There was a fair amount of heckling in the chamber throughout, and President Biden himself was feisty and confrontational. The decorum of previous addresses was conspicuously absent last night.
Feisty Joe: I am glad Joe Biden seemingly took a lot of Adderall before delivering his State of the Union address, since it made him look alive. The only downside was that the actual policies he talked up were all terrible.
Overall, the speech seemed like a campaign event in more ways than one. Biden repeatedly called out „my predecessor“ without criticizing Trump by name, and brought up issues like January 6, as well as Republicans‘ inability to pass legislation. Biden said Trump’s „bowing down“ to Vladimir Putin is „outrageous,“ as well as „dangerous“ and „unacceptable“ (paired with a call for more Ukraine funding, natch). There was a fair amount of heckling in the chamber throughout, and Biden himself was feisty and confrontational. The decorum of previous addresses was conspicuously absent last night. (And Biden’s opponent resorted to, uh, predictably juvenile artistic rebuttals.)
As for actual substance, Biden spent a fair chunk of time „proposing temporary tax credits of $400 a month to compensate for high mortgage rates and the end of title insurance fees for federally backed mortgages,“ per Reason’s Christian Britschgi. The White House circulated more info about this plan, which would „increas[e] the number of tax credits available for low-income housing developers“ and create „a $20 billion competitive grant program that would directly fund affordable apartments.“ All of these are odd, expensive fixes for the actual problem, which is low housing supply that could be fixed by zoning reform and reducing the political power of NIMBY activists.
Biden also devoted a few lines to making the wealthy pay their „fair share,“ specifically claiming that „working people who built this country pay more into Social Security than millionaires and billionaires do.
