State of the Union: Deteriorating

ByABC News
January 23, 2007, 11:26 AM

Jan. 23, 2007— -- President Bush will tell Americans that the state of our union is strong. He'll celebrate a growing economy, enjoying rising productivity, rising profits, more jobs and record home ownership. He'll stand as commander in chief of the most powerful military ever. He'll lay out areas -- energy, immigration, health care -- where he envisions progress through bipartisan cooperation.

What he won't do is level with Americans. In reality, America's condition is deteriorating rapidly. We're like a world-class athlete who has let himself go in middle age. Muscle is turning to flab; arteries are clogged, reflexes slowed. The body is not only more vulnerable to garden-variety ailments, it is susceptible to what might be crippling strokes.

An extreme metaphor? Consider the following realities that the president is unlikely to call to the nation's attention.

Stock prices and productivity are up, CEO salaries are soaring, but workers aren't sharing in the profits they helped generate. Incomes aren't keeping up with costs. Since Bush took office six years ago, more Americans live in poverty (now 37 million), families have gone deeper in debt, more go without health insurance (over 45 million), fewer have pensions at work.

Americans are working longer and harder than the workers in any other industrial nation, including Japan. But around their kitchen tables at night, they find it harder and harder to figure out how to make ends meet. For most Americans, it's getting ever harder to provide the basics -- stable jobs with family wages, adequate health care, affordable education for their kids, a secure retirement, enough money to keep up with their loans.

Step back and look at the country and our condition appears even more perilous. We face the worst foreign policy debacle in our history in Iraq, the largest trade deficits in the annals of time, the worst inequality since the Gilded Age, record family debt burdens, a health care system that is broken, an education system in dire need of basic investment, an energy policy that undermines our security and fosters catastrophic climate change, 13 million children raised in poverty and the worst budget deficits ever.

Robert L. Borosage is the president of the Institute for America's Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America's Future.