Good words; now for action

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address before Congress this week was at times uplifting, paying optimistic heed to American innovation, free enterprise and entrepreneurship, but it came up short in significant ways.

Sure, the president talked about the need to reduce deficit spending that has reached unprecedented levels, but he also talked a lot about the need for government “investments,” in other words more spending.

He called for a freeze in annual domestic spending for the next five years without  acknowledging that the federal government is now spending more than it ever has.

As Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., put it, it seems that Obama’s “idea of cutting spending is to put it on cruise control at the highest level we’ve ever seen.”

And budget freezes are a drop in the bucket, when you are also talking about the need for stimulus-style investments in everything from education to energy to transportation.

For example: “Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.”

Really? Is that type of spending a priority, considering that the Congressional Budget Office’s latest report says the annual deficit has risen to a record $1.5 trillion this year, meaning the government is borrowing 40 cents for every dollar it spends.

Even more problematic is the lack of urgency in talking about the need for widespread high-speed rail in 25 years when so many other problems are pressing right now.

Where Obama was lacking in urgency, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., was not.

“We still have time ... but not much time,” Ryan declared in his official Republican response, adding that debates about spending “are not just about the programs of government; they’re also about the purpose of government.”

Ryan later added that if nothing is done, “the next generation will inherit a stagnant country and diminished economy.”

Precisely. Rather than kicking the can down the road, it is time for serious, even painful changes in the near future, changes that will unleash the power of the private sector economy. That is the tone that needs to be coming from Washington, D.C.

The president did talk about the potential for the U.S. economy.

“We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government.”

Those are fine words, but do they reflect reality? We know that all of these things should happen, but will they? As it is, the expanse and reach of the federal government is unprecedented.

The U.S. is not currently “the best place on earth to do business” largely because of the extent of government regulation enforced by bureaucracies that never seem to shrink.

But President Obama did at times address this, when he said for example, “the best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code.”

That is an area where Republicans would probably get on board with the president in what he described as a mandate from voters for shared governance between the parties. But we think the mandate for the new House Republican majority is to put the brakes on big government, and we hope the president will share that vision, too.