President Obama’s State of the Union address rightly focused on the economy and what can be done to keep America strong. Read EPI’s analysis of the speech and much more in this week’s featured blog posts:
- Lawrence Mishel commends the president for using the State of Union to build on his encouraging December speech in Kansas.
- Robert Scott also gives Obama kudos for his remarks on rebuilding American manufacturing. Scott, though, points out that the president failed to mention currency manipulation, the main cause of our manufacturing woes.
- Andrew Fieldhouse dissects Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ run as director of the Office of Management and Budget from 2001-03. Daniels delivered the Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union, but he fits the description of a deficit peacock.
- Josh Bivens finds it rather amazing that Apple executives overlook exchange rates when trying to explain the global shifting of their workforce.
- Richard Rothstein gives the education “reformers” playbook on failing schools a failing grade.
- Bivens analyzes why the Federal Reserve’s decision to set an explicit inflation target is pretty big, and pretty bad, news.
- Ethan Pollack digs into discretionary budget policy and summarizes why automatic firewalls on defense vs. non-defense spending from the Budget Control Act are a bad idea.
- Finally, Bivens identifies something from the 1981 economic recovery he’d like to see replicated. And Ronald Reagan had little to do with it.