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The State of Our Union

By Lou Dobbs
CNN

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President Bush delivers the State of the Union address on Tuesday.

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(CNN) -- President Bush delivered his fifth State of the Union speech, but he didn't address the issues that matter most to working, middle-class Americans, from substantive health care reform to assuring educational opportunity to combating the outright war on our middle class.

President Bush hopes this latest address will lift his poll numbers and set the tone for the midterm congressional and senatorial election campaigns. But the president and the Republican Party face major challenges.

The American electorate is dissatisfied with the president's conduct of the war in Iraq and frustrated with the rising cost of health care, unchecked illegal immigration, and record budget and trade deficits. Our record twin deficits threaten the short- and long-term health of our economy. This is an economy that's not creating high-paying jobs, and those who have jobs are watching their real wages decline.

Not surprisingly, President Bush did not address the issue of class warfare in the United States. But the war on our middle class is real, and it is intensifying. Middle class working Americans are losing their struggle against special interests, the dominant political power of corporate America in Washington, and business practices that seem designed to destroy the foundation of this economy and our society.

Our middle class is the least represented group in Washington, and middle-class families are under a tremendous financial and social strain to remain in our middle class, a struggle that is far more difficult for them than for their parents. What's hammering American families? It's the basics. Last year, health care costs rose four times faster than income, while college costs soared three-and-a-half times faster. And child care doubled the rate of income growth.

The sad reality is that the situation is dire but difficult to improve. Former adviser to four presidents David Gergen says, "This government has run up such big deficits, there is nothing left in the till to address this middle-class squeeze and the assault on the middle class you've been talking about."

President Bush missed a serious opportunity to show the country that he is finally committed to solving our nation's ever-worsening border emergency. Instead, President Bush continues to push his "unworkable" guest worker program, which even fellow Republicans refer to as amnesty for illegal aliens.

The explosive rise in our nation's trade deficit is another fundamental threat to this country and our economy. The trade deficit through the first 11 months of last year came in at $662 billion, on pace to jump 17 percent from 2004's record deficit. In fact, the trade deficit has nearly doubled since the president took office.

Since 1989, the U.S. economy has dumped more than 1.5 million jobs because of dislocations caused by the U.S.-China trade deficit. And year after year, that deficit marches higher. Our deficit with China is on pace to top $200 billion for last year, almost double the deficit from 2002. All this, as the Chinese overtake the United States in manufacturing. Now communist China is threatening our country's leadership in technology.

Last year, China zoomed past the United States as the world's biggest exporter of information and communication technology. And head to head, China's been winning for years. In information and communication technology, America ran a $14 billion trade deficit with China in 2002, $24 billion in 2003, $39 billion in 2004, and nearly $46 billion in the first 11 months of last year.

President Bush also failed to adequately address the issue of runaway health care costs and eroding medical benefits for working men and women in this country. Ironically, America's leadership in medical care remains unchallenged.

Our nation's medical facilities offer life-saving treatments that are the envy of the world, but at the same time, millions of us can't even afford a checkup. Forty-six million people in this country have no health insurance, a figure that has been increasing by an estimated million people a year since 2000.

Along with health insurance, middle-class jobs continue to disappear as working men and women are watching corporate America outsource their jobs by the hundreds of thousands to cheap foreign labor markets. And so-called free-trade agreements are endangering almost every manufacturing and technology business in this country, and the livelihoods of all those who work in those fields.

Between 2000 and 2004, the manufacturing sector dropped 3 million jobs -- a 17 percent decline -- while the trade deficit in manufactured goods rose by $164 billion, a 42 percent increase. In 1993, North Carolina had just over 265,000 textile and apparel jobs. Then the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, and since then the state has lost more than 65 percent of those jobs.

President Bush also touted the No Child Left Behind program, which has shown modest success; not as much as its proponents and advocates had hoped, but not as little as its critics and opponents would have you believe. There is no question we are failing an entire generation of students, however. We are denying them the opportunity for a quality public education, which has been a birthright of Americans for generations.

But there are reasons to hope. There is a growing movement in this country to hire quality teachers and pay those teachers what they deserve. Last November, Denver voters approved a dramatic change in the way teacher's pay is structured, offering bonuses for improvement in classroom performance and incentive pay for teaching in the city's under-performing schools. Already, it's having an impact.

Most Americans are concerned about our dependence upon foreign oil, at least now that gasoline prices and heating oil prices have threatened to break our budgets. But few of our elected officials recognize that this nation's dependency goes well beyond foreign oil. We cannot even clothe ourselves: 96 percent of our clothing is imported. Seventy percent of our technology is imported, another example of the so-called free trade economy. And we are dependent upon the rest of the world for the capital to buy all of those imports and to sustain this economy.

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