In his seventh and last State of the Union speech this past week, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Americans to ponder the economic and security challenges the United States is facing.
The U.S. president was decidedly upbeat. Americans though may well have had reason to pause. The December shootings in San Bernardino, California, just weeks earlier, became the worst terrorist attack to occur in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001. And the latest Rasmussen Reports survey had 67 percent of Americans now saying their country is headed in the wrong direction.
Yet, Obama declared, "I stand here confident as I have ever been that the State of our Union is strong." And relative to much of the world, the U.S. economy remains so.