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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 mini EIB tower 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 roles by 80%.
Actually, the Illinois law was required was a required follow-up to the 1996 Federal Reform Act, Welfare Reform Act, worked out by the Republican Congress and reluctant Clinton.
Interesting, though, 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 works.
Poor people aren't stupid.
But I like this notion that 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, believe it or not.
Now, the question is, is he a real McGovernite liberal?
Because he's the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate or a 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 Obama started out with, is one of the most, shall we say, I'll be nice here, insidious groups around.
They continually cheat on voter registration.
They've had a settlement in the state of Washington, I think the largest voter fraud settlement ever, I do believe.
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 the Supreme Court decision, I was in favor of that Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment.
And on abortion, I'll work with you, even though he had a radical view on abortion.
Even babies born alive, he said, that would be subjected to termination, for lack of a better description.
It goes 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?
1-800-282-2882.
Back to the phones momentarily.
A couple of other items here, though, on the docket.
Oh, the previous caller on war being beneficial or somehow salutary towards economic growth.
Look, sometimes you have to go to war.
And certainly when 3,000 people die in lower downtown in Manhattan, you need to respond.
Isn't it amazing how 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 got to 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 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 in which he had to pack the Supreme Court to get past or threatened to pack the Supreme Court to get past, that didn't get us out of the recession.
That sort of redistribution never works.
It's never worked throughout history.
And quite frankly, I would argue, 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 into the 1950s, 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 here is, I remember my parents talking about 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 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 they would have to pay a price because this new urbanist, anti-automobile, smart growth, global warming obsession, hysteria,
is embracing these pseudo-Republicans like Bloomberg.
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 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 6.5% in April compared with the same month a year ago.
You know, you're hearing this all over the country.
Now, in the Northeast congested corridor, I'm not going to 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 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 have 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 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, you know, maybe that drilling in Anwar where it's dark 57 days out of the year, 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 rein in how much energy you use, which means going to have to rein 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 carbon fee 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 polluting too much, therefore I've got to pay a fee to the government initially, and then I've 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 got to pay a fee.
That's what this is all about.
The politics of austerity.
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 1% growth.
We've got a situation where soaring gas prices and the cost of living is hitting American families.
And 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 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.
The Twin Cities got one.
12-mile light rail train.
The deficit is $10 million a year.
Supposed to be built for $400 million, $450 million.
It costs 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 the 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 22 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 in Broadcasting Network.
You know, one of the things, probably 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 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 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 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 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 literally, since the rich use the most energy, they're going to have to suffer the most.
How convenient again.
Now, 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, 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 Steffens on this, how global warming is becoming mass neurosis and how all of 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.
Steffens goes on to say that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 came before 1954.
You've got robotic devices in the world's oceans now showing there's been a slight cooling.
And since the warming comes from the water, this suggests we might be going into a mini-ice age.
Certainly a lot of scientists, you know, there are literally legions now opposed to 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 Steffens really talks about in this journal article, and it kind of expands, if you will, on this notion of global warming as being faith-based, something that some of us have said for a long time.
You think about it this way.
Everything is evidence for global warming.
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. Steffens.
What he's saying is, of course 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 $5 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 our easy money policy from the Federal Reserve, which has been a huge disaster, sloshing interest rates, literally priming the pump with easy money.
And we've got a cost of living index crisis right now.
And only a return to more markets, less regulation, fewer taxes, and sound money is going to get us out of this.
When I say a return to markets, I mean you have the EPA remove the mandate for biofuels, which is 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 statehouse, and the United States Congress.
1-800-282-2882, 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.
29-year Air Force Special Operations dittos going out to you.
Well, same to you.
Okay, listen, 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, 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.
They ran silver from a couple bucks an ounce or something, $7 an ounce or something like that, up to $50 an ounce.
And gold followed up and went up to $800.
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, remember, all of the large marketing right now is oil that was drilled for when the price was $25 or $30 or $40 or $50 a barrel.
All right, we've 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 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 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 and 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 going to go up, they in effect are forcing the price up because they buy it at one price, they sell it 50 cents higher, and the folks who are actually users of that product have to follow suit in the spot market or hedge against that in the future market.
Look, you're going to have irrational exuberance in every market.
People buy stocks if people think they're hot.
And 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 1990s, 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 9-11.
What did the Federal Reserve and the money supply authorities do in both cases?
Central banks cut the interest rates, started buying up T-bills, expanding the monetary base, and all of a sudden we went from a tech stock bubble to a housing bubble.
Now, the housing bubble has 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 1970s to me.
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 oil and gold are dollar-denominated, so that's a hedge.
Number two, I don't believe we're going to get an anoir.
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.
You are absolutely right that the tightness of supply is what makes it available or makes it possible for people to run up something artificially.
Anything that's got a fairly tight supply then is very vulnerable to be artificially run up.
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, look, you're talking about the strategic petroleum reserve.
They could actually, I've never quite understood why the strategic petroleum reserve right now doesn't sell at the high price and try to go long on a smaller price.
But that sort of arbitrage probably isn't going to happen there.
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 somebody opens a business, they're speculating.
They're speculating it will work.
When somebody replenishes inventory for their business, they're speculating they can resell it at a higher price.
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.
When you don't have a particular 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, it was drilled for at $50 a barrel and was profitable at $50 a barrel.
Well, then my suggestion to you is go short.
Go short now, sell it.
And when this bubble bursts, as you're suggesting it will, then you can take those borrowed shares at a lower price and make a big killing.
Absolutely.
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, 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 price.
Is that what you want?
No, I'm not saying drive them out by government or by regulation.
I'm saying that when the oil price is artificially high, what did the Chinese do?
They subsidized oil in their own country.
Well, we could spend the same amount of money in our country to essentially run the speculators out of the market.
Not artificially.
They can be there if they want.
No, no, you don't have to do that.
No, 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 ability to go and get the oil shale out of the Rocky Mountain West, if you got out off the outer continental shelf and 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.
100% with you.
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 qualms with you.
I'm 100% 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 going to get Anwar.
I don't think we're going to get ANWAR.
So 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 all the oil companies and say, we're going short on Monday morning, and we're going to go short with the full force and effect of the United States government.
And when they do that, I know.
I know, but that now, I mean, that's like Al Gore's idea.
I think it was Gore or some other lefty 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 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 $70, $80 a barrel.
But those nasty speculators, you ever notice?
You ever notice people like Representative James Oberstar or Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, you name your favorite ethanol type, they never complain about $8 a bushel corn or $7 a bushel corn.
They never talk about speculation in that commodity, which has 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 here is if they say speculation is causing the price to go up, speculation will cause it to go down.
You can't say, they say, well, gosh, drilling an anoir won't reduce the price.
Opening 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.
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 going to have more oil, we're going to have sound money, and we're going to get the environmentalists off the backs of American production, 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.
Got to 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 anchorman, Jason Lewis, America's Mystery.
Call me what you will.
Just call Rush Limbaugh back on Monday, the great one celebrating no doubt.
I bet Rush is playing a 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.
Rush has been there for us, and we all appreciate it.
In Lansing, Michigan, Scott, you are next up.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
It's my pleasure.
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 in there about global warming and carbon sequestration and all that happy nonsense.
And they talked about 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 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 them.
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 global warming crowd.
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, these people have convinced the vast majority.
I wouldn't say the majority anymore because $5 a gallon gasoline prices tends to focus the mind on reason and rationality.
But for a long time, they convinced a lot of people who were greenies that this was a crisis.
And they had to manipulate things.
You know, James Hansen, the Galileo of global warming from NASA, who gets even more money for his particular agency every time he screams some sort of apocryphal nightmare, 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 has 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 have the environmental community or environmental organizations raised on scaring the hell out of 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 $6 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, Todd, I think it's, excuse me, it's a Roger, Roger in Todd, North Carolina.
Todd, Roger's gone.
Okay, let's try John in Petersburg.
You're up next on the EIB.
Hi.
Hi.
A little earlier you were talking about public education and the founders.
And not long ago, I was kind of astonished to read that some of them seem to hint at a publicly supported education, like John Jay and Benjamin Rush and some of the other ones, Thomas Jefferson.
And I wonder what you thought about that.
They never had, you know, if you really want to be cynical about this, 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 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.
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 gained power.
So 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 get into this trap that says, well, 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 Anti-Federalists.
The Anti-Federalists, everybody praises for George Mason, Patrick Henry, for getting in there and giving us the Bill of Rights.
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, Madison, and Jay, said, wait a minute.
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 them warn that if 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 the Federalists, believe it or not, said, look, if it's not in Article I, Article II, Article III, the government can't do it.
And 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 Bob Barr once said, that is now the national government.
May I add one more thing?
Sure.
Well, uh 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 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 the public education system is failing on.
How ironic.
You know what I'm saying?
Let me, I mean, not only that, where we spend the most.
I mean, if you take a look at really the Sinekwanon 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 whose joint income might be $100,000, $200,000, 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 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 distribute it like we do everything else through the 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 in Broadcasting Network.
I didn't see what the market was doing today.
Is it up?
I think it was up 60, 70 points, something like that.
But yesterday, after the fall of about 166, down to bear market levels.
Now, you're talking about speculation.
This is another example of speculation.
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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