State of the Union
Stayed up to watch this the other night. Yeah, I know it's been a few days and I am so behind the curve. However I have a few impressions that I would like to share. Bear with me while I get political.
There were things that were mentioned that I liked - I liked the idea of making changes to the unemployment system to make it more focused on getting people jobs again. I think I'd like to see or hear more of that kind of thinking with the welfare system too. Like instead of these programs just giving people fish to feed them for a day, they could teach them to fish and help them eat for a lifetime.
I agree that the infrastructure of this country needs some updating. And with the cost of some of the emerging technologies starting to come down, now isn't a bad time for making some improvements. And as far as energy - I think the broad spectrum attitude is a much better bet than focusing on any one single technology. If for no other reason than a system using many sources will not be severely impacted by shorts in any one form. The same goes for potentially negative environmental side effects.
I didn't like everything I heard though and I was also a little sorry to not hear a few things. The two things that sent up warning flags for me were the taxing of multinational corporations. I don't want government policy to encourage outsourcing, but at the same time I don't want government policy to punish a company for doing business overseas. We can no more exist in a vacuum in a business sense than we can in a political sense.
The other was the statement to reduce federal funding to colleges and universities that raise tuition. That I thought was just laughably scary naive. The state of Michigan reduced funding to the state university I was going to one year, you know what happened? Instead of the originally projected 9% tuition hike, I got an 18% tuition hike. It made college so much more affordable.
Also while this may not be the case everywhere here is an interesting point of fact: I had the same on-campus job the entire time I was in college. It was supposed to be a work study job, and my family made too much money for me to qualify for a work study program. But I got the job anyway because no work study student applied for it. Based on that experience I'm not sure that doubling the number of work study jobs is going to do much good. You might be more effective making work study more available to any student who needs a loan to pay for college tuition.
And that actually brings me to what I wished I had heard. In all the talk of job training and education there was no mention of trade skills. I was surprised by that a little. But then I wonder if President Obama really appreciates that skilled trades can require just as much learning, intelligence and expertise as any white color job that most colleges can prepare you for.
I'd actually had that discussion with some friends a while back. The theory that we came up with at the time was that Mr. Obama was raised, like most of his generation, to believe that a college education meant success. Parents wanted their kids to grow up and get nice white collar jobs. They saw the blue collar career path as something of a failure. I was raised this way too. It wasn't until I was older that I started to see things in broader terms. And I'm pretty sure that I am still influenced by prejudices that I'm not fully cognizant of.
In all the talk of education I would have liked to hear about more funding for things like trade schools. For programs that will prepare students who do not want to go to college for professions that can sustain them. And on a final note - was I the only one that chuckled when the President talked about the corporate partnership between Siemens and a community college like it's a new thing? Hate to burst the bubble here, but General Motors did it first.
Transcript of the State of the Union Address
There were things that were mentioned that I liked - I liked the idea of making changes to the unemployment system to make it more focused on getting people jobs again. I think I'd like to see or hear more of that kind of thinking with the welfare system too. Like instead of these programs just giving people fish to feed them for a day, they could teach them to fish and help them eat for a lifetime.
I agree that the infrastructure of this country needs some updating. And with the cost of some of the emerging technologies starting to come down, now isn't a bad time for making some improvements. And as far as energy - I think the broad spectrum attitude is a much better bet than focusing on any one single technology. If for no other reason than a system using many sources will not be severely impacted by shorts in any one form. The same goes for potentially negative environmental side effects.
I didn't like everything I heard though and I was also a little sorry to not hear a few things. The two things that sent up warning flags for me were the taxing of multinational corporations. I don't want government policy to encourage outsourcing, but at the same time I don't want government policy to punish a company for doing business overseas. We can no more exist in a vacuum in a business sense than we can in a political sense.
The other was the statement to reduce federal funding to colleges and universities that raise tuition. That I thought was just laughably scary naive. The state of Michigan reduced funding to the state university I was going to one year, you know what happened? Instead of the originally projected 9% tuition hike, I got an 18% tuition hike. It made college so much more affordable.
Also while this may not be the case everywhere here is an interesting point of fact: I had the same on-campus job the entire time I was in college. It was supposed to be a work study job, and my family made too much money for me to qualify for a work study program. But I got the job anyway because no work study student applied for it. Based on that experience I'm not sure that doubling the number of work study jobs is going to do much good. You might be more effective making work study more available to any student who needs a loan to pay for college tuition.
And that actually brings me to what I wished I had heard. In all the talk of job training and education there was no mention of trade skills. I was surprised by that a little. But then I wonder if President Obama really appreciates that skilled trades can require just as much learning, intelligence and expertise as any white color job that most colleges can prepare you for.
I'd actually had that discussion with some friends a while back. The theory that we came up with at the time was that Mr. Obama was raised, like most of his generation, to believe that a college education meant success. Parents wanted their kids to grow up and get nice white collar jobs. They saw the blue collar career path as something of a failure. I was raised this way too. It wasn't until I was older that I started to see things in broader terms. And I'm pretty sure that I am still influenced by prejudices that I'm not fully cognizant of.
In all the talk of education I would have liked to hear about more funding for things like trade schools. For programs that will prepare students who do not want to go to college for professions that can sustain them. And on a final note - was I the only one that chuckled when the President talked about the corporate partnership between Siemens and a community college like it's a new thing? Hate to burst the bubble here, but General Motors did it first.
Transcript of the State of the Union Address