Where's My Day One Money?

I was anxiously awaiting President Trump’s State of the Union speech since I am retired and on a fixed income, and desperately need some out of pocket spending relief.  After his address I was still anxious about finding such relief because surprisingly, there was little mention of actual plans for solutions to the cost of health care, prescription drugs, gasoline, food prices at the supermarket, housing affordability, or the out of control auto and home owners’ insurance costs.

Instead, he referenced annexing I Greenland three times, five mentions of how the U.S. needs to own the Panama Canal, and discussed the “Gulf of America” twice.   In all fairness, he did talk about his actions regarding the roundup of illegal immigrants, the stepped up enforcement of illegal border crossings and the implementation of tariffs as a solution to bringing jobs back to America and limiting drug trafficking.

However, Trump still seems to be obsessed with the election he lost to Joe Biden for he mentioned him 13 times in rhetoric that resembled more of a campaign speech rather than a State of the Union speech that looks to the future.  Joe Biden is gone, time to move on.

President Trump’s speech also dedicated 7 minutes to Elon Musk and his newly created DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), and its success in going after government’s waste of taxpayers’ money.  Ironically, according to Musk’s DOGE budget page on the social media platform X, he initially saved on some items approximately $620 billion, which upon fact checking was actually only $620 million.  In fact, many of his purported billions in savings upon further review have been deleted or reduced on the X budget page due to such gross errors.

Sadly, even when President Trump pointed out his own example of government waste by giving the example of the U.S. government spending, and I quote, “$8 million for making mice transgender. This is real,” he got it all wrong.  The reality of this spending was to create TRANSGENIC mice which are lab altered to make them more similar to humans in their response to diseases. These mice are used in medical research for treating and preventing diseases such as cancer, diabetes, etc., and such research would not exist without them.  It has nothing to do with transgender folks except for containing the word “trans.”

I guess for some folks the speech was uplifting if you weren’t that concerned about the depletion of your hard earned cash. But for me I am still in the dark about how implementing tariffs, the rounding up of immigrants, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, annexing Canada, owning Greenland and the Panama Canal, cutting off aid to Ukraine, and the plethora of executive orders (more than 70 in 100 days) are impacting my wallet immediately even though he promised to deal with that “on day one.”  

Prices are continuing to rise.  Where and what is the plan? Maybe I just need more patience; a quality I am not very good at.