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May 29, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:25
May 29, 2006, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
I have just I've just figured it out.
It's it's another drive by media hit, folks, on this gasoline price panic out there.
I have it here right in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers.
We're back, third hour of today's excursion into broadcast excellence is underway.
All right.
You ought to be on the program today.
Hi, my name is Rush Limbaugh, by the way.
I'm America's anchorman, America's truth detector.
And uh the uh general all around good guy here from my own institute.
I have an institute.
It's the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882.
Email address rush at EIB Nest uh B EIB net.com.
All right, here's the culprit.
Average gas price at highest level since last November, Triple A reports.
Gasoline prices are at their highest level since last November 9th, with the current nationwide average price of self-serve regular at $2.36 per gallon.
This according to the Triple A's online fuel gauge report.
Triple A, the nation's largest organization for motorists, said the high prices are partly due to oil prices near sixty-four dollars per barrel, as well as seasonal maintenance being performed at gasoline refineries, which temporarily limits gasoline production.
Triple A said current prices are somewhat puzzling, however.
Since domestic gasoline inventory is our near year-ago levels when a gallon of self-serve was just two dollars and three cents a gallon.
Or 33 cents less expensive than today.
Hawaii has the highest price in the nation, 272 per gallon.
California and New York have the next highest average prices at 257 and 247, respectively.
So uh there's also another factor in this.
Apparently the uh the uh barrel price has come down, but the pump price, the barrel price for oil's come down, the pump price hasn't.
So I know this see that I knew something was up yesterday, even without knowing I could when I left here yesterday to go home.
I have never seen so much traffic on the road.
I mean, the line to get across the bridge was was was had to be a mile long.
I don't know what was going on, but even I wasn't trying to cross the bridge, but I could see it as I was going the other way.
But I mean it was I there was a 75-year-old lady with bottle blonde hair driving a Corvette convertible in front of me, barely doing 15 miles an hour, holding everybody behind his back.
With traffic was all over the place.
Do you have to understand where I live?
We search for the highest prices, and we pay them so that we can brag about it.
And that explains I knew the gas price was up yesterday, so people went out and filled up at the highest price they could find, and they were driving around.
Now, this is clear what this is.
They're just they're just trying to stir people up about this, and then we had this these hearings yesterday, and so forth and so on.
I got an email.
It's always happens.
Dear Rush, gas where I am in Delaware was a dollar forty-nine pre-katrina, then rose to over three dollars a gallon.
I'm still waiting for it to come down to pre-katrina levels.
One of these days there's gonna be a whistleblower when it happens, you're going to eat crow.
Love you anyway.
Lots of laughs.
Irene.
Thinks it's gonna be a whistleblower that will somehow divulge the truth behind the gouging going on.
Now here's my question for you.
Here's my question.
Now be honest.
I I I'm not asking you to call and answer this.
I want you to be honest with yourself.
How many of you, honestly, honestly?
I know there are gonna be some, but how many of you actually note the daily price of gasoline when you go in to get some.
I know if it's gonna spike to three bucks after Katrina and so forth.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But what if it goes up a couple cents or five cents?
Do you really know it?
Or does it take a drive-by media report to tell you that you're being ripped off and gouged and you don't even know it because you don't even think you are.
I'm just curious.
I want you to answer that question yourself because I want you to ask yourself if you are a dupe, an unwitting dupe of the drive-by media and the triple A, just trying to get people all revved up here.
Because this is exactly what I mean by drive-by media.
They drive in and they lob their little bullet points.
They lob their little mortar fire and they get everything all stirred up and everything's out of whack, and then they head back to the convertible, head back down the road, ready to fire into some other crowd a few minutes later with some other story.
That's why I just want you to ask yourself.
Because I'm trying to wean you people off of the drive-by media.
It can ruin your attitude.
It can ruin your...
And I if you're waiting for prices to go down to pre-Catrina levels, uh you're gonna be waiting a while.
Because that just isn't going to happen.
Uh uh for a whole host of reasons.
I'm not going to waste your time with it.
I've got something else that I want to talk to you about.
I was starting, I was reading a drudge report uh today.
I don't know how to tell you people this, but uh Africa is literally splitting apart.
The continent of Africa is coming apart.
Normally new rivers, new oceans, new mountains are born in slow motion.
But the Afar triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story.
A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed, at least by geological standards.
Africa will eventually lose its horn.
Now, this uh Afar FR triangle, this is uh near Ethiopia.
Uh that uh borders on the uh the Red Sea, and it's just right across uh the little body of water there from Yemen.
And it's a uh it's a story from the German magazine Spiegel.
Der Spiegel.
It's uh in the English language version.
And they've got nine pictures that will show you exactly what's happening.
A team went out there.
Uh they had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet.
The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter.
Then it happened.
The earth split open.
Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up.
After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalu and his colleagues realized that they had just witnessed history for the first time ever human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.
It's a pretty long story, uh, but it describes what's happening.
Apparently, this is uh uh the what they term the the Earth's biggest construction project, where three tectonic plates are coming together here, and the Afar triangle of Africa.
Recent months have seen hundreds of crevices splitting the desert floor, and the ground is slumped by as much as a hundred meters, three hundred and twenty eight feet.
At the same time, scientists have observed magma rising from deep below as it begins to form what will eventually become a basalt ocean floor.
Geologically speaking, it won't be long until the Red Sea floods the region.
The ocean that will be uh born will split Africa apart.
The FR triangle, which cuts across Ethiopia, is the largest construction site on the planet.
Three tectonic plates meet there with the African and Arabic plates drifting apart along two separate fault lines by one centimeter a year.
A team of scientists working with Christopher Vignier of the Paris Laboratory of Geology reported on the phenomenon in a 2006 issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, while the two plates move apart, the ground sinks to make room for the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
And so, as I say, it's it's it's pretty fascinating.
A chain of volcanoes that runs along the roughly 3,700 mile long East African rift system offers further testimony to the breaking apart of the continent.
In some areas around the outer edges of the rift system, the Earth's crust is already cracked open, making room for the magma below.
From the Red Sea to Mozambique to the south, dozens of volcanoes have formed, best known being Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Niragungo.
These fiery mountains, too, will one day sink into the sea, geophysic.
Now, they've calculated ten million years, the East African Rift system will be as large as the Red Sea, and will that happens, uh, Africa will lose its horn.
Ten million years.
That's how we're not talking about tomorrow.
Well, yes, we have time to fix this.
But you know what I read this story?
It's just typical.
This would have to be happening in Africa.
They're already leading the world in disease and poverty, and it just can't catch a break.
Just can't.
We got Bono trying to help out.
We got Bob Geldoff trying to help out, we got President Bush trying to help out.
And Ethiopia.
I mean, Ethiopia is already a desert anyway.
It's a famine going on in Ethiopia.
A communist government doesn't feed its people trying to wipe them out.
Now Africa said a hell with it is splitting apart.
Why couldn't this happen here?
Why couldn't this happen in the United States?
We're the ones that deserve this kind of tumult and chaos.
But the people who are gonna be hardest hit by this is always are the poor.
Even Mother Nature spares them nothing, folks.
It's just a shame.
Here's another contribution to yesterday's drive by media panic on gasoline prices.
Actually, this is what it's it's this was Pat Lahay cited this yesterday.
This is a story from uh 2004, USA Today, but Leahy cited this.
You heard in the soundbite we played that mergers always lead to price increases.
You want to hear how much.
The General Accounting Office tallied 2,600 petroleum company mergers from 1991 to 2000.
13% of them involving refining and marketing.
Researchers found that six of eight mergers studied led to gas prices averaging two cents a gallon higher than otherwise.
Two cents.
Gasoline price went up two cents after six of eight mergers.
Two mergers led to declines of about one cent a gallon.
One.
Okay, gas prices go up.
Well, there's leaky leahy adding to the drive-by.
These mergers are raising prices.
You're living in nicer homes as a result, blah, blah.
Now I want to go back.
I I use an analogy now and then, and every time I do, some of you send me caustic rude uh emails upbraiding me for my for making a false analogy, and that is the water industry.
Do you know what water is per gallon?
If you go buy bottled water per gallon, you're out there.
Uh it's 12 bucks, something like that, maybe even higher.
And you know, there's not a whole lot of exploration to do.
There's not a whole lot of refining.
Who'll have a whole lot of environmental regulations?
The water, you know, big water guys don't get called up before the Senate to explain their gouging or any of this.
Then people always say, but Rush, I don't buy water by the gallon, and I don't use water by the gallon, and I don't need water to get to and from work.
No, you only need it to live.
But you'd be surprised how much water you use.
Now, not all of it's priced at the same level of bottled water.
I mean, you cook, you take a shower, and so forth.
You're using every bit as much water as you're using gasoline.
It's it's close to it.
If the price of, you know, if if the if the public works guys, you know, from the from the town water supply ever decide to get in on a bottled water craze themselves, look out.
And they're a government operation.
I mean, it's at some point anything can happen.
We're back to this again.
Maybe your doctor should write up a grocery list to help lower your cholesterol.
Suggests a small study that showed a rigid diet, seemed as effective as cholesterol lowering pills.
The upshot of this is, oh, the upshot of this is tofu and oatmeal lower cholesterol.
Folks, I don't know about you.
I'm not playing this time.
The last time this oat thing came up, it was oat bran.
And oat bran was supposed to clean us all out and make us healthier, and it didn't.
They had to announce some years later it was worthless.
Now tofu and oatmeal will reduce cholesterol.
If you want to jump on this never-ending health bandwagon and put it go right ahead, But I'm not.
The first purge of city voters in Milwaukee.
The first purge of city voter rolls since at least 2001 resulted in about 105,000 names being dropped.
Mostly because they were listed at old addresses that were no longer correct.
The number amounted to about 23% of the names that were on the voter rolls in Milwaukee.
Officials had said they weren't sure if the rolls were purged after the 2000 election.
Neil Olbreck, the assistant director of the City Election Commission said the names purged were primarily those of people who had moved.
Twenty-three percent of the voters moved in five years.
Twenty-three percent moved.
If this keeps up, these blue states aren't gonna stay blue.
That's the point here.
Well, maybe they will.
That means 105,000 people voted that may not have been around.
Never know.
Okay, people have been patiently waiting.
We go to the phones.
Willis in Denver, I'm uh I'm glad you called.
Welcome.
Greetings, old wise one.
Thank you, sir.
Hey, uh, I got a question for our kids in in DC.
If they're so bloody concerned about big oil making money, why aren't they going after the Goldman Sachs?
Why aren't they going after JP Morgan?
The trading houses.
Oh, yeah.
Do you see the losses the profits and the bonuses those people are paying out?
Oh, yeah.
But they're the ones that drive the market.
They're the funds.
Them and the and the new hedge funds that are in there.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
But there's not big oil.
Big oil is a seller of commodity.
Exactly right.
If if you're long the commodity, which oil is, you don't buy.
You sell.
You're exactly, exactly.
The same with uh uh unleaded gas, leaning heating oil.
I mean, t to blame the rise on the New York Mercantile Exchange on in crude oil and natural gas on the producing community shows the colossal ignorance of our representatives.
They do not know how the markets work.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
They're not they it doesn't show that at all.
It doesn't show that at all.
John Corzon, the governor of New Jersey, former CEO and grand poo ball at Goldman Sachs.
These guys all know that all they're doing, it's no different than the port deal.
They the triple A comes out with this drive-by media report that gasoline prices are up a nickel or so.
Blame it on oil.
Huh?
Blame it on oil.
Well, the no, but they know that the American people are gonna feel like they're being gouged and used and abused, and so all they're doing is pandering.
So they bring these oil guys up there and they bring uh and then they get go out to the cameras and we're gonna make sure that this gouging stops and so forth.
They know full well what's happening.
They know that the they know the market determines the price.
Well, Lundberg Index, whatever you want to say.
Uh they're just pandering, just like the port deal.
All that's all they're doing, and that's that's why that's why I'm I'm I'm a little you know agitated over this.
See, folks, I can prove a point to you.
I have been suggesting to you for the last l number of months, but really intensely, this week and last week.
If you want to improve your life, turn off the television news for just a week.
Try for three days.
Listen to this program, but just turn it off.
Turn all you will be amazed at how different your perspective on your day is, and how your perspective on your life.
I am living proof.
I didn't even know about this drive-by media hit from the triple A on gasoline price.
I had a great night last.
I had a great morning.
I was on a roll with a great show, and then somebody starts calling complaining to me about gasoline prices, and all of a sudden they started rolling in an email.
I said, What the hell happened?
I didn't even know.
Because I don't watch the news at night.
I pay people to do it now.
I do my own research and I have other ways of getting the news, but I'm not gonna watch these clowns on television.
It's just it's dispiriting.
It's doom and gloom.
I don't waste my time with anymore.
The only time television comes on is when twenty-four is on, when the sopranos are on, or when I'm gonna watch a movie.
Pure and simple.
I don't watch it anymore.
I can't stand it, I don't learn anything from it, and I generally get mad.
And I don't want to come in here the next day sounding mad all the time.
So I didn't know that this drive-by media hit from the triple A on gasoline, which I've already crumpled up and thrown away, so I yeah, I don't even know what the details of the price increase were, but that doesn't matter.
What got everybody all out of whack is they think the barrel price is coming down while a pump price is going up, and it ought not be that way.
But that this last caller nailed it.
There's so many people in the futures market on this selling long, selling short, you know, long options, short options.
Some people are betting on the price to go up, some betting on it to go down.
That's long and short.
And that affects the futures market.
You've got existing stocks, all these factors, the refineries uh reduce capacity, usually this time of year to to gear up for you know, do some maintenance to gear up for the summer driving scene.
I'll make you a prediction.
It won't be long before gasoline price is going to start creeping up again.
It'll just happen, happens every spring, and then we'll get panic stories about summer driving season will impact vacations, and the price will go down just as the summer starts.
Mark my words, make book on it right now.
Spreading good cheer, optimism, and the concept of enjoying life.
Each day here on the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network, 800-282-2882.
Somebody in the email said, Rush, these geologists are lying to everybody about Africa splitting apart.
There's nothing going on over there other than Halliburton is digging a giant subterranean pipeline so they can get oil that we're stealing from Iraq straight into where we wanted to go without having to use all these tankers.
Faster than having it be shipped on the oceans.
Now, Mr. Snerdley asked me during the break, he said, you know, you better you you better be careful because when you say things like people where you live, like people where I live, search for the highest price and then pay that so that they can brag about it.
He said, You better be careful, they're gonna believe they're gonna believe you.
Well, you should, it's true.
You bragging rights of big things here.
I do it, so yes, I well, I no, I don't actively seek the highest price.
I just don't care what the price is.
You know, I when I go buy a car, I don't I don't waste time bargaining.
It just I just and and it's it's sort of like trying to pay cash at the doctor.
They don't know what to do.
Go out there and see the car you want.
I say, I want it, get it ready in five minutes.
I'm driving it out there.
You can't do that, the dealer prep.
No, I don't don't sell me anything else.
I don't want the undercarriage protection.
I don't want any of this stuff.
I know it.
Just give me the car.
I see the car, I like it.
Here's the check.
I want to go.
Just like because I hate shopping.
You know, and if you see what you want, the price is what it is.
Why are you going to negotiate them down under five to seven thousand yep, yep, yep, yep, yahoo?
So Snerdley's rolling his eyes now.
No, I'm serious.
It says buying a car is like buying anything else.
The process of buying it is a pain in the rear, but getting it is what's fun.
Getting out of the store is the second most enjoyable aspect of buying anything.
Going into the store is the worst aspect of it.
In fact, in fact, if you want to the truth, the dealership brings the book cars to me and I pick from those.
I don't go to the dealership.
Well, they brought it right here, use some.
I never went to the dealership to get my car.
Never, never step foot in there.
So I wasn't making it up.
Big C, I told you so here, folks.
Workers who lose their jobs and collect unemployment insurance, stay out of work for 21 weeks on average, more than twice as long as those who don't collect the benefit.
It's it's just it's axiomatic.
I have I've said this each time we extend unemployment benefits.
Politicians do this to show their big heart, their compassion, blah, blah, blah.
Just promoting unemployment.
It's just promoting it.
And I've gotten beat up on the phones.
People go, you don't understand how hard it is.
Yes, I do, but I also know that if you're gonna sit there and live on unemployment, uh you're you're you're not gonna you're not even coming close to maximizing your potential.
The report obtained by the Associated Press, as though it's some big secret, uh said the finding is consistent with economists' assumptions that workers collecting unemployment benefits can search longer for a more desirable job.
That's the exact wrong way to look at this.
Uh anyway, the investigators could not explain some of their findings, such as why women appear to more be more likely to get unemployment insurance than men, or why married workers tend to be more likely than unmarried workers to get benefits.
At any rate, unemployment compensation keeps people from getting a job.
If you have unemployment compensation, be out of work in average twenty-one weeks.
If you don't have it, eight weeks.
It's just called common sense and necessities.
Senator John Kerry, who once served in Vietnam, Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, possible candidate in 2008, says his party does have a message for the electorate, vote.
Vote for change.
That's it.
Don't let anybody tell you the way Democrats don't know what we stand for.
We do.
Vote for change.
That's it.
In a nutshell.
Cindy in Marshall, Texas.
Welcome to the program.
Great to have you with us.
Hello.
I cannot believe I'm getting to talk to you first.
Oh, thank you so much.
It's very sweet of you.
Um my husband has worked for an oil company for some twenty-five years.
And we remember the late eighties when the price of a barrel, a gallon a barrel of oil, sunk to like nine dollars or so.
Yeah, I do too.
And we had pe people lost their jobs.
We had wells that had to be shut in and drilling rigs that sat idle.
Yeah, I know.
And I don't remember any congressional hearings about how they could help the oil industry out.
There wasn't there weren't any.
I remember those days I cite them on this program frequently.
The rest of the country was in a massive boom.
Well, we were coming out of the rig and tack we were in a massive economic move.
We were growing through the roof, but the Louisiana and and Texas oil business was floundering because they they uh the it they they they couldn't bring oil out of the ground at the price the the worldwide barrel price was and actually had to cap some wells forever.
Uh and it's always been I always use it to make the point that even in great economic times, there's certain people get hurt when prices go down.
Like we've had low interest rates and low home mortgage rates, but people in the uh in the elderly population who who live on interest from whatever, if the the interest rate's one or two percent, they're not they're not doing everybody loses at some point while things are going great, and even when when times are bad, there are some people that score big.
Well, this ought to make the the little trip from Rhode Island that called you earlier ought to make him mad.
Frankly, I don't care what the price of the calendar gas is.
That's a minute, wait a minute, Cindy.
That's awfully heartless of you to say about a fellow citizen, even if it is from Rhode Island.
Well, if you cannot afford it, you know, consider what kind of car you're driving.
The price of the gas is maintenance cost.
No.
No, no, no.
I'm I'm I knew you would lost touch on this.
You have to understand gasoline is so important.
The oil companies shouldn't even be making a profit.
The price should be as low as possible at that point where no oil company or gasoline company makes profit.
Do it for the good of the country.
Oh, yes.
I'm sure that's what every Democrat would want me to do.
Let me tell you something more than just Democrats.
There are a lot of people out there who have a w don't yes, who d who are even apolitical who don't understand economics, who think that the last time I thought this was when I was six.
And my dad sent me straight.
When I was six years old or ten, whatever, I was big I was big in a space program.
I fascinated by it.
I'll never forget the first cover of Time magazine that had Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom, and who was it, uh forget the f the the three original redstone astronauts.
Never forget this.
My mom got me redstone rocket for Christmas, a little plastic model.
She even knitted me a sweater with mercury capsules on it.
I was so big in the space program, and it was we were doing this, don't forget to beat the Russians.
Sputnik was up there spying on us, who knows doing what, causing age, and we didn't even know it.
And so Kennedy and anything, we've got to get to the moon before these Russians were gonna do it, and a whole national effort.
And I asked my dad uh about and I also heard how expensive, and I'm listening to the news reports of it and how expensive it's going to be to do this.
And I asked me, expensive, why why doesn't everybody donate their effort for the sake of the nation?
We're in a battle with the Russians to get up there first.
Why don't we just donate it?
Why should this cost anything?
And that's what I got my first economics lesson.
I know it's instinctive for people to think of that, especially if they get uh if they get intertwined with patriotism and Do it for the good of the country.
We're at war, we're gonna run over there threatening the nucleus, we're gonna these people ought to sacrifice and they and I I t I think I never got in school.
I'm just I never got in school the lesson in economics my dad gave me when I was just in single digits about the space program.
And then the second stage of my and I've began to educate myself on it, which can be a risky thing to do, but all through high school and I think I had to take economics in college, but I don't even remember.
Um and I know there wasn't much of it in high school.
But I uh it wasn't until I moved to Sacramento in uh in 1984 and uh uh became friends with uh with an agricultural economic specialist, uh and I've ref referenced on him him on this program countless times, uh Professor Hazlitt, Thomas W. Hazlet, who has now gone on to become a specialist in telecommunications economics and so forth, but that's when the next stage of my he was professor, that's when the next stage of my economics uh education began.
I can just tell you that uh is it gas price reaction uh and and the port deal is the classic example of how it's just not taught.
How people don't understand it.
Uh and so when I when I hear people say, need to do it for the good of the country, I'm reminded that was my attitude when I was seven.
So some people theoretically still have an an economics education that is nothing beyond well, there's no education.
They just have the same instinctive emotional reaction to things that they had when they were seven years old, or or that I had when I was seven.
And that's just that's just a fault of the um of the education system, uh, because it's you know, economics appears hard because the the the professional economists use language that is intimidating, like legal ease.
Economics ease.
And they start talking about various uh macroeconomics, microeconomics.
I can't even know all the terms, I don't pay attention to them.
Uh but the basics of it, which is all I'm talking about, just the basics, you know, beyond supply and demand, are really not hard.
They're very logical, in fact.
Uh if if you find somebody that's good at explaining them to them, like it's you know, a good teacher's hard to find.
Uh if you get a good teacher, you'll probably be able to learn anything to apply yourself to it.
Quick time out, we'll be back.
Stay with us.
Just remember this, folks.
Big oil delivers oil.
Despite the unrest in the Middle East, despite all the obstacles that's put in their way, they deliver the oil.
It's not just about price, it's about supply and what it takes to get the supply distributed at a price.
What's big government deliver?
Big government delivers drive-by sound bites and photo ops.
All right, Tom and Los uh Los uh lo s uh well.
Well salamitos, fresh.
It's low alamitos, yes.
It doesn't say Alamitos up here, it says that's something I never heard of, and I couldn't believe it.
Well, your cross screen knew the racetrack was here, so you might get together with him.
Anyway, listen, I'm I premise is I'm a capitalist, but Rush, something is smelly, and I'm mad about the gas industry, big oil.
Listen, big pizza, big fast food, all these other companies, they're begging for my business.
I've got to go through tons of commercials, I get my mail loaded with 50% off coupons.
How come the gas companies don't have to do that at all?
I there's no competition.
None.
One cent difference from the one across the street.
There's something wrong.
They are not playing capitalism.
That's what I'm upset about.
Okay.
You uh uh this is not your fault, but you were so impassioned there that I was so you you were distorted somewhat in my uh rudimentary hearing device uh known as a cochlear implant.
But what I gather you said was that big pizza, I heard that, and big fast food are always offering 50% off coupons.
They're offering uh uh uh different products, competition and so forth.
They're fighting they're fighting for my business constantly.
Back on back away from the phone just a little bit.
You can keep yelling, but back away from the phone.
All right.
They they're fighting for my business constantly.
My mailbox is piled high with jobs.
Well, okay, look, this is not I don't get anything from Chevron.
I don't get anything from mobile.
They don't they don't have to.
You know, businesses who reduce the price or give it away, or do s or advertise it, do that because they have to.
Rush, that's not true.
Come on.
Are you telling me that the pizza uh pizza makers in a huge?
Wait a second.
For your analogy to hold, there would need to be an alternative fuel that big oil was competing with.
Big pizza is competing against big Colonel Sanders against Big McDonald's against the taco, but no, no, no.
The Taco Bell guys who are trying to get people to think outside the bun.
They they you know, they the uh there's it's it's all food, but it's different cuisine.
But Rush, I want I want to see uh a gas company come in and say, Are you tired of paying this price?
Here, we're gonna we're gonna pay a lower price to compete.
You don't see it.
Do you do you know that there is a federal regulation that limits the amount of that kind of pricing that can go on in in um I think the oil companies are prevented from engaging in loss leadership, like selling below cost.
Okay.
But other companies you're talking about will do lost leader promotions now and then to try to increase business on the hopes that they keep their new arrivals.
It's really not the same.
Let me give you another analogy.
In New York, you have I'm gonna leave some, I can't help but leave these some out.
And I wouldn't I'll just give you a list of my favorite places to go.
Patsy's 21, Cafe Balud, Danielle, uh, Le Cirque, uh, Ben Benson's.
None of them advertise.
And they're full every night.
They don't have to advertise.
They don't need to.
They and you know how many restaurants there are in New York?
There are more restaurants in New York than there are people in Milwaukee.
And there now, some of the restaurants advertised, the fast food guys do that you're mentioning, but you don't you don't I mean you you just don't see it because they don't they don't have to.
Uh you think I don't know what I'm talking about.
But big oil's got one product.
Rush.
Today I can respond to that.
Yes, feel free.
Well, the reason why is because they have built a brand, and they don't have to.
I am actually in merchandise.
That's my business I own.
I have to hope my brand gets business based on quality that I've built over years.
Mobile doesn't do that.
Chevron doesn't do that.
I have to go there.
You know what?
They used to.
I can remember when I was when I was first started driving at age sixteen, and gasoline was.
What if they used to?
They don't now.
No, you had the standard gasoline or whatever it was, Amico was advertising had a better cleansing agent.
Mobile said no, we're our gas is cleaner and more efficient.
You had that back then.
And and uh uh, you know, at the at the maybe at some of the gas stations you'll see some signage that says they're gasoline's best.
But there is competition.
I just had a letter from a guy who lives two miles out or outside the Washington Beltway in a two-mile stretch, the price of gasoline was at two miles, two dollars nineteen cents up to two dollars forty-five cents.
There is competition in the price.
But they they they're really don't have to advertise like the big pizza guys do.
Your your audience right now.
Plus, big pizza doesn't have to refine the food.
Anybody can open a pizza parlor, but you and I can't start a big oil company.
Rush, your audience right now is waiting for a better answer than that.
I'm telling you right now, this is not this is pathetic.
You telling me you're telling me my my my audience and you have been let down.
I'm telling you that this is not economics.
I mean, we understand you when you talk about competition and uh and here's another word entrepreneurship.
There is none of that.
I couldn't start a gas car.
You don't start a gas gas following.
You know something, Tom, you are not listening to me.
The only reason this this my man my answer was fairly brilliant, in fact.
The reason isn't penetrate the the salient point that you missed is until there is an alternative fuel out there that is as readily available and is as good, serves the purpose, and is priced similarly to oil or gasoline.
You're not gonna get the kind of competition that you want.
It just isn't going to happen.
Plus, this is an industry, you know, the the everybody's income depends on this product.
Their jobs getting to and from kids to and from school.
That's why I say oil is the is the fuel of commerce and life on the planet.
As such, there's really you there it's I don't know.
I I've run out of time here, but you've really you've hurt my feelings to tell me that my answer was pathetic.
That cuts to the quick.
I've never been told that before.
You know, oil is sold like any other commodity.
It's got very many uses.
Wheat and corn end up as things other than wheat and corn.
Oil is used for a whole lot of things besides gasoline and heating oil.
And it's just embarrassing how woefully uninformed some people are.
See you tomorrow, folks.
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