Americans want to raise healthy families in safe neighborhoods, and give their children full lives. But today, they're facing a perfect storm of soaring costs for health care, for home heating oil, for gasoline prices, and for college tuition, a prescription drug fiasco for their parents' generation, and the shadow of globalization hanging over the workplace.
What they see in Washington is a spreading culture of corruption that puts special interests first and people's interests last. They see pharmaceutical companies' and insurance companies' dictation health policy, and 2,000 more Americans becoming uninsured every day. They see Big Oil dictating energy policy, and global warming relegated to the back burner. They endured a botched response to Hurricane Katrina when families in the Gulf Coast needed help the most. They see an endless war in Iraq that America never should have fought.
Sadly, President Bush failed to offer credible solutions to the immense challenges facing this nation. Instead he offered empty rhetoric and proposals that will only make the problems worse.
On health care, President Bush has ignored the issue for the past five years, and every family in America can feel the impact of his failure. The cure he prescribed will only make a bad situation worse. Like the fiasco of his plan to privatize Social Security, his health savings accounts are a windfall for Wall Street and other special interests and a nightmare for the vast majority of families. Fortunately, the American people know better, and they question the credibility of this President.
America's failure to guarantee the basic right to health care for all our citizens has been one of the great public policy failures in our history, and we must not allow that failure to continue in this new century. Our goal should be an America where no citizen of any age fears the cost of health care, and no employer stops creating jobs because of the high cost of providing health insurance.
The obvious answer is to make Medicare available to all. Can anyone doubt that Medicare has been a huge success to the senior citizens for the past 40 years in paying their hospital and doctors' bills, and the sooner we make it available to all Americans the better. My hope is that a Democratic Congress in November that will pass it and override President Bush's veto if he continues to fail to see the light.
To make this country more competitive, I agree with the President that we must increase our focus on math and science education, and I welcome his interest. But it takes more than State of the Union rhetoric to meet this challenge, and that's where he falls short time and again. In his past two budgets, he called for absurd reductions in funding for math and science programs at the National Science Foundation. Last year he eliminated funding to support technology in the classroom. Unfortunately, his Administration continues to be the Administration of broken promises and nowhere is that truer than in education, where his No Child Left Behind Act has been starved for funds since he signed it into law in 2002.
I hope that this year, after the devastation of the Gulf Coast hurricanes and all that they revealed, that President Bush will devote real resources to helping the poor. He barely mentioned the strains that millions of American families face every day with an economy that leaves them out and behind. We did not hear that the American dream seems more out of reach for millions of families who work hard and play by the rules. We did not hear that most Americans' paychecks haven't increased at all since the President took office, yet costs for essentials such as gas, heat, and health care have climbed so high that families simply can't make ends meet. And we did not hear of the millions of hard working Americans who deserve a long overdue increase in the minimum wage.
The President also said that we need to end our addiction to oil - an idea I welcome if it means he'll also end his addiction to Big Oil. To live up to that bold statement, the President should insist that his cronies in the oil industry return to the U.S. Treasury a fair share of the immense windfalls they received from sky-high profits.
The President pledged that we must not abandon our commitments in Iraq. But he failed to explain why he abandoned those in his Administration who dared to speak the truth about his arrogantly and incompetently managed war. General Shinseki was sidelined because he said we would need more than 200,000 troops for the war. General Riggs was punished for saying that he'd never seen the military as strained in his 39 years of service. For the sake of our troops in Iraq and our standing in the world, it's time for the President to listen more carefully to the advice of those who disagree with his misguided policy on Iraq.
The President's fifth State of the Union Address was tacked to his fifth year in office: full of empty promises, a growing credibility gap, and a failure to acknowledge that without restoring honesty in government and ending the culture of corruption, the special interests will prevail over those of the American people.