Middle Class Jobs Are North Star For US

13 Feb 2013

President Barack Obama has said the same thing on many things except for the fundamental change of focus on middle class prosperity calling it `the true engine of economic growth,' while delivering his State of the Union address before Congress on Tuesday night.  He said creating middle-class jobs should be `the North Star that guide our efforts.'

In regard to foreign policy issues, President Obama declared that by 2014-end `Our war in Afghanistan will be over'. Over the next year 34,000 troops were going to be pulled out. He called on Congress to vote on gun-control proposals in order to honor "Americans whose lives have been torn apart" by senseless and mass violence. "They (the slain) deserve a vote," he added.

The Obama presidency is increasingly favoring a bipartisan approach, throwing the Republicans into knots. On many major issues confronting the nation, the President has been seeking and in a calculated manner extracting support from the Republicans for policies beneficial to the nation on gun control, immigration, problems for avoiding fiscal cliff and the subsequent `sequester' that could result in blanket spending cuts. He warned these "sudden, harsh, arbitrary cuts" would jeopardize military readiness and "devastate priorities" like education, energy and medical research. He wanted a "balanced" plan to reduce the nation's $16-trillion-plus debt with both spending cuts and new tax revenues derived from closing loopholes and ending certain deductions.

Congressional leaders, however, said Obama's plans relied too much on government and not enough on the market to rebuild the middle class. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. — a potential Republican presidential candidate for 2016 — said that past Presidents "have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity."