All Episodes
Previous Next
June 20, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:06
June 20, 2008, Friday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, you gotta like this, liberalism at work.
I've never met a movement, a political cause that has been so unaccountable in my entire adult political life.
You've got this high school up in Massachusetts, I believe Boston Way.
No, it's not Boston, it's Glausta.
It's Glass Damas.
And it's up there with a gr with the number of girls, at least seventeen, who apparently had a pregnancy pact.
They all agreed to get pregnant with older men, by the way.
Some girls seemed more upset when they didn't get pregnant, according to the principal there.
So you've got this teen pregnancy pack suspected.
The school, by the way, administered 150 pregnancy tests to the students in the last academic year.
You know, if this isn't more evidence that sex ed is working, I don't know what is.
You just wait, though.
You just wait.
According to the story, the school forbids the distribution of condoms without parental consent.
I don't think the parents in this case might have minded who knows, but speculation, you know.
But I can just hear it already.
Well, see, if we would have distributed those condoms, why this wouldn't have happened.
How is it possible that you can almost draw, this is a little bit like the advent of the great society, modern welfare state, and illegitimacy, you can almost draw a third correlation to sex ed.
I mean, why is it the liberals always claim to solve a problem, they make the problem worse, and then they give us more of the same.
Whether it's the energy crisis, whether it's, you know, weakness and vacillation and foreign policy under Jimmy Carter, and now they're advocating more on that.
Whether it's sex ed, why are schools in this business?
It might be nice to impart, oh, I don't know, math, phonics.
You know, if you have the things that will actually enable you to earn a living when you get out of school, instead they are in in the values business.
The problem you've got when schools get in the values business and you don't allow the community's values, just the school district, the superintendent, the school boards, is they are usually antithetical to yours.
I'll make a compromise with the sex ed types.
And this is all this really is about make work for government.
But I'll make a compromise with them.
Let's not teach abstinence and let's not teach condoms.
Let's not teach it at all.
Let's all learn it behind the barn where we're supposed to.
You know, back in the 40s and 50s, when the illegitimacy rate was about one what, one-tenth of what it is today?
Go back and plot the graph.
Do your spreadsheet.
The advent of the Great Society welfare state.
You know, the the advent of modern welfare as we know it.
You can throw in Medicaid, which wasn't around until 1965.
You can throw in the Department of Housing and Urban Development until 1965, and all of the cash benefits in those days, AFDC, now what, temporary aid for needy families?
Draw a chart and watch the dollars for that rise along with illegitimacy.
You see, when you reward something, you get more of it.
When you reduce the consequences to someone's irresponsibility, you get more irresponsibility.
It's called inducing the moral hazard.
Not a good idea.
And liberals intuitively understand this, even if they don't know explicitly.
By that I mean they're the ones clamoring for higher cigarette taxes.
Isn't that an admission of supply-side economics?
High cigarette taxes will reduce cigarette consumption.
So you want less of something, you tax it.
You want more of something, why you subsidize it.
So we're going to tax cigarettes.
Now they want to tax oil, which means we will get less oil.
The windfall profits tax is one of the worst ideas.
By the way, could I just say this?
And by the way, welcome back, second hour now, up and running.
But uh there is no such thing as a windfall profit.
What is a windfall profit?
You know how Congress describes a windfall profit?
Something that we think is not reasonable.
More than a reasonable profit.
There's no such thing as a windfall profit.
If Hollywood makes a cheap movie, remember the great movie Rocky back in 1976, made on a lean budget, a frugal budget, parsimonious budget, blockbuster.
Somebody made a lot of money.
Was that a windfall profit?
Or was it just a profit?
Was it the encouragement to go out there and create something new on the assumption you would get rewarded?
That's what capitalism is.
That's why they call it capitalism.
If you take a look at these nasty oil company profits, I mean, for heaven's sakes, the oil companies, ExxonMobil, Had uh 40 billion dollars in in the profits last year.
By the way, uh you know, if you take a look at the mass what is the entire oil industry, all of it.
U.S. News and World Report uh reported last February that in 2006, you know what the oil industry did with those profits?
76% of them, seventy-six percent, they reinvested them.
Now, if you think if you want to take away investment in our oil and gas infrastructure, well, then have a windfall profits tax.
You want to take away incentive, have a windfall profits tax.
But their profits aren't that great anyway in the grand scheme of things.
You're looking at 40 billion dollars on 400 billion dollars of sales.
That's eight, nine, maybe ten percent in a good year, ten percent of your sales.
That's your that's your gross profit.
I got news for you.
A number of other industries, uh I mean, up until recently, banking, electronics, Microsoft, their margins are much higher than that.
Oil and gas companies had about eighty-seven billion dollars in profits last year.
Want to take a look at technology companies profits, over a hundred billion, financial service industry profits, five hundred billion.
I mean, by any measurement, whether it's gross profit or net profit, up until very very recently, the oil companies have been right in the mainstream of the SP 500, and frankly, in the nineties a little bit below.
You take a look at their earnings yield, which is the inverse of the price to earnings ratio, it's nine percent.
So if you buy, you know, uh a share of Exxon stock at ninety bucks, you can hope to get back nine point nine percent.
Uh, and that, by the way, is the earnings.
You may you won't get that in dividends.
I'm not talking about the dividend yield, I'm talking about the earnings yield.
Think of it, here's where people I think get screwed up on this.
They see 40 billion dollars in profits, what they don't see is five point four billion shares outstanding for Exxon.
So they're earning two bucks a share every quarter.
So you buy a hundred bucks a share or ninety bucks a share, and you're gonna get two dollars in earnings.
Is that an outrageous windfall to investors?
Folks, you gotta understand something.
If in fact we start diminishing profits, or in the minds of some real loony lefties, take them away.
What happens?
How many of you will invest in a company that has less profit or no profit?
None of you.
If they have no investment, that 76% return to the field to explore for more oil is gone.
To explore for more gas is gone.
More coal is gone.
That means energy is gone and the price goes way up.
That's why when Jimmy Carter imposed his windfall profits tax, what happened?
Price went up, and then we had actual shortages.
People will not work perpetually for the benefit of the collective.
That's lesson number one.
I could go on on this, but it becomes so silly after a while.
I mean, we we are either a serious nation, we are either going to be grown-ups about this, or we're going to be stuck in this junior high trust fund brat environmental mindset.
Most people outgrow the silliness.
Other countries are serious.
Brazil and China and the Middle East, they're laughing at us by locking up our oil and gas supply.
Think of these dilettants out in California led by Governor Schwarzenegger.
So now we're getting a move.
Charlie Christ is starting to say, you know, maybe we ought to drill off the coast of Florida, and people in Florida are saying it.
It's not going to cause anybody any harm.
Your view from from the Naples hotel and beach club is going to be the same.
You're not going to see anything.
You can't see what?
Four or five miles out?
I don't know what that would be, but you certainly can't see 100 miles out.
So we're either going to be serious and we're going to say, well, look, we're importing 10 million barrels per day.
Let's see.
If we drilled in Anwar, that would produce one million barrels per day.
Wow.
Well, that's that's uh quite a bit of a reduction when you consider we're importing ten million, and we can offset that by ten percent domestically.
I mean, and talk about the trade deficit, those people are going to buy American oil now.
So we're either going to be serious About this, or we're going to be silly about this.
Uh I think we're starting to get serious.
And I'm a little bit sanguine about the future.
If uh McCain and Christ et al.
the Republican Governors Association, uh if they if they keep going with this, this is a winner for the GOP.
Because environmentalism sounds great until they actually put it into place.
And when they put it into place, what do you get?
Well, let's see.
You get skyrocketing oil prices, you get skyrocketing gasoline prices, you get a biofuels industry that's creating a dead zone down in the Gulf because of all this runoff.
We have diverted, I mean, literally 130 million tons of corn to inefficient fuel, further exacerbating the inflation problem.
So now you go to the grocery store, thanks to the biofuels mandates, and the idea we've got to have what, 36 billion barrels of or 36 billion gallons, I mean, of uh ethanol?
Insane, folks.
Ethanol is not efficient.
It wouldn't be it wouldn't come to market without the subsidies at the federal and state level, without the import tariffs of 54 cent a gallon, the federal subsidy of 51 cent a gallon, the 300 billion dollar farm bill that goes to corn growers.
None of that would be priced anywhere below six dollars a gallon, your ethanol, if in fact you didn't have those subsidies.
Meanwhile, the oil companies paid $30 billion in taxes.
That's right.
Exxon alone, their 2007 tax bill, $30 billion.
And they're not being taxed.
Exxon, uh Chevron, Conigo Phillips, according to the SEC, had a 2006 tax bill of 41% of net income.
They're not being taxed, they need another one.
Meanwhile, we subsidize biofuels.
We subsidize solar, we subsidize windmills, all of which don't stand a chance of giving us the energy we need going forward.
So, you know, the the the economics are clear on this.
The economics are quite simple.
Uh i if something is efficient, it will come to the market.
It doesn't need a government subsidy.
It doesn't need a government mandate.
If something is fundamentally inefficient, no subsidy or no government mandate will make it so.
1-800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
You know, I gotta be honest, I can't help but think of my uh favorite Hillary Clinton joke when I uh when I I couldn't have helped but think of that joke when I read the uh story about the 17 teens getting impregnant.
I mean, in schools, they don't really call it sex anymore.
They call it hooking up and they're doing all these sorts of well, I'm not gonna describe them.
It's you know, it could be dinner time where you are.
But I I'm thinking of the old line, one of my favorite jokes.
You know, Hillary, before she decided to run for president, had to go out and meet with Chelsea and and sat her down and said, Look, you know, we're we're gonna be back in the spotlight again, and you know, sex in the spotlight, as you well know, can be kind of tough.
So I I gotta I gotta vet you.
I've got to ask you some questions, Chelsea.
You've been out on your own for quite some time now.
Uh it's kind of uncomfortable, but it's gonna come out in the campaign.
But Chelsea, uh have you had sex yet?
And uh Chelsea thought for a moment, looked at Hillary and said, Well, not according to dad.
That's all, you know, I guess he's got a point there.
1 800, 282-2882.
Joe in a Toka, Tennessee, you are on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, hi.
Jason, thank you so much for taking my call.
Uh thank goodness for you and uh Mark and Rush, the you know, loving your country.
I'm kind of an old guy, and I go back to the 40s listening to uh Edward R. Murrow or Gabriel Heater or Walter Winchell and guys that love their country.
I've stopped watching TV and I just listened to your program.
But anyway, what I wanted to talk about was the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
I mean, these environmentalists are getting us to grow corn and produced ethanol, but the fertilizers they're using are nitrogen-based, they're flowing down a Mississippi, and they have contaminated and killed thousands of square miles in the Gulf of Mexico.
Not to mention across the world, but certainly the United States, where you had prairie land being plowed under to plant, they're gonna maximize yield, and I don't blame the farmers for doing that.
I blame the government for subsidizing an inefficient fuel like this and diverting what is efficient food into fuel.
So you've got this rising price of the grocery store, and if you don't, by the way, you're getting a lot of of liberal Republicans like Charles Grassley of Iowa saying ethanol's got nothing to do with the rising food prices.
Um First of all, gang, the World Bank, the IMF, hardly, you know, right wing think tanks have all said, and every economist I know said, look, you can't divert that much corn from the market uh of food and not have an effect.
Now, I think, you know, the failed monetary policy of of loose money has contributed a lot to all of our inflation woes.
But you you are seeing this ripple through the entire this entire economy.
And you're right.
Some people say that all of the runoff from all of these new acreages of of corn planted and now they're planting soybeans because the price of soybeans are going up because the the price of corn went up so high that they were plowing under soybean fields to plant corn.
So you're getting this horrible ripple effect, and it's hurting the airline industry is simply not going to be able to make it if we don't get jet fuel down.
Uh you've got food inflation.
Uh school school districts are saying that we're having problems with the price of of food and fuel.
So it really is a crisis.
And you're right.
Ethanol is just not a good fuel.
Takes four hundred and fifty pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank.
It's twenty-five, thirty-five percent less efficient than gasoline.
So even if the government subsidizes it down to fifty cents below the price of unleaded, you're only going to get sixty five, seventy percent miles per gallon on it.
It's a wash there.
And it consumes water like politicians consume booze, seventeen hundred gallons of water to produce one gallon of ethanol.
If our entire corn output were put to ethanol production, it wouldn't reduce our gasoline consumption but by eight, nine, ten percent.
And that's that's why this particular product is not possible without a dollar a gallon subsidy when you include everything.
Uh it simply doesn't work.
It's a bad idea.
It needs a subsidy, just like windmills need subsidies, just like solar needs subsidies, and they still account for what?
Less than one percent of our total net electricity generation.
Uh you got to back them up with fossil fuel plants in case the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow.
We've got a situation here, my friends, where the most efficient fuel is a fossil fuel.
Whether it's natural gas, whether it's clean coal, whether it's good old-fashioned gasoline and oil.
Now, we're having a test right now.
Would you rather pay four or five dollars a gallon for gasoline?
And would you rather pay double what the price of eggs and meat and milk are, and wear your Sierra Club sticker and be happy?
Or would you rather have a higher standard of living bequeathing that to your children with clean produced fuel?
The earth has never been cleaner.
It is an absolute canard by the environmental left to suggest our water's never been cleaner, our air has never been cleaner, the land we've got more acreage of forest land than we've ever had.
All of these myths have been bought into because the mainstream media, academia, the institutional liberalism that is America, have sold you on it.
And now you're seeing the cost.
Finally, the cost benefit analysis.
And the cost is not pretty right now.
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Tom, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Earth to Tom, are you there, sir?
Uh this is Spence.
Oh, all right.
Well, Spence.
I'm sorry, I guess they got the names mixed up.
Spence, Tom, sounds alive.
Thank you very much, sir, for taking my call.
It's a privilege.
Uh my privilege.
Uh, I totally agree with what you're saying about ethanol.
I think it's absolute madness.
Uh, number one.
Uh, the only thing you've said that I would disagree with, though, is that uh that the fossil fuels are the ideal fuels.
I think the ideal fuel is nuclear fuel.
I think that is the long-term solution.
It'll it'll it'll provide all of our energy needs for the next three hundred, four years, four hundred years.
It's totally clean, it's cheap, it is the perfect solution for the future.
Now we're the fact the fact of the matter is I think you're right on a lot of fronts, but the upfront cost to build a nuclear power plant much higher than a coal-fired power.
Yes, but it's got to be paid.
It's gonna have to be paid.
Well, what are we gonna do?
Wait until there's no oil left?
I mean, when are we gonna do it?
No, no, no, no, no.
The United States of America is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Yeah.
We just have a bias against coal.
Yes.
I agree with you, the nuclear needs to move forward.
I mean, France gets 70% of their power from nuclear.
So I I agree with you, but I'm just saying we need to be aware that you're going to have to amortize the cost over a longer period with the nuclear.
Number one, if we would do that, we should have done it ten or fifteen years ago, if we would uh go on a massive program to build hundreds of plants.
I mean, they can build them by my house.
They can build one to the north, south, and east and west of me.
I will be thrilled.
Right.
Because if we do this, we can begin to sell our fossil fuels.
We could turn our whole balance of trade deficit around.
This could be the biggest crisis in the history of this country, or it could be the biggest blessing.
Opportunity.
No, no, I I I couldn't agree more.
I really do believe this is an opportunity, and I've been I've been somewhat uh cautiously optimistic as of late, because the most important aspect coming out of this is the the the diminishing of the influence of the environmental cartel.
And here we go with uh Minnesota's real anchor man, I am Jason Lewis having more fun than a human being should be allowed, filling in for El Rushbow, talent on loan from the big guy.
He will be back on Monday, uh Rush Limbaugh.com up and running.
Check that out.
Great website, 1-800-282-2882, the contact line as always on this open line Friday.
I mean, I I really do think the other political ramifications coming from this, and you hate to have to go through this pain of an energy crisis, but this is a government-induced manufactured energy crisis.
It's a little bit like deliberate congestion when the liberal left refuses to build highways or a new beltway in your town.
Uh there's a lot of of deliberateness to this.
That is to say, they know that if they had induced congestion, it's going to get more people to ride their mass transit boondoggle.
Do you realize how much money is diverted from your federal gasoline tax to mass transit?
I believe since 1982, about 20 percent, about a fifth of all the gas gas taxes go into the mass transit account.
Now think how insane this is.
You and I pay federal gas taxes, it goes to Washington, and they dis they choose to say, well, let's send money from Utah to Florida, let's send money from New York to California.
Oh, here's a novel idea.
We've got the interstate system built.
States can cooperate on upgrading their interstates.
Why don't we eliminate the federal gas tax, uh, the federal gasoline tax and return the money, if we don't eliminate it, at least in block grants, directly to the states in proportion to who paid the most and let them decide where to build or what to build.
A lot of these mass transit boondoggles and this new this new, you know, liberal smart growth, new urbanist obsession with heavy and light rail, especially light rail, whether it's Houston or, you know, San Diego.
You can go any place outside the congested Northeast corridor, and these things are fiscal rat holes.
People love their automobiles, but there's an agenda from the new urbanist cities without suburbs, and by God, they're gonna get you out of that car.
And five dollar a gallon gasoline doesn't help or doesn't hurt, I should say.
Just ask Tom Friedman, the energy dilettant from the New York Times.
He thinks he thinks it's great.
The liberal left has been preaching for a three, four dollar gasoline tax for how many decades?
That's that's liberalism.
You want more of that, vote left.
That hasn't been the case until recently, but maybe some people are getting their environmental epiphany here.
Or should I say capitalism epiphany, that they're realizing that this stuff has deleterious effects on human beings, Americans, the cost of energy, the cost of living index.
I mean, these folks in the environmental green movement are busybodies.
They think they were put on earth to tell you how to lead your life.
And they'll do and say anything to get the power.
CBS News and the Associated Press were quick to regurgitate claims that global warming has increased the intensity of earthquakes five fold.
But according to the American thinker, had either one of them taken the time to investigate, they would have discovered that both the sources, facts, and credentials were on tenuous ground, to say the least.
apparently CBS is getting their news the same old-fashioned way they make it up.
Two guys in a fax machine, as Kit would say.
The scientist that was behind the study believes the Earth is going to explode from global warming at some point.
This will never end because these people are on board, but you're fighting back, according to the polls.
By the way, I give you a good microcosm or a good example of what I'm talking about.
If you if you talk about literally the environmental movement, and if you want to talk about what's brought $4 a gallon gasoline, it's the environmental movement.
I hate to be so blunt about this.
Now, granted, I will concede that the Federal Reserve's misguided easy money policy literally has created a couple of things now running through the economy, inflation at every level, including oil, uh, and also some bubbles.
We had the tech stock bubble in the 1990s.
Now we've got a housing bubble that's that burst.
I mean, the the bubbles usually happen because the Fed creates money, it goes to the credit markets first.
That's how the Fed expands the money through the banking system, and they get the money and they start to invest the money.
And they invest the money and look for an asset.
They look for tech stocks in the 1990s when we had some easy money.
That bubble burst, and instead of clamping down on interest rates and getting getting the supply of money so it produces a stable value on the dollar and not fine-tuning unemployment levels under Humphrey Hawkins or any other silly piece of legislation, they expanded the money supply again.
You know, they bought more treasury bills on the open market again, inflating or devaluing the dollar.
So then we had a housing bubble, which is a classic symptom.
An asset bubble is a classic symptom of easy money.
So when that happened, what do they do?
They not only continued in these artificially low interest rates, they decided to go in and bail out some investment banks, which is a horrible thing to do because you're trying to cure.
You know, you can't have capitalism without failure.
You've got to have some pain along with a success.
Because if you don't, people will repeat the same mistakes, the same malinvestment.
People have to pay for a poor choice for a poor investment.
It's creative destruction, as Joseph Schrumpter used to say.
So the point here, you've got to throw that in, the easy money from the Fed.
But you've got all these fiscal stimuli stimuli, too.
The ethanol nonsense, the environmentalist controlling supply that has had a huge impact on the cost of living in America.
And why, quite frankly, re people are mad at Republicans.
What about our tough defense?
What about the war?
What about our tax cuts?
Well, you know what?
College is going up because we subsidize college, and when you subsidize something, you actually get an increase in price, believe it or not, because they know the government's going to bail them out.
Healthcare is going up because we're refusing to reform health care in a serious way.
So we've got the government picking up the tab for 47% of the health care costs.
Guess what happens?
People get a freebie, they go to the emergency room, they go visit their doctor twice, three times, what's the problem?
I'm not paying for it, and the cost of health care goes up.
The energy crisis, which is manufactured through the ethanol mandates, manufactured by not drilling, uh, manufactured through easy money, it's a government-induced crisis.
Government is still the problem.
None of this has to happen.
But some people want it to happen.
They want it to happen because they think, oh, I know.
This is a good way to control people.
We've got an energy crunch.
Therefore, we're going to have to conserve.
We're going to have to tell the next generation, a la Jimmy Carter, that they're just going to accept a lower standard of living than ours.
That's what we're going to hand off to our children.
That's the American way, isn't it?
You can have to conserve, ride the bike to school, ride the bike to work.
You have to ride mass transit, socialize transportation.
You're even going to have to change your light bulbs.
That's why I think I think this whole fluorescent light bulb issue is a perfect microcosm of the busybody state, the nanny state in which we live.
Now, the the liberals, and this this goes back to the economic axiom that says basically if something is viable on the marketplace, it doesn't need a subsidy, it doesn't need a mandate.
If something is not viable in a market system, no mandate or no subsidy will make it so.
Now, whether or not people want compact fluorescent light bulbs in their homes, in their businesses, is up to them.
And if they really do save energy as much as they claim they don't, they do save some energy, but not what people claim because of a number of reasons.
Why people will buy them.
Why do you need the government to ban incandescent light bulbs and force us to buy light bulbs laden with mercury?
Why would we do such a thing?
Because there's because people, the manufacturers of these bulbs, want a larger market share.
And so the American way is now go to the government and mandate a market share.
Instead of getting out there and competing.
You have just raised the cost of living on a lot of poor folks that can't buy an incandescent bulb for fifty cents and now have to spend three, four bucks on a CFL that has mercury in it.
You can't go fishing up here in Minnesota without some green environmentalist telling you, Did you check that fish for mercury?
And now they're advocating that we import mercury into our home.
Let me tell you something.
I've got a little handout from Ramsey County, which is a county uh that engulfs St. Paul and the Twin Cities, home of the uh GOP convention up here in uh September, early September.
What should I do if I break a fluorescent bulb?
Quote, if you break a fluorescent bulb, keep people and pets out of the room.
Open the windows and exterior doors to vent the mercury vapor to the outside for about 15 minutes before you clean up.
Put on rubber gloves, rubber gloves, and carefully pick up the fragments, glass, and any powder with sticky tape.
Once you've picked up any visible pieces, you can then vacuum.
Place all the pieces and used cleanup materials, including the vacuum bag, in a plastic bag, seal it.
Call your local hazardous waste facility for disposal instructions.
Wash your hands after you clean up.
If you break more than two fluorescent bulbs, or if you are unsure what to do, call the Minnesota duty officer at so-and-so-so-and-so, any time, day or night.
But don't worry, the amount of mercury in these bulbs is minuscule, right?
You know, my old buddy Dr. John Lott, author of Freedom Nomics, he came up with a good idea.
I actually was thinking about this.
The news media has been so obsequious towards these environmentalists.
They're all over these CFLs.
It'll be an energy saver.
It's a good thing.
You gotta pay five times as much, but what the heck?
It's a good thing.
It's good for the environment.
And I thought maybe we ought to just, you know, ship them a broken CFL in your favorite newsroom and see those newsroom scatter.
Now I wouldn't advocate that.
Don't.
It's not that's not nice.
But my old buddy John said, you know, wouldn't it be fascinating if a member of Congress who was opposed to this bulb mandate, again, a beautiful symbolism of what the environmental movement is all about, goes to the to the house floor, the well of the house on C span.
Takes a CFL bulb.
Don't do it on C SPAN for uh uh what do they call those uh I can't remember orders or something where nobody's in the in the well.
Wait till you've got dare I say the State of the Union.
No, no, no, no.
But when you wait till you got folks in the House of Representatives, drop the bulb and watch the people scatter.
And then see what you have to do to clean out the House of Representatives.
And then tell me the mercury in these bulbs.
Ah, don't worry about it.
That's just it's just uh hyperventilating by the uh right wing reactionaries on Talk Radio.
I'm Jason Lewis, Infor Rush.
Back to the phones we go when we return on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882, back with me, Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, filling in for the big guy, L. Rushbow, he's back on Monday, but right now Tom and uh let's see, Tom and Lancaster, who I called Spence the last time, I think.
You're out next on the program.
Hi.
Hi, how are you doing today?
Good, sir.
Hey, um, first off, I would like to thank you, Rush, all conservative talk radio show show hosts out there for influencing our younger generation.
Um my son joined the Marine Corps on Father's Day, the best Father's Day I could ever have gotten.
And part of it is because of the influence you guys have on the younger generation.
So thank you.
Well, well, that's very nice.
And uh God bless your son.
Thank you.
Well, listen, um, you know, the government is talking about, or those in government are talking about uh, you know, limiting the hedging, the uh, you know, the speculation, all that.
I think they'll look in house.
Because doesn't the post office offer the forever stamp?
Yeah, you know, look, of course.
Of course.
I mean, I mean, how ridiculous is this whole thing right here?
It is what drives capitalism.
Of course it is.
Speculation is the byproduct of free markets.
It is not driving anything.
It is kind of you know, people are saying it's the speculators that are driving uh the cost of oil up.
No, it is the lack of supply and the bet by speculators that supply won't increase that's driving up.
This is only the vehicle, the forward price discovery.
What the speculators are telling us is what they think the price will be going forward if we don't change.
Exactly.
That's all they now is that not a good thing?
I think it's a great thing.
It is a great thing.
That's what that's what built this country.
And it's sending signals.
It's telling the market look, uh you need to get more supply, or the the price for this commodity in December is going to be 30% higher.
That's exactly the price signal that allows free markets to allocate resources more efficiently than a command and control five-year Soviet plan that the Democratic Congress seems to want.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But it's very frustrating how much economic ignorance is out there.
It is, especially in the government that's supposed to uh you know lead us.
But unfortunately, they're they're trying to lead us with all this misinformation.
You got well, and I think there's an ulterior motive.
I mean, you really people are are don't fall into this trap that the Republicans or the conservatives anyway, the free market types, and the liberals both have the same vision.
They just want to get there different ways.
Uh nonsense.
I don't really I don't even think they want more oil and gas on the market.
I think they like high prices.
Uh they've been preaching this for years.
They want energy conservation, they don't want cheap energy.
So it's not a matter of, well, the methodology is the difference.
We both have the same vision.
What's going to be best for the energy markets, what's going to be best for the consumer.
Hogwash.
They want to change your way of life with the most intrusive government you have ever seen.
Chain telling you how high your thermostat could be.
Telling you what kind of car you can drive, what kind of light bulb you have in your house.
This is the most intrusive movement in the history of mankind.
I mean, you know, the former uh re uh Czech Republic president knows of what he speaks here.
And cap and trade, we haven't even talked about that.
You want to know how how uh invidious or or pernicious cap and trade is.
Think about it if we applied it to gasoline or any other uh commodity.
You'd have to buy a gasoline permit to fill up your car.
And then there would be an overall cap and trade, there'd be an overall limit on the total amount of in fact there was an op-ed, I think, in the Wall Street Journal not long ago about this.
We need cap and trade for gasoline, which is the same as cap and trade for CO2.
The government would let you buy carbon permits.
You would have to pay the government in order to buy more gasoline.
Then you would get ration stamps, and that would be your allotment for gasoline.
If you wanted to buy more, you'd have to buy those, buy more.
The only people that get rich there are the speculators in that particular case, the carbon traders.
And then they'd set an overall cap lowering the amount of total gasoline consumption every year.
Same thing with CO2, because eighty-five percent of all the energy we produce emits carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant.
If they're telling us we've got a ration carbon dioxide, they're telling us we have to ration our standard of living.
James and Reston, Virginia, you're up next on the program.
Hi.
Hey, uh Rush makes a fuss about this, and you've been making a fuss about it too.
Um the old-fashioned long fluorescent bulbs also contain mercury.
Yep.
They always have.
They used to be called mercury vapor lamps before mercury became a bad thing to say when you're talking about product.
Right.
And then they switched over to fluorescent.
So it's not just these compact fluorescents that are toxic waste if you've got No, that's a fair point.
Now, how many of those did you recycle?
The the uh the fluorescent bulbs?
The old yeah, the old ones, the old long tube ones.
Always brought them to the toxic waste site at the uh uh a local uh uh local uh recycling facility.
Well, hot damn, you get the environmental defense award of the year there, James.
I'm glad you're green.
I'll guarantee you most people didn't.
I guarantee you most people said, oh, the the bulbs are gone, I'm throwing it away.
If you if you uh do not do that with these bulbs and you're gonna have many more in circulation now that the government has mandated it, you're gonna have more mercury in your landfills and your streams and your rivers than you can shake a stick at because people are not going to do what you did.
And and a lot of people, Kit's saying he doesn't even know you had to.
And that's my point.
A lot of people took those bulbs you just mentioned, and it's a fair point.
They didn't recycle them.
So anyway, it's I'm glad you called, but it's it's not too convincing.
More coming right up after this on the EIB.
All right, let's switch gears a little bit next hour.
I want to talk about the Supreme Court decisions and the spying deal that was cut between the White House and the Congress and the war on terror, that's all coming up.
▲
Export Selection