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Aug. 16, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
August 16, 2007, Thursday, Hour #2
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Time Text
And greetings.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Rush Limbaugh here on a cutting edge of societal evolution, meeting and surpassing all audience expectations on a daily basis.
No mean feat.
Telephone number is 800-282-2882 and the email address, rush at EIBnet.com.
Talking about battered liberal syndrome here for a couple days.
And, you know, after I saw the Democrat debate up there, well, the forum in front of those union members at Soldier Field, and they had these union members paraded up there with questions or comments for the candidates.
And it was just one long whine.
I lost my job at healthcare.
My wife didn't.
What are we going to do about this?
What's wrong with America?
Who's going to fix it?
A constant whine.
These people have been voting Democrat all their lives.
Now, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
They've been voting Democrat all their lives, and yet they continue to complain to the very people they're voting for.
And the Republicans, of course, get to blame for it.
I got to thinking, this is battered liberal syndrome.
It's like battered wife syndrome.
So for those of you in this audience who are liberal, you are battered.
I mean, you can't be a liberal and not be battered these days, and none of you are happy.
I, El Rochebo, am going to try to help you through this in mere moments.
I want to grab a phone call here first because I normally don't take calls in the monologue section or segment of the first hour, but this looks like it's something that can be good.
It's Leslie from San Francisco.
I'm glad you called.
Launch, what is it you have for us?
Well, I'm buying.
I'm in the market right now and I'm buying.
And why are you buying, Leslie, when the market appears to be tanking?
Well, I've been waiting for this, actually, because I was looking at the markets.
I'm in a lot of cash.
And I was looking at the markets early on, like May, June, and they were all at the highs.
And I said, now I got to sit.
I got to wait because it's going to correct.
And now's the time to do it.
I've been through this in 87.
I've been through this all through the 90s.
I went through this in 2000.
It's just cyclical.
I can't believe people are out there panicking, but that's what I'm taking advantage of right now.
Well, who is panicking?
Are you suggesting there's panic in the sell-off or panic in the public?
Well, I started in this business working with traders.
Traders cannot hold anything.
They're not supposed to.
And they're the ones getting dropping stuff like hot potatoes, taking their profits.
And that's the time for a small investor like me to hop in and take advantage of that.
All right.
So the panic, do you sense a panic like you're in San Francisco?
Do you sense a panic on the street in San Francisco?
On the street?
Well, it's a bunch of idiots up here.
By the way, it comes from the belly of the beast.
Well, okay.
But it's a bunch of liberals out there, and then the drive-by media is doing their best to panic everybody over this.
Oh, yeah.
Do you see it working?
Panic amongst the general population who may not even be in the market just saying, uh-oh, economy's tanking, whatever.
Oh, well, when I first heard this, my stomach kind of dropped because I am invested, but it's an opportunity.
You can't look at it like it's, you know, like this is the end of the world.
Of course not.
But when do you decide that we've hit the bottom?
Are you selling short?
No, no, I'm not selling short.
I'm buying.
I'm definitely buying.
I don't sell short.
That's kind of a different mentality.
No, I decided it's been, what, five days of down market?
That's good enough for me.
All right.
Well, thank you for calling.
People, I think, needed to hear somebody like you with knowledge and experience in this and how you're reacting to it, looking at it as an opportunity, because you're right, it is cyclical, and it'll come back.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
It always does.
Oh, it does.
So, well, look, Leslie, great you called.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you much.
I'm a big fan.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I have a friend, folks, who bought Google.
And by the way, this is how Washington budgets work, this example.
I have a friend who bought Google at $100.
It went up to $200, and he sold it.
Well, the problem is Google's now at $500.
Look at all the money he lost.
Well, that's how Washington would look at it.
You know, baseline budgeting.
Now, will the government bail this guy out for the money he lost, i.e. didn't make by selling too soon?
I'm illustrating risk here.
Everybody takes risk, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I had a friend down here.
He's no longer alive.
His name was Ned.
The guy made and lost $100 million twice in his life.
He got wiped out in one day.
I forgot he was in a commodities market.
Somebody got wiped out one day.
Got back at it the next day.
Now, that's a rare example, but I mean, Ned did not go anywhere and say, hey, hey, who's going to make up my loss?
I mean, this isn't fair.
He just went back at it himself.
Now we've got, you know, people, you've got to make my mortgage good.
I don't lose my house.
The American dream.
No, you took a risk.
It happens.
But you know, we are a compassionate country.
What do you mean, see?
See what?
Snordley's screaming at me here instead of screening calls.
What, Right.
All right.
Snurdley's afraid that I have been misunderstood as cold-hearted and cruel.
Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. I'm going to lose my home.
So, you took a risk.
It happens.
He thinks I don't care.
Of course I care.
I feel sad.
I know.
Now I'm being bombarded.
I know there's children in those homes.
There are children.
And there's probably a dog and a cat, maybe.
You might even find a pit bull cage in some of these houses.
Who knows what's in there?
I'm sure there's a bunch of televisions, too.
And I'll bet you there are two cars out in the garage.
Well, we are a compassionate country.
And when the right call is made by the right person, the bailout or the help will happen here at some point.
That's really off the beaten path here.
What I told you in the first hour, what concerns me most is that this cyclical action in the stock market, there are corrections constantly or often.
Well, that's the first one since 2002.
That's a great example of what a boom market this has been.
Correction is when it goes down 10% from a previous high.
And it's happened today.
And the drive-bys are out there panting away.
They're all excited because they want to drive the economy down overall to help Democrats in the upcoming election.
Remember, a great economy, like this reminds me.
We're in the 2004 presidential race in the 2006 midterms, and the economy is doing great.
Nothing like this is going on.
Consumer confidence is high.
And yet, miraculously, for the first time in American political history, modern political history, the economy wasn't a factor.
A good economy was not a factor.
The old rule of thumb was that all elections were based on the size of the wallet in the back pocket.
But all of a sudden, with a Republican incumbent running for re-election in 2004, the economy, the drive-bys told us the economists, now the economy is not nearly as important as a factor any longer.
I said, why is that?
Well, our economy is so strong.
The American people expect it.
They just expect it's not, it's not news that we've got a strong economy.
That's right.
So they didn't report it as news.
They didn't report it as something great about the country.
But now they're trying to say, oh, no, this is disaster.
We're all going to hell in a handbasket, even though there's a shortage of handbaskets because the economy is taking a downturn.
And they're going to try to gin up the economy here as an electoral issue.
And that's my primary concern with this.
Brief timeout and battered liberal syndrome tutorial, shall we say, when we get back.
There's Rush Limbaugh smoking a nice cigar, wearing a golf shirt.
There was another video where you could see the nice watch that he's wearing.
Who's the snob in this case?
David Schuster, MSNBC, reacting to Carl Rove's appearance on this program yesterday where Rove called him elite effect snobs.
Schuster referred to me as the snob in that bite.
They just can't stand it, folks.
The success of this program and the size of the audience.
Casey in Aiken, South Carolina.
Glad you waited, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hey, Rush, Mega Dittos from South Carolina.
Thank you.
Yeah, I wanted to make a comment.
You had a caller earlier that was referring to the mortgage flop here recently.
And I spent a lot of years with some large banks.
And just wanted to let you know there are, with every bank that I've worked for, had what they call emerging markets, where they actually had subsidized funding for even down to zip codes in certain city areas and would attract low-income borrowers and so on.
But one thing you've got to understand is that those loans are all insured.
And it's the subprime loans that are not insured.
And that's all you really hear about.
The subprime stuff is determined by Wall Street, basically.
All right.
Tell people, in a layman's way, what the subprime market is.
The subprime market is basically anything that's not Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac type loan.
The rates are determined by different risk factors.
Okay, who has them?
What kind of person has a subpribe loan?
Somebody that either makes a lot of money and can't prove it or has less than perfect credit or pay history.
Well, now this is that's a pretty broad category.
Makes a lot of money but can't prove it.
Or has less perfect.
Can't document it.
It what?
He can't document it.
Can't document it.
Yeah, well, we all know why.
Absolutely.
But see, those loans are.
It's in the cash business, right?
That's right.
Well, the thing is, those types of loans are attractive to guys that can do that.
And it might be a short-term thing.
If you get a subprime loan that may have an attractive rate, especially these arms that people are.
All right.
So basically, the subprime market attracts people who are really, really big credit risks.
In a lot of cases, but not necessarily all the time.
All right.
So what's going wrong in this case?
Well, I think what's going wrong is that there's a bad, you know, bad thing or a bad skew on the mortgage industry because people, consumers, are thinking they can borrow this amount of money because they have an attractive rate.
Yeah, but isn't what's happening here in part that these people, a lot of them had fixed or variable rate mortgages and the rate's going up?
And when the rate goes up, the payment goes up to a point where they can't afford it.
But here's the thing, Rush.
Here's the thing.
An educated borrower knows that his rate's going to adjust.
Therefore, he's going to make arrangements way before that happens.
Well, now, wait a minute.
We're obviously not talking about educated borrowers here.
Hmm.
Well, in that case.
Well, by definition, we can't be if the subprime market's collapsing.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
Good point.
Why am I host?
Well, I think it's the banking industry, the finance industry in general, it caters, they've made it easier for folks to borrow money.
I mean, 15 years ago, you couldn't get a seven-year car note.
The same thing with houses.
They've got 40, or excuse me, 50,000.
15 years ago, 15 years ago, cars didn't cost $50,000 or $60,000 either.
Well, good point.
Some of them did, but I mean, but some of these big monster SUVs and so forth.
Well, look, Casey, I'm glad you called.
I appreciate your time.
Moving on to Baldwin Park, California.
This is Dennis.
Hello, sir.
Hey, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
I'm a non-smoker, and I'm not going to be voting for a business.
You are a good person.
You are a good person.
Well, you made a point today.
Same point you made yesterday.
Really good point, in fact.
Yesterday, you got me a little angry, though, when you were talking to that guy from Logan and saying, well, you'll probably raise my taxes.
And that's not exactly what you said.
But basically, the temptation for us non-smokers is to pass the bill on to somebody else.
You're imposing on us with your smoke, and we don't like it.
So we'll just tax you for use.
And the question on my mind is: if we've got an economy that is not driven by taxes and taxation, but by reducing taxes, and yet we're getting to where we're going to be changing the tax code perhaps sometime real soon here and changing the way taxation goes, and maybe not flat taxes, but a usage tax or deals.
Never happen.
I don't care what.
It's never going to happen.
But that's not the point.
You admit that you want to soak smokers with more taxes because they offend you.
I'll admit it in the past.
I've actually said so.
I'm glad you said it because you're making my point.
I don't know what you were mad at me about.
Well, that's just it.
Yesterday I said, no, no way am I going to be raising your taxes, Rush.
No way am I going to do that and impose my will on you.
No, but I have to admit that in the past I've been that way.
And it was because of your program that I learned not to be that way.
All right.
Because the point is, if you sit idly by and cheer tax increases on any other segment of society for whatever reason, you are basically saying, come tax me when it's my turn.
You're basically, because a tax, there's no such thing as an incremental tax.
A tax on tobacco and smokers, people who buy the stuff, is going to end up being a tax everybody's going to pay in one way or the other.
High prices.
And this is, you know, interesting way the tax increasers are going about this.
It's just like the comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act of 2007, that immigration reform bill.
Comprehensive.
Let's do it all at once.
Well, you see what happened.
It had no prayer once it was discovered how it was done in secret with La Raza sitting there demanding this clause in it and that clause in it.
People found out about it and stopped it.
The massive comprehensive Hillary Care Health Care Reform Act of 1992 or 93, whenever it was, bombed out, went for the whole thing in one bite.
Well, the tax increases have learned, well, let's do it incrementally.
And so look at this new children's health program, the SHIPS program that's got to be reauthorized because it's about to expire after 10 years.
So this is where the new tobacco taxes are.
$1 additional new tax on a pack of cigarettes and a $10 per cigar tax.
And this money is going to be used to fund the program.
By the way, Ruth Marcus had a piece in the Washington Post yesterday.
Remind me about this, Mr. Snirdly, because she had, this is an amazing column.
It's related to this.
But what's going to happen is that, as I've said till I'm blue in the face, people are going to support this.
And there's a whole lot in this because there's tobacco taxes in it.
Everybody thinks only smokers are going to be paying the new tax in order to fund the program.
So they sit idly by saying, Yeah, yeah, make them pay for it.
They're polluting the world and making me sick.
It's filthy.
Make them pay for it.
Well, in addition to the taxes on tobacco, a kid is now qualified to be a kid up to age 25.
Do you know what else is in this bill?
Speaking of incrementalism, free health care for illegal immigrant children.
You thought you had beat that back.
You thought you showed them.
Well, they're coming back and they're putting it in a program for the widow children.
And they're taxing smokers.
And so the rest of you sit out there and go, yeah, make them pay for it.
They're not telling you about the children of illegals being covered here, that they're covered.
That's what the Ruth Marcus column is all about.
They are covered.
So look at what's happening with this once relatively small piece of legislation program to insure children in this country for health care.
Now we're going to get an element of immigration reform in it.
We're going to have a brand new tax increase on a segment of the population.
And as I've told you, it's going to be hard to oppose because it's for the widow children.
And we've been hearing for years about how many poor Americans don't have health insurance and oh, what a rotten country we are.
Can we be so mean, especially to the widow children?
And then when these taxes are not sufficient to pay the bill for all of a family of $82,000 a year is going to qualify.
You could have a family of four where they're all 25 or under, and the whole family's covered in this.
The children's health care program.
If they make up to $82,000, that's the ceiling.
So if the tobacco taxes aren't enough to pay for this, then who's next?
And they won't be.
And they're not going to cancel the program.
So you're going to come to all of you who were applauding the tax increase on these filthy, rotten smokers that you dislike so much.
And that's how this stuff works.
Be right back.
Don't go away.
We go beyond the limit each and every day.
There is no limit.
There are no boundaries confining this program other than good taste, morality, decency, and the American way.
All right, here's Ruth Marcus writing about the SHIPS program in the Washington Post yesterday.
And the title of it is Attack Ads You'll Be Seeing.
Here's an emerging line of attack you can expect to hear more of in the 2008 congressional campaigns, especially if you live near a vulnerable Democrat incumbent.
Democrats vote to give welfare benefits to illegal aliens.
Or even better, Democrats vote to take benefits away from deserving senior citizens to pay for welfare for illegal aliens.
Ugly?
Absolutely.
Devastating?
So Republicans hope.
Is it true?
Well, Ruth Marcus says, no, it's not, but it is.
She actually writes this piece on the SHIPS program, with the point being that Republicans are going to lie about it in attack ads against Democrats.
So did a little research.
And I went to our buddies at redstate.com or dot org.
They keep going back and forth.
Eric Erickson's bunch.
And they did a little research looking into this.
And in the Dead Tree issue of the Washington Post is a letter that they didn't put at the Washington Post on their website edition.
But in a Dead Tree edition of the paper, there's a letter from Dennis Smith, who is the director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations.
The conclusion in Ruth Marcus's August 8th, op-ed column, ATAC Edge you'll be seeing soon, that public benefits will not be provided to illegal aliens in consequence of recent legislation is incorrect.
Under the reauthorization of the state children's health insurance program, SHIPS, with a P, passed by the U.S. House, unprecedented new eligibility rules would not only allow public benefits for illegal aliens, but would provide incentives to states to open Medicaid and ship to do so.
Mark McClellan, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, was quoted as saying that an Inspector General's report did not find problems related to citizenship status in the current program.
However, the very protections in the Medicaid system that would work to prevent fraud would be gutted by the House version of the SHIPS bill.
States would be allowed to turn eligibility determinations over to new express lane agencies that could make children eligible on the basis of scant information.
Incredibly, families could refuse to provide or verify information provided to a state agency by an express lane agency.
State would also be allowed to determine eligibility for benefits without even taking an application.
This is, I don't want to belabor the point here, but there's so much illegal immigration in this children's health care bill.
And it's stealth, and it's a way of getting what they failed to do in a comprehensive way, getting it done incrementally.
So, whereas tax increases on cigarette smokers and cigar smokers may not have gotten your dander up, and you might not have cared even that kids were going to be called 25 or under in this bill, and you might not have even really cared that you only had to make 82 grand to qualify, to get your kid health insurance paid for by your neighbors, essentially.
But I'll bet when you find out that the illegal aliens and their kids get in on the deal, that might get your dander up.
And that's why Ruth Marcus wrote the column yesterday, try to dispel this notion of what's in it.
But analysts have looked at it.
Look, it is or it isn't.
I mean, it's, and the way this is written, it doesn't expressly say, by the way, illegals are covered.
What it does is give the states the right to not even check fast lane agencies to authorize people as legal participants, qualified participants in the program.
And if you don't have to do checks on them, the states can do what they want, and you know what they're going to do.
They're going to spend it.
They want to spend it as fast as they can, the money.
People that run bureaucracies in government want as many people depending on what they do as they can.
Any organization that is not conservative by definition will be liberal.
That's a truism.
Ought to be number one in my next 35 Undeniable Truths of Life.
Jenny in Denver, Colorado.
Jenny, one of my all-time top 10 favorite female names.
I've heard that.
It is.
Yeah.
How are you?
Ditto's from a Rush Baby Infiltrating Academia.
Thank you.
I'm calling because you mentioned this morning the Boulder Philosophy Prof and his article.
Yes.
And I'm a graduate of that program.
I'm now a philosophy professor myself.
And the reason I called is because one of my administrators told me, gave me some insight into why there are so many liberals in academia.
He said it's because conservatives won't work for less than 40 grand.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
One of your administrators, these terms in academia.
What is an administrator?
He's a dean.
He's essentially my boss.
Okay, the dean.
So you asked him, why aren't there more conservatives in the academy?
No, he was mentioning they had a recent hire, and the recent hire is pretty liberal, and so he was getting a lot of calls complaining about it, although most of our faculty is.
So he was explaining to me the reason why so much of our faculty, so many of them are liberals.
Do you buy his explanation?
No, I don't think so, because I'm a conservative, and I'm pulling in under 40.
Gladly, I guess.
I have a whole different theory about this.
I think just what I just said, an organization that is not conservative will by definition be liberal.
And liberals and conservatives have two completely different worldviews.
Liberals, like in the Ivy League or anywhere, actually, at higher education levels, go there for the express purpose of creating more mind-numbed robot liberals.
They go there as activists.
It is their opportunity to create and mold more people as liberals and send them out in the world that way.
Conservatives, well, they're activists, but they're now getting into the same kind of, well, they're trying to do the same kind of thing at special universities.
They can't infiltrate academia and so forth where you are.
I mean, you've done it, but I mean, it's never going to be dominant conservative as it is dominant liberal because when you're a conservative, you don't want to control somebody's life, and you don't want to turn them into a robot.
You want to deal with them intellectually, and you want to teach them, and you want them to understand on their own.
You want lights to go off in their heads every day in the classroom.
That's not what liberals want.
They're scared to death of that.
They want no lights going on.
They want people sitting there like sponges soaking up all of propaganda.
And as such, you know, it's like conservatives, but the biggest problem with conservatives and Republicans in government is they don't look at government as a tool to advance their agenda.
Government is the problem.
They want to limit it.
Liberals raise all these little kids to go to these schools and be trained to go to the bureaucracy and stay there their whole lives in stealth positions, making sure the institution remains liberal.
And conservatives, so it's, you know, it's a whole different set of priorities.
And this is why conservatives end up always on the reactionary side of things and defending things because the aggressors in this case are liberals.
Now, I'm not saying conservatives have abandoned the effort in education because they haven't, and they've made a lot, a lot of inroads.
I think the majority enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley is now Republicans, for example.
But the faculty isn't.
Well, I'm being sort of quietly subversive, and I'm finding a lot more of my students are conservatives than you actually would hear about.
So that's probably what it is.
Well, see, that's another thing that's happening, too.
That's the way this is going to change if it does.
Like you, you're a rush baby.
And with the advent of the so-called new media, there are a lot of young kids that are going to college today who are not as liberal or liberal at all as they were a generation and more ago.
And so when the students show up with a solid foundation of conservatism for wherever they got it, from their family or just from their own lives independently of their parents, it makes it harder for the propagandists to turn them into little mind and robots.
Yeah, I think that's what helped me to get through my schooling without turning, I suppose.
What made you choose philosophy?
I just had some really inspiring professors along the way.
And I just really, and I enjoy teaching it to my students because I feel like it's a discipline they don't think is very applicable to their lives.
But I teach a lot of factory workers who say, you know, this is interesting because I can do something during my job.
I can think.
Yeah, philosophy teaches people to think.
It's one of the great values it has.
So I suppose I'm doing my part.
Well, quietly.
Kudos to you.
But don't believe this 40 grand stuff.
I mean, there are a lot of Republicans that, you know, conservatives who do have high financial aspirations.
But this, I'll tell you the hideous thing about that comment.
And it's one of these age-old clichés.
Liberals don't care about money.
They care about larger things.
They care about the welfare of society and so forth and the health of the planet.
I couldn't be concerned with money.
And that's one of the biggest lies out there.
They are obsessed with it.
It's why the Clintons got fouled up in whitewater, because back then they thought everybody that had money stole it or got involved in shady deals rather than worked hard and earned it.
And they got caught in it.
Now they can't stop talking about how wealthy they are every time a tax cut debate comes up.
You've got these professors.
They may not be making a lot of money from the university, but they've got their graduate assistants doing all the work while out there writing scholarly papers and books and getting published.
They're supplanting their income.
They go do speeches and so forth.
Don't believe this garbage.
They don't care about money.
And they're getting settlements like Ward Churchill, so they're getting plenty.
Of course they are.
And of course, one of the primary jobs that liberals have, they don't even do real work.
They set up some sort of non-profit foundation and they start fundraising, raising money for their cause.
And then they live off.
They take their salaries and so forth off that.
It's not even real work.
And they're all some Republicans do it too.
But I mean, the notion that they don't care about money, there are more wealthy Democrats in the United States Senate than there are wealthy Republicans in the United States.
And the notion that Republicans are the big fat cats and the Democrats, you know, they stand for the blue-collar little guy.
So if look at John Edwards, look at Teddy King.
Look at these people.
Look at the Clintons.
They all run around and make big public shows and conspicuous displays of their consumption and their wealth.
It's just the notion.
Don't buy that 40 grand a year argument doesn't attract conservatives.
That's intended to mislead you.
Thank you.
All right.
Great you called, Jenny, and best of luck to you out there at the University of...
Are you at Boulder?
Uh...
No, I'm not there anymore.
I graduated from there, but I. Where are you teaching?
Where are you teaching?
I don't know if I can disclose it.
Oh, don't.
Absolutely right.
Don't do it.
You'll become a target because then they'll know it was you who called.
Right.
All right.
Well, best of luck to you out there.
I'm glad you got through.
Thanks.
Quick timeout here, folks.
El Rushbull back with much more right after this.
And we're back.
Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Half my brain tied behind my back because that's all I need.
Pat in Navarre, Florida.
Nice to have you with us.
Pat?
Rush.
Yes, Pat, hi.
Hi.
I wanted to tell you, I don't have much compassion for these people who hold subprime mortgages.
One of the reasons is these mortgage brokers who handle their loans or the mortgage companies who gave them the loans, they knew well and good some of these homes were not worth what they were loaning on them.
Not only that, these people had lots of credit card debt, and in order to qualify, they had to get rid of that debt so they would loan them in excess of what the house is worth so they could get into it.
Well, now they can't pay the mortgage payments because the interest is going up.
Everybody knew what was going on.
They all just kind of pushed it under the table and ignored it.
Hence the credit crunch.
They're calling it the Wall Street going salt on credit worries.
That's defined as people can't pay the loans back.
Well, sure, they can't pay them back because the homes weren't not worth what they were borrowing on them.
This happened, wasn't it, back in the 80s when the same thing happened when I lived in Dallas and you had that big fiasco with the Savings and Loan Association.
You know, the properties were changing hands five, six, seven times a day, and every time it did, the value went up on paper, but the property wasn't worth it.
Yeah, well, there was interesting with the savings and loan crisis because there was a lot of irresponsibility in that.
But one of the things that happened to some of the people in that incident was we had tax reform in 86, and we basically came down to three rates: 31, 28, and 15.
And as part of that reform, deductibility rules for certain types of real estate investments were changed.
And it left it.
People had ordered their lives according to the age-old tax code, and they changed it right in the middle of some people's financing real estate projects and so forth.
And it just exposed the SNLs and the lenders to these new rules.
And that was a contributing factor to it, too.
And it was a trade-off because it'll lower the rates and then get rid of the deductions.
I remember taking calls on this program.
People were livid that their credit card interest rate was no longer going to be deductible.
And I said, don't you understand?
You don't want to be paying the minimum payment on these credit cards, even if you can deduct.
But they thought that they were playing games and getting away with cheating the government by deducting their interest.
All that went away, and it happened in real estate, too, leading to a portion of the SNL crisis.
Okay, so you don't think these subprime people should be bailed out?
No.
I mean, just like you say, it's a risk.
Anytime you buy anything, it's a risk.
And when you buy something that's actually worth more, there are children in those homes.
I know.
Isn't it too bad?
Well, they've got to go out and rent a house, just like everybody else does when they lose their properties.
They go out and rent a home.
Rush, I need to ask you a question.
I can't get an answer from anyone unchecked.
How does the American public or a group of American people go around Congress to get a law enacted that will, number one, reduce, make term limits on all of our congressmen that they cannot run again?
And number two, how do you get any kind of a bill passed that says each bill has to stand on its own?
You can't tack all this crap on the end of it.
How do we do that as a public?
It's not possible.
The way the Constitution is set up, unless you want to be, maybe you join the Pep Buchanan brigades and grab the pitchforks.
And no, I'm just kidding.
That's not possible.
The only way you're going to get that is to get a bunch of people elected who want to do that kind of thing and then enact it.
I'm not being rude here.
I wish I had more time to delve into this answer for you, but I've got a hard break here, as we call it in big time broadcasting.
I must go.
We'll be back here and continue to wrap up this hour here in just a sec.
Let me give you a great quote from Warren Buffett.
I get nervous when others get greedy, and I get greedy when others get nervous.
Meaning, a lot of people are nervous right now.
So what he's saying is, this is the time to buy.
Leslie from San Francisco nailed it.
By the way, that's one of my top 10 all-time favorite female names, too.
I forgot to tell her that.
We'll be back.
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