighter planes for any US Armed Forces.
Get your facts straight before you post such absolute clueless drivel.
@ Porter – please read the link below…I got my facts straight!
video.foxnews.com/v/1402465911001/us-air-force-gives-big-contract-to-brazil
Let’s try again Volunteermom.
The US Army does not fly fighter planes – that job is reserved for the US Air Force… maybe you heard of them – they split from the US Army Air Corps in 1947.
I can’t watch videos where I am and if you take your news from Faux News I can see why you are intellectually challenged. They generally water it down to simple bits that people like you can digest. Even they canned Glenn Beck after a while.
The only thing Brazil is currently making that the US may use is a propeller driven trainer. TRAINER. PROPELLER DRIVEN.
Try this on for size: Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano
Propeller driven – counter insurgency NOT Fighter – about as complex as a P-51 Mustang – Not even close to an F-35… and not even a P-80 Shooting Star. Glad you aren’t into aviation. From your perspective I’m sure a C-5 looks like a bomber.
Common sense, basic math!!! Give incentative to the all business and tax breaks so they create businesses and jobs in the US. The more jobs, the more taxes collected and more social security collected. Less money goes out the door of the govt to pay unemployment and welfare!Now our govt has the money, not to rely on other countries, increase our defense and to care for its people and military that have worked hard and deserve it!!
Is it really that hard?
The businesses, especially small ones, are not going to hire anyone with Obamacare hanging over their heads. What good are tax credits with all the uncertainty of this nightmare This was confirmed by a survey of small businesses conducted by the US Chamber of Commerce. The uncertainty is keeping them from hiring because they don’t know what their costs will be.
Government doesn’t create jobs; private enterprise does, and they are not doing it as long as Obama’s policies are in place.
I would suspect that if Obama is booted out of office and his job-killing regulations are overturned, the economy will take off. I further predict the stock market will take off the day after Obama is defeated.
Non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”), in formal logic, is an argument in which its conclusion does not follow from its premises.[1] In a non sequitur, the conclusion could be either true or false, but the argument is fallacious because there is a disconnection between the premise and the conclusion.
Any argument that takes the following form is a non sequitur
1.If A is true, then B is true.
2.B is true.
3.Therefore, A is true.
Even if the premises and conclusion are all true, the conclusion is not a necessary consequence of the premises. This sort of non sequitur is also called affirming the consequent.
An example of affirming the consequent would be:
1.If I am a human (A) then I am a mammal. (B)
2.I am a mammal. (B)
3.Therefore, I am a human. (A)
While the conclusion may be true, it does not follow from the premises: I could be another type of mammal without also being a human. The truth of the conclusion is independent of the truth of its premises – it is a ‘non sequitur’.
This is such a tired argument to make. If we follow your false logic we would easily be able to say that Clinton created the raring 90’s and Bush destroyed it in the 2000’s.
Unfortunately, life is never as simple as we want it to be.
@noble, can you please give me specifics on how Clinton created those “raring [sic] 90’s?”
He didnt!! He lived off the coat tales of Reagan who gave tax breaks to the Americans and built our defenses. Clinton came in and the county was on a upward rise since people had money to invest in our country. Clinton had the money to spend and spent every bit but also cut many of our defense programs and as we all know, closed his eyes to any possible threat of BinLaden. Bush gets in office,he get slammed with 9/11 and, how many natural disasters between states burning down, tsunamis, hurricanes etc. Not only is he trying to help rebuild homes and businesses that get destroyed but also now needs to build our defenses that Clinton cut! Congress,Senate and the American people all agree that we need to go to war,knowing that he said “this will be a very long hard war.” He now has to invests billions in Homeland security and our military! Yes, Bush spend a lot of money!! Well spent money to rebuild our country after mother nature, terrorist groups and Clinton tried to destroy us!
No I cannot, because it is not logically possible to do so. That was my point.
You can think anything, but that doesn’t make it true.
It is absurd to believe we can warmonger our way out of the financial mess in which we find ourselves, particularly given that is one of the main reasons we are here.
no Billy Jack, (terrible move by the way, we are in this mess because we spend more than we bring in. it was happening before the war and since entitlements make up the largest percentage of outlays perhaps that we would be a good place to start. however, I am all for cutting a reasonable mount out of defense.
Nicholas, we had a balanced budget before you got your money back. Your money that was paying down the debt. Before we engaged in two wars, one of them elective, that were off budget.
Actually David we never had a balanced budget. The National Debt was not reduced at all during the Clinton Presidency.
Fiscal
Year Year
Ending National Debt Deficit
FY1993 09/30/1993 $4.411488 trillion
FY1994 09/30/1994 $4.692749 trillion $281.26 billion
FY1995 09/29/1995 $4.973982 trillion $281.23 billion
FY1996 09/30/1996 $5.224810 trillion $250.83 billion
FY1997 09/30/1997 $5.413146 trillion $188.34 billion
FY1998 09/30/1998 $5.526193 trillion $113.05 billion
FY1999 09/30/1999 $5.656270 trillion $130.08 billion
FY2000 09/29/2000 $5.674178 trillion $17.91 billion
FY2001 09/28/2001 $5.807463 trillion $133.29 billion
The National Debt never went down as Clinton claimed.
They Clinton Administration reduced the debt but, never balanced the budged and never created a surplus.
Clinton swapped funds around from the various Federal Trust Funds and under the smoke and mirrors scheme he faked a surplus. In other words he borrowed money from funds that must be paid back, and counted them as government revenue.
He was able to do this with a complicit GOP controlled Congress.
@David, you make the claim the wars were “off budget,” were is your source for this? It is true that much of the cost was in the Original FY budgets, but they were added in supplemental spending bills. The government funds many programs, and not just the war in that fashion. For example, many of the Unemployment Insurance extensions were funded in this manner. There is nothing nefarious in this practice in of itself in spite of your implications. But you make the claim that wars busted the budget, unfortunately, your argument does not completely hold water. Other expenditures such Social Security, Medicare and welfare have grown at a faster rate than defense spending over the last 15 years. The budget under Obama has exploded and the costs of the wars are only a small fraction of the costs including the cost of increased interest.
Nicholas, you are such a downer. What are you taking delight in? The fact that my understanding that we had a balanced budget as Clinton left office is flawed. Or that you are correct that nothing we have attempted to do to be fiscally responsible has worked – ever?
If things were paid for that were not a part of the original budget proposed by the president – they were off budget – and their impact on the debt was still real. Just hidden. One necessary war and one elective war were stupid ideas. We are supposed to sustain two wars at the same time according to Pentagon policy and we could barely combat guys hiding in caves using cellphones inside of the ten years we have been there. And I loved the Shock and Awe. It was like the fourth of July – oh wait… I guess that was the plan after all. Nothing like bright and shiny things to distract simple minds.
So let me review your basic math: Decrease revenue to allow businesses to hire people and increase defense spending. I think that has been tried already. And if you haven’t learned from history you are doomed to repeat it. And with that kind of simplistic reasoning you will appeal to a lot of simple people. And you could be the President someday…. just like in the movie “Idioccracy”.
As long as Sasha and her sister are on their way to great schools in fancy clothes and futures so bright they have to wear shades, the rest of us can have the crumbs. Not just now, it’s always been that way – bottom line – looking out for number one. Help the middle class by giving them higher health costs, energy costs, food costs, etc etc all the while telling them the lie that you are helping them. A good politician is a retired one – to be nice.
Sometime in the last 10 years I’ve stopped watching the SOTU. I read the transcript the next day (I haven’t yet).
I remember from when I was about 10 I would watch it and found it really inspiring and interesting. That lasted quite a while. But somewhere I decided it was so much pomp, circumstance, and political theater, it wasn’t worth my time. Soon after that, it actually started to disgust me.
Now I feel like it’s just like watching the Super Bowl: 1 hour of football destroyed by 3 hours of commercials and idiots talking– no substance
The last one I remember watching was 2002 after 9/11.
I’m with Mr Nasney. I would further add that, as Pelosi states that food stamps and unemployment payments stimulate the economy, why worry about jobs at all? Get everyone on food stamps and unemployment and this economy will be humming, baby! Haaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!
The scary thing is that so many still believe the patently ridiculous statements of these people.
Wish I could contribute something to this discussion, but ya’ll pretty much nailed it!
The president seemed to stress working together and getting the job done for America. It’s a shame he didn’t feel that way when he and the rest of the Dems rammed Obamacare down our throats. Just that action itself showed what a dishonest individual he really is. He doesn’t seem to feel like working with Congress is a good idea when he makes his presidential decrees like not deporting illegals unless they have committed a crime beside being here illegally.
Hydesman, thank you for remembering how health care was jammed down our throats. Even Congress didn’t know what was in the bill, and the Speaker of the House Pelosi made the idiotic comment that we would all find out after the bill was passed. If that doesn’t scare Americans, I don’t know what will. It was a page out of Nazi Germany and how they rolled over for Hitler. If that wasn’t bad enough, Obama stops the pipeline from Canada because it was being too rushed.
Did you have a representative in congress? Yes, I think you did. Did the insurance companies lobby hard to get rid of the Public Option which would have been sensible rather than insisting everyone buy insurance? Yes they did. You got what everyone else wanted that they could agree to. It sucks. It’s not Obamacare. It’s called politics and it has a way of taking grand ideas and turning them into crap.
David,
You are correct, the Affordable Health Care Act is crap.
“America does its best when we work together to get things done. We shouldn’t be acting like the Red Party and the Blue Party, we should start behaving like the Red, White and Blue Party.”
This from the mouth of a career politician who votes the party line 94% of the time (110th Congress) – precious.
Amen, Localguy. I’m surprised the Dagger wastes space on her latest tripe… “I support Obama cause he has a big “D” (after his name)… blah, blah, I love Obama, yada, yada, if I were 80 years younger, rowwlll… a few trillion more in the hole and we’ll have this economy on track…