President Barack Obama tips his hat to the crowd after finishing a round of golf during his family vacation on Monday in Kailua, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
(CNSNews.com) — “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” President Obama said in his State of the Union Address Tuesday night.
But hours earlier, Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, said the Obama economy “is just not working,” and he suggested that President Obama must be wearing rose-colored glasses:
“He has the colored glasses that are just marvelous. And the optimism that he sees is just not out there,” Marcus told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto Tuesday afternoon.
“If the president got up tonight and the first thing he said, Neil, was, I have decided to take the next nine months and really work on my golf game, this — I would be the happiest person in the world.
“I think he ought to work on his golf and be the lame-duck president that he should be, because everything that comes out of the White House and everything that comes out of the EPA, the Department of Labor, and the NLRB, and I hope not the FBI, but I certainly know that the IRS and everything else has been corrupted.
Marcus said he’s lost his trust in government: “I just don’t have it anymore. And part of the reason is, we hear speaking, and then we see the actions, and the actions don’t work. There are more people out of the work force today than ever before in the history of this country. We have kids out of college. Almost 50 percent are living with their parents.
It’s true they don’t have to the jobs that they were trained for in schools. They’re taking jobs as waiters. They’re working in places in order to keep alive. And this is not the America that we wanted. It’s not the one I remember.
“And we see more small businesses failing than opening. The middle class has gone down dramatically.
And, by the way, this is not my idea and this is not what I think is happening. We have the numbers that tell us over and over again that this is where the world is.”
In his speech to the nation, Obama said the reason so many Americans “feel anxious” about the economy is because it has been “changing in profound ways,” something that began “long before” he took office.
Later, Obama admitted, “I think there are outdated regulations that need to be changed, and there’s red tape that needs to be cut.” Obama, now in the final year of his two terms, did not give details or say how he would make those changes. Instead, he launched immediately into his familiar class-warfare meme:
“But after years of record corporate profits, working families won’t get more opportunity or bigger paychecks by letting big banks or big oil or hedge funds make their own rules at the expense of everyone else; or by allowing attacks on collective bargaining to go unanswered. Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.
“Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns.
“It’s sure not the average family watching tonight that avoids paying taxes through offshore accounts. In this new economy, workers and start-ups and small businesses need more of a voice, not less. The rules should work for them. And this year I plan to lift up the many businesses who’ve figured out that doing right by their workers ends up being good for their shareholders, their customers, and their communities, so that we can spread those best practices across America.”
President Barack Obama tips his hat to the crowd after finishing a round of golf during his family vacation on Monday in Kailua, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) 
