Anyone who watched or read President Obama’s State of Union address a few weeks back saw a very rosy picture of the state of our nation, a representation that unfortunately is not true. The fact is the President still has not learned anything after the midterm election two years ago. Despite the president’s claims, the country is still in rough shape economically.

While Obama listed reasonable goals like bringing down unemployment by starting new jobs and reducing our reliance on foreign oil,Obama also preached unity and urged the country to come together to climb back to prosperity. Most of the speech as expected focused on the jobs and the economy, but it was more of the same, like the last three years. Obama, during his whole term in office has made promises and then failed to keep them. His policies have not only failed to improve our economic situation but have stunted the country’s economic recovery. This speech was more about Obama rallying his base then laying down a successful plan to improve the economy and reduce the national debt.

The content of his speech was nothing new, the president still wants to tax and spend our way back to prosperity even though the results have been minimal at best. Once again the president dumped the blame on everyone but himself, portraying a professor scolding his students. Again he proposed bigger government over creating an environment that encourages job creation.

Another interesting aspect, I noticed, never mentioned in the speech was the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would run from Texas to Canada. Obama shot down the proposal that would have brought tens of thousands of jobs to the United States, including South Dakota. Not to mention the added benefit of bringing down gasoline prices, this would have an exponential boast to the economy as well — another of his “goals”. But inexplicably he rejected this proposal. Obama talked about rewarding businesses to create new jobs in the U.S., instead taking them to overseas to countries like China, which is what this particular oil company is considering now.

It appears he would much rather give millions and billions of dollars in bad loans to green energy companies like Solyndra that went bankrupt and fired all their workers. This is just one example of how the current administration says one thing and does another.