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May 11, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:36
May 11, 2006, Thursday, Hour #3
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Thank you and welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock in here from KO Geo Radio in San Diego for today.
Tomorrow Rush is back from his rush to excellence in Dallas, Texas.
In the meantime, of course, you can keep up with everything at rushlimbaugh.com.
I want to talk about the economy because there's been a remarkable admission that tax cuts have produced prosperity beyond the prediction of anyone.
And I want to get back to that.
But the big item today of liberal angst is the National Security Agency collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, data provided by AT ⁇ T, Verizon, Bell South, etc.
Now, all of those folks, ATT, Verizon, Bell South, and others, have come forward now and have said we haven't provided anything that isn't provided in the law to provide.
In other words, our lawyers didn't allow us to provide anything that wasn't required by law.
Now, I don't know whether you can help me here connect this dot because a couple of weeks ago, it became clear that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others were cooperating with the Chinese government, complying with Chinese law, to shut down access to sites that mentioned the word freedom or Golang Fong, that exercise group they have there,
or any of these other things the Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to have access to.
And their defense was, well, yeah, we know this isn't the kind of thing we like, but we have to comply with the laws of China.
Now, all of a sudden, the laws of the United States, and by the way, the compiling of this records, specifically, specifically approved by the United States Supreme Court in 1997, now it's a big brouhaha here that somehow or other the NSA applying their algorithms, applying their equations to the records of who called who, not what was said.
There is no recording of what was said.
There is no snooping.
There is no listening in.
There is no privacy violation.
I particularly like the Brooklyn call we got in the previous segment saying, what do you mean privacy?
I can't get on the subway.
I can't get in.
And I walk down the street.
I hear half the conversation bellowed out from everybody standing next to me on their cell phones.
Notwithstanding that, there is nothing in this NSA story, even though USA Today went out of its way to leave that implication, that there's anything to do with recording conversations.
It's the record of the phone calls made, like, comes on your bill.
So that's number one.
And then number two, it is obvious, I guess it's more than obvious to the advanced students in this class at the Limbaugh Institute, that the target is not the NSA.
The target is the NSA's former director, Air Force General Michael Hayden, nominated last Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA.
First, it was the phony, well, wait a minute, a military man at the head of the CIA?
Oh, yeah, more than half of our CIA directors have been military men, including cuckoo guys like Stansfield Turner.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but, you know, guys like that who were in the military and who went on to be CIA directors.
So Michael Hayden is not out of the mainstream in that regard at all.
And they finally, when somebody, you know, I mean, that's what I love about conservatives, we actually have memories.
Liberals have no memory.
It's trained out of them in the public education system.
Memory is bad.
Memorizing is evil.
It hurts free expression and all that other stuff.
And finally, they forget that just a couple of years ago, they were on the other side.
It's like all these people who voted for the war and now they're anti-war.
Well, wait a minute, what happened back then?
Well, when was that?
So now you have people saying, well, wait a minute.
What is this NSA thing?
They're snooping on our phone conversation.
No, no, they're not.
They're trying to figure out who's calling whom.
And if you are calling Osama bin Laden, you know, on a satellite phone, hey, Osama, what's up?
You know, if you're doing that kind of stuff, then I want somebody listening to that conversation, okay?
Let me be very frankly clear here.
In a time of war against people like this president of Iran threatening to nuke everybody in sight in the name of God, I want the President of the United States, whoever that person is, to be listening in to make sure we intercept, to make sure we stop those people from killing Americans.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, when the nuke goes off, when the dirty bomb, when the biotoxin, whatever it is, goes off in the mall or the elementary school or whatever, because we didn't listen in on those conversations, you know what John Kerry, the bloviating senator from Massachusetts, will say.
You know what Leakey Lea will say.
You know what these folks will say.
It's Bush's fault.
See, he couldn't protect you.
He doesn't deserve to be president.
You know they will, because they don't remember what they said the last time.
They don't want to remember.
Being inconsistent, as long as your heart is in the right place.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, you see.
When you're liberal, consistency and logic and facts and memory have no place.
They are not as important as feeling that moment that you're right.
It's a wonderful thing to be a liberal.
Now, because I think there are still Americans who are logical and rational and do have a memory, let me regale you with this latest, because it is actually an apology from the Congressional Budget Office that consistently applies the static analysis to tax cuts.
If you cut the rate of taxation, they will always say, and they've said for the last 40 years that I know about, we're going to cut government revenues.
If we reduce the tax rate, it reduces tax revenues.
Everyone knows, since Art Laffer sketched this out on a cocktail napkin for George Schultz some years ago, everyone knows that exactly the opposite happens.
If you reduce tax rates, the revenue actually goes up.
The wonderful thing, and I wish George Bush would put it this way: the wonderful thing about the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 3, there were several waves of them.
The wonderful thing about those tax cuts is that they've soaked the rich.
Let me just give you an example.
Corporate income tax.
Corporate income tax in one year from 2005 to 2006, corporate income tax went up 29.5% in dollars collected by the federal government.
29.5% increase in dollars collected on corporate income tax in one year, a 29% increase.
Soak the rich.
That's the way we ought to do this.
What we ought to really tell people is we're going to reduce the rates on taxation in order to soak the rich, because the rich are going to pay so much more tax when the capital gain goes down to 15% from 20%.
Yeah.
About 14% more revenue came into the federal government than the year before when the rate was at 20%.
This is what people of rational ability to think through facts and connect dots understand about the Democrat opposition to tax cuts.
They're not talking about new revenues to the government, else they'd be supporting tax cuts.
They're not talking about what they are trying to do is replay the totally discredited class envy play card from the discredited socialist communist movement.
Envy is the emotion they're trying to envy, is the emotion of the left.
They constantly say greed is the emotion of the right, of capitalism.
Greed is the emotion it's the evil and so forth.
Well, let me just tell you something.
I'll take that over envy.
The idea that nobody should have more than I do.
Or let's take it away from them.
Because we know what happens there.
You can go live in Cuba and find out what happens or North Korea, where everyone is poor except the leader, who has hundreds of millions of dollars.
So let's talk about what has happened.
The tax cut has reduced.
Here's the latest evidence from the Treasury Department, the monthly budget report for May.
Tax receipts were up 11.2% for the first seven months of the fiscal year.
By the way, the 11.2 doesn't sound like a big number.
You know what the number was?
Do you know what the number of new dollars because of the lower tax rates was?
$137 billion that the Congressional Budget Office didn't think was coming in.
So they've apologized.
Now, I'm going to read their apology, and you will say to yourself, it doesn't sound like an apology.
And believe me, in bureaucratic terms, this is an apology.
Here is the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office.
Quote: Various types of personal income not automatically subject to tax withholding may have increased faster than expected in 2005.
Sources of such income could include capital gains, non-corporate business income, interest, and dividends.
In addition, growth in incomes in 2005 may have been concentrated more than expected among higher-income taxpayers who face the highest tax rates, unquote.
That's as close as they're going to come, folks.
That's as close as they're going to come to saying, oops, when you lower the rates, these high-income folks pay more.
So I think the Bush administration ought to recast this whole thing.
Cut taxes, soak the rich.
I'm Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh, back after this.
Roger Hedgecock hidden for Rush and back with your calls at 1-800-282-2882.
Now, here's CNN, of course, putting up the tax cut chart in which if you make between $15,000 and $20,000, it's only worth $9.
And if you make $50,000 to $75,000, it's only $110.
This cut is insignificant for those who are working hard.
It's just the wealthy people.
A guy making a million makes a $42,000 cut.
CNN, of course, lying about this because they know, and I hope you know, that the reason there's a $42,000 cut from someone making the million bucks is because that person making the million bucks is paying, and all the people like that person, are paying 90% of the income tax as it is.
Nobody even making $15,000 is paying income tax.
Well, it's only a $9 cut.
You can't cut past zero.
Oh, no, that's right.
You can cut past zero.
Now there's the earned income, a tax, earned income tax credit.
So if you make below a certain amount, and we take pity on you by sending you a check.
So, this is what all the illegals do, by the way.
They file for this.
And this is so well known here.
It's amazing.
You file the income tax return, and you show so many dependents that you never have any withholding.
And then at the end of the year, you show only a certain amount of money, and therefore you get the earned income.
And these guys get checks, $2,000, $4,000 checks from the Treasury for people who are illegally in this country out of your paycheck.
See, they've mastered better than CNN the real dynamics of our tax system, better than the New York Times, whose editorial today said, one way or the other, tax increases are coming.
Well, that may be true.
Actually, that sentence may be true.
If the Democrats take over the House of Representatives this coming fall, as their plan is, if they have time other than impeachment of George Bush, they will raise taxes.
There's no question about that.
So maybe this is a prediction with regard to the direction of the elections.
Could be.
Can you imagine it?
Pelosi.
Now, see, the problem, we don't, I know the rest of you in the country have a problem with Pelosi's politics and the left-wing thing and all that.
Out here in California, we're just wondering who her surgeon is.
I mean, that's a terrible job.
She can't blink anymore for crying out loud.
I mean, that's, you know, out here in California, we worry about stuff like that.
Anyway, so here's the New York Times.
The nation's budget deficits, they declare, are too big to outgrow.
And the latest tax cuts, which Congress is likely to sign off on today, will dig the hole deeper.
See, they haven't read the CBO report.
The deficit is way smaller than projected because the revenues are way up.
Now, what is also up, and conservatives cannot stomach under the Bush administration, is this laxity of discipline with regard to spending.
And these crazy Congress critters who are so-called Republicans who want to keep in the earmarked perks, Jerry Lewis, I'm talking about you, Bill Thomas, I'm talking about you.
You know, let's name the names.
I agree with this earlier caller.
Let's name the names of people who are so-called Republicans who think it's their right to spend billions of dollars they don't have on perks to keep them re-elected.
We don't.
We, the people, don't think that's their right.
So let's make that clear, too.
But it goes on, the New York Times goes on to say that the idea of opening up the Roth IRA to everyone making more than $100,000, it's currently limited to that.
If you make under $100,000, you can put away tax-free money that grows tax-free in a so-called Roth IRA.
Why shouldn't that be applicable to everybody?
Because you know what's going into that?
What that is, the Roth IRA, is the savings that is no longer in the savings rate, you know, because the crazies, our savings rate is zero.
No, it isn't.
They don't count the IRAs.
They don't count all these pension plans, which have mushroomed over the years as savings.
It's not in the savings account.
It isn't savings.
Well, yeah, it is.
And you know where all that money goes?
Back into the economy to create jobs, to give us the 4.7 percent unemployment rate lower than it has been in 10 years.
See, people who do know about the economy do know what's going on.
And so when they see junk like the CNN report, you're only going to save $9 if you make $20,000 a year.
You're only paying $12 in tax.
Okay.
Here's Lewis in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Hi.
Hello, a great job you're doing, Roger.
Really, really doing a fine job filling in for Rush.
I would just like to comment on this, a so-called surveillance of Americans on their telephone systems and contrast that with the way the press characterizes it with what was going on before World War II even started.
Regularly, we had the Pan American Clippers going through Bermuda and the whole airplane, the mail, was offloaded, censored, read, and then forwarded on to Europe.
And the same thing happened coming back from Europe.
And this is just one of many, many examples of surveillance that was going on, even before we declared war.
You know, this is really worth spending just a moment, Lewis, because many, many people, including myself, were not around when all this happened.
And yet, when I read about it, I say to myself, wow, here was a nation that was at war and actually understood what was at stake.
Namely, our very existence as a people, our very existence individually, was threatened by the fascists, by Hitler, by Mussolini, by Tojo, by the Axis powers who were intent on destroying Western civilization.
This happened in the 1940 to 1945 era, you know, 60-some years ago.
Here, we've almost forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt, the guiding light of liberalism and the Democratic Party to this day, was not only the one who rounded up all the Japanese and put them in concentration camps to protect us from the few among that number who were agents of the Japanese government,
but who also, when they caught German spies landing on the beaches of Florida or wherever it was, had them lynched with secret courts coming to the conclusion that they were in fact Nazi spies.
They were executed.
And now you bring up this other issue that, look, we weren't going to give ordinary mail any kind of sacred pass, which normally Americans would expect, that, you know, you send a letter, nobody's going to open that up from the government, except when you're in war, you open it up because you don't want something said.
You're not just reading your mom.
It's not a Mom's Day card.
It has a Mom's Day card and a nuclear reactor diagram in it.
You want to take the nuclear reactor diagram out and let the card go forward.
So, you know, an absolutely important point.
When this nation was at war and knew it was at war and knew what was at stake and was determined to win over a determined foe, we knew what to do.
And it didn't have to do with debating the constitutional rights of our enemies.
That's right.
They don't have any.
They don't have any constitutional rights.
Not when they send an 18-page letter, a la the unabomber kind of letter from the president, so-called president of Iran, giving us one last chance to convert to Islam.
Well, guess what?
We're not converting to Islam.
We're not going to give up Western civilization.
And I guess once again, we have to prove it to the Islamic world.
They're not going to behead all of us before we get them.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, back with more after this.
Welcome back to the Russian Limbaugh Program.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, filling in for Rush Today.
He'll be back tomorrow.
All the details at RushLimbaugh.com.
I needed to get to the Al Gore emerging presidency run.
If you haven't caught on to this, Al Gore is out with a documentary entitled, quote, an inconvenient truth, unquote.
It is a heart of it is basically a slideshow proving the unassailable reality of global warming and the dangers for humanity of the continuing addiction to fossil fuels, the atmosphere of greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of coal, oil, and gas.
He has launched a new educational group, quote unquote.
That's a code word for don't you dare tax us, called the quote alliance for climate protection.
And again, the ABC News reporting that the Climate Protection Alliance, quote, will look like a political campaign, unquote, seeking to convince Americans that global warming is the urgent problem of the day and by implication, not the war on terror or Islamo-fascism's war against us.
Now, this would all be laughable and easy to ignore, except for this prediction I'll make right now.
This documentary will be nominated for an Academy Award.
It will be Al Gore's credibility, his cred, to get back into the race.
It will be his way of reintroducing Al Gore to on a separate subject away from the normal debate about issues that we've talked about all day today, the economy and the war and all the rest of it, the border, in his own issue.
So he's creating his own play pen, and he's going to have his own rules.
And he's got his own money.
This is something new.
New York Post reporting that Al Gore's faith in the internet, he may not have invented it, but he certainly has benefited from it.
Here's how.
Gore became a senior advisor to Google in February of 2001, years before its stock went public, by the way, in August of 2004.
So, Gore, as a senior advisor and close pal of CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt of Google, Gore becomes an insider at Google.
Now, you know what happened in August of 2004 when the shares went public.
Google soared from what was it?
The opening price was about 85 bucks to more than 400 bucks.
And Gore, according to the New York Post, quote, owns a ton of Google stock.
A well-placed Democrat, unnamed by the New York Post, is quoted as saying, Gore, quote, owns a ton of Google, and he's made enough money that he could wait until a month before and just drop 50 million bucks into launch a race, that is a race for the presidency.
So stand by for more from Mr. Al Gore.
I will again have to resurrect, I guess, the Al Goreisms from Earth in the Balance, his book about this subject, and the Unabomber treatise, which was published in the New York Times.
I once had a Democrat congressman on the air, Bob Filner from our area, and I gave him quotes.
And I said, now I'm going to give you quotes that are either the vice president at that time, Al Gore, or the Unibomber.
You tell me which one it is.
He couldn't get one.
I went through six of them.
He couldn't get one right.
When I quoted from the Unabomber, it was Gore.
When I quoted from Gore, it was the Unabomber.
It was the funniest bit we ever did.
All right, here's Tim in Martinsburg.
Hello there, Tim.
Welcome to the Rush program.
Hi, Roger.
How are you doing today?
I'm doing well.
I really appreciate you taking my call.
Thank you.
I have a question with regard to the economics that you were discussing earlier.
And that is, you mentioned the laugher curve, and I'm a full believer in the laugher curve.
I mean, it's pretty much irrefutable.
But has anybody ever done a study or something like that with regard to where the laugher curve actually starts to tail off?
Because, I mean, obviously, you can't have 0% tax because 0% of anything is 0, and that would be no revenue.
So, has anybody actually done a study to see where it tails off?
No, because as a practical matter, we've never gotten close, Tim, right?
I mean, we've reduced the capital gains from 20 to 15, unleashing a tsunami of capital gain revenues to the federal government.
Now, if it went to 10, if it went to zero, as you're pointing out, if it went to zero, then there'd be no money coming in.
Does it get more money going down to 10?
My guess would be yes.
If we ever get to a point where lowering tax rates actually lowers tax revenue, then we can say we've gone too far.
We're so far from that, Tim, that there's no sense discussing it.
Exactly.
But I would like to make a comment.
Yeah.
And that would be: I would suggest that, and I can't remember his name, he's one of the guys who sits in for Rush, like you.
He's the Dean of the Department of Economics for George Mason University.
Yeah, Dr. Walter Williams.
Yeah, Walter Williams.
That's it.
I would suggest that a study like that would make a great senior project for any economics department.
But there you go.
Because you know what I'd like to ask in that study, and I think it's a great idea, Tim, is that we talk about how low can we go and still get more revenues.
In other words, how much can we soak the rich?
I think we ought to have this discussion.
Can we soak the rich more at 10% capital gains tax than we are at 15?
Because we clearly soaked them more when we went to 15 than we did at 20.
We got more money out of the rich people than ever.
So if we went down to 10, would it be even more money out of the rich people?
You know, it does, you know, Tim, beg the question: what is the tax code for?
Is it to punish people for success?
Is it to subsidize people for failure or being in the country illegally?
What is it for exactly?
I thought originally it was only for getting enough revenue to allow the government to function in its constitutional responsibilities.
So, you know, I now sound like what?
Teddy Roosevelt or something.
I'm going back 100 years here.
Why would we ever want to get beyond the notion of simply trying to collect the money necessary to have the government carry out its constitutional responsibilities?
How did we ever get so sidetracked onto the issue that somehow or other getting that money has also something to do with punishing people who are rich?
And how did we allow a major party of the two-party system in the United States of America to be captured by what is essentially a communist notion?
I don't know.
Those questions need to be asked, too.
Here's Paul in Jensen Beach, Florida.
Hi, Paul.
Welcome to the Rush Program.
Hey, Roger.
How are you doing, buddy?
Good.
Nice listening to you again after the many years I used to listen to you when I lived in a little place called Solana Beach.
Oh, good for you, Paul.
And there's a little place called Del Mar.
I understand you know a little bit about Del Mar.
I used to be the city attorney there.
I know that.
I know that.
That was back in 1972 when I lived there or somewhere thereabouts.
Yep, that's right.
Anyway, I made the mistake of turning on national TV last night, and the guy was coming on, and the first thing he was making a remark about is how the economy, while it looks like it might be good, we have rising interest rates and rising gas prices and rising gold prices, and everything's really not as rosy as it seems, and we must be heading for doom and gloom again.
And it just made me think that the whole press, as I listen to them now and have listened to them over the years, are just the masters of deceit.
They're more interested in reporting their opinion of the news as to oppose the news and the facts.
And I think it's even worse than that, Paul.
Actually, too much of the mainstream media is interested in reporting bad news about the war, about Bush, about Katrina, and there's plenty of bad news there about the economy when there's no bad news there.
And because bad news means Bush is doing a terrible job and maybe Gore will finally become the president he should have been in the first place.
That's kind of their attitude.
And Paul, all I can say about your point about the gold prices and gas, let's take up the gas prices.
If you don't understand by now that government, not only our government, but the governments that control OPEC and control most of the oil supplies, and the government of China and India, which, by the way, are growing their economies and oil demand is going up, that these governments are the main reason why gasoline has become more expensive.
When you haven't built a gas refiner, gasoline refinery in the United States since the 1970s, when you won't allow any drilling to go on here, when demand is going up, I'm sorry, Economics 101, if demand is going up and supply is not increasing to meet that demand, the price will go up too.
Now, those of you who want me to go slower on that, we'll have a separate tutorial later on on that issue.
Mike, we're going to get to you in a second.
Let me take my break so we've got plenty of time.
I'm Roger Hedgecock, Infor Rush and back right after this.
High gas prices, I don't like them either.
And, you know, it doesn't help me when people point out to me another rational fact, which is that adjusted for inflation, these prices aren't as high as they were during Jimmy Cart.
So what?
They're still very high.
So why are they very high?
Well, here's one reason.
Everybody on the left is all extolling the virtues of Brazil, which recently announced it was free of dependence on foreign oil.
And we've done it because we grew sugarcane like crazy.
We're making sugarcane into ethanol.
We're putting ethanol into our Volkswagens.
And we're driving like crazy in Brazil.
And we're having a great time and doing the Samba.
And we don't have to bring in any oil, right?
Well, sort of.
They are clearing a lot of jungle, a lot of rainforest, and the environmentals haven't said anything about that to grow sugar cane.
I've been in Brazil.
I've seen the sugar cane.
They make the sugarcane and ethanol.
They put the nethanol into special pumps at the gas station.
The guys do drive up in their Volkswagens and fill it up with the ethanol, and it seems to run great.
Perfect.
But it isn't really the story.
They became, in Brazil, independent of foreign oil input only when they opened up their latest offshore drilling rig, which brought in a bonanza of new oil.
That's when they became independent of imported oil.
We could do the same, of course, in the United States with sitting on top of a at least Venezuela-size pool of oil in Alaska.
And one of these days, we're going to protect the caribou.
We're going to go for caribou reproduction rates never before seen by putting in the drilling and putting in another pipeline that gets warm so that just like the pipeline we have now in Alaska, the caribou will nest near it.
They'll get amorous.
And as caribou do, they will thrash around a bit.
And then there's more caribou.
I can't go into it any more than that.
That's all I know.
1-800-282-2882.
But here's what the Bush administration could do today, and I'm back to Brazil now.
I know this ADD thing is getting to me too.
I'm back to Brazil now because Brazil has more of the sugar cane than they can actually use.
They would be happy to export it to the United States.
Ethanol that we could have now.
We have ethanol from corn.
We don't have enough of it.
The Congress waved a magic wand and said, okay, now you're going to have 10% ethanol and all the gas in the country.
And we weren't prepared for that.
And that's why gasoline got short.
And that's why the price jumped up.
The government caused it to jump up.
Okay?
We needed to have enough ethanol to meet the magic wand demand.
We could have had it had we allowed the Brazilians to import into the United States, to export from Brazil, their excess capacity.
Except that the Free Trade Administration of the Bush Administration has a 54 cent a gallon tariff on imported ethanol to protect who?
The local sugarcane growers in the United States, multi-millionaires who are protected six ways from Sunday by the crazy patchwork of subsidies and regulations and so forth out of the federal government, this being one of them.
You cannot bring in sugarcane-based ethanol into the United States without paying 54 cents a gallon tariff.
In other words, you're not going to bring it in.
If they waived the tariff, which Bush could do, we'd have plenty of ethanol.
We could be like Brazil.
Mike in Raleigh, North Carolina is next.
Hi, Mike.
You're on the Rush Program.
Go ahead.
Hey, Roger.
Great job today.
Thanks.
Mike, as you said, from Raleigh, North Carolina, probably one of the highest tax rates on fuel anywhere in the country here.
How much is it?
It's in the high 30s.
For state?
Pardon me?
For state taxes you're talking about?
No, I think overall.
Overall, man, we're 56 cents in California.
It's 60 in New York.
I think it's the highest.
It's one of the highest.
All right, go ahead.
Go ahead.
It's high for us.
I understand.
The question I have for you is that if we reduce the taxes, does that not accomplish what the left has been telling us all about, and that is that we need to reallocate all the money to some of the poorer individuals, meaning that if we reduce our taxes, we're going to hold more of it, and then this way we're going to be spending it in the local areas where we live, the communities and the states.
And that's actually going to increase the amount of money that each state has because they're collecting more taxes for the goods and services that we are consuming.
Does that not meet their objective?
Yeah, but Mike, because they're redistributist kind of people on the left, they can't buy that argument.
They can't understand by lowering taxes, you actually increase tax paying by rich people because rich people do more with that money.
They pay more.
They're likely to pay more.
If you raise capital gains and dividend taxes and all that, you simply have less of that.
They can't acknowledge that fact, even though it's been proven over and over and over again, because their rhetoric, the leftist rhetoric left over from, I don't know, left over from Stalin or somebody, is you've got to soak the rich by raising the taxes on wealth and income and rich people.
We need to punish them for their success and make sure that some of their success is redistributed to those in need who are poor.
When the reality, the actual truth in the real world is that when you lower the tax rates, the rich actually pay more.
So I've been urging all day long the Bush administration ought to take this tax.
Soak the rich, lower the tax rates, and increase the tax revenues.
All right, Casey in Seattle next, been waiting a long time.
Casey, go ahead.
Good morning, Roger.
How are you doing?
Good.
First of all, I think Sheriff Joe ought to be head of Homeland Security, but what I wanted to give you here was a 15-second immigration plan.
You don't have to put in a new fence post.
You don't have to change any laws.
You don't have to do anything.
What you do is any employer that is caught hiring an illegal, you pull his federal tax identification number, you pull his state resale certificate, and you pull his city business license and suspend that for a period of five years.
And all the illegals will end up, the Border Patrol will be patting them on the back and directing traffic as they head back across the border.
Now, all those agencies and resources are already in place through Social Security, Department of Treasury, and the Federal, the Internal Revenue Service.
Thank you again, Casey.
Thank you.
You are absolutely right.
Another caller so far ahead of the curve here.
And I hope the Bush administration is listening to the program.
You have the laws now in place, the bureaucracies now in place to stop illegal immigrants coming into this country by removing the magnet of the jobs.
Put a couple of employers in jail.
You know what the rest of them would do?
Absolutely.
Give them a way to check for sure that the Social Security number matches that particular name.
Get a foolproof way of doing that.
And Casey, you're absolutely right.
There would be such a rush for the border because there'd be nothing left up here for people who are illegally in the country.
Now, do we need legal immigration?
I think we do.
I don't think you can have 25 million abortions since 1973 and not need new people to work in your growing economy.
That's one issue that maybe we won't have time to get into.
But you're also not going to have 20 million illegals, you know, so-called doing the job, you know, doing the drugs, doing the crime that Americans just won't do.
I'm Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Back After This.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh, who will be back, of course, tomorrow.
And I want to say thanks to Rush and the entire crew, Kit and the rest.
Thank you very much for the opportunity for me to be here today.
I appreciate it.
Hope we have had some thoughts out there.
More thoughts at rushlimbaugh.com.
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