Overall, more than 1,500 people died in hurricanes last year, including many of our Gulf Coast neighbors in Louisiana and Mississippi.  Hundreds of thousands more lost their homes, remain in shelters, or are scattered in cities throughout the country, thousands of miles from friends and relatives.

So listening to the President deliver his State of the Union address, I was disappointed to hear him briefly mention the hurricanes only once and that mention was forty-nine minutes into his fifty-two minute speech. 

More importantly, he did not address how we are going to prevent future tragedies, the ineptness of the federal response or the fact that a lack of federal funds prevents the National Hurricane Center from flying as many hurricane hunter flights as deemed necessary to adequately predict a hurricane's path and strength.

The President remarked in his speech to the nation from Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina that,

"As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

"So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses."

Sadly, but not surprisingly, we heard nothing in the State of the Union of the President's plans to address the dark underbelly of poverty that millions of Americans grapple with each and every day. These images that were thrust into the American consciousness, of thousands of poor people struggling and dying in New Orleans, should not be left as just a hollow paragraph in an obligatory Presidential speech.

What we did hear was that "America is addicted to oil."  This is a startling revelation from the leader of a party that has bent over backwards to provide tax cuts and subsidies to the big oil companies.  In fact, there are over $8 billion in existing subsidies for oil companies -the same companies that raked in over $100 billion in profits last year alone.

We also heard that we need to make health care more affordable, that we need to increase homeland security and we need to reduce the federal deficit.

Does the President's rhetoric of the State of the Union match his budget proposal introduced this month?

Let's see what the newly proposed Budget brings us:

1)                  Make health care more affordable?

·        The 2007 Budget slashes Medicare by $110 billion over the next 10 years.

·        It cuts Medicaid funding by $13.7 billion.

I am not sure how you make health care more affordable by slashing over $123 billion from Medicare and Medicaid funding, two programs that already provide affordable health care for millions of seniors and disabled Americans.

2)                  Reduce our dependence on foreign oil?

·        The amount the President dedicates to spend on clean energy research is equal to just seven percent of the 4^th quarter profit of ExxonMobil.

3)                  Protect America and increase homeland defense?

·        He eliminates the Local Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention program.

·        He cuts the Urban Area Security Initiative and Homeland Security grants.

·        He underfunds such key priorities as rail and mass transit and port security.

4)         Education funding?

·        Cuts Head Start funding.

·        Underfunds No Child Left Behind by $15.4 billion again this year, bringing the cumulative underfunding of the program to $55 billion in five years.

·        Once again he places college out of reach for hundreds of thousands of  students by freezing the maximum Pell Grant at $4,050 -the fifth year in a row that the funding has been frozen, this in spite of the fact that tuitions continue to sky rocket across the country.

5)                  Retirement Security?

·        The President cuts $2.2 billion from Social Security, eliminating the lump sum death benefit.

The federal budget deficit for this year is expected to be $423 billion, the largest ever recorded in the entire history of the United States, a terrible burden to place on our children and our grandchildren.

All across America we are feeling the pinch of cutting programs while real wages have been falling and tax relief is all but non-existent for working families.  If we continue down the path of ballooning deficits, out of control spending in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts for the top two percent of American wage earners, I am afraid that things will only be more difficult for our children and our grandchildren.