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Jan. 20, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
January 20, 2006, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
That's right, Johnny Donovan.
This is Walter E. Williams sitting in for the vacationing rush, and he'll be back on Monday.
And if you want to be on a show with us today, we have a lot of work to do today, just call 800-282-2882.
Now, there is a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal, and it's a reminder for all of us.
And that is, 25 years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States.
And coming into office, he promised less intrusive government, lower tax rates, and a victory over communism.
Now, the whole world knew that he was serious because the American hostages that were held 444 days were released that same day.
Now, what's the significance of the Reagan Revolution?
Or what's at least the result of it?
Let's look at a few things.
It's worthwhile for us to remember some of these things.
That is, as a result of Reaganomics, and this article, I believe, was written by a former student of mine at Wall Street Journal, a former student named Steve Moore, although it's just kind of a regular article, doesn't carry his name.
Anyway, he says, or the article says, the editorial says, perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that over the course of the past 276 months, the United States economy has been in recession for only 15 of those months.
That is, 94% of the time since Reagan was elected as President of the United States, the economy has been in a growth mode.
For example, since Reagan was inaugurated, there have been 43 million new jobs.
And wealth, American wealth has increased by $30 trillion.
In other words, more wealth has been created in the past quarter of a century than the previous 200 years of our history.
That is remarkable.
That is a remarkable tribute to a president that got this new thinking started about lower taxes.
As a matter of fact, in the 70s, the 1970s, I believe the top marginal tax rate was 90%, let's say, was 70%, I think it was 70%.
Earlier than that, it was 90%.
Reagan was responsible for leading the movement to lower taxes in our country.
He is also responsible for the deregulation movement in our economy.
That is getting government out of our lives.
Now, there's been fits and starts since the Reagan Revolution, and there's been some betrayals of the Reagan Revolution.
That is, there's been massive spending increases that has led to the deficits.
A lot of people will say it's the tax cuts, irresponsible tax cuts that led to the current deficit.
No, ladies and gentlemen, it has been irresponsible spending.
Matter of fact, as a result of the tax cuts, federal revenues, let's say the tax cuts that President Bush, the current President Bush, pushed through in 2003, those tax cuts have led to an increase in federal revenues.
But if spending is going to be greater than revenues, well, there's always going to be a deficit.
Now, a lot of people are against the tax cuts because they say they're tax cuts for the rich.
Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, over the years, I have wished that I could find a humane way of getting rid of the rich so that we could get down to what's in the best interest of the 99, 44, 100% of the rest of us and stop worrying about the rich.
But a lot of people say, oh, the capital gains tax cut is for the rich.
Now, let's look at this, whether it's really only for the rich, the capital gains tax cuts.
Now, here's a little lesson for you.
I wrote about this several weeks ago in a column that's carried at Jewish World Review and Town Hall.
And matter of fact, it's on my site, website, walterwilliams.com.
But I asked the, or I'll ask you.
Suppose you see two construction sites, you know, two sites where they're building a highway.
And on one construction site, you see the workers building the highway using shovels and wheelbarrows.
At the other construction site, you see workers building the highway with huge earth movers, asphalt-laying machines, and huge cranes.
Now, here's the question.
At which site do you think the workers are being paid a higher wage?
Now, I bet most of you will say, oh, at the site where they're using the big heavy equipment.
Well, why?
Is it because the construction companies just like earth mover drivers and just pay them a higher wage than people who use shovels and wheelbarrows?
I don't think that's the answer.
Or do you think that the guys who run the earth movers, they just have more bargaining power and they get higher wages?
That's not the answer either.
The answer is, is that the workers at the project using earth movers and cranes and asphalt-laying machines, they are more productive.
That is, they get more highway built per day per person than the people using wheelbarrows and shovels.
And so their wages reflect that productivity.
They're more valuable.
Now, why are they more valuable?
Well, because they have more equipment to work with.
They have more capital.
They have more capital to work with.
Now, that's the crux of the matter.
Now, building machines and building technology, this is all called capital formation.
Now, firms will build more capital if it's cheaper to build capital.
That is, the cheaper the cost of building capital, the more capital will be built, the more productive workers will be, and the higher the wages will be.
And we call this capital formation.
Now, things like the capital gains tax, the corporate profit tax, the tax on dividends, they raise the cost of capital formation.
And so there's less of it around.
So if you really care about wages, you want to make the cost of capital as cheap as possible.
Now, I believe that we have the capital gains tax, and another tax that impacts capital formation is the death tax.
I believe we have these two taxes that don't generate much revenue in and of themselves.
That is, the capital gains tax generates something like $56 billion worth of federal revenue.
That's 3% of the total revenue.
And the death tax, about 1%, $25 billion.
They don't generate much revenue, but they're in keeping with the philosophy of getting the rich.
But when you try to get the rich, you invariably get the poor or the common man.
That is, you strip him of the ability to have more equipment to work with and hence higher wages.
Anyway, I think that the Reagan revolution has been very, very important, not only in terms of stimulating our economy, but putting an end to communism, the most oppressive system that the world has ever known.
That is, more people have died, have been murdered by their own governments under communism than under Nazism.
But how come Nazism gets a bad rap and communism doesn't?
Well, because there's so many people who like communism.
Now, they're not only in Russia, but they're in the United States.
They're people who love government control over people's lives.
And so they'll give Stalin and they'll give Khrushchev and they'll get Mao Zedong a free pass, but they will not give Hitler a free pass.
Okay, folks, there's another – the second hour, by the way, I have to mention.
Well, there are some problems, and we're going to try to get them solved in the second hour.
And let me give you, let me just whet your appetite for these problems because I don't want to talk about it in the first hour.
I want to talk about it in the second hour.
More than half of students at four-year colleges and 75% at two-year colleges have been, according to the Pew Charitable Trust study, a study that was funded by them, they don't have enough literacy to handle things like figuring out credit card offers.
They don't have enough quantitative skills to figure out whether they have enough gasoline in their car to get to the next gasoline station.
You just have to do some adding, some tracting, some dividing to figure that out.
So matter of fact, if you see people stranded alongside the highway, it could be these students that can't figure out, can't do the math to figure out how much gas they need to get to the next gasoline station.
So we're going to find out more about this when we talk to Lisa Snell.
She is the director of education studies and child welfare at the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, which is one of the free market foundations that's doing really state-of-the-art work in many, many areas of our economic lives.
But we'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back.
Walter Williams sitting in for a rush who will be in Monday.
He'll be in the Attila the Hun chair on Monday.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
There's another story in the news.
And it has to do with this recent United States Supreme Court ruling against ruling in favor of Oregon's doctor-assisted suicide.
Now, there's a couple of issues you might want to address on this.
Now, if I were the court judge, you know, deciding whether somebody wanted to commit suicide or something like this, I would just say, well, you know, let's say Walter Williams.
He wants to commit suicide.
Well, if I were a Supreme Court justice, I would say, well, who owns Walter Williams in the first place?
And I'd say, well, if the government owns him, if the United States Congress owns him, well, no, he does not have the right because that is the property of somebody else.
You don't have the right to destroy somebody else's property, but you have the right to destroy your own property.
But maybe that's a little bit too deep for the Supreme Court.
But there's this whole issue of federalism.
And matter of fact, this article says federalism is not for sissies.
That is, if you believe in federalism, well, then it's a state's right.
And I don't understand.
And for the life of me, Justice Scalia, he voted against it.
My good friend Clarence Thomas voted against it.
They were in the minority, and Justice Roberts were in the minority.
And it seems like it's a clear question on this for those of us who have respect for the United States Constitution.
It says, now here's what, here's how James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was trying to describe the Constitution to the, in 1787, 1786, he was trying to explain it to the people.
And here's a quotation from him, and you can find this in Federal's paper 45.
And Madison says, they're saying, what is this Constitution, folks?
And I mean, they're asking in Madison, what is this Constitution?
Well, he's saying, and I quote, the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined and mostly restricted to external affairs.
Those powers which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.
Period.
Now, what is unclear about that?
I don't understand.
I don't see that.
And so that means that the federal government does not have any input into a decision made by the state of Oregon or any other state.
That is, it's restricted to the delegated functions enumerated in the Constitution.
So, I don't know.
I don't know about my friends in the United States Supreme Court.
Let's take a few of your calls.
Let's go to Barbara in Florida.
Welcome to the show, Barbara.
Thank you.
Thank you for taking my call.
I just had a comment to make about those earth movers and crane workers.
They didn't get the salary that they got because they negotiated or for any other reason.
The reason was they got an education.
They went to school.
They learned a trade.
They learned a skill.
That's what makes the economy hum along.
Okay, but suppose they went to school and got an education and found out how to operate a train or a crane or earth mover, but there were no earth movers and cranes.
Then get a different education.
Well, I know.
Now, you know what I mean.
That is, without the physical.
Matter of fact, education is capital formation as well.
But you need the physical equipment there, too, don't you?
That is, if they're, I mean, you could take this crane operator to a country that did not have any cranes, and he would not get that kind of wage, would he?
No, he wouldn't.
Even though he had the skills to operate a crane very well.
Right.
I'm agreeing with you.
But also, you have to look the other side of the coin.
If you have 100 cranes and you have no crane operators, what good are your cranes?
They're no good.
Right.
So, you know, my thing is, get an education.
When I hear people whining about being poor and having no money, well, I went to school, and not only did I go to school, I paid my own way.
I went to school where they were tall ladies in black dresses called nuns, and they taught me how to be a nurse, and I worked 12 hours a day, and I got my education.
Very good for you.
I don't have to whine, and I get really picked off at people who are complaining about the minimum wage.
Well, don't stay there.
Go get educated.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, the minimum wage, or even people complaining about not earning the living wage.
Doesn't that bother you when a person says, I'm not earning the living wage?
And here he is talking to me.
He's obviously alive.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So what does he mean?
Now, I can understand this if a corpse was telling me somebody laying in a casket saying, I'm not earning the minimum wage.
I could understand that.
But somebody living telling me that he's not earning the.
It's your standard of living.
You have to decide what standard of living you want.
If you want to live at that standard, then don't get educated.
If you do, then go get some smarts.
That's right.
And thanks for calling.
You know, we don't have much time for another call, but there's a little tidbit that you folks ought to be aware of.
According to NASA scientists, the planet Mars is undergoing significant global warming.
The planet Mars.
So I need to talk to, I want an environmentalist wacko to call up the show and tell me what kind of SUVs are operating on Mars or what kind of emissions are people making that's causing Mars to warm.
Because it says in this article that, according to the, for the past three summers on Mars, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet South Pole have shrunk from the previous year's size.
And I just want to know and Brett, if anybody calls, if one of these environmental wackos calls and wants to explain this to us, put them right through.
Put them through instantaneously, because we have to know what's going on on Mars, why there's global warming on Mars.
And and hold on folks, we'll be back with your calls after this and you can reach us by calling 800-282-2882, folks.
You know, sometimes you have to kind of wing it a little because sometimes the engineer gives me false signals here.
It's really not my fault.
We'll be back after this.
Welcome back, folks.
We're sitting in for Russian balls, Walter Williams, and we're pushing back the frontiers of ignorance.
There's another story before I get the phone calls I'd like to talk about.
And that is a story that has come to my attention.
And it's about those of you who travel a lot.
And it says that airline passengers, it's a new program.
It's being announced by the Transportation Security Administration's chief, Kip Hawley.
And it says that airline passengers who buy pre-approved security passes and have their credit histories checked and property records examined as part of a government's plan to turn over a registered travels program to private companies.
Anyway, if you spend this money, you pay a fee and you have your ID checked, et cetera, et cetera, it says that you could pass through airport security lines more quickly.
That is, Kip Hawley says the program's benefits would include passengers not having to take off their shoes or coats off or removing their laptops from their cases.
I think there's a lot to be desired in our airport security problem program.
Matter of fact, folks, I don't travel commercially anymore.
Matter of fact, I used to travel giving lectures all over the country, matter of fact, all over the world.
But as of two years ago, I stopped altogether.
I just don't travel commercially.
And what prompted me was some of the stupid airport security regulations.
I remember going through the airport, this was about two or three years ago, and I had my carry-on bag.
And the guy looked through and he said, you know, I had an eyeglass repair kit.
And it had a little screwdriver in it.
And the screwdriver is maybe about three or four inches.
Not even that, about two inches.
And the screener said, well, you can take the screws, but you cannot take the screwdriver.
So I asked the fellow, I said, What's the chances?
Do you think?
What's the chance of an airline being hijacked with an eyeglass screwdriver?
He said, Wait here.
So he called his supervisor.
The supervisor came all over Huffy-Puffy.
He said, What's wrong?
And so I said, I asked this fellow, he wants to keep my eyeglass screwdriver.
I asked them, What's the chance of an airline being hijacked with an eyeglass screwdriver?
He said, It's on the list.
Either leave it here or you don't get on the plane.
I wouldn't have gotten on the plane, ladies and gentlemen, but the people who invited me had gone through all kinds of very costly preparations.
So I went.
But I said, that's the last time.
And so I have not been since.
Now, and I think some of these regulations are very stupid.
Matter of fact, I wrote three columns that's last year.
It's called Stupid Airport Regulation, Part 1, 2, and 3.
And as a result, I got calls from pilots.
And pilots were telling me how stupid they were, too.
You know, pilots were saying they have to go through some of the same stuff.
I don't know where they still do.
But this pilot was telling me, that guy had his Allen wrenches taken or files taken.
And he said, it's so stupid to do that to pilots.
He says, they'll take away a guy's fingernail files, but leave in his cockpit a crash axe.
You know, a crash axe is one of those axes that if the plane crashes, you know, you can just chop yourself out of the cockpit.
And so I asked you, ladies and gentlemen, which is more dangerous, a fingernail file or a crash axe?
Obviously, the TSA think It's a fingernail file.
And by the way, the pilots were telling me the TSA guys, they refer to them as thugs standing around, which I think is a good idea.
Anyway, I don't travel now.
See, I don't use commercial airlines anymore.
And look, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not beaten up on the TSA so much because they have their procedures and I have my procedures.
And my procedures don't allow me to cope with stupidity, except in class while I'm teaching.
I'm being paid in that case.
Let's go to the phones.
Let's go back to the phones and welcome Al in Chicago on his cell phone.
Welcome to the show, Al.
Dr. Williams, it's always a pleasure.
You opened the program talking about communism.
And, you know, I read a law by Bastiat a number of years ago, and I kind of remember the introduction of the preface to his book in which he talks about how socialists refuse, as we find today among Democrats.
In fact, Marion Holmes, I use Holmes Edelman, was on television the other day kind of making the same argument that regardless of the failure of their philosophy, they continue to argue its efficacy.
They disregard how the great society has flopped.
And Marion Holmes Edelman said, the only problem is we didn't do enough.
And why is it that there is no honesty among those people that they don't look at the absolute failure of their philosophy, admit it, and make the changes necessary to restore what our society once was very individualistic?
I don't believe that they view it as a failure.
They say, we meant well.
That is, we intended, we had good intentions.
And many people judge a policy not by its results, but by the intentions behind a policy.
Well, isn't Ms. Edelman like Jesse Jackson and others part of an apparatus that has made a lot of money off these programs and have been part of these institutions and really look more at their survival than they do at the benefits of the projects?
Well, they think.
Go ahead.
Thanks.
They've done very well in and of themselves.
That is, many people go to Washington or they get in these various federal programs in order to do good, and they find out they do very, very well.
These people who benefit immensely are the people, let's say, for example, the GS15s, GS-16s, 12s, who run these programs.
They get high salaries.
The college professors who get $500,000 grants to do studies on poverty and meet in Miami during the winter at a nice hotel to have discussions about the poor, they benefit.
And many times the people who are calling for various programs to help the less fortunate among us, they're really kind of saying, let's feed the sparrows through the horses.
Now, if you have any rural background, you kind of understand what that means.
They say, give the money to me and we will help the poor.
And it looks like, and if you do an objective assessment of the great society programs, many of the people who might have been targeted, or at least the target group of those programs, in many aspects, they're worse off now than they were before the programs.
That is, if you look at illegitimacy, you look at level of education, you look at family breakdown, in many areas, These circumstances are worse off than they were at the inception of the program.
And it's my opinion that the war on poverty has done more to destroy particularly the black family than the harshest slavery and the rankest racial discrimination has done.
That is, the welfare state has done to the black family what slavery and racial discrimination could not have done, namely to break up the black family, or actually a better term is not break up the black family, the question of the family not forming in the first place.
That is, 38% of black kids, only 38% live in two-parent families, whereby in 1875 it was 75%.
In Harlem, in 1925, 85% of black kids live in two-parent families.
I doubt whether you can find 15, 20% today.
Illegitimacy rates among black kids in 1918 or the 19 teens was lower than the illegitimacy rate among black teenagers was lower than that among white teenagers.
And now the illegitimacy rate is sky high.
And you can't blame that on discrimination.
I believe you blame that on the welfare state.
As I said, the welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery and discrimination could not have done.
And the welfare state is doing the same thing to white Americans.
For example, in 18, I'm sorry, in the late 1960s, when Moynihan was talking about the crisis in the black family, illegitimacy among blacks was 25% in the late 1960s.
Now, of course, it's 70%.
However, among whites today, the illegitimacy rate among whites today is 25 to 30% what it was among blacks in the 1960s.
So the welfare state is an equal opportunity institution or family destroyer.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, pushing back the frontiers of ignorance.
You know, one of the things we ought to think about when we look at stories, some of the tragic stories about the recent accidents in the mines in West Virginia, it's something to kind of, you know, kind of put in the hopper to think about.
First of all, Western coal, coal from the West, in the Western part of the United States, is far safer to mine.
That is, they use open pits or strip mining.
Secondly, Western coal has a much lower sulfur content.
It burns cleaner.
Now, you might say, well, how come these power companies on the East Coast are not just shipping in Western coal?
Well, there's a law that requires power companies to meet the emission standards by not by buying coal that doesn't emit as many sulfur and dangerous emissions, but they have to meet these standards by putting scrubbers, buying scrubbers, and putting them on the stack to clean the dirty coal.
And so they say the Western company, the Eastern power companies say, well, look, if we have to buy these scrubbers, well, why go buy Western coal?
You might as well buy the dirty coal from West Virginia.
Now, who do you think pushed through legislation to require that power companies meet emission standards by having scrubbers as opposed to low-sulfur coals?
Oh, Kit Carson, he came up with the answer.
He said it was Sheets.
You folks, you know who Sheets is.
He is the senator from West Virginia.
That is, Sheets Birds pushed through this legislation to create more employment coal mining in West Virginia.
It would have been far, the power companies would be buying far, you know, much more coal from Western coal mines than the ones in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
So anyway, when you think about miners, you know, the accidents in our coal mines, you might want to ask the question, how come we're mining so much coal in dangerous conditions when we can get the coal that's even better coal in safer conditions?
That's one of the unanticipated effects of political manipulation of the market.
Let's go to Mark on a cell phone in Buffalo, New York.
Welcome to the show, Mark.
Mr. Williams, this is a true honor to talk to you.
You're one of my favorite fill-ins for Russia.
Thank you.
Comment that I had through the call screener was that the government or the newspapers are always going after private industry for their accident rates.
And the mining industry has improved exponentially over the years with their safety audits and always trying to improve safety.
But you never see any safety concerns or anything published in the newspaper about, say, for instance, a government organization like the Mail.
I mean, there are people that are, unfortunately, probably lose their life delivering the mail or hurt seriously.
I never seen any reports, industry reports citing any of those.
I don't know if you're familiar with that or not.
No, no, I'm not at all.
However, I think people give government a pass because I think they say, well, it's us or they at least they weren't motivated by profits.
That is, you know, people, they're really hard on people motivated by profits, but they're, but if it's a non-profit organization, and matter of fact, the government is the largest non-profit organization in our country.
And so you have to expect to find different outcomes when profits are not the motivation.
See, matter of fact, if you look around, let's ask ourselves, in which areas of our lives are we the most satisfied and which areas of our lives are we the most dissatisfied?
Well, we're all satisfied with our supermarkets.
They always have what we want when we go there.
We're satisfied with our computer companies.
We're satisfied with the DVD, et cetera, et cetera.
They're all profit motivated.
Where are the areas that we're really dissatisfied with?
Well, it's the post office, it's the public schools, it's the Department of Motor Vehicles, and et cetera, et cetera.
And the reason why we're dissatisfied in these areas where it's a non-profit organization, why nonprofits produce all this dissatisfaction, is because they can survive whether they please us or not.
That is, because they have government to take our money.
Now, if Dell computers, if Dell Computers, for example, if they had the power to take my money, they wouldn't be as interested in pleasing me.
It'd be just like the public schools.
So, people, humanity is served best through the profit mode.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, winding down the first hour, and we just have a minute left.
Let's welcome Joseph from Hartford, Connecticut.
Welcome to the show, Joseph.
Dittos, Dr. Williams.
Yeah, it sounds like you ran into the 5% of the morons we have working for us at TSA.
Your kit was not banned, not even that screwdriver.
And we also have to deal with people like Senator Dorgan and Senator Wyden having us take people's lighters away, regular lighters, which is stupid.
You know, a lot of us are veterans.
We know what you can use, what you can't use.
You know, and we work for them.
We've got a 10-year background check, like the pilots.
We can't bring any of those items to the security checkpoint either.
I'll be darned.
It's silly.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
And we need some input from insiders like you to change the show.
We try.
We try.
Thanks a lot for calling in.
And folks, you've got to tune in next hour.
We're going to have Lisa Snell from the Reason Foundation to talk to us about education in America.
I don't know what she's going to tell us, but she's going to give us some very, very good insights on, I think, what needs to be done.
Why we're continually going down the tubes in education.
Why our kids can't read a credit card?
Why they can't tell whether they have enough gas.
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