Featuring Herman Cain

Transcript

Thanks, Amy.

I would like to thank Amy, Sal, and the Tea Party Express organization for making this happen and putting this together. And I would like to thank you for being here.

I am deeply honored to have been asked to provide the tea party citizens’ response to the State of the Union Address that many of you just heard from President Obama.

Now, many people are probably tea party people and they don’t know it. Because if you believe in less taxes, less government, the free market system, more individual responsibility, and enforcing the Constitution, you are a tea party person. But you may not know it. A lot of people don’t know that they are tea party people because the political elites, as well as the media elites, have tried to marginalize this movement. It will not be denied. It is stronger and growing as much as ever before.

In the President’s speech tonight, we heard more well-scripted rhetoric. We heard more proclamation of how well we are doing in certain areas. We heard more promises of working on various problems. We heard more class warfare where the President and his administration still want to manipulate the tax code and pick winners and losers, reward some and open up new loopholes for others. We heard more excuses and blame, and attacks on businesses, and attacks on Congress for what they have not done. In a word, I heard the speech and it came across as a hodge podge of little ideas. No big ideas that would fundamentally change how things work in Washington. No big idea that would dramatically impact job growth and economic growth in this country.

Now let me tell you what we did not hear. We did not hear the real facts about the state of the union. Facts don’t lie. Here are some of the facts you did not hear:

Unemployment. The December unemployment rate was reported to be 8.5%. But if you add in the people who have been looking for so long that they have stopped looking and they are discouraged, and you add in the 8 million people that are underemployed, the real rate of unemployment is 18%. It’s a matter of how you want to count it.

Economic growth. Our economic growth in the last 3 years has been anemic. In 2011 alone, it was less than 2%. If we were really in a recovery, our GDP growth should be around 5% per annum. And that’s still only half of what countries like China are experiencing in terms of their economic growth. Gasoline prices are almost double what they were when President Obama took office. Why? It’s real simple. We do not have a cohesive, common sense, energy independence strategy.

We did not hear about how Obamacare is coming up short of what the President and his administration thought that it would. It was suppose to help bring down health care costs, it has not. It was suppose to help keep health insurance costs down, it did not. Hundreds and hundreds of companies are asking for waivers in order to be able to try to keep the health insurance plan that they have, because if they convert over to Obamacare, they won’t be able to afford it, they may not be able to provide health insurance to their employees at all. Obamacare simply needs to be repealed because it was forced down our throats to begin with.

We also did not hear about the out-of-control spending, our national debt. It is now over 15 trillion dollars, and the President is already asking for another 1.2 trillion dollars to add onto that. Our national debt has become a national disgrace.

Allow me to put it in another perspective. In 1999, my first grand child was born. In 1999, the national debt for every man, woman, and child living in this country was nearly 21,000 dollars. New Years Day of this year, my fourth grand child was born. The day he was born, New Years Day 2012, before he took his first breath, the debt that every man, woman, and child inherited, nearly 50,000 dollars. And it appears as if there is no end in sight. Worst yet, our national debt exceeds our GDP growth. We’re starting to look just like some of the European countries that are facing a spending crisis. That’s not where the American people want us to be, but that’s where we are because the spending has not stopped and the economic engine of this country has not taken off.

And so I say in response, on behalf of the tea party and citizen people across this country, with all due respect, Mr. President, some of us are not stupid. The state of the union is not good. We want common sense solutions. That’s how we do it outside of Washington, and we happen to believe that we need more common sense solutions inside of Washington. The American people, the tea party people, we know that this nation is broke. Not almost broke, it is broke. And Washington is broken. We can’t spend our way to prosperity even though the President continues to propose ideas for more spending, more agencies, and more entities on top of the over-bloated government that we already have. We also can’t tax our way out of debt. Not until we get this economy growing. The President didn’t talk a lot about that because that’s what’s missing in this equation in this big scheme of things.

The people of this country that I’ve talked to and listened to and the tea party people that I’ve worked with and seen, they believe that we deserve better. We deserve better than what we have. Why? Because America is an exceptional nation. We deserve a fairer and simpler tax code. Many of the changes that the President talked about tonight were still manipulating around the edges for the benefit of some and for the lack of a benefit to others. We need a bold tax code, a bold solution, that starts with throwing out the current tax code that we have and putting in a structure that is fair to everyone equally. Fair and treats all businesses the same. Put in a structure that will not allow the politicians in Washington to try and pick the winners and the losers.

We deserve an energy independence plan. “Made in America” is possible if we maximize all of our energy resources right here at home. We deserve a balanced budget. We have been on this path of spending for decades now and our elected leaders, including the President, have got to get serious about a balanced budget. We deserve a government that listens to its people rather than a government that ignores its people. We deserve a strong military, not a weakening military. The people of this country believe in that principle of peace through strength and clarity, but yet, under this administration, our military has been cut and cut and cut.

We deserve a brighter future for our grandchildren instead of the nightmare scenario we are facing that the President is in denial of. We deserve as a nation to put the word “united” back into the United States of America.

Mr. President, stop the class warfare. Discourage your surrogates from making racial innuendos. Stop the attacks on business. Stop the attacks on citizens by making government too big. And Mr. President, most of all, stop the blame game. You know, it was 1773 when the colonists got fed up with Old King George and the Brits, and their act of defiance was the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Two years later, we had the start of the American Revolution. Eight years later, we won.

We can do it again. We need another revolution. This time it will not be about bombs and bullets. It’s going to be about brains and balance at the ballot box. Washington is out of touch with the people because there are times they forget that they work for us. We must remind them. We the people are coming. That’s the tea party message to Washington, the President, and his administration. We the people are coming and we know that we are up against Goliath, but this is why the tea party movement will become not a single David trying to slay Goliath. We will be an army of Davids. The tea party movement is alive and well, and contrary to what the media elites and the establishment want you to believe, it is going to continue to redefine the political landscape in 2012. We the people are coming. We want our power back.

Thank you for listening. God is blessing America. Join the movement. I’m Herman Cain.