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Feb. 9, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
February 9, 2006, Thursday, Hour #2
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Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
And again, uh Russia's uh interview at Fox News yesterday on the Neil Cavuto program is up live uh now.
Live, it's up on uh the Rush Limbaugh.com site on the uh free portion of the site.
So you can see it uh right now.
You can see Rush for Free.
That interview, just terrific distillation of all Russia's been talking about for many, many months.
Um uh this year, the uh United Nations turns sixty.
Along with the first wave of baby boomers.
And uh this is an occasion for us to take a hard look, it seems to me.
The idealism that drove the founders of the UN to believe that collective global action by nation states could thwart aggression, prevent um disasters, uh genocides, and so forth.
The idea that uh that it would work is uh boy, we are so sadly far from that ideal.
And uh last night uh treated myself to a DVD of uh uh to that effect called called Broken Promises, the United Nations at 60.
It is narrated by uh Ron Silver, who himself turned 60 this year as well, uh produced by in part by uh Ron Silver as well, the well-known uh actor, producer, director, and uh longtime actors equity association president, a lifelong Democrat who spoke up after the uh attacks of September eleven to support the uh war on uh terrorism and supported George Bush, and has now delved into uh the broken promises of the UN on this DVD.
He joins us here on our guest line, Ron Silver.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you, Roger, for having me on.
You're a terrific guy, and I just uh I love this DVD as as stark and as uh brutal as it is in in depicting the various genocides around the world that the UN has been powerless or worse to stop.
Why did you do this?
Well, I've had a longstanding interest in the UN, and I think uh like many people feel that it betrayed its foundational principles.
If you look at the charter, you look at Chapter 1 of the UN, it was a creation basically of Franklin Roosevelt, who was trying to fulfill Woodrow Wilson's vision.
Uh Truman was very influential and uh it in in its beginnings, it wanted to do the right thing in an effect of United Nations would enhance United States interest, and it has gotten so off track now that uh it's it's almost criminal, some of its activities.
In fact, some of them are.
And what concerned me and the reason that I wanted to do the picture was I felt this was not a partisan issue, that some of the hypocrisies and the dishonesties and corruption should offend liberals and multilateralists more than anybody else, because it's their ideals that were being betrayed.
So what I wanted to do is do uh a pretty genuine, authentic look at how the organization operates and how it needs to be reformed, if it can be reformed.
And that's a question we want to get to.
Your honesty on this is is uh is very clarifying, I'll tell you, because you're absolutely right.
You can look at conservative or right-wing attacks on the United Nations, and they never were happy with it back in 1946.
Uh isolationists and others just didn't like the idea of the internationalist idea here because it diluted in their minds the nation-state, the prerogatives of sovereignty of the United Nations of the United States.
But if you look at from the liberal point of view, from the from the Roosevelt point of view, if you look at the original intent of this to stop genocide, to stop aggression, to stop the future uh wars of the kind that uh devastated the twentieth century, uh, this has not gone well.
Well, everybody simply needs to ask themselves when Truman addressed the San Francisco Conference that came up with the charter in 1945.
He started off by saying you members of the conference ought to be the architects of the better world.
Now, I don't care what side of the aisle you're on, just look at the organization, what it has failed to do, what it has done, and determine whether they are the architects of a better world.
Yeah.
Is it fixable?
I think it is.
I think it is.
I there's been some extraordinary uh reform task force on reform.
The United States Institute of Peace, chaired by uh former Speaker uh Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell, uh Senator Mitchell, came up with a very, very detailed reform report that if it was implementable, uh it would go a far way in well, certainly solving some of the deficiencies of its management and its corrupt practices administratively.
Uh what's harder and where they actually punted was on Security Council reform where most of the stuff gets done.
Uh and also the uh Committee on the Present Danger came out with a very good report about reform too.
I think everybody recognizes, or most people recognize, it is in the United States' interest to reform the organization.
It can enhance our goals and our visions in the world to have an effective United Nations because we can't do everything alone.
From your point from your in the and and I think that's uh the that that's right.
Bush is already in turn in terms of Iran reaching out to the UN and hoping that it can fulfill its its its original mission.
But uh as you look at this and as you look at those reports suggesting uh the ways in which we can reform and make effective and return to the original ideals.
What what role is uh is the new um uh ambassador uh taking on this that that you uh is it positive, is it negative?
How's Bolton doing?
I think he's doing a wonderful job.
And had he been approved earlier, uh I think a lot of the recommendations and reforms that he's suggesting happened would have had more time for other members to reflect upon.
Uh, you know, because he was his approval process was took so long.
He didn't get in there until right before this 50th session met uh there was a lot that needed to be changed and done.
So some people saw it as obstructionist and uh kind of unilateral American big bully coming in.
But had he been uh approved and been at the UN months before, uh they would have had more time to reflect on.
I think he's doing a very good job.
There's there's nothing he suggested that should not be done, and everybody knows that.
They they have to revisit some of their principles.
You uh they need a a caucus of democracies there.
They need to abolish the human rights commission.
Amen.
Which is not only feckless, but it it that is criminal the way it's criminal uh operates.
So they need to do a lot of things, but the I mean a pessimist would say, you know, you look back at almost from its inception, there have been calls for reform.
In nineteen ninety-three, the General Assembly passed a resolution citing fifteen previous attempts at reform.
And in nineteen ninety-four, I mean I remember this, Ambassador Albright was exulting in the success of uh I forget the exact words, but it was something like an enormous diplomatic effort to secure uh uh a standing internal watchdog office of the UN.
And the mission was called uh the internal oversight committee, the internal oversight, whatever.
Uh and it was supposed to crack down on waste fraud and abuse, and she said finally we got something done in nineteen ninety-four.
Nineteen ninety-four was the year that the oil for food program began.
Yeah.
So I mean the cynics have a case here.
Yes, they yes, they do.
Ron Silver with us, and again the uh the movie is Broken Promises, the United Nations at sixty.
Talk a little bit because you get into it in such great detail in this uh about that uh human rights uh commission and I guess Cuba's on it, some of these other folks uh it's a mockery.
Yeah, well well what they do what's astonishing, if you look at the ninth session of the UN, which is fifty-four fifty-five in the resolutions that were passed, and then you look at the fifty-ninth, which was convened last year, before this year's resolution, you see the imbalance of the resolutions.
The General Assembly was supposed to be the deliberative body, the Security Council was supposed to be the body that could actually take action on on uh using military force, etcetera.
From the beginning, there were structural flaws.
I mean, and Roosevelt understood that.
He understood he was sitting across from Joseph Stalin starting this organization.
They were concerned at that time about fascism and about the transnational wars and crossing borders, but he felt in time that the Soviet Union would come around to being part of the international community.
He was right, but it took forty-four devastating years for that to happen.
And I think that set the tone for a lot of its deficiencies over the years that we had to sit and talk to Joseph Stalin.
And in 1972, Mao joined the table.
So a whole lot wasn't going to get done.
No.
Because everybody had different interests on it.
But y you know, the we're confronting new vulnerabilities now that we're unprepared for, and I think the UN was unprepared to deal with the unprecedented types of threats.
They in their founding statements and in everything you read about it, what we're plagued with today, proliferation, non-state actors, terrorism, uh large part of the world with poverty rates that are unsustainable, transborder infectious diseases.
This was not what they were set up to do, but these are the vulnerabilities and and threats that we face.
Well, and we face an old-fashioned one, frankly, in a in a rogue state like uh Iran uh getting the nuclear power.
Well, it's not only Iran.
I mean, there there are similarities today, I think, uh, to the war against fascism and the war we had against communism, in that the Western world cannot compromise with totalitarian evil.
And we trying to deal with that within the structure of the UN is an almost impossible task the way it's set up now.
Well, a terrific now, where can we get this uh DVD?
Is it going to be in the last you asked, Roger?
Yes, Roger.
Broken Promises Movie dot com.
Broken Promises Movie.com.
Yeah.
And Ron Silver, uh great narration job, uh uh uh unbelievable visuals in this thing.
Unliterally unbelievable.
Well, we talked to a lot of the victims, you know, in Rwanda and we talked to Bisms and Srebinitza, and you get a different uh more emotional take on what the consequences of policies or lack of policies at the UN have for people around the world.
Well, good job, Ron, and I appreciate your being on today.
Thanks for your time.
Roger, thank you for having me.
Ron Silver, I'm Roger Hedgecock, Infor Rush Limbaugh, back after this.
Roger Hedgecock In for Rush Limbaugh, welcome back.
And uh what a remarkable thing has happened.
The former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, Pear Allmark, has put forward a name, a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now, this prize has lately been devalued by being awarded to uh Yasser Arafat and uh Jimmy Carter and uh there was some uh killer here on death row that got nominated, Tookie uh Williams here in California.
Good grief.
So I mean it's not and I understand it's a little tarnished at the moment.
But John Bolton, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been nominated by this Swedish former Deputy Prime Minister.
Specifically because for the Peace Prize, specifically because it was Bolton's work that helped break up the AQ Khan nuclear uh underground network.
This is the Pakistani nuclear scientist that was selling nuclear secrets to uh anybody who could bid it up, North Korea, Iran, whoever, Libya, etc.
Bolton is the guy, and this is why he came to the attention of George Bush, who really put together the effort that uh r rolled up the uh the con uh nuclear network.
How interesting that as of yet I don't think that this m our ambassador has actually uh been uh been thoroughly uh approved by the Senate.
Uh they were blocking his uh uh his nomination, and then he had to get the the recess nomination by George Bush, and I don't think he's yet been actually confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
But uh this uh a new nomination and the recognition of John Bolton's service to this country ought to wake some people up at some point.
Now, the best article of the day.
This was a chuckle.
This was good.
This was good.
Because again, everything Russia's been saying about the Democrats totally true.
USA Today.
And you know when it gets distilled to USA Today, it's uh you know, it's the it's the great mass uh of people out there.
This is not this is not uh a journal uh for the elite uh for some s selected group of people.
This is not the Woodrow Wilson School of International Relations Quarterly Magazine.
No, this is USA Today.
Okay.
Headline Dems in search of pithy agenda.
I I I don't know.
I think they're just in search of any agenda.
Subhead with hopes of great gains in Congress, leaders vowed their own contract with America.
Well, Where did they get that phrase?
Gee, what an idea.
They start out by uh talking about a panel of Democrats at a United Auto Workers Conference.
And Bonnie Loria, a retired General Motors plant worker from West Branch, Michigan, gets up to say, um, stop the torrent of words.
She said, too much information is not good sometimes.
She's talking to these Democrats.
Too much information is not good.
Just give me six or seven strong points to catch people's eye.
In other words, what do you guys actually stand for and can we reduce it to something people understand?
This is coming from a retired auto worker.
If she gets it, believe me, every voter gets it.
And I don't mean to demean Lori at all.
Just the idea that every American is waking up to this.
The Democrats are just hate Bush, and that's it.
There's nothing beyond that.
And they agreed.
John Lapp, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in response to Loria who publishes a newsletter for UAW retirees, said in response that Democrats, this is what he said, suffer from, quote, diarrhea of the mouth, unquote.
And that's about what it is, too, diarrhea.
Well, that's my ad.
While Republicans distill their ideas into a few short sound bites.
Those are called uh uh, John, those are called ideas.
Rapp said of the re of a Republican opposition, quote, you know what they're for.
Yeah.
He says he's hopeful.
This is so this guy's the head, the executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, John Lapp, he says he's hopeful Democrats will soon have a quote, understandable unquote agenda.
Well, yeah, sooner rather than later in this election year.
Um then they they talk about since the uh State of the Union message, Democrats have come forward in droves to float dozens of their own ideas and themes.
They have, and here's the list USA give A Today gives, they proposed energy independence in ten years, universal broadband access in five years, a cleaned up Congress in a hundred days, hundred thousand new soldiers, a hundred thousand new engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, a seventeen percent tax credit to companies that give health insurance.
Now let me go back over this because this is fascinating stuff.
When they talk about energy independence, just what are they talking about?
We think we know because obviously they turn to the environmentalist uh wacko fringe of their of their coalition and say, okay, we're how do we get independence?
Now, other than, you know, walking to work, boy, another 26-mile walk.
Ready, I'm ready.
I'm leaving at 3:30.
Um.
Other than that, just what are they talking about?
Because I've gotten into alternative energies.
I mean, I have a hybrid car in our family.
I have solar panels going up on the roof of this house I'm building.
I'm into this idea that I ought to personally be as independent as possible on the energy things.
The Democrats really aren't.
U.S. representatives Alan Mullihan, Mullohan, and Nick Rahall, both West Virginia Democrats, are leading, I'm reading now out of the ECN special report, are leading a high-profile fight against wind farms on the state's mountaintop ridges.
So every time you pursue an alternative energy, you want a wind farm off of uh Nantucket.
Oh, no, no, no, Ted Kennedy, who's in favor of uh alternative energies all the way down the line, um get off of foreign dependence on oil, get off the foreign dependence uh you know, all that blah blah blah.
But you try to put a wind farm where he can see it, he's opposed to it.
John Kerry's opposed to it.
You see, they want a wind farm someplace else, a red state somewhere.
So they go to a red state, West Virginia, and two Democrat congressmen down there oppose the wind farm, which will bring jobs and electricity without being dependent on foreign oil.
Who opposes them?
Democrats.
How are they Going to be for energy independence?
What is it that they're going to do to get energy independence if they're going to be opposed individually to projects that will give us that independence?
Are they going to support nuclear energy, which is one of the answers?
Wind farms, which is one of the answers.
My solar panels, which is one of the answers.
Where are the Democrats' solar panels?
Republicans are putting up solar panels.
Republicans are buying the hybrid cars.
We'll be back after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hitchcock filling in for a rush.
So Virginia Governor Tim Kane, who made the uh State of the Union response, or one of them, has um come up with uh the phrase that uh Paul Bagala and others in the Democratic Party now are warming up to as the the uh the rallying cry for the Democratic Party in 06, behind which they can put together some, as uh John uh Lapp put it, understandable ideas for the American public.
Like a like about time.
Uh and that phrase is we can do better.
We I don't know.
Does that stir you?
Does that pick you up?
We can do better.
Huh?
We can do better what?
Better pancakes?
We can do better.
We can do better.
We can do slightly better because we don't like to do best because then it hurts the self-esteem of those who can't do as well.
Uh, what what is this we can do better?
We can do better.
Um we can do socialism.
Uh Hillary Clinton, along with uh Vermont uh socialist uh Congressman Bernie Sanders is now supporting with the bankruptcy of Delphi Corporation, planned job cuts at General Motors and Ford.
They are talking about a quote, I get this, quote, Marshall plan, unquote, for the U.S. auto industry.
A marshall plan.
What this industry needs is vast infusions of your money.
That's what the auto industry needs.
Why didn't I think of that first?
Take my paycheck, please.
Just give it to the auto industry so that they can provide middle class retiree health benefits for these auto workers.
Which I won't be able to afford now with the high taxes, but I'm not complaining because I think the auto workers deserve it.
Why don't they make cars people want to uh hello, Hillary?
If for I'm going to go slow here because this may be too too too shattering.
If Ford and General Motors made cars people wanted, they wouldn't have a problem.
Now to be fair about it, since I own General Motors cars and I own a upscale Ford, um, they do, but not enough of them.
Chrysler makes cars people are excited about.
They're doing pretty well.
Now, of course they had Mercedes in fusion, I understand that.
But if Ford and Delphi can't cut it, then sell out to Toyota and let's be done with it.
A car manufacturer that's destined to be number one in the world because they are building cars, people want.
What we don't need is uh General Motors and Ford Motor Company becoming a department of the federal government.
President Hillary, good grief.
Scott in Virginia Beach, next on the Rush Show.
Hi.
I got a question for you, but I'd like to tell you something.
First, that this uh attack in Los Angeles in 2002 was the uh cooperation between the United States, Thailand, and Afghanistan governments had nothing to do with wiretaps or the FICA courts, and a Butch spokesman actually said that after the speech.
Nothing to do with wiretapping in the United States.
How did they find out the information, do you think?
Well, it was the the Al-Qaeda Southeast and Afghanistan, those governments cooperate with us on intelligence.
Not a good nothing with FICA courts.
How did those gu how did those governments come by the information, do you think?
Well, I don't know, but I know it it's nothing to do with the FICA course like you insinuated it was.
I'm telling you that I didn't say FIFA, it's FISA for the certainly insinuated.
Scott, Scott, here's what I said rather than the insinuation.
Here's what I said.
I said that uh tapping individuals, getting their phone calls, intercepting their communications was vital in stopping that attack, and that's true.
And that's nothing that anybody in the United States is against.
What they did was perfectly legal, nothing to do with what we're talking about with these wiretaps.
If foreign governments tap your phone call, then you don't have a problem.
Well, no.
Okay, and I I got a question for you.
I was listening to Gonzalez in those hearings.
He said if a terrorist in Los Angeles calls a terrorist in New York, they start wiretapping him, and then they go get a court order.
How come they can't do that from a foreign point of view?
Scott, I've uh I completely lost you and and I'm and I'm and I'm sorry you called.
Uh this is uh uh where we are with Scott and all of these liberals is they're incoherent and they're angry.
And it's just difficult to have a rational conversation.
I asked him point blank, is it okay then if a foreign uh government taps your phone and he said yes.
Uh uh what what are you gonna do?
And he's I think I said, Do you object if a foreign government uh would tap your phone?
He goes, No, I uh you know how do you even have a conversation with somebody like that?
It's clear to everybody that we can't uh outsource our security.
The nation's security cannot be outsourced.
This was the outcry against torturing suspects, al-Qaeda suspects by shipping them off to Eastern European countries.
You remember this big flap that went nowhere because the idea was uh we can't uh allow foreign governments to do what uh we what we can't do.
Uh we can't torture uh people, we won't torture, we're not a torturing kind of society, but uh to to get the information we can't uh outsource the torture uh to Poland and Romania.
So now I get this call from this liberal who says uh yeah, but it was these other governments that tapped uh and found the information.
It wasn't FISA and it wasn't uh Bush and and it was these other governments in the Philippines and Afghanistan.
So we're outsourcing the tapping now, and that's okay.
Here's Aaron in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hi, Aaron.
Hi, Roger, how are you?
Good.
Hey Diddle, I want to say hello to my parents who I know are listening in Naples, Florida, first of all, but uh I wanted to talk about the FISA law and the wiretapping and something that I don't think anybody's really considered or at least vocalized is what happens if uh we intercept a communication and then 72 hours later we go to the FISA court and uh they look at uh the French law or some other um voodoo witchcraft that says that uh what we did was improper um with all the Democrats I know that are so
helpful in and uh you know protecting the nation and cooperating with uh the president, what do you suppose would happen if 72 hours after an intercept they said it was improper?
Well, exactly.
Uh and and how how in the world do we get this all to f keep in mind what we're trying to say here.
A guy has a uh five-minute cell phone.
He has five minutes on that cell phone, it's a use once and throw away cell phone, and that's what they're doing now.
Use once and throw away.
We have five minutes max, and maybe the phone call itself is a minute or two to uh find out the location of that cell phone because the number he's just called is uh Zawahiri's uh private n line.
Uh you know, and and they have this list of names they've gotten from these computers, from these guys, they know where these Al-Qaeda operatives are.
Now maybe we don't know all of them.
I'm sure we don't know all of them, but we know these guys.
So if they get phone calls, they want to know who's calling them and why.
And you just have a minute, you know, to find the location of that cell phone and try to figure out is that somebody threatening the United States.
The 72 hours following, what do you say to the court?
Look, he was calling uh so and so, he's on our list, we wanted to know why.
He's living in uh Lockwana, uh and and maybe they're trying to bomb the local, you know, you're working in a local mosque and he's trying to bomb the local whatever.
Uh you know, the courts, you're absolutely right.
The uh uh some judge is gonna look at that.
And and if he says it was improper, then what?
Then what do we do?
Then that'll be open opens the door for all kinds of congressional hearings and the president's impeachment and the broken laws and uh less defense for the country.
It's just crazy.
I know it's crazy.
I'm sorry, I it is crazy.
Aaron, thank you.
It it is crazy.
Uh by the way, Hillary Clinton is looking over her shoulder today.
Um a former Virginia governor, Mark Warner is assembling a team to Challenge for the presidential nomination.
This uh Mark uh Warner is and most pointedly assembling a team of formal and informal advisors with ties to the Clinton administration.
Charles Manette, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, is uh working with Mr. Warner.
This and you know how the Clintons are.
If these guys uh you know, these guys that used to be their guys show up with Mark Warner challenging Hillary.
I I hope they have bodyguards.
To Chris on a cell phone.
Chris, welcome to the program.
How are you doing?
Uh Republican Republican solar homeowner dittoes.
I'm a Republican, I own a solar home.
I just, you know, I'd like to hear uh on obviously like Russia's show is great nationally because a lot of libs listen to it.
I get a lot of people talking to me about how they think it's great that I own a solar home and what clean power it is.
Actually it's a very dirty power.
If you own it like I do, I actually the heart of my solar system is my battery bank.
And if if we were to go to the ultimate end of what they want, which is to get rid of the big power companies and no transmission lines, and everybody went to a solar home like I have, a real off the grid power, you g you're gonna have millions and millions of lead acid batteries.
they're going to eventually end up in a landfill somewhere.
You've got acid, you've got chemicals that are produced from the acid, the batteries being charged.
I mean, I've got just 12 that I just replaced.
And I mean, you know, you're only gonna be able to recycle that so many times.
And we're talking about how many batteries do you have?
How many batteries?
How big is your house?
Uh my house square foot is not too big.
Let's see.
Probably about twelve hundred square feet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, uh what I've d I haven't gone that far, Chris.
Uh, you know, I didn't want to be uh having those batteries because I don't think they're I just I don't like I don't like the whole idea.
So I am in the grid, but I got one of those reversible meters, so during the day my meter goes backwards and then during the night it goes forwards and hopefully it balances out so I don't pay pay the power company anything because in the daytime I sell them power and at night they sell me power.
Right.
I mean I make uh I mean I I love it.
I mean it was it was one of those you know economical decisions.
It was gonna cost me so much power to have electricity brought out because I'm pretty far out in the woods.
Or I could go solar.
So I went solar, but you know, it's not uh, you know, all you know, whatever you want to call it.
No, no, no, you're right.
Now is it is it working for you?
Oh, it works great.
I mean I've I've had it for about eight years now.
But like I said, if if if all the people just in America all of a sudden change over to solar power and we said, Sure, there'd be a billion batteries.
Yeah, up to up yours to the big power companies, and you know, boy, we would be in a bad way.
I mean the gas that's produced from charging those batteries, the batteries themselves eventually are gonna be no good and end up in a landfill.
No question about it, Chris.
I appreciate the call.
Got to run to a break.
I'm Roger Hedgecock In for Rush, and after this, back with your call.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, filling in for rush today.
Uh Tom Sullivan tomorrow, rush back on Monday.
You can uh hear Rush However uh and see him for free at Rush Limbaugh.com.
The Neil Cavuto interview is up on the website uh there at Rushlimbod.com.
Mark on a cell phone in Pennsylvania next on the Rush Show.
Hi there.
Hey, hi Roger.
Thanks for having me on.
I uh love this show.
Any chance I get to uh you know, find on the radio I'm driving drunk.
Hey, um I'm from Pittsburgh, you know, and uh you were talking about Hillary.
I am tired of of our money being taken out of our pockets and taxes being raised to bail out SNL loan companies to bail out airlines and and now auto industries.
You know the steel mill was closing down.
My dad went out and got a job with the borough building, shoveling asphalt and they you know, uh whatever it took.
He he didn't sit around and wait for the government to handle money.
You know, that's ridiculous.
They gotta uh wake up.
I mean, you just can't keep bailing out these big companies that don't know how to um you know make a buck and uh, you know um how how to make a business plan work.
It's they got a thousand men sitting around or or more from what I understand, like fifteen hundred men in a jaw bank that they sit there eight hours a day, get thirty-some dollars an hour.
I wish I could sit and get thirty.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Mark, Mark, let me back up with me.
What what what is a job bank?
A job bank is if they uh currently don't um like if they have more workers that than jobs rather than lay them off, they just send them um, you know, they go into a room, they read newspapers, they read magazines, drink coffee, uh take a nap or whatever, eight hours comes by and they go home.
This is like a UAW thing with the GM.
Yes.
So they can't be wait wait wait wait wait wait mark they can't be fired.
They're actually they're taken off the job, and then because the GM can't use them in the plant, they go down to the rec room and uh read papers and still get paid?
Yes.
Oh but you like to have a job like that.
Well, that's that's unbelievable.
I'm stunned.
I never even knew that.
You know what?
Check into it.
Check into um job banks, and uh you'll see.
And I think the number's bigger than fifteen hundred.
Um I heard you know, thousands, but uh uh check into it.
Find a number of the right.
Well, GM is talking about closing uh a number of plants that have to be in the thousands.
Uh you're suggesting that what happens is they don't really get to save all the money they might because workers who are laid off uh because of the downsizing simply sit around uh and can get thirty bucks an hour by sitting around.
Or more and you know, full benefits and all this other stuff.
And uh in the bill.
I mean, figure it out.
Take one thousand people, thirty dollars an hour plus benefits, times that by by um eight hours a day, five days a week, and uh you start looking at millions and millions and millions of dollars.
Wow.
Mark, thanks for the call.
If anybody else knows about that, I'd love to get a call uh on that.
Uh I want before we get too far, I wanted to single out Democratic Senator Max Baucus.
Max Bacchus from Montana is the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee.
And speaking of, you know, one of the great success stories, and Arthur Laffer is probably laughing about this.
One of the great success stories is that the laughter curve has worked again.
We lowered the capital gains rate from what, uh 20 to 15 percent, whatever it was.
We lowered the capital gains rate of taxation.
And everybody predicted that means that fewer dollars would come into the federal government.
Actually, over the last 30 months of the lower capital gains rate, more money, 30 percent more money has come into the federal government because capital gains sales have soared because it costs less to do the sale.
It's only 15% instead of 20%.
At 15%, you get more activity.
You get more at 15% in dollar terms than you did at 20%.
You get a third more.
By the way, total tax receipts have increased by a hundred and twenty-four billion dollars more than the Congressional Budget Committee estimates for two thousand three, four, and five.
A hundred and twenty-four billion dollars more.
Because what they say is if you cut taxes, it costs the government X. Because they just take the tax rate, they take the amount of money the last year at that rate, and they lower the amount of income by the amount of that rate.
They give you a static situation.
When, of course, in the real world, when you lower tax rates, you increase economic activity, you increase tax revenues.
Now, will the Republicans stand up to Max Bacchus on the finance committee?
Because he's saying no, no, no.
The investment tax cuts that we made in 2003, the Republicans want to uh they expire in 2008.
Republicans want to extend them through 2010.
They should be extended through 210, uh just to keep this economic uh expansion going.
By the way, we have provided more jobs during George Bush's administration than Europe and Japan put together.
More new jobs in the United States of America during George Bush's administration than Europe, the European Union, and Japan put together.
Now, Max Baucus is saying, I don't believe any of that.
I don't care about any of that.
We can't extend these because just tax cuts for the rich.
If the tax cuts bring in more tax money, why wouldn't you want to have those tax cuts continue?
Baucus still keeps saying, we'll lose revenue after two thousand nine.
We'll lose revenue.
When the facts are you'll gain revenue, because that's what's happened.
Will the Republicans call Baucus' block?
I'm Roger Hedgecock.
We'll be back with more on the Rush Show after this.
Welcome back to the uh Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for uh Rush, and I'm sorry, not enough time to get to this next caller, Chuck, but Chuck, you hang on.
I want to get back to you to talk more about the job bank.
No wonder GM is having a problem in Ford and all these people.
The UAW rules uh make it impossible to become competitive in the global marketplace.
Uh tell you, we'll contrast that with Toyota doesn't do this.
Uh the the successful companies don't do this kind of stuff.
Pay people when they don't work.
Only the federal government does that.
Good grief.
Oh, there's a success story.
I'm Roger Hitchcock Infor Rush.
Check him out at Rush Limbaugh.com that Neil Cabuto interview.
Terrific.
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