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July 3, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
July 3, 2008, Thursday, Hour #2
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All right, we are back.
Second hour now underway on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis.
Minnesota's real anchor man with talent on loan from Rush, high atop our well, our mini EIB tower in the at the Northern Command.
Great to be here.
Great to be with you once again.
Rush as always working hard, took a day off, and why not?
You can always check out the latest, though, at Rushlimbaugh.com and he will return on Monday from factcheck.org.
Obama's latest political ad repeats an often stated claim, saying he worked his way through college and Harvard law.
We know Obama took out loans to get himself through school, but the campaign provided information on just two jobs Obama had in those years, and they were both in the summer.
Hmm.
The ad also says he passed a law to move people from welfare to work, slashed the rolls by 80%.
Actually, the Illinois law was required uh was required follow-up to the 1996 Federal Reform Act, real welfare reform act, worked out by the Republican Congress and uh clin the reluctant Clinton.
Interesting, though, uh we talked about welfare reform proving once and for all that there's a moral hazard in transfer payments.
The more transfer payments you have, the more people suddenly are in need of them.
That's how economics work.
Poor people aren't stupid.
But I like this I like this notion that, you know, Barack Obama, and this guy is becoming Clinton-esque.
I mean, you really don't know where he stands on though.
He's flipped on the wiretap issue, he's flip-flopped on public financing of campaigns, he's flip-flopped on now he's actually moving to the center on foreign policy.
Uh believe it or not.
Now, the question is, is he a real McGovernite liberal because he's the most liberal uh member of the U.S. Senate or community organizer for Acorn, for heaven's sakes, how do you get more liberal than that?
Acorn, by the way, if you don't know this group uh Obama started out with, is one of the most, shall we say, I'll be nice here.
Insidious groups around.
They they continually cheat on on voter registration.
They've had a settlement in the state of Washington, I think the largest voter fraud settlement ever, I do believe.
Uh they've been indicted all across the country for registering illegals, registering homeless people, and they get money from you, the taxpayer.
That's acorn.
That's where Barack started.
But nobody knows if he's that Barack or if he's now the new Barack, saying, well, you know, I'm for the wiretapping thing and and uh the Supreme Court decision.
I was in in in favor of that uh Supreme Court decision on the second amendment.
And an abortion, I'll work with you, even though he had a radical view on abortion, even babies born alive, uh he said uh that would be subjected to termination for lack of a better description.
Uh it goes right down the right down the list.
You don't know where the guy is, but now he's saying he worked his way through college and Harvard Law, but according to factcheck.org, the campaign only provides info on two jobs, both in the summer.
Living proof once again of the Democrat version of the work ethic.
Hard work won't kill you, but why take the chance?
1800-282-2882.
Back to the phones momentarily.
Couple couple of other items here, though, on the uh docket.
Oh, the previous caller on war being beneficial or somehow salutary towards economic growth.
Look, you sometimes you have to go to war.
And certainly when three thousand people die in uh lower downtown uh in Manhattan, you you need to respond.
Isn't it amazing how that Iraq is going so well now?
The surge has worked that now the new template for the criticism of the administration is, well, yeah, but look at Afghanistan.
They gotta find something, don't they?
Got a troop shortage in Afghanistan.
How come you're not talking about Iraq anymore?
So sometimes you have to do that.
And we need a military.
I mean, I think it was Washington.
The best way to avoid war is be prepared for war.
Certainly that was the uh the epitome of Reaganism on foreign policy, peace through strength.
We need that.
But let us not delude ourselves that resources the government uses for any purpose.
And that's why they ought to be reserved only for the necessary purposes of keeping us free, can be a net drag on the economy.
People point to World War II got us out of the economy, not the Great Depression.
Well, FDR and his massive redistribution of wealth and which he had to pack the Supreme Court to get passed, or threatened to pack the Supreme Court to get passed.
Uh that didn't get us out of the recession.
That sort of uh redistribution never works.
It's never worked throughout history.
And quite frankly, I would argue as a as a lay economist, I don't think the war got us out of the recession.
I don't think we recovered from that malaise until we got the the end of the nineteen fifties, the post-World War II boom, we started to get a handle on spending and taxes.
Spending dropped precipitously after the war, government spending.
And we finally got a handle on taxes to some degree until they crept back up.
But the point the point here is I remember my parents talking about uh the war and how they had to rely on ration stamps to get the essentials of life.
Whether it was gasoline, whether it was foodstuffs, you name it.
So what you do when government goes on a binge is you ration all the other things that make make life, well, wealthy or make life good or make life sustainable.
That is not the answer to economic growth.
You provide the military or we fund the military we need, whatever that cost is.
But we keep government.
We keep government limited where we possibly can everywhere, so that the resources are devoted to private markets, which can direct them in a much more efficient way, primarily market discipline.
If you're wasting resources in the marketplace, your business shuts down, your enterprise shuts down.
If a government program wasted resources, they get another grant.
That's the fundamental difference.
Speaking of which, soaring gas prices, according to the New York Times today, soaring gas prices and higher tolls seem to be doing for traffic in New York what Michael Bloomberg, his congestion pricing scheme, this is the scheme that Bloomberg wanted to impose on anybody that drove into downtown, into Manhattan, that uh that they would have to pay a price.
Because this new urbanist, uh, anti-automobile, smart growth, global warming obsession, hysteria is embracing these uh uh pseudo pol pseudo republicans like Bloomberg.
Is he I don't even know if he's a Republican anymore.
He's probably an independent by now, isn't he?
Anyway, apparently the soaring gas prices uh are actually reducing the number of cars clogging the city streets.
Oh, hallelujah.
More people are using mass transit.
Well, isn't that wonderful?
Weekday subway ridership up six point five percent in April compared with the same month a year ago.
You know, you're hearing this all over the country.
Now, I you know, in the Northeast congested corridor, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that trains don't make some sense.
But I will tell you a lot of people in the rest of the country, whether it's the upper Midwest or Southern California or the Northwest or the Southeast, don't want to live like the folks in Manhattan, God bless them.
They want space.
They want the American dream, they want to live in a suburb, they want to drive a car, maybe two, maybe three, they want to have a big garage.
That is under assault.
It's under assault by the environmentalists.
It's under assault by the new urbanists.
New urbanism, if you haven't heard, is really a euphemism for uh command and control under the name of saving the environment.
Urban growth boundaries, because we're consuming too much land, so we put up these urban growth boundaries and say you can't move outside this boundary.
You've got to live in a highly congested, high-density, Soviet-style condo next to a mass transit station.
People don't want to live that way.
And that's why the left loves $5 a gallon gasoline.
It gets people out of those nasty cars.
The energy dilettante, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, has been preaching this for years.
He ought to be the poster child.
You ought to see a mugshot of Friedman every time you fill up your gas, your your car.
Because he's the guy that's been preaching the virtue of this.
The rest of his environmental kook buddies.
Meanwhile, the rest of America is going, uh, you know, maybe that drilling in Anwar, where it's dark 57 days out of the year.
Well, maybe that's not such a bad idea after all.
Democrats really have their backs against the walls on this, and the GOP and conservatives need to keep pressing the issue.
But this is about an agenda.
Environmentalism is not about saving the earth.
It's a socialist agenda.
It's going to need world governance.
It's going to have to rain in how much energy you use, which means it's going to have to rain in your lifestyle.
It's going to have to tell you what kind of light bulbs to use, ones with mercury, not without, and that cost more.
It's going to tell you you can't drive your car here.
We're going to end up I mean, think of cap and trade.
They talk about cap and trade where we're going to have carbon taxes, you're going to have to pay a fee to the government, a carbon fee, or then a f a carbon fee to it to to exist to a Solar power plant.
Literally, that's what cap and trade is.
If I want to run my coal-fired power plant, if I want to do this or that and produce energy, oh, I'm I'm polluting too much, therefore I've got to pay a fee to the government initially, and then I got to pay it to the alternative energy producers because they can't survive in the marketplace.
Well, think of cap and trade when it comes to gasoline.
Maybe we ought to have a cap and trade system for gasoline.
You know what it would be?
It would be gasoline rationing.
You get 20 gallons a week, any more than that, you've got to pay a fee.
That's what this is all about.
The politics of austerity.
The pile I mean, really, you think about this.
So we've got a situation where the economy is actually slowing down a bit.
I think we had one percent growth.
We've got a situation where soaring gas prices and the cost of living is hitting American families.
And the the liberal Democrats and their allies in the environmental movement like it because it's getting you out of your car into mass transit.
It's the politics of austerity.
Income inequality goes down when the economy falters.
Did you know that?
When the economy is booming, income inequality rises because there's no limit to incomes in America.
And you have the Uber rich.
Well, that's a good thing.
Everybody gets wealthier, but some people get real wealthy.
Isn't that the American dream?
But when you have a recession, it hits the top the hardest, and therefore, boom, their their incomes come down the most, and then you have a lessening of income inequality.
Your trade deficit goes down when the economy is in the tank because you're not buying as much from overseas.
Pollution goes down.
We're not driving as much.
So here's the answer from the liberal left.
We need a depression that will reduce pollution, reduce global warming gases, it will reduce income inequality and the trade deficit.
Well, isn't that wonderful?
Did you know, and this is going to blow you away.
It certainly does me.
All these mass transit systems, which run massive deficits from Salt Lake City to San Diego to Portland to Charlotte, you name it.
Twin Cities got one.
Twelve mile light rail train.
The deficit is $10 million a year.
It's supposed to be built for $400 million, $450 million, it cost three quarters of a billion.
Now the deficits are 10 million a year.
And for the first time ever, the House of Representatives last week appropriated federal money not used to build the mass transit system.
Right now, your federal gas tax, your federal gas tax goes to the mass transit account of the DOT, and they dole it out to build these light rail systems, to build these trains where people don't want trains.
It's never subsidized the operating deficits.
That was a responsibility of local government.
Well now for the first time, House Liberals passed legislation that would include federal money to support the local mass transit operating deficits.
You want to know why?
Because the fares for transit cover about 22, 23, 25 percent.
About twenty-two here, probably around that where you live.
They can't raise the fares to cover their costs.
No one would ride them.
What was I saying about government resources and how they don't have any market discipline?
You get the picture?
18 after the hour, I'm Jason Lewis, in for Rush Limbaugh, back to the phones we go right after this on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
You know, one of the things, probably the the biggest justification for all this urban growth boundaries and environmentalism and getting you out of your car into the bus or into the train and all the the ridiculous CFL light bulb mandate that's going to put mercury back in your house at $5 a bulb or whatever the cost is going to be.
All of this has this global warming justification now.
And global warming was was always, was always sort of an answer in search of a question.
The question being, you know, well, we've got the answer, global warming.
Oh, what's that's the question?
Oh, yeah, we need a question.
Yeah, the question is what can we do or what can we use to rationalize total control over every American's life.
Lives.
Oh, I know global warming.
And it's a perfect justification.
Have you ever noticed how convenient or how similar all of the old liberal nostrums are going back 50 years long before global warming.
Higher taxes, more government, this or that.
They all conveniently are the same answers to solve global warming.
Wow, it's a mystery, I tell you.
This is becoming rather spooky here, friends.
This is all about equalizing lifestyles.
That's why environmentalism is socialism.
It's uh literally, since the rich use the most energy, they're gonna have to suffer the most.
Well, how convenient again.
Now, not the science, of course, isn't there.
I mean, the science cannot be settled.
You can't have all the evidence shore up on one side.
In fact, you know, a lot of people, in fact, I've mentioned this going back months or years, but global warming is a faith-based religion right now.
A faith-based religion.
I think Deborah Saunders has written on this and a few others.
In fact, there was a great article in the Wall Street Journal this week by Brett Steffins on this, so how global warming is becoming mass neurosis, and how all of the the data is opposed to it.
NASA had to admit that the hottest year on record not long ago was not 1998, it was 1934.
Stephens goes on to say that six of the ten hottest years since nineteen eighteen eighty uh came before nineteen fifty-four.
You've got uh robotic devices in the world's oceans now showing there's been a slight cooling, and since the warming comes from the water, uh this suggests we might be going into a mini ice age.
Certainly a lot of scientists uh, you know, and there are there are literally legions now uh opposed to uh this scientific consensus for global warming.
The Heartland Institute had a big convention in New York City, and you had all of these scientists, PhDs coming out saying, well, the science is not conclusive, and it was as though the conference never occurred.
Oh, but the Arctic sea ice is melting.
Yeah, and the Antarctic sea ice has been expanding.
You can go on and on.
But what Stephens really talks about in this journal article, uh, in a kind of uh kind of uh expands, if you will, on this notion of global warming as being faith-based, something that some of us have said for for a long time.
You think about it this way.
Everything is evidence for global warming.
Everything is if and if everything is evidence for global warming, it is a non-falsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of a supreme being, to paraphrase Mr. Stephens.
What he's saying is, of course it's uh it's a faith-based religion, because what the global warming advocates are saying is you can't disprove it.
If it gets cold, why that's evidence of global warming.
It gets warm, that's evidence of global warming.
Well, that's not science.
That's faith.
And that's all they have to rely on.
Meanwhile, in the name of global warming, gasoline prices are approaching five dollars a gallon.
Your utility bills are going up because of windmills, because of solar power, because of biomass, and ethanol is diverting precious corn for food into inefficient fuel that even the governor of Texas now says that's got to stop.
The governor of Texas, along with a bunch of cattle ranchers down there, are saying, look, we cannot divert, what is it, 130 million tons to inefficient fuel and not expect an impact on food prices?
You bet.
Now you throw in the weak dollar and their easy money policy from the Federal Reserve, which has been a huge disaster, slashing interest rates, literally priming the pump with easy money, and we've got a cost of cost of living index crisis right now.
And only a return to more markets, less regulation, fewer taxes, and sound money is gonna get us out of this.
When I say return to markets, I mean you have the EPA remove the mandate for biofuels, which was what Rick Perry wants.
Anyway, oh, I wanted to get that in because this is really what's driving so much of this command and control left-wing activism coming from your city council, your county commission, your State House, and the United States Congress.
1800-282-2882, Mike in Olympia, Washington, you are on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
That is great.
How are you doing today, Jason?
I couldn't be better because we've got almost as much beautiful water, gorgeous lakes, as they do in Olympia.
Probably just about as much.
Why, I bet there are 10,000 lakes in Minnesota.
Twenty-nine year Air Force special operations ditto's going out to you.
Well, same to you.
Okay, listen, uh, what I wanted to talk about is the fact that oil trading, the speculation that everybody's talking about is not actually on oil.
It's actually on oil contracts.
Right.
You can drive up the price of oil contracts and thus the price of oil, even though there is not necessarily a great increase in the demand for oil.
Well, Kurt, uh, sure.
I mean, when you buy a futures, if you go long or short on a futures contract and the price is higher than otherwise would have been, the spot price is going to follow.
The point, though, with that is that for example, back in the late 70s, early 80s, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market.
And They ran silver from a couple bucks an ounce or something, seven bucks an ounce or something like that, up to fifty bucks an ounce, and gold followed up and went up to eight hundred.
There was no fundamental change in supply and demand for gold, but because people were buying those contracts, they were running up the price.
Right.
Well, but remember oil, all of the water.
Well, that is the marketing right now is oil that was drilled for when the price was twenty-five or thirty or forty or fifty dollars a barrel.
All right, we got to get into this when we come back.
I'm up against a hard break here, but I want to focus on this because it's a crucially important point when we return.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
Back with me, Jason Lewis and Mike from Olympia, Washington on this whole speculation issue, one of my favorite topics because it does uh betray the ignorance of the liberal left in this country.
Now, Mike, I'm not altogether certain the point you were making vis-a-vis speculation.
Speculation exists, but speculation is the marketplace.
That's what the market does.
You're you're right.
The people who produce oil, refine oil, and are bulk users of oil or bulk buyers, deliverers of oil, have a need to be able to stabilize prices to be able to predict their business models.
But when Joe Blow and Mark Money Manager jump into the market and start buying it just because they think it's gonna go up, they in effect are forcing the price up because they buy it at one price, they sell it fifty cents higher, and the money and the folks who are actually uh users of that product have to follow suit in the spot market or hedge against that in the future market.
Look, you you're going to have irrational exuberance in every market.
People buy stocks if people think they're hot.
And if you keep if you keep driving up the price of a stock, sooner or later it's going to come down and you may get burned.
You've got to factor in a couple of other things here quickly, and that is remember in the nineteen nineties we had a tech stock bubble.
There was speculation on technology stocks.
They got too high, they couldn't sustain themselves, they burst.
Then we had 911.
What did the Federal Reserve and the money supply authorities do in both cases?
Central banks cut the interest rates, started started buying up T bills, expanding the money monetary base, and all of a sudden we went from a tech stock bubble to a housing bubble.
Now the housing bubble is burst, prices got so high people couldn't afford them.
What did the Federal Reserve do again?
They slashed interest rates.
The open market committee expanded the money supply, and now we've got a commodity bubble.
And it's not just oil.
And it's not, I mean, you take a look at the monetary influence of all of this, and this sounds like stagflation back in the nineteen seventies to me.
Uh but but I have no doubt that people are speculating, but they're speculating because of this, Mike.
They're saying, look, for the foreseeable future, it doesn't look like we're going to get a handle on inflation and and on oil and gold are dollar denominated, so that's a hedge.
Number number two, uh, I don't believe we're going to get an anwar.
I don't believe we're going to really drill off the outer continental shelf.
I don't believe we're going to increase supply.
So I think the price is going to stay high for a long time.
So I'm going to buy it today.
I I you are absolutely right that the tightness of supply is what makes it it makes it available or makes it possible for people to run up something artificially.
Anything that's got a a fairly tight supply then is very vulnerable to be artificially run up.
And and that's certainly the case.
But what the Fed needs to do if they want to solve this problem is the next time they feel like dumping $70 billion into the economy, they need to go out and sell oil short.
Because when they do that, they're going to run out all the speculators who really have no business in there trying to set the price.
Well, you know, uh look, the the you're talking about the strategic petroleum reserve, they could actually I I've never quite understood why they the strategic petroleum uh reserve right now doesn't sell at the high price and try to go long uh on a s on a on a a uh smaller price, but that sort of arbitrage probably isn't gonna happen there.
The the the point the the point here is when you pull up at a gas station, Mike in Olympia, Washington, and you see somebody as I did the other day in the Twin Cities, filling up their car, then filling up a couple of gas cans, they're speculating.
They're speculating they can get the price today cheaper than they can tomorrow.
When when somebody opens a business, they're speculating.
They're speculating it will work.
When somebody replenishes inventory for their bin business, they're speculating they can resell it at a higher price.
Actually, actually, you're partially right.
But there's a difference between investing and speculating.
When somebody opens a business, they should have a business model and they're investing in themselves and they're investing in their idea.
No, no, no.
I disagree.
I disagree.
They're responding rationally to the threat of inflation and the threat of limited supplies by the environmental cartel.
That's a rational response.
There's no doubt that that provides the environment for it, but at prices...
When this stuff was drilled for, it was drilled for at fifty dollars a barrel and was profitable at fifty dollars a barrel.
Well, then my suggestion to you is go short.
Go short now, sell it, and when this bubble burst, as you're suggesting it will, then you can take those borrowed shares at a lower price and make a big killing.
Absolutely.
I I think in fact it probably is a great idea to go short, but not in the middle of hurricane season.
Well, see, that's the market responding.
And it's responding to inflation and it's responding to the environmental cartel.
If you take the speculators out, and this is what some of the Democrats are suggesting, get those speculators out, uh all you're going to do is move the speculation offshore to Dubai or someplace else and reduce American jobs.
But above and beyond that, then you're only going to have the people who actually take deliver controlling the s the the price.
Is that what you want?
No, I d I'm not saying drive them out by government or by regulation.
I'm saying that when the when the oil price is artificially high, what is it what do the Chinese do?
They subsidized oil in their own country.
Well, okay.
We could spend the same amount of money in our country to to essentially run the speculators out of the market.
Not artificially, they can be there if they want.
No, but no, you don't have to do that.
No, no, no, no, no.
All you all the government has to do is get pardon my French, the hell out of the way.
If you got the regulations like the permitting process for drilling, if you got the the the ability to go and get the oil shale out of the Rocky Mountain West, if you got out off the outer continental shelf in an Anwar where we could replace basically the imports from Saudi Arabia, a million barrels per day, if you got the government off the backs of the energy industry, and this talk about windfall profits is causing the prices to go up as well, and you got inflation in check, I can guarantee you what would happen to the price.
That is the biggest problem is that the supply is so tight because of all the environmental stuff and all the people that just do not understand the impact of oil in their daily lives.
I have no I have no qualms with you.
I'm a hundred percent on going wide open and everybody you know the government getting completely out of the way.
What I'm telling you is you just said a few minutes ago, you don't think we're gonna get Anbar.
I don't think we're gonna get Anwar.
I d I So what what I'm looking at is the only thing that I see that our government can rationally do today, they can't punish the oil companies.
They need to call the oil companies and say, we're going short on Monday morning, and we're gonna go short with with the full force and effect of the United States government.
And when they do that, yeah, I know.
I know, but that now I mean that's like uh Al Gore's idea, I think it was Gore or some other uh lefty that that wanted to have the government actually invest the Social Security Trust Fund in stocks, which is a horrible idea.
I do not want the government and social investors determining the prices in the marketplace.
You're looking at speculation as the problem.
Speculation is the byproduct of an underlying problem.
And the underlying problem is a monetary problem, it is a supply problem, it is a government problem.
Now the only I I can guarantee you, and this is where the Democrats can't have it both ways.
They can't sit here, or liberals sit here and say, Well, gosh, the supply and demand equilibrium is there, or supply and demand shouldn't warrant a price above seventy, eighty dollars a barrel, but those nasty speculators.
You ever notice you ever notice uh people like Representative James Oberstar or Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, you name your favorite ethanol type, they never complain about eight dollar a bushel corn or seven dollar a bushel corn.
They never talk about speculation in that commodity, which is doubled.
That's kind of odd.
It's only oil.
Why?
It's almost as if there's a bias there.
But I digress.
The point the point here is if they say speculation is causing the price to go up, speculation will cause it to go down.
Open up the outer continental shelf won't reduce the price because it will have no effect on supply.
Well, wait a minute.
You just said supply and demand doesn't matter because the speculators are controlling it.
Speculators is a i speculation is a forward pricing mechanism.
It's telling us a signal on what the markets think the price will be, however the length of the contract is.
And if the markets believe we're gonna have more oil, we're gonna have sound money, and we're gonna get the environmentalists off the backs of American production, the speculation the speculators will lower the price tomorrow, long before the supply comes online for the same reason it's high today.
I'm Jason Lewis, gotta go.
More calls when we return on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Don't go away.
1-800-282-2882.
The contact line for the Rush Limbaugh program.
Greeting conversationalists across the Fruited Plain.
I am Minnesota's real anchor man, uh Jason Lewis, America's Mr. Roy, call me what you will, just call Rush Limbaugh back on Monday, the great one celebrating no doubt.
I bet Russia's playing little golf this weekend as well.
I just have a hunch that he's playing a little golf, taking some well deserved time off.
Congratulations to Rush as well for leading the way in this fight against command and control liberalism from environmentalism to taxes to regulation, you name it, Russia's been there for us, and we all appreciate it.
And Lansing, Michigan, Scott, you are next up.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
It's my pleasure.
Well last night I was watching the propaganda broadcasting station to see if I might be able to learn something.
And they had a little show on there about global warming and carbon sequestration and all that happy nonsense.
And they they talked about the you you need seven trees to absorb the carbon that's exhaled by the average person over a course of a year.
And I was wondering what do the big cities do with their new agenda for grouping everybody together when they don't have any trees in there.
So I sort of started thinking, well, but then all on this hot topic of carbon offset credits and everything, maybe we could get the people that don't have any trees to pay carbon offset credits to the people that have more than seven trees per person.
Don't give them any ideas.
Well, trust me, I'm very much against taxes.
I've never seen any redistribution that worked in my favor.
So I'm just trying hard to come up with something that might actually work in my favor.
Well, right, exactly.
The the the bottom line here is by the way, that's what government does to people.
I mean, that's really what big government does.
Sooner or later people say, Well, if you can't beat them, let's join 'em.
And big government begets more big government, and it becomes a very, very vicious cycle, and pretty soon you've got everybody in the wagon and nobody pulling it.
But you know, carbon dioxide is good.
It's not a bad thing.
This is the fundamental fallacy of the of the global warming crowd.
Uh carbon dioxide greens the planet.
It's a good thing.
It's what we exhale.
How could that possibly be a pollutant?
And yet, you know, the these people have convinced the vast majority, I wouldn't say the majority anymore, because uh five dollar a gallon gasoline prices tends to focus the mind on on reason and rationality, but for a long time they they they convinced a lot of people who were greenies that this is this was a crisis.
And they had to manipulate things.
You know, James Hanson, the Galileo of global warming from NASA, who gets even more money for his particular agency every time he screams some sort of some uh sort of sort of a you know apocryphal uh nightmare.
Uh he admitted a few years ago in Scientific American, as I recall, that well, I need to exaggerate a little bit on the dangers of global warming just to get people's attention.
NASA's been exaggerating since day one on this.
Why?
Because they get the money for it.
That's the real dirty little secret in the global warming debate.
How much money of the environmental community or environmental organizations raised on scaring the hell out of uh first graders?
How much money has the government been able to siphon off for global warming research?
I believe the figure, federal, state, and local was six billion we've already spent on climate change studies.
You don't think these people have a vested interest?
Of course they do.
And yet that, oddly enough, is never investigated by the mainstream media.
It's almost as if they're with them on this.
In beautiful North Carolina, uh Todd, I think it's excuse me, it's a Roger, Roger in Todd, North Carolina.
Todd is uh Roger's gone.
Okay, let's try John and Petersburg.
You're up next on the EIB.
Hi.
Hi.
Um little earlier you were talking about public education and the uh founders.
And uh long ago I was kind of astonished to read that uh some of them seem to seem to hint at uh a uh publicly uh supported education like John Jay and uh Benjamin Rush and some of the other ones, uh Thomas Jefferson.
And uh wonder what you thought about that.
They they never had, you know, if you really want to be cynical about this, what they some were early advocates of some sort of local community education in many cases to retrain immigrants, many of them Catholics, by the way, because they didn't didn't necessarily trust them to assimilate the right way, and this was going to do it.
None of them envisioned, though, the behemoth that has become government-run education today.
That did not start until the Progressives and Horace Mann and all of this.
Uh it was not in the Federal Constitution, obviously.
There was no Department of Education, it's not a federal responsibility, and you did not have these massive school districts come into being, quite frankly, until the teachers' unions gain power.
So I would argue I would argue that was not the vision of the Founding Fathers.
The vision of the Founding Fathers was limited government.
I mean, enumerated powers.
You really want to talk about what the vision of our Constitution is.
It's the enumerated powers doctrine that if it's not in the Constitution, the government can't do it.
Instead, we we get into this we get into this this trap that says, well, oh, where do we have these rights or where do I have those rights?
This was the great debate, by the way.
I hate to get too philosophical on you, but this was the great debate between the Federalists and the Antifederalists.
The Antifederalists, everybody praises for, you know, George Mason, Patrick Henry, for getting in there and giving us the bill of rights.
They weren't going to, they were not going to, okay, this new charter, this new Constitution, redo the Articles of Confederation, unless they had a bill of rights.
The Federalists, Hamilton Mattleson, Madison and Jay, said, Wait a minute.
Uh why would you want to tell the government what it can't do when in the body of the Constitution there is no power to do it to begin with?
Right.
And some of some of them warn that if you st you s you uh you start to write down a bill of rights, sooner or later, people are going to look to those as our only rights.
And we're going to be pleading about second amendment rights to the Supreme Court, where where the the Federalists, believe it or not, said, look, if it's not in Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, the government can't do it.
And we need to we need to reinvent that.
Of course, if you rediscover that, if you rediscovered that, we would end up eliminating half of the national charity as uh Bob Barr once said that is now the national government.
Well, may I add one more thing?
Sure.
Um one thing that uh the founders are saying that uh they wanted to uh support public education because they wanted people to remember the deeds of the uh the revolution and the principles of the revolution, also to fit people to carry on their private business and also to teach them virtues, and that's those are things that uh the public education system is failing on.
How ironic, you know, and l let me I mean, not only that, uh where we spend the most.
I mean, if if you take a look at really the Sinequanan of education, it was to provide something free for people who couldn't afford it.
I mean, why think of how absurd this government monopoly on education is for a moment.
Why is it somebody in the suburbs who join whose joint income might be a hundred grand, two hundred grand?
Why do they need a service called public education?
Give them their property taxes back and let them buy their own education.
Well, but we need public education for the poor who can't afford it.
That's where it's failing the most in the inner city.
How ironic where the the the the public education, the very rationale for it, the poor, the inner city, is where it's doing the worst.
We need to free up education in America and and distribute it like we do everything else through the uh price mechanism through the markets and for the vast majority of people, and we'll have a much better product back after this on the excellence and broadcasting network.
I didn't see what the market was doing today.
Uh is it up?
I think it was up sixty, seventy points, something like that.
But yesterday, after the fall of about one sixty-six, down to bear market levels.
Now you talk about speculation.
Uh this is another example of speculation.
Uh the Dow Or pick your favorite index is speculating.
What are they speculating?
They're speculating that Barack gets elected and the capital gains tax goes back up to 28%.
The dividends tax goes back up.
In fact, the dividends tax, I believe, would be just about tripled under Barack's plan.
You would get marginal income tax rates soaring, payroll taxes, Social Security would go up under Barack.
That's what the market is speculating.
And that's what speculators do.
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