On January 24, Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) delivered the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.
Gov. Daniels began his response by praising President Obama for “his aggressive pursuit of the murderers of 9/11, and for bravely backing long overdue changes in public education.” The governor then turned to the issue of the economic crisis. He criticized the president’s handling of the economy and rebutted several of the president’s assertions during the address.
In contradicting the president’s claims of an improving economy and increased job growth, Gov. Daniels said, “[T]he percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades. One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today.” When referring to President Obama’s proposed tax policies, he said “the dumb way is to raise rates in a broken, grossly complex tax system, choking off growth without bringing in the revenues we need to meet our debts.” The governor then explained that the country needs “a dramatically simpler tax system of fewer loopholes and lower rates. A pause in the mindless piling on of expensive new regulations that devour dollars that otherwise could be used to hire somebody. It means maximizing on the new domestic energy technologies that are the best break our economy has gotten in years.”
Gov. Daniels also called for Medicare and Social Security reform: “The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing. Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them. It will mean that coming generations are denied the jobs they need in their youth and the protection they deserve in their later years.”
Gov. Daniels criticized the president for blaming Republicans in Congress for little forward movement and highlighted the importance of moving past party politics and uniting as one people: “It’s not fair and it’s not true for the president to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements, and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down time and time again by the president and his Democratic Senate allies…No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others. As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat. If we drift, quarreling and paralyzed, over a Niagara of debt, we will all suffer, regardless of income, race, gender, or other category.”
The governor concluded his remarks by asserting that “2012 must be the year we prove the doubters wrong. The year we strike out boldly not merely to avert national bankruptcy but to say to a new generation that America is still the world’s premier land of opportunity. Republicans will speak for those who believe in the dignity and capacity of the individual citizen; who believe that government is meant to serve the people rather than supervise them; who trust Americans enough to tell them the plain truth about the fix we are in, and to lay before them a specific, credible program of change big enough to meet the emergency we are facing.”
