State of the Union Reactions

1. I am not totally sold on the sequester being a horrible thing – although there can be little doubt that such an untargeted approach is less than ideal, the reality is that I would disagree with almost every member of Congress on what the targets should be, so perhaps I ought to accept some collateral damage. I am in total agreement with the President that a plan to remove military spending from the sequester is definitely “even worse” (although I don’t know the details of any Republican proposal to that effect), but I’m sure I would object to his counterproposal… well probably not just as strongly, but strongly nonetheless.
2. There is nothing magical, in principle, with a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, and I see little reason to believe that it’s obviously the best choice. That said, it is perhaps politically magical, because it enables Obama to appear as a centrist while the Republicans seem extreme.
3. https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/301521730378285058
4. I question to what degree he actually means the statement “It is not a bigger government we need, but a smarter government,” but it is certainly a good sound bite to throw at the Republicans.
5. An “all of the above” approach is stupid. Find out what works, and do that, or leave it to the market. Scott Brown kept harping on about this during his Senate campaign too. Just because someone has an idea, doesn’t mean it’s a good one. I really don't understand why a simple carbon tax would not fix all of our problems in the energy arena, frankly.
6. When someone is denied for a loan, we do not need to fix it. They were denied for a reason. Did we not just go through a subprime loan fiasco? Was the takeaway from that experience “we need more subprime loans?” I find it hard to believe that I’m hearing the President say these words only 5 years after the shit hit the fan in the mortgage markets. The fact that poor people get denied for loans is not the problem; the problem, insofar as a problem exists, is that there are poor people.
7. The minimum wage is something that I am generally against in principle, but I certainly would agree that if we have it, it only makes sense for it to be tied to the cost of living. Perhaps I should be advocating managing programs that I don't like poorly in order to see them fail, but in principle that seems stupid - and also it’s entirely possible that my position is wrong, so to get the best possible outcome it seems reasonable to implement the system well, even if I would prefer a slightly different system.
8. This is not a criticism that’s limited to the President, but I think the political focus on jobs is misplaced. Unemployment can be a problem, but it’s worth noting that most of us probably have a vision of utopia in which unemployment is nearly 100%. Unemployment is not a terrible problem if we are sufficiently wealthy and have sufficient redistribution. It’s not usually easy to label me a socialist, but I am actually a pretty big fan of income redistribution. I just think we do a miserable job of it. Edit 2/21/2013: I need to retract part of this bullet. I forgot that unemployment is not actually a measure of people without jobs; it's a measure of people without jobs who are actively seeking jobs. That would be a pretty poor utopia, and was a pretty poor mistake for me to make.
9. It’s ludicrous to use the phrase “even more transparent” in relation to Obama’s military policies. He might look better than his predecessor (although I’m not sure to what extent the Bush administration even tried to hide what they did – I wasn’t really paying attention at that point in my life, but I think torture was in the news at the time – I seem to recall that it just seemed like everyone was cool with it), but “at least he isn’t Bush” is a poor slogan.
10. Our ability to influence others does indeed depend on our willingness to lead and meet our own obligations. I would prefer if he actually believed this rather than just saying it.
11.  I like our military as much as the next guy, but I’m not sure that we need to pull out all the stops when compensating them for their service. They do indeed make a great sacrifice for our country, but we shouldn’t forget that A) they already receive pay and benefits, and B) their sacrifice is not actually even the most dangerous occupation. Note that logger compensation does not appear to be terribly inflated due to the job risks, even though they apparently die at slightly higher rates than the military (I was unable to find a particularly conclusive source, but most figures I found from a Google search were around $35-45k). As a side note, the idea that it’s actually safer to be shot at for a living than to cut down inanimate objects is…well, odd.
12. The President has different views than I on gun control, but I have no problem with the statement that it deserves a vote in Congress. I do object to using Newtown, Aurora, etc as the poster children for gun control, however, as they actually represent an extremely small fraction of gun violence incidents that have sparked a more disproportionate response than anything since 9/11 (OH SNAP, I WENT THERE!). Such incidents are actually about as close to a non-issue as you can get - the number of people who die on average every year in mass shootings (about 17) is lower than the number of children who drown in buckets every year (about 32, at least from 1984 to 1989. Perhaps we’ve gotten better since then). The real issue is the 11,000 firearm homicides and 19,000 firearm suicides annually, but I guess those don't make quite as good television.

That ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated. It might not be obvious from the list above, but I did vote for him. Cthulu wasn’t running, so…