In his final State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama boasted that the United States is the most powerful nation with the strongest economy in the world. He said, “the United States of America has the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” but if you feel anxious about the economy, it may be because “the economy has been changing in profound ways.”
More and more, Americans are becoming open to the idea of free community college and raising the minimum wage to at least $9 an hour. The president has pushed for these changes throughout his terms, and raising minimum wage has been a major topic in all his State of the Union speeches.
For years Republicans and Democrats have been strongly divided over the issue of whether to increase or decrease social welfare and handouts in the United States, a conflict that has revealed itself recently during the establishment of the Affordable Care Act.
“As long as you work hard, you should get a shot,” Obama said in his speech Jan. 12. If you have that mindset, I think you might not be working as hard as you say. In my opinion, the right attitude to have is to expect nothing.
There will always be some sort of injustice or unfairness in the economy, and we should stand up for ourselves when we are being mistreated and get help from other authorities. However, experience tells us that our hard work does not always pay off in the way we think it should. Therefore, “hard work” does not equate to “equal opportunities.”
If you watched the State of the Union on whitehouse.gov, you could have been watching the speech with side bars filled with facts and statistics that complimented Obama’s speech. The facts showed that 14.1 million jobs were created in the past six years and the unemployment rate has decreased to five percent, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The clip goes on to boast that the national deficit has steadily decreased since Obama took office in 2009. Could it just be that 2016 is merely another high point in a seven-year economic cycle?
Even with all this purported success, America’s optimism appears to have gently decreased. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans were happily looking forward to 2010, while 34 percent were not. However, a 2014 Lifeway Research poll indicates that 54 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future of the United States and 40 percent were not. A 2015 Pew Research Center report showed that 40 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the economy and 56 percent were satisfied.
Obama even mentioned that Americans do feel anxious about the economy in his speech. These statistics show that a significant amount of Americans feel both happy and unhappy about the future and the economy, even with Obama’s increase in welfare spending. Optimism is still alive, but pessimism spreads easily.
Unfortunately, the government is not in control the resources of our economy; and therefore, they can not promise us equal opportunities. Although they can influence the events in our economy to an extent, Congress cannot ensure that every person gets a fair shot.
Almost every person may think that his or her work is worth is more that the wages he or she receives, and so we are all driven by a desire for more and more. Knowing that this cycle will never end and that we will never be satisfied through our greed, we should stop expecting.
If we base our happiness on what the government can do for us, we will never be satisfied. This is not the way that Obama would prefer to end his State of the Union pep talk. He wants us to trust him, and we should respect his authority. However, I doubt that his promises of equal opportunities will ever come true, so it is time to embrace a different mindset.
