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Dec. 26, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:36
December 26, 2007, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Good to have you along on this post-Christmas day, December 26th.
Busy going back and forth to the stores, naturally, to shop.
Didn't we all do that before Christmas?
Now we're doing it after Christmas.
It just never ends.
But hey, it's good for the economy, right?
You've got to spend more for the economy.
You know, I'm getting, I hate to digress and going off on these tangents like I am today, but that is one of the great economic myths.
Rush was talking about the great seven medical myths last week.
One of the great economic myths is consumer spending drives the economy.
You want to know why we've got a trade deficit?
You want to know why?
Because our trading partners save more than they spend, and we spend much more.
That is the flip side to a trade deficit.
This nation needs capital.
It needs investment.
And if we don't save capital, or if we don't save to invest in business, i.e. business gets capital, the truck driver isn't going to have a truck.
And last time I looked, the truck made him much more productive than without.
Savings is what's important.
We used to call this old classical economics or supply side even.
That's what that was all about.
But the next time you hear some Keynesian liberal talk about what we've got to do is to increase spending, remember that's a euphemism for increasing some government program to fine-tune or prime the pump.
All savings are spent.
Everything you earn is spent.
It's either spent on investing in a business, which increases production, or it's spent on immediate consumption, which doesn't.
That's not to say consumption isn't needed.
Not to say consumption isn't good.
But we are on the other side of the pendulum right now where what we need are more savings.
And the best way, obviously, to get more savings in our economy is not to discriminate against savings.
And that's where the fair tax people do have a more than legitimate point.
Now, you take a look at what the Democrats are proposing to jumpstart an economy that some say might be slowing, although it's funny, every economic indicator.
You know, GDP grows 4.9% surprises economists.
It always comes back.
We've had an amazing economic renaissance coming out of the dot-com bubble, coming out of 9-11.
And remember, it is an absolute, it is an absolute fact.
I hate to traumatize the liberal left out there, but Bush inherited an economy going down in 2000, the dot-com bubble.
Then you add one of the great attacks on American soil, 9-11.
And all of a sudden, what happened?
If it were not for the tax cuts of 2001, accelerated in 2003, we wouldn't have created, we wouldn't have created the millions of new jobs we have.
I believe the last count was roughly 7 million.
An unemployment rate of 4.5%, 4.6, 4.7%.
Business spending way up.
Median household income way up.
The market, as volatile as it is, way up.
This has been an amazing renaissance.
So naturally, what do the Democrats, along with their surtax king, Charlie Wrangell, want to do?
They want to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which is going to be, by the way, a tax cut on middle-class America.
The untold story, the greatest story never told was the fact that Bush actually had larger tax cuts for the middle class than the wealthy.
And if you repeal the Bush tax cuts, you're going to see a huge tax increase.
The marriage penalty will kick in.
The generous child exemptions will be out once again.
And when it comes to savings, a doubling of the capital gains tax rate, a tripling of the dividends tax rate.
And then for those who, yes, make the most and in many cases, invest the most because they have disposable income, why a 4% Charlie Wrangell surtax.
You want to kill the economy.
In fact, right now, we are in very, very dangerous territory because if the liberal left gets control of the economic levers, can you say stagflation?
We've had some very easy monetary policy designed to, quite frankly, prime the pump or bail out the subprime mortgage mess.
We've had some very, very easy monetary policy, and we've had the threat of huge tax increases down the road.
There is nothing worse than that one-two punch with the American economy.
You want evidence?
Two words, Jimmy Carter.
21.5% interest rates, 13% inflation, unemployment near 10%.
Misery index.
I mean, it's remarkable.
That's the worst policy.
What you need is a sound dollar.
What you need is stable money and an incentive to produce.
And it is amazing when you have an incentive to produce, when you have low tax rates, why you have greater savings.
You have a greater savings pool.
Now, the best thing of all in combination of that is a cut in government spending.
Because no matter how you finance government, as I mentioned earlier, taxes, inflation, or borrowing, it all comes out of the private economy.
So if you could match a stable dollar with lower tax rates and serious levels of government cuts not holding the line, you'd have an economy that would blow your socks off or you'd continue this surge.
But we are in danger of doing the opposite.
We are in danger of stagflation.
And to that, I think the markets have been responding in this up and down mode this last month or so.
And that's why 2008 is so crucial.
That's why conservatives are looking for the real thing.
Speaking of easy money, if you really want to get to the one of the reasons that we've had, some would say, a, oh, I don't know, a more liberal Federal Reserve policy, I'm not using that term in a pejorative sense, like liberal Democrats or liberal politicians, I mean more expansive, is that Wall Street's been clamoring for it.
Kind of this false sense of security.
Gee, we've got a subprime mortgage crisis here.
And we're going to have to, well, you know, bail people out.
And it's here we go again, folks.
I mentioned this earlier.
You know, it doesn't matter whether you keep rebuilding in a floodplain.
It doesn't matter whether you live in a place that's drought prone or a hurricane alley.
And what Governor Charlie Crist of Florida is trying to do, and that's make certain the American taxpayer has to insure anybody that lives in a hurricane alley.
You know, the insurance markets will work just fine.
They're great regulators of behavior if you let them.
But when you have government has the first insurer, you get bailouts, bailout after bailout after bailout.
And we have now become addicted to them.
Whether it's a bailout for alternative fuels, a bailout for a flood, a bailout for a drought.
We've got more FEMA disaster payments than you can shake a stick at.
In fact, the GAO just said not long ago that they have now estimated $1 billion worth of waste in disaster aid over Hurricane Katrina, which is not to say in a calamity of that sort, disaster aid shouldn't be appropriate, but it is to say that understand what you're getting into.
Massive, hundreds of millions of dollars in waste.
Because nobody's careful when somebody else is picking up the tab.
And that gets me back to the mortgage woes and the subprime mortgage mess.
If you watch the business channels or read Investors Business Daily or the Wall Street Journal or whatever, oh, the markets are very leery of the subprime mortgage mess.
And the Senate has passed a bill helping homeowners caught in the mortgage crisis.
Hillary Clinton wants to freeze reset interest rates for seven years.
Seven years.
Barney Frank wants to penalize the mortgage brokers, get this, for making loans that their clients did not pay back.
As though any mortgage broker, or for that matter, any institution that would then assume the mortgage, the secondary lenders, if you will, the mortgage service lenders, would want somebody to foreclose.
And yet, we're going to punish once again somebody who's not responsible with predatory lending nonsense out of Washington, D.C. We're going to have the government intervene to freeze interest rates, which, by the way, is going to dry up credit.
You've got all of these things that the government simply is not capable of doing.
And in fact, it's going to exacerbate the entire situation.
If you want to get the markets more stabilized, if you want to get out from under the credit crunch, you and I both know what really needs to be done.
We don't need to have a bailout of people.
And by the way, the bailout, the bailout for the subprime mortgage mess, if you want to call it that, the bailout for foreclosures, it's not for people who are losing their homes.
It is for people who have bought the mortgages on Wall Street.
Now, I don't want to bash Wall Street because I'm a big fan of capital markets, even though the latest stat I saw was that the Democrats now get more money from Wall Street than do Republicans.
But I'm not going to let that interject, in my opinion.
The point here is, if the government expands the FHA ability to insure the reset mortgages, if the government offers a bailout to people who have been foreclosed and indirectly a bailout to people that hold the collateralized debt obligations,
these particular financial instruments that people invest in, those are people that pack mortgages into secondary investment options and they buy those and then the money flows to Wall Street and then they go out and buy these risky mortgages.
If we bail those people out, what do you think is the ramification of that?
Well, you know and I know.
You're inducing the moral hazard.
You're encouraging more of the same in the future because you can say, well, don't worry, I'm going to take this risky investment.
I'm going to overextend myself on this house because if I get caught, the government's there.
It's the safety net.
Does the SNL crisis come to mind?
Government insurance of any sort is a bad idea.
Government insurance of the first sort is a horrible idea.
You and I, as I said, both know what needs to happen with the subprime mortgage mess.
Those people holding the CDOs, those people on Wall Street, those banks need to mark to market.
And if that means they have to forego some interest rate adjustments on some of their most tenuous clients, then do it.
You don't need the United States government getting involved in this.
That's why the Treasury plan was a bad idea.
It sent the wrong signal.
It sent government will rewrite contracts and bail people out.
Let the big banks and Wall Street mark their instruments to market.
They'll have to take big hits.
Let people who are in foreclosure downsize.
You know, it's a pretty good lesson.
Sometimes you can overstand, sometimes you can make mistakes.
You're going to suffer from those.
We're all capitalists when we have profits, but we're all socialists when we lose.
No, that's not going to cut it.
You can't have somebody bail you out every time you suffer a loss.
And if you do that, and if we let this market correct, this thing is over by summer.
If we continue to expand the money supply in hopes that easy money is somehow going to ignite more credit, we're going to get inflation.
And some say we already have.
If we have bailouts, you're going to get more people taking riskier behaviors because they think the government's going to bail them out.
And if Barney Frank wants to punish the mortgage industry and the mortgage brokers for predatory lending, then they're going to get less credit because fewer people are going to lend.
This is a classic case of the best solution being the government staying the heck out of this market correction.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB mic in the Excellence of Broadcasting Network back out of the world.
You're listening to the EIB Network 1-800-282-2882.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man, having more fun than even a human being should be allowed.
I love that line, Rush.
To the phones we go.
Let's start with Aaron from West Virginia.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hi.
Thanks for taking my call.
I have a question about the subprime mortgage fiasco.
How exactly did Congress cause it?
Rush has said that it's really Congress's fault they made these people give out loans that couldn't shouldn't have been given out.
How did they do that?
When did they do that?
It's a great point, a great question, and Rush is right.
The fact of the matter is this is a classic asset bubble, primarily driven by the era of easy credit, when the Federal Reserve, in my view and many others, kept interest rates artificially low for so long that they came down to the point where people were getting into homes that, frankly, they couldn't afford with interest-only loans, hybrids, and things like that.
But all of them knew that there was going to be a reset time period and the rates would go up.
But with that, it's a little bit like the dot-com bubble.
When you've got that much money, that much credit chasing some particular asset and the dot-com bubble burst, it chased housing.
So you had this inflationary run-up or asset bubble on housing because of, I think, easy monetary policy.
And then you did have Congress not just demanding no redlining.
I mean, there were these, the ridiculous left-wing welfare rights organization called ACORN.
You ever heard of them?
Yes.
They would protest any bank that wasn't loaning appropriately to risky borrowers.
And you would catch hell, Jesse Jackson would hold a press conference.
There was some statutory language against a redlining.
So you had that pressure.
And then on top of all of that, you obviously had the government backing the number of mortgages out there with FHA loans.
Now, some of those weren't as risky as the hybrids, but that sort of government backing and the buying of mortgages in the secondary market by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac put the government's imprimatur on some risky loans combined with the easy credit.
And it's absolutely fair to say the government created this problem.
Now, don't get me wrong.
So did those who were trying to get a big investment return, and so did people who were overextending themselves.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
I don't understand why we even talk about bailing them out, but I didn't know how government had sort of involved itself to begin with.
So thank you.
That really helps.
I'm glad we could be of help.
In fact, the FHA now, which originally insures mortgages that are at the origin, I should say.
It ensures the mortgages when you get your first one, doesn't ensure the resets.
Well, now the Congress, where was this vote the other day?
Let me see if I can find it.
I want to say it was 93 to 1.
Yeah.
93 to 1 so that thousands of Americans facing foreclosure can get help.
The Federal Housing Administration can now expand their charter and back refinanced loans.
What happens when they go bankrupt?
Who's the FHA?
It's you and me.
It's the taxpayer.
That's right.
Oh, my goodness.
What a mess.
You couldn't be more correct.
The fact of the matter is people are all capitalists when they make a profit.
But boy, we now live in a society when if you make a loss or if you suffer a loss, you turn socialist real quick and want a government bailout, don't you?
You sure do.
I love that quote.
That's great.
Aaron, thanks for calling BSAF out there in those West Virginia mountains.
I am Jason Lewis in for Rush.
I mean, I could add a whole host of other things onto this.
I mean, the idea that there was this implicit guarantee by Freddie Mae or the implicit guarantee by government of Freddie Mae or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made mortgage rates lower than they otherwise would have been.
All of these guarantees of mortgages lowers the rates.
It lowers the risk, and there are people willing to take a lesser interest rate.
So we did create this.
The government did create it.
Now the government's going to exacerbate it with a bailout.
In fact, in the Treasury bailout plan, it encourages states to float municipal bonds that you will inevitably pay for to literally encourage or give out the cash, frankly, to people in foreclosure.
Well, if they still foreclose, guess who's going to be on the hook now?
You are.
How does that benefit anybody?
How does that correct the marketplace?
The dirty little secret in this is the vast, vast majority of mortgages are not in arrears.
Even, I mean, you know, you look at even some of the more exotic loans, they're not in arrears.
This problem has become primarily a problem of people in the secondary mortgage market wanting to make certain they can recoup their investments.
Well, you know what?
You know, buyer beware, as they say.
Nick from, where is this?
Texas?
You're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
It's Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Oh, I'm sorry, Tulsa.
How are you?
Good.
Yeah, Jason, I completely agree with you on that.
Government should not be getting involved here.
In fact, we really do not have, I don't believe we have a real estate issue.
Like you said, it's just the second, the subprime market really that's in trouble out there.
I think we kind of have a situation kind of like Alan Keyes, where the media constantly pushes the fact that, you know, in Alan Keyes' case, that he's not electable.
So people say, oh, he's not electable.
Well, I must have to vote for somebody else.
And in the real estate, we have a case where we are, the media is saying, well, real estate's in trouble.
And what we end up having is people say, oh, real estate's in trouble.
I must not be able to buy now.
Well, look, I got to let you go, but real estate is in trouble to the extent that home sales are down 23% from a year ago.
I think we've had the 10th straight month.
But that's what's called a market correction.
We had an unsustainable run-up in real estate prices that had to come down sooner or later.
If you keep propping it up with inflationary monetary policies or with government bailouts, you never get the correction that is the easiest to handle.
You get a much more severe one later.
Today on all of the cable news channels, 24 hours of the tiger story.
Can you believe how vacuous these people are?
That is the most important issue for the cable news channels.
The tiger in San Francisco that did tragically kill somebody, but I mean, 24-7, the tiger update, awaiting a news conference.
We've got better things to talk about here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Nick from Illinois.
You're up next on excellence in broadcasting.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, this is Jeff.
Well, my son's name's Nick, so I'll accept that as well.
Well, that's close enough.
Hey, I wanted to thank you, buddy, so much for the economic lesson today and tell you that the housing bubble is not all bad because as you know, as the market moves there, if you're someone like me who's considering refinancing, things will be a little brighter.
Not so good for savers right now, though.
Well, you're right.
And it's not nearly as bad as people think.
It's bad for some, you know, for Citigroup.
It's bad for if you're holding these secondary mortgages or collateralized debt obligations if you invested.
But everybody makes bad investments.
Roughly 35% of homeowners have no mortgage debt on their homes at all.
Of those homeowners still paying a mortgage, about 90 to 95%, actually closer to 95%, are paying on time.
And even in the subprime adjustable rate loans, you got more than 80% still paying on time.
So it isn't the and by the way, they want to blame the subprime adjustable rate loan originators for this.
It is my contention and others that the individuals, some of the individuals who got these loans would have defaulted on a conventional rate loan.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, it's, you know, it's a market, and you're either in it and understand it or you're not.
You're not going to do very well.
And it's not going to be pretty the next few months, but it's going to be even worse if you go with a fiscal government bailout coupled with easy money.
It's just going to exacerbate the correction, and the correction is going to be that much more severe, that much more painful down the road.
Let's mark these assets to market and be done with it.
Absolutely.
Real quick comment, Jason, if you got a second about those fair taxers.
I haven't read their books, but I wonder, is it possible that they're gaining traction because of the intrinsic nature of our federal income tax system having inherent falsities in it, you know, making people out to be liars and cheaters and thieves, a lot of it due to ignorance.
Well, look, their modus operandi is akin to you either with me 100% or you are the devil incarnate.
And I got an email in front of me saying, hey, Jason, nice job on Rush today.
But you better inform yourself on the fair tax.
I mean, these people are, shall we say, zealous in the least.
The problem with this is it is motivated by the outrageousness of a graduated progressive income tax in Washington, D.C. that is still out of control, about the government taking 40% of our national income when you add federal, state, and local fees into all of it.
Milton Friedman came up with a stat years ago.
About 38, 39% of our income is devoted to government.
So they're looking for a solution.
The problem is their solution, by their own admission, does nothing to cut government spending.
They say, well, don't worry, our fair tax is revenue neutral.
Well, I don't want a tax cut that's revenue neutral.
I want a tax cut that means the government has less money.
Well, we haven't seen any tax cuts even out of the last administration.
And that's the big problem.
And people, I think, they're hungry for some sort of change.
Hey, listen, last time I was in Europe, they were very curious as to how we made a federal income tax work at all.
Because, as you know, they tax commodity.
Well, look, we have seen federal income tax cuts, and they've worked marvelously so far.
The problem is at the local level, people seeing their property taxes skyrocket, their local or state taxes go up, that is dwarfing the federal tax cut.
And here's the other issue.
When you take 40% of the income tax filers, we've got about 130 million tax filers.
The bottom 40% of those pay no income tax at all.
That means you and I are saddled with the rest.
That's right.
It's a subsidy.
It's an absolute redistribution of wealth.
I've long had a philosophical view that any tax a government unit needs to level ought to be borne by all.
Because once you start front-loading the tax on the very few, then there will be a constant majority for raising taxes on those people.
Well, it's great to have the economic academic perspective, but how does that translate to the actual taxpayer, the one that sweats bullets every year having to negotiate the paper, the receipts, the minutiae in the system?
And that's what they're frustrated with.
I agree.
I agree.
And that's why tax reform is the next big issue, not just tax cuts.
You're going to have to reform the system.
And there are, you know, look, there are three or four options on the table.
The Democrat liberal option is to heck with reform.
We're going to raise taxes, especially on the quote-unquote wealthy, which is a euphemism for the most productive in many cases.
And then on the conservative side, I mean, you've got the flat tax crowd that says you ought to do your taxes on a postcard and no deductions, no mortgage interest deduction, no nothing.
You just get your adjusTedros income.
You pay, as Art Laffer says, I think anywhere from 12 to 15% of that, and you're done.
And then there's the fair tax crowd.
And then there's Ron Paul who just says, abolish the income tax.
Well, how are you going to replace it?
I'm not going to replace it.
So, you know, it's a fascinating time to be involved in this debate.
But the bottom line here is all of any tax system that is too onerous is driven by one thing, government spending.
So the folks in Illinois, Nick, need to look in the mirror and say, do I really need a $300, $286 billion farm bill when commodity prices are at all-time highs?
We couldn't do it with the last administration.
That's the real frustration there.
We couldn't cut with Reagan that well.
We couldn't cut with Reagan.
But when you talk about spending, yes.
Now, Reagan made a bargain that I thought was worth it, and that is I'm going to win the Cold War.
I'm going to cut taxes, grow the economy, reduce inflation, and win the Cold War.
And he did.
But you're right.
Since the Republicans took control of both the White House and Congress, they absolutely failed.
In fact, they exacerbated the problem of spending.
And any economist worth his salt will tell you, it is spending that crowds out capital markets, not just the borrowing or the taxation or the inflation.
It's all derived from government spending.
And if we don't start collectively looking in the mirror and saying, do I really need another college loan subsidized by the government?
Do I really need another ethanol subsidy, another $286 billion farm bill that goes to millionaires and Archer Daniels Midland?
Do we really need the mortgage bailout?
Until we get a handle on that and start acting like pioneers instead of the dependent class, I'm afraid any tax reform is still going to raise the revenue-neutral amount, which is still going to imprison us in many ways.
Nick, I got to move.
Thanks for the call.
I do appreciate it.
We've got time for one more call.
This segment, let's go to Corona, California.
Tom, you're next up on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I am here.
Glad to have you here.
Well, it's nice to be here.
Let me tell you, I sit right in the heart of this thing, and probably Southern California is we're the leading economy of the nation.
Everything happens here.
We are primarily right now just shut down.
I have never seen it this way since the late 40s, early 50s.
Southern California and Florida are probably the epicenters of this thing.
Well, there isn't any question about that.
Number one.
So what would an easier Federal Reserve monetary policy do to alleviate that?
What would the government bail out or having the FHA insure the resets or the refinancing?
What would that do to help the market?
Well, first of all, FHA can't help Southern California.
There is no help through FHA unless they raise the minimum limit that they will, or the maximum, I should say, that they will lend or insure.
And that proposal is out there.
What is it right now, about $362,000 for the price of a home?
$362.8 in some areas, $417 in others.
So, okay, so instead of the taxpayer being on the hook for homes valued at $363,000 or less, we're going to make the taxpayer on the hook for homes valued at $500,000, $600,000 or less?
No, no, no.
You don't understand.
See, the government in 2003 came to the mortgage industry and said, you are to make it easier for more people to own their own home.
I believe they do and should have the right to own their own home.
No question.
The problem is how they go about this.
Now, there's no question.
Incidentally, I've never made a subprime loan.
And I won't because I don't believe people need subprime loans.
There are other ways to put people into homes, but you would.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Hold on, let me hold you there.
In any speculative bubble, you have homeowners, then you have the investor class.
And what the investor class wants to do, Tom, is maximize leverage.
If I can do that with an interest-only loan, if I can do that with a hybrid, where for the least amount of money down, I can get a bigger home than I otherwise would for an investment and then recoup that at, say, 10% growth, I'm going to make more money.
You had a classic case of irrational exuberance, a classic speculative bubble that has now burst in some of the markets we're talking about.
And my point is, let them take the losses.
I'm not suggesting a bailout.
The people who went out and buy all this speculation, hey, now, and you hit the nail right on the head, partially, but only part of it.
Fact is, they bought way over top of what should have happened.
People cannot afford, not everyone can afford a three-quarters of a million or a million-dollar home with a hundred percent loan on it.
No question about it.
But the problem here lies back with everything that's happened to the dollar right on up.
And the fact that brokers, as well as banks and large lenders, never intended.
All they went out there to do is to push this thing as high as they could.
And now they're suffering.
And my view is they ought to suffer.
But they've taken everyone else with them, including you.
The problem reverts back now.
The dollar's worth less than history.
Well, that goes back to the monetary issue, Tom.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, Tom.
Hold on.
That goes back to the monetary issue, of which I probably agree with you.
But before I let you go, let me just say, nobody was complaining when they were riding the run-up in their home price.
But now that the bubble has burst and people are seeing, yes, their homes, whether they're in the subprime market or not, come down a little bit.
Why, now they're all saying, oh, the price of my home is coming down.
Well, you've already made $100,000, $200,000 on it.
You weren't complaining when it was being run up.
So I don't want to know where that comes in here because we need to go back and look at what happened.
The fact is, is that we've got a monetary fund sitting out there with a man running it who didn't know what he was doing.
A year and a half ago, he should have reacted to things.
You're talking about raising the federal funds rate, raising interest rates, tightening up the money supply.
All right, you get the last word.
He should have lowered some of those interest rates.
He raised it too fast, too quickly.
Well, no, no, no.
Tom, I got to let you go, but I'm going to tell you something.
For every individual that said just what you said, there are 10 who say the problem was a federal funds rate of 1 or 1.5% or 2% for months and months and months, and those low interest rates drove the housing bubble.
Got to go.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush on the EIB.
You're listening to the EIB Network.
I'm back for New Year's Eve, and then Rush returns January 2nd.
More politics in the most watched election in my lifetime because of its fluidity on both sides.
This is going to be a fascinating 2008, friend.
So stay tuned right here to the Excellence in Broadcasting Network in 2008 and beyond.
In the meantime, let's squeeze in a few more calls before we have to say goodbye.
Let's see who's up next.
Alan in Phoenix, Arizona is on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi, Alan.
Hi, Jason.
Hey, listen, just real quick.
I'm a Republican.
I'm going to vote Republican.
There's no way I'll vote for a Democrat.
But I do have one issue I need to ask you about.
You say about these home loans, the ones that people are in foreclosure right now, and the government shouldn't bail them out.
And you said there should be let the market correction take care of itself.
I agree to that to a point.
And I guess what I want to ask you is: what about the Chrysler tech bailout back in the 80s?
What about the stock market rush that happens every once in a while where the government steps in and they put stops in the stock market to keep it from collapsing?
No, no, no, you're thinking of what you're thinking of what the New York Stock Exchange did with automatic market breathers to stop trading from spiraling out of control.
Nobody's bailing out anybody directly there.
But look, if your overall point is we are now engaged in a form of corporate socialism, you're not going to get me to disagree.
One of the great, the great problems in America, from taxpayers funding baseball and football stadiums to, if you want to say, the Chrysler bailout, but I take the farm bill as an outrageous example of corporate welfare.
We now have a number of businesses, especially big businesses, who find that it's more advantageous to get in bed with the government, become capitalists when they're making a profit, and miraculously demanding the bailout socialists when they don't.
And that is a problem that the Republicans have to address because nobody else will, and they're not doing a very good job of it.
So, you know, there's corporate welfare all the way around.
Well, I'm just confused about the whole when it comes to this kind of thing.
I'm just confused about it because it almost seems like only a certain amount of people can get to that stage where they've made a ton of money by screwing everybody else.
No, no, no.
You don't make a ton of money by screwing everybody else.
That's a liberal myth.
You make money by providing what people want.
And if you do that, you're going to make a lot of money.
It's called production.
But look, the people clamoring for a bailout of foreclosures, unbeknownst to you, it really isn't the little guy in foreclosure.
It's Wall Street, the people that own the mortgages in the secondary market.
And those things have been transformed in these financial instruments known as collateralized debt obligations and other forms of secondary mortgages.
And they're the ones, the big banks and others, that are scared to death.
And they're the ones demanding the bailout because when I bail out you if you're foreclosing, that makes what their investment, the investment they're holding, good.
That's true.
That's true.
I see your point.
I just wanted to ask you, though, about these other.
I don't really follow the stock market that closely.
I mean, I've got mutual funds and things.
I just leave them alone.
And I didn't really realize that I thought the government would step in and put stops on a market rush type of thing, you know?
Well, I mean, you could say after 1987 that there was pressure put, if you want, by, I think, the public, but that's a thing that the market does, the New York Stock Exchange does.
It's not a situation of the government going in there and saying, oh, if you're now, now, frankly, if you want to take the form of a real bailout, the John Edwards tort bar is up for this in these strike suits, where they say anybody that invests in a company, and I think it's Bill Laratch out of California, was the king of the strike suits.
But they say, if you invest in a company and the stock market and the stock goes down, well, you ought to be able to sue them and recoup your investment losses because you were misled if you didn't read the 10K or you were misled by company press releases.
That's a bailout.
And that is an outrage.
And fortunately, I think it's dead for now.
But I got to move.
Alan, thanks for the call.
I do appreciate it.
Let's go next to get a break and then we'll come back and try to squeeze in Gary and David and Art.
Don't go away, gang.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program back after this.
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