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Aug. 6, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
August 6, 2007, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Greetings, my friends, and welcome.
You are tuned to the most listened-to radio talk show in America.
This is the Rush Limbaugh program, and we are here behind this Golden EIB microphone, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
A thrill, a delight to be with you.
Telephone number if you'd like to join us, 800-282-2882, and the email address, rush at EIBNet.com.
Wow, busy weekend, busy morning.
We got an information overload out there.
But if there's one place that you can count on to synthesize it all down to what it really means, what's important and what's not important, it's this show and me, your host, highly trained broadcast specialist El Rushbald.
Your phone number again, 800-282-2882.
And the email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
Well, we have the Republican debate.
We got soundbites from.
I watched it a little bit.
I was flying back from New York yesterday.
I watched a little bit of it on television.
I didn't even know it was going to be on.
What are Republican candidates doing having a debate at 10.30 in the morning or 8 in the morning, whenever it was?
Their base is in church.
And of course, nobody's talking about this.
That's why I'm going to play some soundbites.
Some of it was actually pretty good.
It was actually a debate.
You had Stephanopoulos there and David Yepson from the Des Moines Register.
But these guys are going back and forth with each other.
It actually was a debate.
Some of this you'll enjoy hearing.
Let's see, we've got, oh, how about the FBI searching the home of this guy, this attorney in Washington, because they're investigating the warrantless wiretap leaker?
They think they may have found the guy this idiot was out posting all over the internet.
He's a Clinton administration holdover.
Exactly.
The kind of thing that I feared.
And this can be traced back.
This whole breaking down of the FISA law, which, by the way, the Democrats couldn't rush to fix over the weekend.
Couldn't wait to rush.
Did you notice this?
While their little kook fringe base was having its little convention up in Chicago, which, by the way, the congressional leadership all bailed on Saturday morning, Pelosi, Reed, and Rahm Emmanuel said, all right, guess what?
We can't make it.
We have to stay in the house.
We've got big votes all day.
The presidential candidates went up there.
Hillary got booed a couple times, once over what she said about lobbyists.
I forget the other time.
Whatever it was.
Let's see.
What else we have?
Well, it's a lot here.
I think probably the Democrats are going to change their mantra here on the meaning of the 2006 election.
Ever since the 2006 election, that outcome mandate was claimed to be to get us out of a rock.
I think now what's probably going to be said is that the 2006 election was a mandate to fix our bridges.
The people of this country elected us to fix the infrastructure.
We need to raise taxes and we need to spend, We need to get this done.
Blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I want to start here with something.
I don't know how long ago I said this.
It's just more evidence, ladies and gentlemen, that I know exactly what I'm talking about, particularly when I am talking about our good friends, the Camille Libs.
Mr. Sterling, you might be able to help me remember when this was.
This is back in the, it has to be late 80s, early 90s, in the midst of the then feverish debate over abortion.
One of the things that I pointed out was that, you know, we're starting to eliminate life in this country based on convenience to the living.
And we're doing it at the elderly end, and we're doing it at the beginning in the womb.
And then there came, in the midst of all this, a story came out about medical genetics and how they were advancing.
Who?
What?
Yeah, Colorado governor was talking about genetics and how we can maybe make designer babies.
That we're learning to identify in the womb the traits that kids are going to have.
And I said, this is going to require some really serious ethics here, folks, because if we're not careful, we're going to be able to tell prospective parents that their kid's going to be prone to freckles, red hair, and overweight.
And on the basis of that, parents might decide to terminate the pregnancy and try over.
Because who wants to bring a fat, red-headed, freckle-faced person into the world?
And then I said, if they ever, if there is a genetic link to homosexuality, I said, if, and if they ever find that, you are going to see the fastest turnaround from pro-choice to pro-life that you've ever heard.
Because can you imagine prospective parents go into the OBGYN and says, guess what?
We just found your kid's going to be fat, freckle-faced, red-hair, and potentially gay.
What will the parents do?
Well, I warned of this.
I said, this is all coming.
This concept that if you don't like the original conception of your chow, that you can just scrub it and start all over.
And here we have, what is this from?
This is from an Australian newspaper, I believe.
Yeah, yeah, the news.
Couples should be able to design the characteristics of their children, including personality traits, during IVF treatment, according to an Oxford University expert.
Australian-born ethicist and chair of Oxford's You Heroes Center for Practical Ethics, Julian Soveliescu, told a news.com in Australia that couples seeking IVF should have the right to give their future child greater opportunities through genetic manipulation.
If they're having an IVF for other reasons and they want to select from a bunch of embryos already created for some legitimate purpose, I don't see why they shouldn't give couples information that manipulation is available.
If we can enable couples to influence the degree of self-control that their children have, I think that's the sort of thing we should be offering.
This is an ethicist.
Exactly what I want.
No ethics whatsoever is out there now suggesting that in vitro fertilization, couples should actually design their kids.
Should actually, I just want to tell you, I knew this was going to happen.
And, you know, this has roots to the eugenics movement.
The eugenics movement was making sure, well, we only want a population of certain IQs, certain race.
And this has roots to it.
You start getting into designer babies.
Well, where do you draw the line?
Where do you stop it?
Well, you're asking a wrong person.
Snurdy said, wouldn't it kind of be cool to have the kind of kid you always wanted?
Presumes you always wanted one.
No, I think this is fraught with really potential harm, big harm.
For all of society, for civilization, I really do.
Now, the cops, this is from gizmodo.com.
Cops have a new way for controlling a crowd.
There's a new flashlight out there that makes you throw up.
It's so bright that it temporarily blinds you.
Then it gets you all disoriented and dizzy.
It uses special types of really bright LEDs.
And the flashlight's beam pulses and flashes while quickly changing its color.
And all this somehow makes you feel like you're going to throw up.
Of course, if you want to avoid throwing up, you close your eyes so you don't see the flashlight.
But then if you close your eyes, you can't aim the gun at the cop or anybody else that is giving you trouble.
You can start firing wildly.
This is intelligent optical systems manufactured.
They're going to start testing this flashlight 15 inches this fall on some lucky volunteers at Penn State University.
I want to congratulate a couple friends.
Michael Irvin with his induction to the NFL Hall of Fame over the weekend.
He gave that speech with no notes.
We've got some, I think, a couple bites from it.
No notes, just straight from his heart.
It was really tremendous.
I got to know him very well when I was at ESPN.
And of all the guys I worked there, I probably developed a closer relationship to Irvin than any of the others.
And my buddy Tom Glavin won his 300th game for the New York Mets.
I first met Glavin the first year I played in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic.
He was on my team with the then Atlanta Falcons quarterback Chris Chandler.
So congratulations to those guys.
Those are both no mean feats.
There may not ever be another 300-game winner in Major League Baseball the way the game is played now.
There's nobody close.
Randy Johnson, I guess, the closest, but his career may be over with the back injury.
What is it?
284 wins out there.
Come on, Brian, you're a sports fan.
Speaking, no, you don't have to look it up.
I know it's 284.
How about the Steelers last night in the opening round of the NFL preseason, shellacking the New Orleans?
No, it doesn't mean anything, but it was still great to see.
All right, quick timeout, folks.
You sit tight.
We'll come back.
And I don't know what I'm going to start with here because it's overload.
But by the time we get back, I'll have figured it out.
America's truth detector, the doctor of democracy, general all-round good guy, national treasure, a man who's running the country.
You know it and I know it, Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Folks, before I get to an issue here, I've thought about how I want to start the program.
I want to tell you, I mean this from the bottom of my heart, how proud I am of you.
My dear audience, I'm so proud of you people.
How nice you are, how loyal you are.
But, you know, mostly, what makes me swell with pride is how informed you are.
I would put you up against any audience of any news source.
I don't care.
You put it on radio, put it on television, put it in print.
And especially, you are so much more informed than readers of the New York Times.
And I cannot tell you, both personally and professionally, how much prod I have in that.
And of course, this has been documented by the Pew Center for People in the Press.
You have been rated the most knowledgeable and informed audience in all of broadcast media.
Now, let's go back to last week, just as an illustration of this.
If I were to ask you what were the most important news items of the month of July, right up there, probably near the top, if not numero uno itself, would be the op-ed in the New York Times by the two guys from Brookings, which said, hey, we might be able to win this thing.
The surge is working.
And it appeared where?
It appeared in the New York Times.
And I read it, told you about it.
I'm sure you've read it.
I'll bet you there aren't anybody, the New York Times, maybe Jim Rutenberg, who listens to this program, for example.
But we expose ourselves to what they are doing.
A war we just might win.
That probably, especially in the last week of the month of July, if I were to take a survey of you, this audience, that would be, I'm sure it'd be at the top of the list, if not close.
Now, what did New York Times readers think were the most important stories?
The Times, if you go to their website, will tell you which of their stories are the most read articles of the month.
Do you know what the number one, according to the Times, the number one most read article of the month in their newspaper and under website was?
An epic showdown as Harry Potter is initiated into adulthood.
That's the number one story of the New York Times website.
That's what they say about their own website, the Harry Potter movie or book, whatever it was, number one.
But it gets better.
Number two, most read distributed story, New York Times, Summer Express, 100 simple meals ready in 10 minutes or less.
I am not making this up.
Number three, top red story, New York Times, a $135 million home.
But if you have to ask the class warfare crowd wants to read about a $135 million estates, of course they do.
Number four, the number four most read story in the New York Times.
According to their own website, letters from an 18-year-old Hillary Rodham to her then boyfriend.
Nowhere in the top five of the New York Times most read stories is that column, we just might win in New York.
They claim to have the newspaper of record.
They claim to have their pulse on all the news that's fit to print.
But I'll tell you, if that's what their audience on their website is reading in that order and what they consider to be the most important, what they're passing around, and I have to tell you, folks, we are so far ahead of the game.
I am so, I can't tell you how proud of you I am because I just I know that if I were able to take a survey, much like yours is, and I'm not going to count our website we do.
On our website we have a top four, top five ranked, T is top ten, but it's not.
It's not, and I haven't looked to see what they are, but it's.
It's not quite the same thing.
I just I looked at this, what the Times readers think is most important, and I just was.
I was excited because I know they have a mindless, really mindless, just I mean holes in their head audience, and I don't.
I have you, and I think it's fabulous.
Now, FBI agents searched the home of former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tam last week in an effort to determine who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media.
Newsweek reported this on Sunday.
They cited two anonymous legal sources.
The agents, who had obtained a classified search warrant, took Tam's desktop computer, two laptops belonging to his kids and some of Tam's personal files.
He left the Department OF Justice last year.
He had worked in the department's Office OF Intelligence Policy AND Review.
Now that's, I'm going to call that from here on out the OIPR.
That's what its acronym is, because I don't want to waste all these syllables here on the Office OF Intelligent Policy Review every time I have to talk about it.
But he worked, that it was an.
It was an agency, the Justice Department, and this is the group this is a little subdivision in there that works with the FISA court And deals with warrants.
In December of 2005, as you recall, the New York Times published a story exposing, quote unquote, the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program to eavesdrop on international phone calls and emails of U.S. residents without court warrants.
The eavesdropping was conducted without public knowledge, without any court approval until last January when the program was put under the authority of the FISA court.
And Alberto Gonzalez, the embattled attorney general, said that the leak really hurt our country.
And of course, now the administration is going after these leakers, and this guy, Thomas Tam, appears to be at the top of the list.
Now, we have a little update on this from Clarice Feldman, who does great work at theamericanthinker.com.
This Tam guy, Thomas Tam, T-A-M-N is how he spells it, made a contribution to the Democrat National Committee in 2004.
He also posts on various blogs out there.
And he's, I don't know, there's a blog comment actually from a Thomas Tam from November 2006, critical of the Bush administration not calling the Iraq war a civil war in sarcastic terms.
I'm not going to bother reading the post, but it basically goes on to say, well, I guess we're not going to call it a civil war until one side's wearing gray and they're in the south and one side's wearing blue and they're in the north and blah, Now, Clarice Feldman goes back to the 9-11 Commission report, page 95.
She says this.
But the prosecution of Aldrich Ames for espionage in 1994 revived concerns about the prosecutor's role in intelligence investigation.
We're getting to the wall here that Jamie Gorellik and Janet Reno built during the Clinton administration that prevented intelligence agencies from sharing information because they were going to grand juries with this stuff.
I'm reading here from the 9-11 Commission report.
The Department of Justice's OIPR, where this Thomas Tam guy worked, is responsible for reviewing and presenting all FISA applications to the FISA court.
It worried that because of the numerous prior consultations between FBI agents and prosecutors, that the judge might rule the FISA warrants had been misused.
If that had happened, Aldrich Ames might have escaped conviction.
Richard Scruggs, the acting head of OIPR, complained to Attorney General Reno about the lack of information sharing controls, i.e. the wall.
On his own, he began imposing information sharing procedures for FISA material.
The OIPR became the gatekeeper for the flow of FISA information to criminal prosecutors.
Now, Clarice Feldman notes that the OIPR was also the stumbling block in the trial of Zakarius Masawi.
So FISA seemed to be working just fine prior to 1994 until Gorelic et al. decided to tweak it, and now FISA has become part of the problem.
She says, I think I'm beginning to understand now.
This guy Tam just happened to be in that shop.
I don't know how long he worked at DOJ, but he received an award in 2000, which means he was a holdover from the prior administration.
So bottom line is, the guy that the Justice Department is investigating for leaking to the New York Times about the warrantless wiretap program trying to sabotage it is a guy that's a holdover from the Clinton administration.
Precisely what we've all thought, is it not?
These people infestating all these places, CIA, DOJ, Pentagon, you name it.
It's great to see the Bush administration in action on this.
Bulletin, breaking news from ABC.
It's time, ladies and gentlemen, to stop the checkwriting to Minnesota.
A coal mine in central Utah just collapsed earlier today after a 4.0 magnitude earthquake, trapping six miners inside.
I tell you, infrastructure going to hell under the Bush administration.
My gosh, mines can't even handle.
Mines can't even handle a mines can't even handle a 4.0 earthquake.
What's happening to this country?
What do they think we are?
Russia, China?
What do you mean, why are we mining coal?
That's a good question.
Clandestine Bush project, obviously, mining coal to pollute the planet, destroy our climate.
Maurice in Canyon Lake, Texas, you're first as we go to the phones.
Nice to have you here on the EIB network.
Thank you, Rush.
It's an honor to speak to you.
Longtime listener, first-time caller, a little bit nervous.
Your call screener said to get right to the point.
And I'll say that, you know, you and I agree on 99.9% of all the issues we're going to be doing.
Well, that's wonderful.
That's absolutely fabulous.
But there must be one-tenth of 1% that's causing you to call them.
That is correct.
And it's your enthusiasm over Michael Irvin's selection of the Hall of Fame.
I think that's a blight on the Hall of Fame when you consider his record of cocaine use, cocaine abuse.
You know, he was in another world, he would have been suspended from the NFL.
And I just highly disagree with that.
I agree he's a tremendous athlete.
He may be a good person now, but with that record, I just disagree with that.
Do you think people should be denied redemption?
Oh, no.
No, I don't.
But that's a tremendous honor, you know, to be a historian.
Yeah, it's rarefied air.
There's no question.
Playing in the NFL is rarefied air all by itself, aren't you?
You bet it is.
You bet.
And making the Hall of Fame is as well.
But the message that that gives to young athletes concerns me.
So the message you derive from it is that you can go ahead and abuse cocaine and have on your 30th birthday a bunch of hookers in a hotel room and still make the Hall of Fame.
You got it.
I don't think you really think that's the message that people are going to drive from this?
Well, you know, if you're not going to be able to do that.
You know, he was on trial.
He did show up in a mink coat, Joe Namath.
Oh, I know.
He was on trial.
Troy Aikman was in the courtroom every day.
I still turn off ESPN when he's on.
Well, I just think I just think that's a good idea.
I understand.
But what if at age 30, when all that stuff happened, what if going through it and overcoming it and solving it has made him a better person?
Why can't the person that he has become serve as the role model?
Well, you know, that certainly would be admirable.
But, you know, he's had an incident since then, too, not too long ago.
Yeah, but supposedly it was his friend and everything.
You know that.
Supposedly, and all that.
I have a brief soundbite of Michael Irvin's acceptance speech.
Did you hear any of it?
No.
Well, why don't you listen to it with me?
And then I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
That's all right.
You listen to it with me, and then after it finished, it's about a minute, and then you tell me what you think.
Are you ready?
Do I have to turn on the radio or?
No, you'll hear it on the phone.
Very good.
Don't turn on the radio or you won't hear it from me.
I will not turn on the radio.
Yeah, just listen to it here on the phone.
Here we go.
I sat right here where you are last year, and I watched the class of 2006.
And I said, wow, that's what a Hall of Fame really is.
Certainly I am not that.
And I doubt it.
I would ever have the chance to stand before you today.
So when I returned home, I spoke with Michael and Elijah and I said, that's how you do it, son.
You do it like they did it.
I wanted to stand in front of my boys and say, do it like your dad, like any proud dad would want to.
And at that moment, a voice came over me, and it said, look up, get up, and don't ever give up.
You tell everyone or anyone that has ever doubted, thought they did not measure up, or wanted to quit, you tell them to look up, get up, and don't ever give up.
Now, let me put some of this in context, because what he was talking about here in talking to his boys, what he also said was that he didn't think he was good enough to be their dad at a point in his life.
And he was hoping that other members, Hall of Fame, would be the ones they would look up to.
And he didn't think that he was a good role model as a husband because of what he had done.
He was hoping his boys would look to others to find out a good father.
And now that he's made the Hall of Fame, he was crying through a good portion of this.
I mean, the puddles of tears under his eyes.
So, you know, he's gone through a lot.
His playing credentials can't be denied.
Oh, no, no, and I don't deny that.
He's a great athlete.
So what do you think of what you just heard?
Well, my first question.
In the context of you're worried about him.
Who wrote it for him?
Your context, remember your context here.
You're worried about him being a bad role model.
So what do you think of it?
Well, my first thought is who wrote that for him?
No, no, he spoke with no notes.
No notes.
Spoke with no notes.
He's one of the few who went out there with no notes.
He had no idea.
Well, you know, Russia, I hope that he's rehabilitated, and I hope that he is a good person today, but I still think that he should not be in the Hall of Fame.
Well, I mean, how do you compare that?
I'm not going to.
I'm going to compare that with Pete Rose.
Well, it's a little bit different.
Gambling on the game when you are a manager of a team is a little bit different.
None of us are without sin, and none of us are without failure.
None of us are without fault.
None of us.
None of us.
And all I can tell you is that I know Michael personally, and I like him.
And he's, you don't get to see this when he's doing his football work on ESPN or wherever he's going to do it next.
But he's a pretty deep guy and has a tremendous, if there's anybody that understands the rarefied air and opportunity he had, given where he came from, to play in the NFL and to exceed, it's Michael Irvin.
I don't know.
I don't think, especially now he had to quit early because of a neck injury.
I don't think he takes any of this for granted.
But Maurice, I'm glad you called.
I appreciate it.
We'll go to Toledo next.
This is Christina.
You're up on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Rosh.
It's an honor to talk with you.
Thank you very much.
About 12 years ago, I wrote a paper in college regarding eugenics and the Human Genome Project and the idea of designer babies, basically.
And it was literally, you know, one boy, blonde hair, easy on the eyes, please hold the stupidity.
That's literally the paper I titled it.
And it really had to do with when you take away a trait that might be genetically what might be considered, you know, undesirable.
Let's even say the potential for stupidity.
Are you maybe taking away a trait that was keeping that child from maybe having cancer at a later date?
Or if you get rid of a cancer trait, might there be another.
Wait, are you suggesting there's a link between stupidity and cancer?
No, no, no.
I'm saying it's kind of like the bully on the playground.
You take away one bully.
There might be another bully waiting in the wings to come up strong.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
Well, you know, it's a good point.
What you're saying is I really don't know nearly enough to be monkeying around with this.
This is not our place.
This is not our purview, be messing around with this kind of thing.
That is my point.
It's the height of arrogance.
It's the vanity, like you can't believe.
So you're saying if you remove a genetic trait such as stupidity, you might open the doors for something else to happen to the kid who might not be as stupid as he would have been.
Exactly.
What do we do with a bunch of Mensa members?
I mean, are they going to do the daily job that maybe someone of not such a higher intelligence is able to do?
And would they be?
Have you ever met a Mensa member?
No, I haven't.
Are you one?
No, I may qualify, but I'm not a member.
The best way to express this to you, to show you Bill Buckley, won one of his many classic lines that I would just assume I would prefer, in fact, to be governed by the first 100 names from the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.
Wow.
Right.
And essentially, this is what you're saying.
Look, Christina, thanks much.
I got to take a quick jot here down to Profit Center.
Be right back after this.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
It's time to read the stitches on a fast ball.
I have a story here from, of all places, the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch.
And why, look at the headline: Wealthiest Taxpayers Are Escaping Fair Share at the Nation's Overall Expense.
Wow.
I wonder why this story happens.
Pierre, now, could it possibly be because our infrastructure is falling apart?
Could it possibly be because of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis?
Hmm.
Wealthiest taxpayers escaping fair share at the nation's overall expense.
It's written by Robin Blumner.
And I assume this is a female because it's spelled R-O-B-Y-N.
Let me give you an excerpt here.
The Democrats in Congress.
It's an editorial.
I think it's an editorial, maybe a column.
The Democrats in Congress need to understand that their party's future depends not on collecting money from the rich for campaign contributions, but in collecting money from the rich for taxes.
The worst thing the Democrats can do is reinforce the view that it doesn't matter which party is in power since they are all beholden to the HAVs.
How big an ignoramus must this woman or person be to write this story now?
Well, I say this because the government is awash in money.
The deficit's lower than it's ever been the forecasts.
You have tax receipts pouring in, surprising everybody with lower rates on everybody.
It's how you do it.
Now, if the focus here is generating revenue for the Treasury, for the government, so we can do the precious work saving our infrastructure or whatever the hell else the liberals think is worthwhile, then by golly, realize how you do it.
You don't do it by raising taxes.
I don't know what the number, the corresponding number will be today, but back when I first started studying this tax business in the 80s, at that time, you could confiscate all of the wealth.
You could confiscate.
What was it?
How did it go now?
You could confiscate, not tax.
You could confiscate all the wealth from people who earn something over like $750,000 and run the government for two weeks.
You could take it all and you could run.
We're talking trillions here, folks.
$3 trillion is the next budget.
You are not going to improve anything by taxing a specific group of people.
You're not going to raise any more revenue.
You do it by lowering rates.
Now, the thrust of this story is Warren Buffett's claim that he's the third richest man in the world, and he blasted the U.S. tax system because he said he pays a lower rate of taxes than his secretary.
He said, without trying to avoid taxes, he paid 17.7% on the $46 million he made in 2006, while his secretary, who made $60,000, was taxed at 30%.
I can explain this.
I'm not going to justify it, but I don't know how much of this $46 million he earned showed up as earned income.
You know, I've told you before, the income tax is designed to keep people like his secretary from becoming wealthy.
There is no wealth tax.
So this is a big misnomer, and this reporter is clueless.
You don't, when we talk about raising taxes on the rich, we're starting families of four.
What?
What is a Democrat number now?
$200,000 a year.
You start raising their taxes.
They're never going to have any savings.
They're never going to be able to get their kids to college without student loan.
Even those people aren't.
They're certainly not going to become the rich.
But people like Buffett and others that have all these gazillions, there's no tax on their portfolios other than what they sell it a stock or an asset, and the capital gains rates 15%, which, by the way, has caused a lot of movement in the stock market, pro and con, but it's been very good for business all down the line.
But there's no tax on wealth.
There is a tax on income, and the tax on income is designed to keep everybody who is not wealthy from getting there.
I'm talking about genuine wealth, not the way Democrats define rich.
But, you know, Warren Buffett, for crying out loud, I mean, he can do all kinds of things.
You know what he does?
He scoops up businesses that are inherited by people whose parents have just died because they can't afford to pay the death tax of 55%.
You know how many businesses the people who inherit them have to sell them because they can't pay the death tax.
So the business leaves the hands of the family that had it all along.
This has happened to some family-owned newspapers, in fact.
And people like Buffett go in and buy these little companies and make them part of the corporate empire or whatever.
It's fine, but this notion that we're not taxed enough is absurd.
We are taxed too much.
This story misses the whole point.
We pay too much.
Our government is awash in money.
$3 trillion.
State governments run surpluses even today as we speak.
And the reason that the politicians run around for all stripes, Republican, Democrat, liberal, communist, socialist, whatever, it is goofy and slap happy because they've got all this money to spend.
When they talk about raising your taxes, it's an effort to control you.
It's not about generating more money.
I would tell Senator McCain and the rest of these clowns that think money is corrupting politics.
And so what we need to do is not take the money out of politics.
We need to take the money out of government.
Let me give you a real world example on taxes.
In North Carolina, this past weekend, there was something they do every year, tax-free only on certain items, like back-to-school stuff, clothing, shoes, notebooks, pencils, even computers.
Up to $3,500.
There was no sales tax on this stuff.
They're the fifth year in a row that the state of North Carolina has done this.
I know it happens in Florida as well.
Well, guess what?
It turns out that lots of people in North Carolina run to the stores.
Same thing in Florida.
We're talking about a 7% sales tax in North Carolina.
A lot of people say, ah, nobody's going to make a special trip to the mall to save 7%.
B.S. Places end up being flooded.
This one brief weekend will often serve to make up for a bad weekend at Christmas time for retailers.
That's how much business they do when they get rid of the sales tax in North Carolina.
And there's a lot of promotion and tie-ins to other purchases that they want you to get buy when you're there buying the tax-free items.
So here you've got the state of Florida.
We got to exempt Florida because they don't really have a state income tax here, but let's look at North Carolina.
Five years into this, it just goes great guns.
Now, how is it that the legislators in North Carolina don't see the real-world application of lower taxes, this case, no taxes, and then incorporate that in other elements of the state budget?
Because it's about control.
The real-world evidence is out there, and reporters don't see it.
None of these people who are for high taxes see it because they're libs and their minds are closed.
They don't see real-world examples right in front of them.
All right, folks, got to take a quick time out here.
Our first hour in the can on the way over to the museum housing artifacts of the future Limbaugh Broadcast Museum.
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