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April 10, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
April 10, 2008, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
And thank you once again, Johnny Donovan.
I am Jason Lewis and the Northern Global Warming Command.
Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain.
It's great to be high atop the EIB Tower in the, as I say, the Northern Global Warming Command.
If this is global warming, I would hate to see global cooling.
Good Thursday to you.
This is great to be back behind the Golden EIB Mike once again in the Attila the Hun Chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Rush taking a couple of well-deserved days off.
We will hold down the fort until then.
The phone number remains the same.
1-800-282-2882.
That's 1-800-282-2882 or rushlimbaugh.com.
You can check that out.
How about this for Barack Obama?
Getting in trouble, I guess, with some uh some gay groups.
He's not doing interviews with enough gay publications, say uh uh says one reporter from the Philadelphia Gay News, he won't make time for other local gay publications.
He's been criticized for embracing some black religious leaders who are resistant to uh to gay rights.
And a lot of the the gay rights advocates in these various cities are wondering why Obama doesn't take it directly to their publications, why he doesn't do interviews with them.
He did, well, I'll try to make time, but look, I am going to go see a share concert.
So if that means anything at all, I don't know.
Katie Crook apparently on the outs.
Yeah, according to the Washington Post this morning, Katie Curric and CBS News are talking for the first time about her giving up the anchor chair after the November election if her ratings don't appro don't improve.
Apparently both people are having problems staying tuned to a CBS these days.
Katie Crook leaving CBS News.
A possibility if the ratings don't go up, says uh Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post.
I'm trying to think, what's good CBS, what would they do if Katie left?
Oh, I know they would go back to making news the old-fashioned way.
You know, they just make it up.
Remember Dan Rather?
There's a lot of things going on today, and we'll try to get to all of them, but let's uh start off with the uh cost of living tax.
I've been meaning to talk about this for some time.
A couple of stories today about the middle class growing increasingly downbeat on their economic progress.
Apparently a pure research center report.
Fifty-three percent of adults in the United States define themselves as middle class.
Fifty-four percent said they have made no progress or have fallen back in the last few years.
This is the old uh Reagan line, you know, are you better off for than you were four or five years ago?
And they're having problems with this.
They all consider themselves middle class, but they consider themselves losing ground.
This is something I call the the cost of living tax, where you've got an energy crisis perpetrated by no drilling in Anwar, uh, we offshore we can't drill, windfall profits tax on domestic oil, ethanol mandates, and the cost of a fuel goes up and it comes out of your paycheck.
We have a subprime crisis, the housing prices going down.
Uh the Fed created that.
We've got college tuition costs that the government created that by by paying down the college tuition, they jack them back up.
It goes on and on and on.
What is the price of corn these days?
Six dollars per bushel.
This is a mandated energy cost.
This is a mandated energy crisis or a created energy crisis by the government.
We tell the oil companies they can't drill, we're going to tax them, we're going to put a windfall profits tax on them, even though, by the way, they already pay income taxes to the tune of 41, 42 percent.
They pay the gas tax.
What is the tax foundation?
They pay 1.34 trillion dollars in gasoline taxes in the last 25 years.
Now remember, remember, they talk about all the profits the oil companies have made in the last 25 years.
The Tax Foundation did a study from 1977 to 2002.
And they figured during that period, uh that 25-year period, they did make about 670, 680 billion in profits.
The government through the gas tax made 1.34 trillion dollars in profits.
Who's gouging whom?
And yet we've got this government-induced energy crisis, and yet we keep grilling oil company executives.
We substitute efficient corn, or I should say efficient crops for fuel that's inefficient, i.e., ethanol and biofuels, and that drives up the price of what?
Other commodities, soybeans, corn hitting six dollars the bushel, as I say.
It is a government-induced, a government-mandated inflation, a government-mandated energy crunch.
We tell them, thanks to uh the the governors, many of whom are Republican, you can't drill off the Florida coast.
200 miles out, you can't drill.
Can't drill in the Rockies, can't drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge where it's dark 56 days out of the year.
And then we sit here and wonder why the cost of fuel goes up.
You know, we're getting into the summer driving season, the May through September summer driving season where the Clean Air Act regulations kick in, and you've got some 17 to 20, 25 boutique fuels that each state mandates.
Did you know that?
For instance, in Minnesota, where I'm from, you've got a 10% ethanol mandate.
They want to raise that to 20%.
You've got different sorts of fuel mixtures in other states.
We don't have enough refining capacity because the environmental left won't let us build refineries.
So if a pipeline goes down, it used to be before these these fuel mandates, these May to September Clean Air Act fuel mandates, that you could substitute one fuel for another.
You know, you lose a pipeline in Illinois and you need them you need uh gas from, say, another area, you just bring it right in.
It's the same fuel no longer.
That causes shortages, that causes spikes in prices, and it's all due to what?
Government mandates.
I mean, I could go on and on on this.
This is really one of my pet peeves.
College tuition, I mentioned that.
The college board now notes that college tuition has gone up 35%.
35% from 01 to 06, adjusted for inflation.
That's faster than gasoline.
And yet what do we do?
Every state, and at the federal level, they're crawling all over one another to increase Pell grants.
At every state we say, oh, we've got to, we've got to invest in higher ed.
We've got to spend a billion and a half dollars to buy down tuition.
Well, we've been buying down tuition with your tax dollars.
Nationwide, we spend about 373 billion dollars in public monies on higher education.
And what happens to tuition?
It keeps going up and up and up.
Every time you subsidize your favorite your favorite liberal think tank, otherwise known as a university, they keep gouging you.
The answer is not to subsidize this.
The answer is to remove the subsidy.
Well, if these people want to keep jacking up the price, people will find alternatives.
Like, oh, I don't know, uh, real training.
We'll go become a mason.
They'll become a mechanic, they'll become a nurse, they'll get a technical degree, they'll be an apprentice.
Those are the jobs that drive the economy anyway.
I mean, not a liberal arts degree in sociology 101 or political science or anything else for that matter.
These places are cauldrons of left-wing anti-American, anti-capitalist notions, and yet we keep subsidizing them.
And then they keep raising the cost of tuition.
Until the consumer feels the full brunt of the waste on college campuses, they will never get get their epiphany, they'll never get religion and lower costs and lower tuition because they're losing students.
You subsidize something, you get more spending.
I mean, look at the subprime crisis crisis, I should say.
We created it.
The Federal Reserve had an artificially low interest rate policy of one percent for years and years and years.
Well, I shouldn't say that long, but a number of years.
We had no redlining laws forcing people to make loans in areas where perhaps they shouldn't have.
We had government uh guarantees, government subsidies with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they had this implicit government guarantee that allowed their the allowed them to raise capital at a lower cost that passed through to mortgages at a lower cost.
The point I'm getting at here is we gave all these subsidies for people to buy a house.
Mandates and direct subsidies, FHA loans.
We had all of that.
We had an artificially low interest rate policy, which kept mortgages down.
And naturally, what happened?
When the tech bubble burst, people found, you know, with inflation being reignited, the money found another asset, and we had another asset bubble in housing, and now the bubble has been burst.
And if we were smart, we would do nothing.
Let the prices come down, let the market clear, and then all of a sudden homes would be affordable again.
I'm sorry if a couple of Wall Street investment firms take a hit, but there's no reason for the Federal Reserve to bail those guys out either.
The best policy is do nothing.
What I'm getting at here in this rant is almost every situation right now that is causing, say, oh, I don't know, the Bush administration problems, maybe Republicans in general problems.
They keep saying, gosh, we're we're tough on the war in Iraq, and and we're talking about, you know, extending the Bush tax cuts.
That's fine, and obviously all of those things are important.
But the bottom line is there is an economic angst out there, and I don't think we can deny it, and it's an economic angst created by government.
Now, I don't care whether you're talking about the so-called subprime crisis, that was created by government policy.
I don't care whether you're talking about the so-called manufactured energy crisis, that was created by environmentalists, global warming kooks and their buddies in the government.
And when you, you know, when you tell a utility you've got to use uh expensive wind and solar and biofuels instead of cheap, clean coal and fossil fuels.
When you tell a house you gotta buy $4 light bulbs that are fluorescent and have mercury in them instead of a 50 cent incandescent bulb, that is a mandated tax increase.
And that is dwarfing any tax relief a lot of people are seeing.
When you take inefficient fuel, corn, and divert it, divert it from its natural source or its natural utility, and that is efficient food, you get food inflation.
We have a shortage of crops right now.
That's driving the price up.
Of course, naturally, what does Washington do?
They author the largest farm bill in years to keep subsidizing farm income when it's at an all-time high, to keep subsidizing ethanol.
They are creating all of this from the college tuition crisis to the food inflation to the energy crisis to the subprime crisis.
Ronald Reagan was right.
Government is not the solution.
It is the problem.
The problem is no Republican is talking like that today.
Except for a few talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh.
I mean, that's the problem.
We've lost our way as a conservative movement.
We're now saying, we we're big government conservatives.
We can do this in a better way than we're not going to, you know, reduce government.
We're not going to attack government.
You can't say no to everything.
Well, yes, you can.
You can say no to a lot of things that make things worse.
And I haven't even mentioned health care for crying out loud.
We haven't had a free market in health care since 1945 wage and price controls.
Government now accounts for 47% of health care costs in America.
We have a skewed tax code that says, well, gosh, if you're a business, you can deduct health care costs, but if you're an individual, you can't.
That raises the cost effectively because if I were an individual, I'd buy a cheap cafeteria-style health care plan.
I'd have an HSA account, I'd get rid of the state mandates.
You know, we've got 2,000 government mandated benefits that any traditional indemnity insurer must comply with if they're going to write a policy in your state.
What do you think that does to the cost of health care?
If I've got to cover Whigs, if I've got to cover all sorts of things, port win stain removal, state of Minnesota has 63 mandates.
Now, now, thanks to a uh a couple of members of Congress, Jim Ramstead and Patrick Kennedy, they want a mental health mandate on anybody covered under a self-insured uh ERISA plan.
What is that going to do to the cost of health care?
We could reform health care overnight, make it affordable for 98% of the people in America by simply doing a couple of things.
Following the President's plan by reach uh changing the tax code and letting you get a $15,000 deduction for any health care policy you buy instead of a business, and the business would then pay you in cash instead of health care benefits, then you'd go out and buy it like you do any every other insurance product, and removing all of these mandates.
You know, when we have Hillary Clinton's got this plan to mandate people by insurance, but she's also got a community rating system.
You know what this is?
A massive tax on young people.
You got to buy a Cadillac coverage with all the mandates I just mentioned, so you can subsidize everybody else.
No wonder a lot of people say, well, I'm just gonna go without it.
It's too expensive.
Again, without being too loquacious here, the point I'm trying to get at here is all of the uh the problems in this economy right now, and Greenspan said we're in a recession, all of these problems are government induced.
Let us go back and find the Reagan roots again and realize government is not the answer.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh, 1-800-282-2882, back with your calls right after this.
Talents on loan from Rush.
You know, I hate to be quite so prescient, but no sooner, no sooner than we talk about government exacerbating the problem in our economy, bailing out areas where they shouldn't be bailing out anybody, and the Senate, I see, has just passed a 20 billion dollar FHA housing bailout.
All of you, all of you chumps out there actually paying your mortgage, suffering through lowering home values, but you're getting on, you're getting by, you're working hard.
You need to get on the bandwagon here.
How'd you like it if your neighbor gets his uh loan value reduced, gets the FHA, the taxpayer, to insure it while you keep slaving away.
And by the way, that's going to do nothing in the long term to get market equilibrium, to get a market clearing model.
So as I mentioned, here we go again.
Government intervention, the law of unintended consequences, which created the housing bubble, is now going to maintain it.
We're going to bail out Wall Street firms so they don't have to take a big loss and their creditors.
Now we're going to bail out everybody who got a little greedy and bought a house they couldn't afford.
The vast majority of this, the vast majority of this is not, is not predatory lending.
Predatory lending is frankly a bit of an oxymoron.
Why would any particular lender want to lend money to someone who can't pay them back?
This is a classic bubble.
This is a classic bet that people made that Wall Street made, especially through these credit default swaps that were uh that were backed up by the mortgage backed securities or attached to them, and they bet the wrong way.
Now what should happen?
People should, in a capitalist society, they should be free to profit, which traumatizes Democrats, but they should also be free to fail.
And you and I have no particular no particular obligation to make certain that anybody's investment only goes one way.
And by the way, no one said this.
If the housing prices keep going down, does that not make housing more affordable for the poor?
Now I know this is not exactly music to your ears down there in Fort Myers.
I know it's not good over there in San Diego.
It's tough, and the housing prices are falling everywhere, but most of us have ridden the housing prices up.
We'll get by if we allow the market to adjust, and then they stabilize and then they'll start going back up.
But if the government gets in there with easy money like the Fed is doing, with more bailouts that the Senate just passed today, having the taxpayer now guarantee future foreclosures, you're gonna have an SNL bailout here, gang, inducing the moral hazard, you're gonna perpetuate the bubble, you're not gonna let prices adjust, and sooner or later they're going to fall again.
And what's going to be our response?
Another bailout, more inflation.
Markets correct.
Let them, and we will be fine in the long haul.
1-800-282-2882, Jason Lewis in for El Rushboat today on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network to the phones we go.
Battle Creek, Michigan, Bob, you're first up on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi.
I'm a little nervous as you'll probably be able to tell, but I am a middle class person who has fallen behind quite a bit in the last couple of years, brought on by transitional employees, part-time employees.
Uh I've worked for the same company that I've been with going on 21 years.
Uh was an overtime employee because they needed it.
Uh found that you were a lot of times forced into overtime.
No problem there.
Uh but all of a sudden you wake up and you come in and you have seven, eight, nine, ten people who are making less than you, not making any kind of uh healthcare.
They're not getting bring in.
Let's cut to the quick here.
Let's cut to the quick, Bob.
They're not getting health care benefits.
They're not getting a lot of benefits, and they're bringing them in, it's costing the company less money to hire these people, which if they had their way would probably be the majority of their workforce, and probably that's where it's going to go.
But see, this is like me who have been at the company, do not get the ability to say, okay, uh you you you have a say over uh or your preferential over these people.
You're not.
So what you're finding out is you're losing a ton of money.
I am probably down, like I said, two thousand to twenty five hundred dollars a month.
All right, let me let me try to take a breath there, Bob.
Um of course the policies in Michigan, uh, the tax happy state, driving every industry out, uh, you know, driving them to more uh business friendly climates is not helping you uh up there in Battle Creek.
But uh beyond that, let me agree and disagree a little bit.
Number one, there, you know, my dad told me this years ago.
There's no such thing as economic security from another person.
You make your own economic security.
We are a nation that does not save.
The only reason we have capital to invest in America is because we run a trade deficit and foreign capital keeps pouring in, and that's gonna dry up if we raise taxes and the return on that investment is not very good.
We do not save.
We've got to keep up with the Joneses, we've got to do this and we've got to do that.
And And the way to make your own security is when you're making the money, save it.
But the other problem is, I mean, like, for instance, uh a business, they can't say, well, I've been in business for 40 years, and here comes an upstart business, puts them out.
They wait a minute, I've been a business 40 years.
You can't put me out of business.
There is no such thing as real security.
What I'm getting at is people need to take a little bit more responsibility here for their own for their own future for their own particular economic security, not rely on their business, not rely on somebody else, certainly not rely on the government.
And welcome back once again to the Rush Limbaugh program on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, high atop the EIB Tower version at the Northern Command, the Global Warming Command in the great state of Minnesota.
I am Jason Lewis in for L Rush Post.
He takes a couple of days off.
He'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, check out Rushlimbaugh.com.
The phone number remains the same, 1-800-282-2882.
Now, I didn't want to be too harsh on Bob, because a lot of you are in that situation, and I understand how you get there, but we do not save enough in America.
The other aspect of this is health care costs.
That's what's driving a lot of businesses, especially smaller businesses, to quite frankly go to private or uh part-time employees to do without health benefits.
And as I said earlier, without beating a dead horse, that is a direct result of government mandates.
That is a direct result of government subsidizing health care to the tune of 47% of health care costs in America, 47% are covered by government.
Government now pays 47%.
The Medicare RX benefit, that adds what?
18% of drug costs are now paid by the taxpayer, up from 2% in 2005.
Now, now what does this do?
This creates shortages in health care, causing prices go up.
Remember, folks, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
When the government subsidizes something, there will be unlimited demand.
If some fast food joint was offering free burgers tomorrow, they would have a line outside their door.
And some bureaucrat, some liberal politician would come along and say, look at all the people that need free hamburgers.
We must have a subsidy program.
They're already free.
It creates unlimited demand, and that's why government takeover of health care will only result in rationing.
That will be the only way to get a hold of the global budgets.
But in the meantime, it's distorting the private sector.
It's driving up costs, so they have a little cost shifting here.
You've got the mandates I spoke about, and there's only one way to handle this, and that is let individuals buy health insurance.
You buy your own automobile insurance, you buy your own house insurance, you buy your own life insurance, and you go back to another government intervention, World War II, 1945, the wage and price controls, when businesses could not raise wages to attract help, and then it was exacerbated by the tax code where they said, okay, we'll let you add health care benefits and we'll let you deduct those.
All of a sudden, because of a government policy, we had a paradigm shift in how people buy insurance.
They now expect to get it from their employer, and the employer can't afford it anymore.
We don't have a market in health insurance.
Every time I hear some liberal from Barack Obama to Ted Kennedy to Hillary Clinton talk about, well, the free market isn't working for health care.
We haven't had a free market in health care for sixty years.
This is the most regulated, the most subsidized, the most intervened market in the world.
And what I'm telling you, Bob, is if we change the tax code, if we allow we gave you a medical IRA where you could save tax-free for incidentals to cover a high deductible policy, if we got rid of those individual mandates, Bob, you probably don't need coverage for AIDS.
You probably don't need coverage for acupuncture, you probably don't need coverage for drug abuse.
Then why is it you're forced to buy it?
And more importantly, under Hillary Clinton's community rating system, you are not only forced to buy it, but the insurance companies can't charge you any more for all these benefits.
And so they drop people.
Or young people forced to buy these Cadillac plans and the community rating system, essentially, for lack of a better description, means you you you can't discriminate when you charge insurance prices, uh prices based on age, based on health care status, uh, based on all of these things.
So that drives up the entire price for everybody.
And then we tell the young to buy these Cadillac plans that they don't need.
If a young person could buy a cafeteria-style health care plan and deduct it, up to $15,000 a year, even if the insurance policy only cost him or her four or five thousand.
Uh then you are actually transformed this distorted market into an individual market.
The employers would would be out of the picture.
They could now give you more money instead of health care benefits.
And people like Bob might not be in the uh situation they're in today.
Bob, thanks for the call.
Moving on, let's try Jennifer in Jacksonville, Florida.
You're up next on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Okay, so here's the truth.
Insurance is based on the theories and the empirical evidence of the law of large numbers.
That means that a certain number of people are going to have a certain number of experiences.
You figure out what those experiences are going to cost, car wrecks, heart transplants, babies, whatever that is.
And you divide that by the number of people you're going to insure.
The problem with our program is that there's a third party, very, very much like the mafia in the old days that would go to the grocer or the cobbler or the fruit guy on the street and want his take.
Even though he did nothing, didn't lift a broom, didn't do anything to help that guy make his money, he wanted a piece of the take.
That is the third party system we know as insurance.
They are collecting money, they have no right to.
If that third party is taken out of the picture and we have direct self-insurance, either through the government, administering it or whatsoever, the cost of insurance will drop.
So let me get let me get this straight.
Jennifer, let me get this straight, since you have a monopoly on the truth.
Uh look let me get this straight.
If the government pays all of the current health care bills instead of your insurance company, voila, magically, they'll go down.
I didn't know that what they do that earlier.
You misunderstood me.
Well, I sure did.
You you need to have some form of administration that is a nonprofit, not for profit, and that exists all over the country.
Most hospitals are nonprofit, Jennifer.
Well, that's because they don't collect their money.
Believe me, they try.
Wait a second.
Let me just get my point in, okay?
You made you made your point, and it's horribly flawed.
No, it isn't.
Years ago, when I first learned to drive in Kansas at 15, we did not have auto insurance.
People did not have more wrecks, people did not have more lawsuits.
You hit somebody, you pulled off to the side of the road, you either went with them to get their car fixed or they got your car fixed.
If it didn't work out, you went to court.
You did not have a third party collecting money that was not their due.
That is the flying.
The insurance company, let me all right.
Let me set you straight here, my dear.
Insurance companies, number one, don't make buku bucks on the premiums they collect.
They make it on Jennifer, let me finish.
They make the money on the float or the investment while they've got it before they pay the claims.
They're not making money on premiums.
Two, I would be in favor of if you don't want to buy insurance, that's fine.
But to be perfectly blunt, ma'am, I'll be damned if I'm gonna pick up your health care tab as a taxpayer if you don't buy insurance.
Okay, let me explain to you that that is not where their money is made, because if it works, they wouldn't pull out of states where they had claims.
If their money was being made on their investments, they would have no need to pull out of states like California.
Hey, now I know I finally ladies and gentlemen, I have finally figured out the people that go to Oliver Stone movies.
This is a grand conspiracy.
They pull out of states where they can't afford to write insurance because of these mandates, because yes, their claims cost them more than their premiums because of community rating uh regulations, and therefore they've got nothing to vet invest for 30 days or sixty days or a year to make any money.
Now, insurance companies, Jennifer, do pool risk.
That is the function of an insurance company.
They pool risk, whether it's automobile insurance, life insurance, or health care insurance.
They pool that risk on the assumption some people will need the money, most people won't, but they like the security, like I do.
But here's what they also do, and this is what's lost in in the modern debate.
They also regulate behavior by pricing risk.
Hence, if you get into a lot of automobile accidents, your automobile insurance goes up.
If your home has this uncanny knack of catching fire, your home insurance goes up.
Well, guess what?
We don't think that's right in health care.
Why, if you consume health care, if you're going to the emergency room time and time again, we don't care.
Health care is a right, your insurance shouldn't go up.
All of a sudden, insurance companies pull out.
And why shouldn't they?
The bottom line here is if you allow the insurance markets to function, And frankly, if you don't want to buy it, if you want to self-insure, and I'm all for self insurance to some degree.
And my particular plan, if you were, it's not my plan, maybe a lot number of people come up with this, but you you get into an individual market where you buy a high deductible policy where your out of pocket costs I mean we don't have insurance in health care.
We have prepaid medicine.
Your automobile insurance doesn't pay for your oil change.
You pay for that.
And that's the way healthcare should be.
You should pay for your child's physical before football season starts for routine doctor visits, and you pay for that, self-insure, maybe as you call it, uh through through a high deductible policy that doesn't cover the first five thousand, but you get tax free savings, medical IRAs that carry over.
I'm all for that.
And if you still don't want to buy insurance for the catastrophic problems, Jennifer, fine.
But don't you dare, don't you presume to assume that the taxpayer then has an obligation to bail you out.
And therein lies another big problem.
We are inducing this moral hazard by telling people don't worry, health care is a right, so don't bother to do the responsible thing because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and Ted Kennedy will have the rest of us pick up the tab.
Gee, I wonder why.
In fact, I've got some stats on this when we come back on why some people deliberately don't buy insurance, which raises the cost for the rest of us.
Nice try, Jennifer.
I'm Jason Lewis, In for Rush on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hey, we're getting it going on a Thursday.
I'm Jason Lewis, In for Rush, taking a couple of well deserved days off.
He'll be back on Monday.
Check out Rush Limbaugh.com has always uh you know we we talk about this record number of people uninsured.
Fact of the matter is we have a record number of Americans with insurance.
But two thirds of those forty seven million without insurance are either eligible for a government program like SCHIPS or or Medicaid or something like that, or gainfully employed, ten million of those have households with incomes above seventy five thousand dollars.
Now, if you take a look at those eligible for for a government program or with incomes, let's just bring it down to fifty thousand or above, all of a sudden you cut the number of uninsured more than half.
And actually you cut it down to around seventeen, eighteen million.
And there's there needs to be some market adjustments to do to to help those people, but the answer is a cheap cafeteria style, catastrophic policy.
It is not a government takeover.
That will do nothing to control costs, and it will it will you'll end up with rationing, I guarantee it, because there will be such an unlimited demand when the government has free health care.
And do I need to say Canada, 17 week weights?
Do I need to talk about the UK?
Uh there is it is axiomatic that if the government offers something for free, you get a run on it.
And so the government will do, and they're already talking about this, they will start requiring certain checkups, then they'll start denying care, all in the name of getting a handle on the global budgets.
I don't think that's the sort of health care policy most Americans want.
When you need health care, you want it.
And it's your right not to have it, but it's your right to pay for it.
Chris in Minneapolis, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Jason, how are you?
I'm good, sir.
Good.
Hey, you know, you were talking about the oil versus tuition thing, and uh rather than just throw out uh that it's higher, I actually have some data in front of me because I had this very same argument uh with with the liberal just about a week ago.
It has dwarfed the increase of the oil.
Well, I took I took the figures from nineteen eighty, uh the oil price from nineteen eighty versus the cost of tuition at the University of Minnesota for an undergrad resident from nineteen eighty as well.
Right.
And uh the I don't have the percentages in front of me, I have the the the dollar amount in front of me, but the percentage as as you said was off the chart.
Now he came back to me and his argument was well, you're using the peak oil price.
And I said, Okay, fair enough.
I'll take the nineteen seventy-five price.
Right.
I took the nineteen seventy-five crude oil price, which was twelve dollars and twenty one cents, adjusted that for inflation, then I took the nineteen seventy five undergrad annual tuition at the U of M, which was six hundred and thirty dollars.
And when you adjust that for inflation, you'll find that the tuition is a hundred and fifty percent higher than that of oil.
By the way, his admission that the peak price was in nineteen eighty is instructive because that's only where we're at today.
So what other commodity, ladies and gentlemen, uh commodities, food, corn, you name it, is the bo about the same price as it was in nineteen eighty.
And that's the price of gasoline today, as high as it is in many locales.
Maybe a tad above it.
But that's an amazing stat when you think about it.
And even if you don't use that, as you did, Chris, you get this massive price gouging on the part of the university trustees all across America.
And these universities, by the way, as you know, here in Minnesota, they're demanding more state aid.
They're demanding more bonding from the state to subsidize the university.
You've got universities like Harvard, even in the private sector, sitting on billions of dollars in endowments they don't touch, but then they jack up tuition and say, Oh, we need more government aid.
That's absolutely correct.
It is the greatest scam.
Now, naturally, it doesn't get the media scrutiny.
It doesn't get the the Democrat scrutiny because what they're churning out in many of these liberal arts colleges are future Democrats.
That's exactly right.
Quickly, sir.
Uh I will see you Saturday come rain sleet, or dare I say snow.
I can hardly wait.
Let's go to Mark in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania.
You're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Well, good to talk with you this afternoon.
Same to you.
Uh I'm going back to the discussion on farming and uh aid to farmers.
And I I will say that across the board, I consider myself a conservative.
I want to keep the government from giving people money.
But I become a reluctant believer that this might actually be a real important part of our national security.
Because food supply and guaranteeing the food supply for the nation is a vital interest of the government of the United States.
Then why are we subsidizing the effort to divert corn?
And by the way, which jacks up the price of soybeans and every other crop has fields are converted to corn.
Why are we s diverting that crucial food source to an inefficient fuel like ethanol, where it takes as much energy for a gallon of ethanol to be made as the gallon gives off?
I am one hundred percent against the ethanol project, but I consider that bath water and the overall subsidy plan, the baby.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
286 billion dollar farm bill.
Farm incomes are at an all-time high.
Commodity prices have never been higher.
Should we have the government start subsidizing oil companies because nothing is more crucial uh to our economy than oil?
No, because there's something about farming that is is a slow process.
You cannot re regain a farming uh base quickly in in the same way that you can start drilling and you can't do that.
Sure you can't say.
Oh, are you table?
The capital cost mark for drilling are probably much greater than for an individual farm for crying out loud.
Here's the problem with your rationale uh for subsidizing agriculture.
And and by the way, it has failed to do what it's supposed to do.
It's failed to deliver the cheapest crop.
In fact, the conservation program raises prices.
It has failed to keep family farms from being bought out by big corporations.
Most of the subsidies go to big corporations like ADM and others.
It has failed to do exactly what it what it's done except cost the taxpayer billions and billions of dollars.
Why is it that somebody making up to two million dollars a year?
You know, Representative Colin Peterson of Minnesota who's heading up m much of this in the Congress, it refuses to cut the subsidy for anybody, any farm at a million dollars an individual.
So the two individuals it'd be two million dollars.
Why is it that the taxpayer should subsidize that person's livelihood?
I don't understand that.
And if you go down this road that we've got to subsidize food because it's crucial, why not oil, health care, shelter, where does it end?
The market works.
We ought we really ought to try it more often.
I'm Jason Lewis, In for Rush on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
You know, that last call reminds me of uh of so many politicians that don't understand the market.
Senator Charles Grassley last week was was grilling the SEC over a Bear Stearns failure or the Wall Street problems.
He said, What can we do in the future to prevent these sorts of things?
Now Charles Grassley is a corn king down in Iowa.
He gets a ton of uh of subsidies, agricultural subsidies.
He needs it as a senator, you know.
But I'm thinking to myself, wait a minute, why shouldn't businesses fail?
When is the government's job to make certain no firm goes under?
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