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July 11, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:41
July 11, 2006, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Okay, now that introduction is all well and good, but I was going to say it's not easy being the guest host, but that isn't right.
It's not like it's hard being the guest host.
It's a challenge being the guest host.
It's just different being the guest host of somebody's pro somebody else's program because you realize this isn't your show.
It's Russia's show.
So when I do things in the program that some people don't like, my reaction the reaction that I'll get is one of two things.
Rush would not approve of you doing what you've just done, and well, that's something I do have to take somewhat seriously.
I can't go and hijack the Rush Limbaugh program to do things that Rush would want no part of.
So even if Rush wouldn't mind, people will say Rush would mind in an attempt to stop me from doing whatever it was that I was doing that they were bothered by.
The other reaction will be, and I got a little bit of this after yesterday's program, you're just as big a blowhart as Rush, which I take as a tremendous that's great.
That's a huge compliment.
I want to be accused of being.
I want everybody who despises Russia in his program, the people who listen to Russia's program solely for the purpose of being worked up into a total snit.
I mean, I think I've done my job if I've gotten them into as big of a snit as Russia's able to get them into, correct?
So I take the first part seriously, the Rush would not condone you doing that.
And there are a couple of things I said on the show yesterday that people didn't like, and they're assuming that Rush would not condone my having done all of that.
But I do try to follow within a general broad framework of understanding that this is Russia's program while still trying to put my own individual spin slant take on things.
Now we may begin with today's program.
There are two big stories in the news today.
There has been, I guess you can call it terrorism, even though no one has yet claimed responsibility.
A terrorist attack in Bombay, India, uh coordinated explosions on a bunch of trains, the death toll goes up every five minutes.
Every time I check the internet, the death toll gets higher.
It's 105, 110, maybe growing as many as 260 injured.
Nobody has claimed responsibility for it yet, although it appears to have all the hallmarks of the kind of trouble that has occurred in India.
India and Pakistan have been in dispute over the Kashmir region forever, and in the day and age that we live in, the way that people try to score their points and influence the debate is through an act like this, which I think could generally be ascribed as terrorism, and it should just re-emphasize to all of us that this is a global problem that we are facing.
The United States is the biggest potential target of all because we are the most important nation in the world.
And for all of the people who somehow want to treat 9-11 as an isolated event and pretend that what has happened in Israel for the last 25, 30 years, 40 years really, is not happening and want to pretend that what happened in Spain didn't happen, and what happened in England didn't happen, what happened in Indonesia didn't happen, what happened today in India didn't happen.
We have to understand that this is happening, and our policies and our response has to understand that reality.
I think I'm going to try to get to that point a little bit later on in the program.
The other big story that's developing today, President Bush this morning made a major statement on the American economy, essentially saying we have turned this economy around.
We are booming, revenues are pouring into the federal government, the standard of living for Americans is improving, and it's all because of my tax cuts.
And I want to address that in just a moment.
But those two big stories are out there.
But I'd like to lead the program today by following up on an item that I shared with the audience yesterday, because there's new information on it.
And this story, as much as anything else, shows you not only the absolute total hypocrisy of the left and its thought police branch, but also just how loony liberalism has gotten.
I talked yesterday that liberalism is no longer a political ideology as much as it is just out-and-out crackpotism.
If you think I'm being extreme on that, follow stories like this one.
At the University of Wisconsin Madison, which is not a small university, one of the major universities in this country, from my own home state, and don't blame me for this.
I get grief from those of you in Russia's audience over Russ Feingold and every other goofy thing that happens in Wisconsin.
Trust me, I'm not responsible for this though.
And anyway, at the University of Wisconsin Madison, there is a lecturer in the Muslim studies department who believes that the attacks on 9-11 were not committed by Al Qaeda, but were in fact a direct act of the United States government, that President Bush authorized them, and that we did it.
That we brought down both towers, that we had explosives inside the building, that the hijacked planes were not really hijacked planes by Arab terrorists.
The same thing with regard to the Pentagon.
He not only believes this, he teaches it.
And apparently has been teaching it.
A couple of weeks ago, some, and you gotta love this, bloggers, found out about his statements.
He showed up apparently on a list of speakers at one of these fruitcake rallies in which other people who believe this same kind of thing were to speak, and it showed up on a couple of websites and ended up turning into a news story.
Once again, the mainstream media finds itself without a monopoly on news and information in our society.
So there is a big ruckus in Wisconsin over this, and the university said, well, we'll look into this.
So the provost of the University of Wisconsin Madison decided to investigate this.
His name is Patrick Farrell.
He interviewed the lecturer, the lecturer's name is Kevin Barrett, who offers courses, as I said, in the Muslim studies department.
He came out, the provost came out with his ruling yesterday.
The ruling is that Barrett will be allowed to continue to teach this course at the university.
This is not a matter of tenure.
He's not a tenured professor, he's merely a lecturer, but he will be hired to teach his course again this coming fall semester at UW Madison, and that he will be allowed to teach his theory about who is responsible for 9-11.
This is a public university funded by tax dollars, and the tax dollars are going to be spent on a guy who is going to get up there and teach that 9-11 was a direct act of the government of the United States.
The provost that was at the University of Wisconsin says this is a matter of freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Freedom of speech and academic freedom, that he has a right to his beliefs, and as a university, we don't want to tell academics what they can and cannot believe and what they can and cannot teach.
Now, of course, that's total garbage.
There is less freedom of speech at American universities than anywhere else in this country.
When you think about the things you can't say at a university, just about everything ever uttered by a conservative is deemed to be hate speech.
They've got speech codes and they've got sanctions.
Why, this professor has a hostile environment in his course because he said something that someone was bothered by.
You can't say this.
You can't say that.
But you can teach that the United States did 9-11.
As for the argument that this is somehow academic freedom, if we're going to accept that premise that instructors have a right to teach whatever they want in the name of academic freedom, Would the University of Wisconsin Madison in a World War II course allow a Holocaust denier to teach?
Never happened.
Six million Jews, they're making it up.
The Jews are making that up.
Can you imagine if a World War II instructor, or better yet, an instructor in Jewish studies were to teach that the Holocaust didn't happen, that we had a Holocaust denier up there?
Of course, it would not happen.
An example I cited on yesterday's program.
Can you imagine if some right wing nut got up and said that the leaders of the civil rights movement killed Martin Luther King because they needed a victim?
It makes as much sense as the United States bringing down the buildings on 9-11.
Could you imagine teaching that?
Or would that be deemed vile?
Would that be deemed hate speech?
Would that be deemed some extremist trying to advance a vicious idea?
Remember the president of Harvard University, Summers?
About a year ago, he gave a speech in which he didn't even advocate.
He merely said one of the areas that we ought to pursue academically is whether or not there are differences in the way men and women gain intelligence.
Whether or not men and women somehow learn differently, whether or not men and women somehow process the information that they are to receive differently.
They ran him off that university.
Those ideas were considered so toxic.
First of all, Summers is a liberal.
This is Harvard for heaven's sakes.
So much for academic freedom.
He wasn't even advocating it.
He was merely saying one of the things we ought to pursue, one of the things we ought to look into, one of the things that ought to be researched is whether or not cognitively men and women process information differently.
There's been some research on it, some of it is interesting.
They not only felt the need to shut him down, they ran him off of campus.
So don't give me any of this academic freedom nonsense.
If it doesn't fit the agenda of the people who run these universities, they won't allow you to utter a peep.
So Summers at Harvard wasn't able to ruminate about an area that has been the subject of some discussion.
But at the University of Wisconsin, you've got some guy that can get up now and teach George Bush dead on 9-11.
These were Americans who killed Americans.
I could cite other examples, but I think you get the point.
So don't let anyone tell you that liberalism hasn't descended into Wacoville.
And don't let anyone tell you that American universities in specific and liberalism in general isn't completely hypocritical in this whole area of speech.
Look at the number of times that Rush has been called a hater and been called names, and you should not be allowed to say there's no free speech rights expected then.
There's none of this, let's put it out there in the marketplace of ideas.
This wing nut is going to teach and has been teaching students a pack of lies.
Furthermore, these aren't opinions.
Either Al Qaeda did 9-11 or they didn't.
Either we blew down those buildings or we didn't.
These are statements of fact.
For crying out loud, you had in the flight that was brought down in Pennsylvania people on the cell phone describing who it was that was doing it.
Bin Laden was shown on videotape, shortling over having done it.
Not only is this thing not debatable, this is a question now of whether or not a major American university is going to teach lies just in the name of more Bush bashing.
Rush says a lot that you can't exaggerate this stuff anymore.
You can't exaggerate it.
If I had used as an example, what are they going to do next?
Teach in a university that Bush brought down the buildings on 9-11, liberals will say, oh, there you go again, you're exaggerating.
You create a you can't you create a strum and you create something that would never happen.
You cannot exaggerate what they will come up with next, and I have no idea what the next thing will be.
But some things are true.
And you know what else is true?
Ever since we lowered taxes in this country in 2002, the economy in this country has been booming.
And President Bush proved it in his comments this morning.
We're going to address that next.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Saying I told you so is absolutely essential if you're a conservative.
When we wasn't that the title, by the way of uh Russia's second book, See I Told You So, uh, he's right.
Because when we advocate something, and it's done and it works, somebody's got to say I told you so because the mainstream media is not going to do it.
Furthermore, it's the next it's got to be something that's established the next time you debate the issue.
In 2002, upon the urging of President Bush, Congress lowered tax rates.
We not only lowered income tax rates, we cut the rate on capital gains, we also increased the depreciation rate.
We lowered taxes.
At the time, the Democrats, almost all of whom voted against this thing, and the media said this is going to blow up the deficit.
This is going to cost the government all this revenue, and they always use that term.
Tax cuts are going to quote cost a certain amount of money.
That was then, this is now.
The president this morning rolled out the numbers.
Last year in 2005, tax revenue increased 274 billion dollars.
Revenue coming into the government was 274 billion higher in 2005 than it was in 2004.
As for 2006, if money keeps coming in at the current rate, revenue will increase this year another 246 billion dollars.
The rate of increase in 2005 was 14.5%.
A 14.5% increase in tax revenue coming into the government.
That was last year, and this year's numbers would amount to about an 11% increase.
In the meantime, as these revenues increase, the federal budget deficit is shrinking.
It had been projected by the government to be at 423 billion dollars at the end of the current fiscal year, instead it's 296 billion dollars.
We're headed toward not having one at all.
So instead of exploding the deficit, as had been argued, the tax cuts are shrinking the deficit.
In terms of the impact on the overall economy, we have now had 18 consecutive quarters of positive economic growth.
Do you know when that positive economic growth started?
It started right when the tax cuts were enacted.
In 2004, 5.4 million new jobs were created in the economy.
Yet, the next time some Republican proposes to cut taxes, you're going to hear the same old arguments about exploding the deficits, it's going to cost the government all of this revenue, that the supply siders are espousing an economic theory which is all quackery,
yet every time you do it, starting with the great Reagan tax cuts of 1982, right up to the 2002 Bush tax cuts, you see a positive impact on the economy.
it is so important that this message get out.
Now, there are clearly problems in the American economy right now.
The explosion in the price of oil is a real thing.
Americans are paying a lot more for gasoline and companies are paying more for their energy than they were in the past.
Those things are real.
But in terms of the impact on the federal government, the fact of the matter is that when you lowered tax rates, you encouraged economic activity.
And when there is economic activity, income increases.
And even though the rate at which government is taxing is down, the amount of money government actually gets greater because indeed the American people and American businesses made more money, and that's the government made more money.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush.
The telephone number is 1-800-282-2882.
I've been talking about the incredible improvement in the American economy ever since the 2002 tax cuts were enacted.
Now, President Bush held a news connected, and the reason he's presenting it is obviously tied to the fall campaign.
He wants Republicans to be able to run on his economic record, and the economic record is one of success.
If you're wondering where the increase in revenue came from, the vast majority of it came from very high income taxpayers and from corporations.
Now think about that for a minute.
This windfall that's rolling into the government of increased revenue ever since the reduction in tax rates is largely coming from the rich, the well-off, and from corporations.
The corporate income tax and income taxes paid by people in the upper brackets and the especially very high brackets.
The very people who we were told, for whom this was a tax cut, and indeed disproportionately it was a tax cut, the dollar for dollar meant more for people on the higher end.
But they're paying more in taxes, too.
So all you lefties out there that are so determined to soak the rich, which is the mantra of liberals.
Soak the rich.
We have income inequality in this country.
The rich have too much money.
We need to have the rich bankroll more of the government services that are out there for people who aren't rich.
If you really want to soak the rich, do you know what you ought to do?
Lower their taxes.
Because if you lower taxes on the rich, you will get way more of the rich's money than if you keep taxes at a high level.
And it's been proven by these numbers.
Now, the New York Times, in an attempt to preempt this and an attempt to deny reality, has a very snotty editorial in today's newspaper.
The headline is another mission accomplished.
And they put accomplished in quotation marks.
Get it mission accomplished, the sign on the aircraft carrier after the early part of the Iraqi war, another mission accomplished.
Bush is going to claim victory when there is no victory, that's their point.
They write, and I think it is important to refute what they put out here, because what they are attempting to do is manipulate numbers in an attempt to deny the reality of what has happened.
So I'm going to take on their editorial.
I'm going to read it and I'm going to refute it.
They write on Mr. Bush's watch, triple digit budget surpluses have turned into annual triple-digit bud triple digit budget deficits.
There's no information in the mid session report to alter that utterly dispiriting fact.
Their point is Bush inherited surpluses, and Bush has given us deficits.
Yeah.
That's true.
If you are going to hold Bush responsible for what was happening in the American economy on January 20th of 2001, if the moment George Bush walked into office, his impact on the economy was immediate.
He inherited a recession.
The economy stunk for a year.
Then we had 9-11 occur late in 2001.
So they use artificially the starting point of 2001.
They aren't going to use as the starting point the day the tax cuts were enacted, which is when the Bush economic program began.
They aren't going to use that as the starting point because then their numbers wouldn't be so convenient.
So they use a starting point that makes an impossible hurdle to cross.
If you're going to evaluate the Bush economy, you need to evaluate it on the basis of when his economic program was enacted, not when he was dealing with the leftover recession from Bill Clinton.
Back to the editorial.
Yes, the report is expected to project that this year's deficit will be somewhat less gargantuan than last year's, probably somewhere between 280 billion and 300 billion versus a $318 billion shortfall in 2005.
That's not much to crow about.
But Mr. Bush is likely to gloat anyway.
Earlier this year, the administration conveniently projected a highly inflated deficit of $423 billion.
With that as a starting point, the actual results can be spun to look as if they're worth cheering.
Well, how do you respond to that?
There was a projected budget deficit, and it's lower than that.
Now they say, well, they ought to, they just inflated what the projected deficit was.
Easy to say, there's nothing to back that up with.
Then they continue, the Razzle Dazzle won't end there.
As he did in remarks on Saturday, Mr. Bush is sure to use today's event to credit tax cuts for a projected surge in tax revenue.
Then they put surge in quotation marks.
Well, if tax revenues go up 274 billion in a year, as they did last year, if you can't use the word surge, what word are you supposed to use?
The editorial goes on, the Treasury is expected to take in about 250 billion more in 2006 and in 2005 for a total take of 2.4 trillion.
Devoid of context, this number looks impressive.
Yeah, I guess it does.
They continue.
In fact, it is 100 billion dollars less than the 2.5 trillion dollar revenue estimate the administration touted when it set out in 2001 to sell its policy of never-ending tax cuts.
So their point here is that when the tax cuts were being debated, Bush said it would result in $2.5 trillion in new revenue.
Instead, it's produced $2.4 trillion in new revenue.
And they're saying, therefore, that this didn't live up to expectations.
Think about what they're saying.
The president said that this would create a windfall, and it has.
The point is is that we have produced $2.4 new trillion in new revenue, not the revenue declines that they argued.
You want to have a point of comparison.
Go back to the New York Times editorials of 2001 and add and look and see what they said would happen to revenues if the tax cuts were enacted.
In fact, Bush's number was almost uncanny.
Those of us who said we who said we would have a windfall were correct.
Back to the editorial.
Even with this year's bigger haul, real revenue growth.
Now listen to how they word this.
Even with this year's bigger haul, real revenue growth during the Bush years will be abysmal, averaging about 0.3% per capita versus an average of nearly 10% in all previous post-World War II business cycles.
Once again, they make the starting point, January 20th of 2001, to make the annual rate of growth look lower.
2001 was a bad economic year.
So was early 2002.
By factoring that period in the numbers, they can claim, they can claim that the Bush record isn't that good.
They will not, however, use the tax cut enactment as the starting point.
Because if they did, they'd have to acknowledge that the tax cuts had worked.
Continuing with the editorial, that might be excusable if the recent revenue improvements, listen to this, that the recent revenue improvements could reasonably be reasonably be expected to continue.
They cannot.
Much of the increase in tax receipts is from corporate profits, high income investors, and super high earning executives, sources that are just as unpredictable as the financial markets to which they're inevitably linked.
No, they're not unpredictable.
If they were unpredictable, those of us who correctly predicted what would happen would not have been able to do so.
I'll predict again.
If we make the tax cuts permanent as the president wants, these revenue increases from those groups that you describe, the high income investors, corporate profits, and high earning executives will continue to roll in.
At least they do acknowledge that the people that are bankrolling the economic recovery right now are people at the high end.
So then they write, so the revenue surge is neither a sign that the tax cuts are working nor of sustainable economic growth.
All right, I guess it just happened.
It was magic.
A growing number of economists, most prominently from the Congressional Budget Office point out that upsurges in revenue are also the result of growing income inequality in the United States.
An observation that is consistent with mounting evidence of a rapidly widening gap between the rich and everyone else.
As corporations and high income Americans claim ever more of the economic pie, revenues rise, even if there's no increase in overall economic growth.
So they're concerned that the rich have gotten richer since the tax cuts were enacted.
What's their solution to that?
What's their solution to that?
It was, in fact, because of the tax cuts, that while the rich indeed have gotten richer, that the rich are contributing even more to government programs because they're paying more in taxes.
And that's the linkage that is central to conservative economic thought.
That if you lower tax rates, people will pay more in taxes because their incomes will go up because economic activity will increase.
And finally, they concluded Mr. Bush looked behind his headline numbers.
He too could see that the rich are getting richer while the rest are at best only holding ground.
It would make sense to use some of the windfall revenue to enact policies and programs that tilt against growing inequality.
Unfortunately, he's flogging more tax cuts that will deepen the divide.
There is no real way of countering the last argument.
The reason why the rich benefited the most from the tax cuts is because they're the only ones in this country who are really paying any income taxes anymore.
Income tax rates are very low for anybody under $35,000 a year.
By the same token, since people of lower incomes aren't paying much in taxes, if there is going to be a revenue increase to the government, it is going to come largely from corporations and from the wealthy.
And as I said, it is real important to stress this stuff.
Because the left is trying to argue that what happened didn't happen.
Those of us who believed, and on this show, when I sat in for Rush, I told you and I gave you the timetable by which it would occur.
Those of us who said if you enact the tax cuts, you will see a long-term sustained period of economic growth.
We were right.
And we will be right every time we do this.
Just as every time you raise taxes, you will harm the American economy.
Enough of me.
We're going to get to callers on this topic.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You know, this stuff isn't complicated.
If you allow the American people to keep more of their money, there will be more activity in the economy.
The economy will grow, and therefore tax revenues will flow into the federal government.
It works every time you try it.
To the telephones we go in Minnesota, Tim, you're on Rush Limbaugh's program with Mark Belling.
Hey, forgive me uh for being ignorant, but I thought the corporations, the evil corporations didn't pay taxes, and I thought that the tax cuts were going to benefit the wealthy.
Um so why is it that on national news and the liberal media today I hear that this sudden surge of of income revenue is paid mostly by the corporations?
I I don't understand.
Well, and then they and then they turn around and say that this is this, of course, is not anything that's predictable.
You're exactly right about this.
They call it because corporate profits have increased because the economy is booming, corporations have paid more in taxes.
Their executives are seeing more money, more bonuses, they're paying more in taxes, and it goes right down to the right down to the average wage earner.
But you are right, most of the revenue increase is coming from people at the higher end because that's where most of the taxes are paid.
So what's happened here is they have man what has happened here is we conservatives have managed to soak the rich.
By allowing the rich to keep a greater percentage of their money, we have managed to also have them send a lot more of it into Washington.
What amazed me was that they actually admitted it this time.
Yeah, they do admit it, but in the New York Times editorial, they say that these the income from corporations and high income individuals, this cannot be predicted.
Gee, I don't know.
I haven't had any trouble predicting it.
I said right here on National Radio that if you lowered tax uh income tax rates that the wealthy would end up paying way more in taxes.
I didn't have any trouble predicting it.
Ronald Reagan didn't have any trouble predicting it.
President Bush hasn't had any trouble predicting it.
The only people who are having a hard time predicting what's going to happen with tax revenues are the Liberals at the New York Times.
Thank you for the call, Tim.
Chesapeake, Virginia, Alan, you're on Russia's program with Mark Belling.
Hello, how are you doing?
I'm great, thank you.
One of the things I wanted to share with you is uh from my research uh as an economist, I have got a master's in econom uh economics from the University of Oklahoma.
And uh basically the the point that you made earlier that um the Liberals don't want to acknowledge that reducing tax rates are going to increase revenues is a well established uh principle in economics.
Well, it's not it's established, they just don't want to accept it.
And every time we end up having this debate, we've got to do it over and over and over again and explain that if you lower tax rates, there will be more economic activity, therefore more revenue going into the government.
That's because they only consider the tax policy as a static situation where you have a certain amount of taxes that you can get at any particular time, and therefore if you lower the rate, you're gonna get less taxes.
That's what they see.
I don't know if their representatives and senators just don't get the economic significance that if you let people have more money in their pockets, they spend it somewhere.
They have a mental is they have a mental block on this.
They can't accept the notion that if you lower tax rates that more revenue will come in.
They can't accept that notion because that would mean that they've been wrong about this all along.
They are so stuck on their class warfare, the way they run all of their political campaigns, oh those Republicans went out there and cut taxes for the rich, and you suffered.
They need to have that rhetoric, and they can't process the fact that every time you lower tax rates, it's the rich and corporations that end up bankrolling the government with more revenue.
Now there is an aspect to this that they will raise.
They will say, well, how come we still have deficits?
The answer is is that even though revenues have increased, Congress and and this is where the president deserves some criticism, Congress and the President have been spending more money as well.
Some of it understandable, Katrina, other of it justified the war on Iraq.
But we do have a problem with the Congress with its earmarks and with its discretionary spending, continuing to spend money on all sorts of things that it shouldn't.
That is a separate issue.
But from the revenue perspective, the tax cuts have worked.
They not only produced more revenue for the government, they have allowed the American people to have more revenue.
They're not only keeping more, but they're making more money.
The tax cuts worked.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
What I have noticed is the naysayers, the dissenters are more likely to call into Russia's program when there's a guest host like myself around.
They don't think they can take on Rush, but they think that a second stringer like me is an easy mark.
So I'm going to keep this discussion Going because I want to hear someone from the left argue that the tax cuts didn't work.
I picked my fights very, very carefully.
This is an easy one to win.
All we have to do is take a look at the numbers.
By every objective standard, the tax cuts have worked.
They have increased the standard of living for Americans.
They've increased economic activity.
There's been growth.
And it's been a windfall in revenue for the federal government.
As for the argument about the deficits, while the deficits are there and are a result of spending by the government, because the government is taking in so much more money, the deficits are actually a lower percentage of GDP, only 2.3%.
So while the number is high, the percentage of the deficit is rather low.
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