I did not find anything new or innovative in anything Mr. Obama proposed.

What I heard was a weak attempt to repackage the same old Keynesean Snake oil that has never actually worked. The idea of deficit spending to bring about prosperity has had a few tries in the real world with not so good results.

Looking through the history of recessions in the US the two longest periods of slow to no growth, have occured when government has most tried to interject itself into the economy, that being the 1930s and our current period. Aside from those two periods of time, all other economic recoveries have followed a V curve, the deeper the recession, the faster the bounce coming back out. It is not just here but in Japan, we are watching the failure of a keynesean experiment that has gone on now for 30 years and the Japanese still have not returned to the level of prosperity they enjoyed in the late 1980s. Yet Mr. Obama is essentially proposing the same solutions, an average growth rate of 2% or less is not acceptable.

You say Obama is not a "Big Government" politician, yet the pace of regulations has been higher under his first term in office than his last three predessors, the federal budget consumes more of the GDP than ever, as does the federal spending per person. Washington DC is booming because of the expansion of the federal government. Sorry Pachy, the evidence clearly points toward wanting a more aggressive and powerful Federal Government.

The Nine Dollar an hour minimum wage is yet another demonstration of lack of real world economic experiance. Artificially driven raises in wages will cause a Newtonian reaction in prices. Which means the poorest may have more paper in the wallet, but it will buy less goods and services than it did before, so in the long run you do more harm than good. Also no business is going to maintain an employee whose output is less than he or she costs to have him or her on staff, as such they will be let go. Furthermore such artificial increases also have a chain effect on wages across the board, as they will go up, so will prices, in the end then more inflation. Lastly going to nine dollar an hour minimum wage will effectively price teenagers out of the part time job market, sorry nobody is going to pay a teen 9 bucks an hour to flip burgers or bag groceries in most places. This also will harm the poor because many of those families rely on their kids income to help with family expenses.

As for education, lets acknowledge the problem is not actually funding. On a per pupil basis the US spends more than any other nation on education while returning mid grade results at best compared to the rest of the world. Until we acknowledge that we have a system that is 75 years out of date and need of a ground up redesign we can never hope to improve the economic competativeness of our children. It is good the President paid lip service to German apprentiship programs, but failed to mention that most countries in Europe have had school choice for decades now and are spending less money per child to get higher performance.

As for immigration, it needs to be reformed. I have been privy to several anecdotes regarding how poorly the system works for legitimately skilled persons wishing to live here legally. We really need such folk if hope to maintain our welfare state in the long run. Mr. Obama wants to initiate reform, that is good, but he failed to mention imporving and expanding the guest worker program, a key component of immigration reform. Business are starving for high skilled labor, and guest worker program expansion would help fill those needs.

Mr. Obama also talked about more subsidies for college. Anyone want to guess why higher education cost have risen far faster than the rate of inflation? In our attempt to turn our 4 year universities into "Degree Mills" we have caused an education bubble, which we want to then continue to inflate with more student loans, for ever more costly colleges. As a result millions of Americans are burdened with debt they cannot hope to repay in their lifetimes. When we start getting a trillion dollars or more in student loan defaults, who do you think is going to have to pick up the tab?

Mr. Obama talked about housing, did we not learn anything from the economic mess we are trying dig our way out of now? Every administration since Carter has had this misguided idea that everyone needs to be a home owner. Sorry folks there are some people who lack the intelligence to understand and maintain a home loan. There is simply a large swath of our population better off as renters.

Mr. Obama touched on guaranteed retirement. Our Social Security system is not sustainable into the future without either massive tax increases, or some form of means testing at the very least, which the President did not mention. For anyone who wants to argue with me, it is not a matter of politics, it is a matter of math, the ratio of people paying in versus those who collect is declining, less players means more has to be extracted from each, or you find a way to create less receipients one or the other. It is ironic that the Scandanavian countries which have a reputation for being the most "socialist" all have privatized their equivilants to our Social Security system. I am all for having a basic safety net, but it needs to have some qualifiers. Does anyone think that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet merrit a social security check or should be eligible for medicare?

The bottom line is that we have a President, who speaks beautifully about the future, yet seems to want to apply solutions from the 1930s to our 21st century problems.