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July 3, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:15
July 3, 2008, Thursday, Hour #3
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And thank you, Johnny Donovan.
Great to be back.
Third hour now up and running on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Minnesota's real anchorman, talent on loan from Rush.
My thanks once again to everybody, Kit and Mike back in New York.
We've got Steve Verznick and Jess over here helping me get the program up and running from the Northern Command.
And I appreciate everybody at EIB and what they do when I fill in with all the help.
So, phone number is always 1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program, rushlimbaugh.com as well.
Rush will be back on Monday.
I'm dead serious, though, when you talk about the market speculating.
The market is, what, SP up 1.38 right now, I think.
I don't know.
I haven't seen what the Dow is doing today yet.
The bottom line here is that's what markets do.
There is no such thing as, well, here's the supply and demand market, and here are the speculators.
No, they are one and the same.
The speculation is a byproduct.
It is a signal, a forward pricing mechanism or forward discovery, however you want to phrase it, of what investors, what the auction, that is the market, thinks will happen to a commodity.
And by the way, again, why is it nobody is worried about soybean futures?
They're skyrocketing.
Worried about wheat or corn futures thanks to ethanol and inflation that have gone through the roof.
Why is it that none of these politicians want to rein in that speculation?
I'm a little concerned about that.
Why is it just oil?
Because they've got a bias against energy.
They've got a bias against anybody that actually produces something of wealth.
Surprised they don't have a bias against farmers.
Farmers don't need subsidies.
Farmers don't need ethanol.
They can produce without it.
That's the best way to handle most products.
But there's politics, and politics seems to me to trump markets these days.
And when it happens, we get into trouble.
Just like the trouble we're into now with healthcare, which is you know that 47% of the health care bought in the United States is bought by government.
Who controls college tuition?
Well, you say it's the university system.
No.
The majority of universities are public.
They're controlled by government.
And since you've got a third-party payer, student loans, direct government subsidies, they're literally buying down the waste and abuse that is involved in most universities.
Therefore, they don't have to cut their price.
They don't have to trim the fat and lower tuition because they can have the government, the third party, bail them out, not unlike healthcare.
When somebody else is picking up the tab, you don't have to be efficient.
And that's what government does.
You talk about food inflation.
Clearly, government controls the central authority that is the monetary authority.
That's what's causing that.
So all of those issues, all of those issues, are not a problem of the marketplace or speculators.
They're a problem of government intervention.
And I'm telling you that it may very well be that the stock market is responding to what will happen in a Barack Obama presidency with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.
The president's tax cuts will expire.
That will be the first thing that will happen.
That will result in the largest income tax or the largest tax increase in history, in history.
Americans would have paid an additional $1.3 trillion in taxes had it not been for the president's tax cuts.
If they're allowed to expire at the end of 2010, which all the Democrats say will happen, Americans will pay about $280 billion more in taxes each year.
Now, on top of that, by the way, Barack Obama's got another $1.4 trillion he wants to spend, which means he's going to have to raise another, what, five percentage point hike in the personal income tax rate, 4.6, something like that.
He's also going to jack up the Social Security payroll tax, 12.4%.
Employers don't pay that.
You pay the entire 12.4% for FICA taxes.
Why?
Because that other 6.2 paid by the employer could go towards your salary if they weren't paying for it.
So that price is the payroll tax is going up.
The dividends tax is going to triple.
The capital gains tax is going up.
The estate tax is coming back with a vengeance in 2011.
The child credit is going to be cut back.
The marriage penalty reimposed.
All the while, my friends, government is still collecting enough revenue, in fact, a little bit more than the historical average at about 19% of GDP.
If you measure our national income, and for talk radio purposes, national income and GDP are synonymous, the government consumes just at the federal level, almost 20% of everything we earn.
Now, you add federal, state, and local to that, and the government is pushing 35%, 36, 37% of our national income.
You know, that nice summer breeze you're feeling right about now is the founding fathers spinning in their graves at a government at all levels consuming close to 40 percent of income in this country.
But at the federal level alone, they're at about 19 percent of GDP.
That's above the historical average.
We've got a federal budget of $3.1 trillion.
Where is the crisis for more money?
There is no crisis for more money.
Raising the payroll tax on Social Security will do one thing, turn Social Security into a welfare program like they've done with Medicare.
Do you know they're now means testing Medicare?
They've got extra surcharges and fees if you make too much money, and therefore you're going to pay more as a Medicare recipient than others.
That's exactly what Barack wants to do, what the Democrats want to do with Social Security.
Raising the payroll tax, I might add, will not bail it out.
I mean, it never has.
You can go through all of the payroll taxes that were increased since time immemorium in the Social Security plan, and it's never bailed it out.
The bottom line, we've got a demographic problem with Social Security, and it doesn't run out in 2041.
It runs out in 2017.
That's when the trust fund will take the IOUs that are sitting in a filing cabinet in Virginia and turn those into the Treasury and say, hey, we need cash now.
Where are they going to get it?
That's in, what, 10 years?
Less than 10 years.
But when I say Social Security will be turned into a welfare program, which it wasn't intended to be, it was supposed to be a pay-as-you-go system.
The dirty little secret is the wealthy right now don't get back as much in benefits as they pay in payroll taxes, even limiting the payroll tax to $100,000 of income.
The reason is the benefits formula is not skewed upward that high.
What the Barack plan will do will be to exacerbate this so that you'll pay more and get even less, turning it into yet another welfare program.
Ironically, probably it will have less support going forward, which might not be a bad idea, come to think of it.
Yeah, I mean, FDR himself never even envisioned this.
His idea wasn't to make this a welfare program.
Otherwise, it never would have passed.
And that's ⁇ I mean, how are increasing the payroll taxes going to create a robust economy?
How is he increasing the capital gains, the dividends tax, marginal income tax rates?
How is that ever going to create a robust economy?
If that were the case, the former Soviet Union would have been an economic juggernaut.
If government spending can revive an economy, Eastern Europe wouldn't have collapsed.
And yet we have to learn that experiment over and over again.
Meanwhile, on this July 4th, the Washington Post now reports a shortage of troops in Afghanistan.
One particular chairman, the Navy admiral, I should say, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he doesn't have enough troops I can reach for, not enough brigades I can reach for and send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq.
Hmm.
Admiral Mullen said military commanders are looking at the prospects for sending additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009, but only if conditions in Iraq continue to improve, continue to improve.
Hmm, they're improving?
Gee, amazing.
The surge might be working.
You know what's fascinating about this?
I can just see what's going to happen, though.
I can just see it already.
See, Afghanistan is now, we're bogged down in Afghanistan.
This is what people forget about the whole Iraq debate.
When we were still in Afghanistan before the invasion of Iraq, the New York Times and a bunch of liberals were saying, we're getting bogged down in Afghanistan, sure enough, long before Iraq.
Barack Obama has switched his view on the wiretap issue, too, along with a number of other issues.
It seems to me that he voted against it.
Yes, he voted to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies in a Senate vote going back a few months.
Now, since they passed the warrantless wiretap bill, although it's still a bad idea because it still requires the commander-in-chief to run hat in hand to the FISA court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, this wiretap bill wasn't perfect, probably the best we could get.
But I've never quite understood how the United States of America, for 200 years, spied on its adversaries without a FISA court.
We didn't have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or Surveillance Act until 1978.
So all those commanders-in-chief, all those presidents from FDR to Lincoln who were opening mail and spying on people and Bobby Kennedy authorizing wiretaps, they were all, they all should have been indicted for civil liberty violations.
Dare we say war crimes?
Well, no, there has always been a dichotomy in American jurisprudence, American law.
And the dichotomy was if you're spying for political gain or on political enemies, that is wrong.
It's against the law, and you will be caught, prosecuted, and probably removed from office.
If, however, you are spying, including warrantless wiretaps, in order for national security or for national security, that's always been legal in this country because it's a function of the commander-in-chief, Article III, and the courts don't fight wars, and the courts don't spy.
You know, people are always saying, well, gosh, well, what's going to happen if they start spying on us and say it's national security?
Well, when they use the information they gather, it will be found out they weren't spying for national security and they will be punished.
And at the very least, my friends, you can throw the bums out of office.
And we've done that time and time again if people abuse the National Security Authority.
We've done it.
I mean, people talk about Nixon.
Nixon did not, his tenure did not end well.
Although a lot of presidents prior to Nixon were using all sorts of wiretaps.
But the bottom line, even when we passed FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, even when the FISA law itself came into being, and now we said we've got to go to the judiciary to get the okay to spy on incoming communications from al-Qaeda, even when we got that, Jamie Gorlick testified, quote, the case law supports that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.
A 2002 Court of Review opinion declared that FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional powers.
I mean, you've got presidents, even I don't need to go further, but the Clinton administration, their interpretation was they could still spy.
The reason being you need those tools if you're in a war or if you're trying to stop another attack on American soil.
And the bottom line here is, it has been seven years this July 4th, seven years almost since 9-11.
And we have not been attacked again.
And we have not been attacked because the president took this as a war and not a crime.
And he took the precautions necessary, including these warrantless wiretaps that have been invaluable.
Now, people can argue they don't like it, and the civil libertarians can go around preening.
But the fact of the matter is there hasn't been another attack, and that ain't beanbag, folks.
1-800-282-2882, your calls when we come back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Jason Lewis.
Don't go away.
Back now on the Rush Limbaugh program with Minnesota's Real Anchorman, Talent on Loan from Rush.
I'm Jason Lewis.
Thanking Rush once again for the privilege of filling in.
Always a special day, especially this day, July 3rd.
Kind of an open line Thursday on a Friday because we're celebrating the July 4th weekend.
Remember to get those flags out.
Always nice to see down a beautiful boulevard.
Well, before the light rail line and mass transit got a hold of everything.
But before that, you could drive your car down a beautiful suburban boulevard and see all those flags sitting out there.
Isn't that nice?
1-800-282-2882 in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Here's Mike.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how you doing today?
I'm doing well, sir.
I got a question that nobody's been able to answer for me.
I think I got a pretty good handle on speculation.
Price of a barrel of oil today, you know, two years down the road will be $136, $137 a barrel.
But yet, as your one caller mentioned earlier, the barrel of oil they're refining today may have only cost them $60 or $70 for that barrel.
Yet every time the price of a barrel of oil goes up, the next day the oil companies raise the price of gasoline accordingly.
But yet they're not going to be refining that oil for a couple of years down the road, whereas the oil they're refining today, they may have only paid $80 for it.
So why are they charging us every time a barrel of oil goes up when the oil they're actually refining everybody?
First thing you've got to separate are the oil companies and the gasoline retailers.
The gasoline retailers are usually independents.
In fact, Exxon's getting out of the retail business entirely, and they were one of the last companies in it.
So you've got two different situations there.
The gasoline retailers, where you buy the gas, are essentially jobbers.
They used to be oil jobbers, the wholesale level.
Now they're retailers.
But call them what you will.
They're wholesalers, for lack of a better term.
They buy the inventory and then they resell it for a profit.
Now, the fundamental question here is, are you going to stay in business or are you going to go out of business?
If you're going to go out of business, you can sell the oil you bought for a small markup, a small margin, regardless of what the replacement cost is.
But if you want to stay in business, the only cost, any wholesaler, and it doesn't matter whether you're selling gallons of gasoline or widgets or doesn't matter what product you're buying.
If you're a wholesaler and the cost of your inventory is, say, $100 today and the cost to replace it is going to be $150, you're going to sell it for $170, even though what you've got on the shelf is $100.
And the reason is if you don't sell enough to replace your inventory, pretty soon you're left with no inventory.
Oh, well, that was pretty simple.
It just didn't make sense to me.
It sounded like maybe it was some kind of gouging because the oil companies would jack up the price of their product that they sold to the independents for the price that they're paying for oil two years ago.
I get this all the time.
It really is indicative of somebody that hasn't been in the wholesaling business.
I come from a family business background and we were wholesalers, and that was the case.
Let's say you've got a gasoline station with a big tank of gasoline beneath the pump, and let's say we'll narrow it down to make it easy.
But let us suppose that they bought that for $75 in the old days.
So they got a tank full of gasoline for $75.
Now the price goes up to $105 to replace it.
But they bought it for $75, so why don't they sell it for $85?
It'd still be $10.
Why don't they sell it for $100?
That'd be a 25% margin.
That'd be healthy, right?
Because they want to refill the tank so they can stay in business.
And if you sold it for $100, but it costs you $105 to buy the next batch, you're going to only buy 90% worth of the tank.
And if it goes up again, pretty soon your inventory gets whittled down and down and down because you don't have the revenue to buy at the replacement cost.
Yeah, I can understand that, but it seemed to me that it would be less of a shock, buddy, if the gasoline didn't jump up that fast.
I mean, would they do the same thing if, say, tomorrow the price of a barrel of gas went down to 80 bucks a gallon?
How quick would it take for these guys to say, well, since it's going down, I'm going to have to lower mine down to stay competitive.
I'm going to keep it way up there because I'm two years down the road.
I'm still going to be paying this kind of money for that gasoline.
Funny you should mention that.
Ask Dr. Lewis.
The bottom line is: as long as you allow the price mechanism to work and the markets to work, the price will come down.
Because as you point out, it's a great question.
Okay, now say the price goes down and they bought this, you know, they bought the gasoline and they're selling it for an exorbitant fee and now the next replacement tank is much lower.
Will they lower it?
Well, not if they don't have to.
But if this gas station across the street says, you know what, I don't need an 80% gross margin.
I can live off 70%.
They'll lower it.
And then they'll lower it.
And then they'll lower it.
And that's why you had cheap gasoline all throughout the 1990s.
The supply was plentiful.
And literally, you had a price war where investing in some of these companies was not a good investment.
So it will work.
Now, here's the dirty little secret.
In Wisconsin and Minnesota and a number of other states, you've got a number of these retailers, independent retailers in gasoline and others, who have lobbied Congress.
And here's where problems start when the government gets involved.
It lobbied not Congress, but the state legislatures to have a minimum gasoline price.
I'm not making this up.
They don't want Sam's Club to come in there and have cheap gasoline to put them out of business.
So literally, in a number of states, there is a price below which you cannot lower the price.
Once again, it's not the market.
The market will lower the price.
It's people lobbying the government for favors that ends up hurting consumers.
This is the lesson of the day.
You get the government out in every facet, and this problem will take care of itself.
You know, I would be remiss if I did not mention and praise the brave Colombian soldiers that freed the American hostages.
This really is an amazing development.
You've been seeing all day today.
And this is the way to handle communist insurgents, I guess.
I mean, the Colombian military rescued Ingrid Betancourt and three American contractors who had been held hostage, I should say, by this outlandish communist group, FARC, as you know.
And it really is inspiring.
14 hostages held by the country's communist rebels, three of them are three U.S. military contractors, 11 Colombian soldiers and policemen.
The president of Colombia, Mr. Uribe, has been very, very tough with these folks.
He has not settled with them or negotiated with them, even though they've been getting aid, of course, from where?
Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, the darling of the Hollywood left.
You know, this brings up, I guess, well, I mean, might as well talk about it, and that is the Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
These guys are the good guys.
We ought to be encouraging trade and commerce with Colombia.
You've got a situation down there in South America where the commies are on the march in Venezuela and Bolivia, a whole host of places, and Colombia is reaching out to the United States saying, let's have a free trade deal.
Let's do something.
And the Democrats refuse.
And remember, there's already a duty on American exports to Colombia.
Colombian imports come in here almost de facto duty-free.
So it would benefit the United States to have this free trade deal.
There are a whole host of reasons to do it.
But the bottom line, I shouldn't say the bottom line, but certainly one of them is to aid Colombia in their fight against the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia or FARC getting aid from Venezuela.
Remember that, by the way, remember that.
The country giving aid to FARC is Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the darling of the Hollywood left, and that particular group getting aid from Venezuela, and indirectly the Hollywood left, is taking Americans hostage in Colombia.
Oh, and these same people oppose the free trade agreement with Colombia.
I just wanted to get that in on this or before the show was over today.
Let's try Russell in Fort Worth, Texas.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Russell dropped it.
Let's try.
Let's see here.
Bill in Salt Lake City.
Bill in Salt Lake City, you're up there.
Hello, Jason.
How are you?
Good, sir.
How are you?
Keep up the good work.
Love your program, okay?
Need to add to your story about speculators and futures marks on crude oil, okay?
The piece that I don't think the public understands out there is the margin that is required to be put up for a purchase on the futures contract.
You had a great example of the guy that drives into the service station and fills up his car in two five-gallon cans.
Those two five-gallon cans are speculation.
What did he pay for those two five-gallon cans?
He paid 100% of the value.
When you go to the futures market to buy one crude oil contract, that's 1,000 barrels, 1,000 barrels at $140 a barrel is $140,000 worth of value.
A speculator can hold that contract for about $10,000.
I'm in favor of the speculators.
I want them all to be in there, but I want them to pay a fair margin.
Well, do you think that's true they get out of this?
This small margin is what drives this thing to extremes.
A couple of points.
Would you apply that to the farmer?
Farmer uses the contracts.
They'll go short on corn.
They want to lock in a price at $7 a bushel.
Should they have to pay the entire thing when they don't have their crops yet?
Absolutely.
If you're buying in the market, if you're buying in the market, you should pay a reasonable margin.
Well, you've got to remember that these operate as insurance products, too.
Hey, it applies there.
It'll get out of whack.
Well, premiums aren't the cost of it.
In fact, far enough in history, they say that the socket market crash of 1921 or 1929 was precipitated by low margins in the market.
Well, what is it?
You've got to understand something.
Speculation is a price signal.
Now, the more difficult you make it to speculate, the less the signal becomes apparent.
And I happen to think that actually speculation, I think it's a fool's gold.
I mean, some of these people buying in are going to get burned just like they did in the tech stock bubble and the housing bubble and everything else.
So they do so at their own risk, and we shouldn't be in the business of bailing them out.
We shouldn't have bailed out Bear Stearns and the mortgage-backed securities nonsense.
We shouldn't be having a housing bailout.
I say, you know, let them profit and let them suffer if they make a malinvestment.
But to take away the ability for the market to send a signal, even though it's leveraged, as you say, I think is actually a bad idea because we don't get those signals then.
Or we get them in a money.
Pardon me.
But the margin should be more than the modest 10%.
To hold that 140,000 barrel contract only costs about $10,000.
That leverage is what's hurting us very, very badly.
I don't think it's – what makes you think it's hurting us?
I mean, what the market is saying and quickly is you need to quit inflating or debasing the currency, and we need more oil to come online.
Without this sense of urgency and this forward pricing signal, we would literally be sitting here twiddling our thumbs while we'd have a massive energy crunch going forward.
Jason, there is no physical shortage of crude oil in the world.
Right now, we consume about physical.
There is no physical shortage of crude oil in the world.
Right now, we consume more than we produce, and the International Energy Agency in Paris just said that was going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Well, can I share the numbers with you?
They're real simple, and people ought to hear them.
In this country, we use about 18 million barrels a day.
We refine about 15 million barrels a day.
The difference between the 15 and 18, the 3 million barrels, is product that we bring in.
Out of the 15 million barrels a day that we refine, we produce about five.
That means we're importing 10 million barrels a day.
We import about 10 million.
We're about 3 million barrels of product, which is about 72 percent of that total, which means every time we drive into a service station and buy 10 gallons of gas, and I don't care if you're in Salt Lake or Houston or New York, you are paying about 7 of those gallons are imported material.
And the public doesn't understand that and needs to understand that.
That's what's under our view.
You're right.
You're right.
We do import about 10 million barrels a day, but that means that if Anwar can produce a million barrels a day, which most people say it can, you have just offset 20% of your imports.
That doesn't sound like dropping the bucket to me.
But the bottom line is we've got a world oil market.
I mean, I don't think ⁇ are you suggesting we shouldn't have any imported oil?
Oh, no.
We're going to be on imported oil, Jason, for the rest of your life and the rest of my life and the rest of our children as a big part of it.
But Anwar is an important piece.
But the other thing that people don't understand, we've drilled in Anwar.
Yes.
We have already drilled in Anwar, and we haven't made a mess.
No, I know.
Nobody ever reports that.
Well, they say too.
We ran Anwar.
Anwar was under the control of the Navy, and they contracted to have wells drilled up there at specific locations that they picked, you know, so they could obtain some geological information.
And there were a number of wells drilled in Anwar, and we didn't make any mess doing it.
Well, of course not.
And we're talking about 2,000-acre footprint on 19.6 million acres.
That's it.
2,000 acres is where we need to go to access the oil out of 19 million acres.
It's not a footprint.
I mean, it's minuscule when you consider the absurdity of the environmental left opposing that.
It boggles one's mind.
Now, there's also the case of what some people say is 1.20 barrels of oil shale if we could get into the Rocky Mountain West.
There's also 87 billion of recoverable oil off the outer continental shelf.
So we could make a huge dent in the shortage of world supply when you consider the world consumes around 86, 87 barrels per day and produces about 85 if we raise the supply, which is precisely what the speculators are telling us.
Got to go when we come back, Matthew in Tampa.
We'll try Mike and Butler as well, so don't go away.
You're on the Russian Limbaugh program on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882 on this July 3rd, 2008.
Hope your July 4th weekend is shaping up to be a good one.
Rush is back on Monday.
In the meantime, in Tampa, Matthew, thanks for waiting.
You're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, how are you doing, Jason?
Fine, sir.
How are you?
Good.
I just wanted to talk about basically the administration today and their irresponsibility with monetary policy.
Basically, we hand out all these tax cuts, and really, what's really taxing the American people if they hitting tax is inflation.
With this war on terror, they're spending this into debt, really.
The tax cuts really mean nothing without when you put it in place inflation.
Well, what is the percent of the budget devoted to the Department of Defense and the supplemental war funding?
I really don't know.
I don't have numbers in front of me.
Well, then why would you say the war on terror is bankrupting the nation?
Well, it is.
We're spending a lot of time.
Well, you don't know the numbers.
You just said you didn't know.
We're spending a trillion dollars a year on foreign policy.
I think we could cut back a little bit.
A trillion dollars a year on foreign policy.
Actually, the budget for national defense under this president is about 20% of the federal budget.
Well, even if we did cut back on that 20%, it will definitely improve the national debt and help us fight inflation.
Well, this is one thing I don't understand about my libertarian Ron Paul friends.
And I'm just confused about this because you could look at the 20% of the budget that goes to an actual government function that the framers intended, national defense, the Constitution calls for, national defense.
You can look at that and cut to save, or you can look at 80% of the non-defense budget.
But why is it you all never look at 80% of the non-defense budget and seem to focus on the actual legitimate function of government defense?
Well, you know, we could certainly cut from other areas, too.
I mean, it's not just foreign policy that we have to cut from.
I'm not saying it's true.
Really?
I never got that impression.
But we do spend a lot on foreign policy.
I don't know if it's 20%.
I don't know what numbers he end that from or what.
Well, that is a lot.
It's $600 billion.
I mean, the war on Iraq, we can cut a whole lot from that.
I mean, I'm not supporting any Democrats.
I know Obama is not going to cut anything from the Middle East of foreign policy.
I'm just saying, you know, it'll be a lot because since we spend so much, you know, we're not really producing or getting that money from taxes.
We're just printing it from the Federal Reserve and, you know, charging interest.
Well, I agree with you on inflation.
I don't agree with this obsession with the defense as the culprit for deficit spending and or the government budget of $3.1 trillion.
The bottom line is spending or spending cuts on this.
This is the view that's starting to really bother me.
The view that that government is a big national charity and nobody wants to cut the goodie bag.
Nobody wants to cut all of those tools used to buy votes.
They only want to cut the legitimate functions of government.
The debate here in this election, or any other election for that matter, is not between big government liberals and small government conservatives.
I can be big government if there's a war going on.
I mean, I don't like it, but you've got to spend the money.
You've got to preserve safety.
You've got to preserve the country.
And liberals certainly can be small government when it comes to defense.
The debate is not that simplistic big government versus small government.
The debate is, do you believe in the legitimate functions of government or do you believe in the illegitimate functions of government?
And the legitimate functions of government, raise a minimal amount of taxes, raise them neutrally to fund true public goods.
And true public goods, Matthew, benefit everybody.
They are non-exclusive.
National defense is one of those.
A system of justice, of courts are one of those.
The police force is one of those.
However, most of the government, certainly at the federal, state, and local level, most of all government goes to goodies, non-defense goodies.
Counties, biggest portion, welfare.
You know, your property taxes, biggest chunk, schools.
Now, some would say, well, education is a public good.
That's a debate for another time.
Insurance is a public good, too, but we don't actually pay for it.
We have other people pay for it ourselves.
But that's a different issue.
The point here is that the legitimate function of government funds public goods that benefits everybody.
Illegitimate functions of government takes money from one taxpayer and gives it to the other.
You know, back when the French had statesmen, there was one of my heroes, Frederic Bashtia, who said, see if the government takes money from one person and gives it to another while doing that in the private sector would be committing a crime.
Or if that was done in private, would be committing a crime.
That's what government has been relegated to, reduced to.
If I say I need money because I'm poor or just because I need money, and I go club you over the head and I take your money, they put me in jail.
But if the modern welfare state does the same thing and redistributes wealth, taking from some people by force, that's all government is, is force, why, that's considered statesmanship.
That's considered national service.
That's considered getting government to work.
No, that's considered an anathema towards everything American freedom was about in individual rights and the pursuit of happiness.
Mike in Butler, Indiana.
Hi, and welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey, how you doing?
Good.
I just had a comment about your thing about why people complain about gas, but not other commodities.
I think it's because you don't buy as many of them at a time, like gas.
You could say it's $4 a gallon.
You buy 20 gallons.
That's 80 bucks.
You buy a gallon of milk, it's $4.
You buy a couple gallons a week.
I would like to buy $80 a gallon.
You don't buy a bushel's worth of bread a week.
You buy a couple loaves of bread a week.
No, I would like to see your gas bill compared to your grocery bill.
What do you think is bigger?
Well, I spend probably $120 a week when I go grocery shopping, and I spend $80 to fill up on gas.
Well, it's about what?
How many times do you fill up?
Oh, probably one and a half times a week.
One and a half?
So it's about the same.
You don't have a family?
Yeah.
You're spending $120 a week on groceries for a family of what?
Four digits?
Four.
Get out of here.
$120 a week on groceries?
Am I off base here, guys?
Mike and Kid, help me out on this.
Where am I going wrong?
I guess in Indiana, you've got some pretty good...
Food inflation is bankrupting American households, Mike.
It is.
It is.
Well, I mean, transportation expenses are pretty bad.
You're right.
I'm getting insurance on your car, too.
Yep, but you take a look at the cost of all of those groceries that have been driven up by the same inflation the previous caller talked about and the ethanol policy, so popular in Indiana, I might add.
And I would bet you that if you added it all up, your grocery bill is bankrupting your household budget just as bad as gas.
I got to move back to wrap things up after this on the EIB.
Michael Fimento in the New York Post today, he has been prescient on this issue.
He wrote, what, the myth of heterosexual AIDS, gosh, 15 years ago or so.
He now quotes the world's top AIDS bureaucrat as admitting that, quote, it's very unlikely that there will be a heterosexual AIDS epidemic.
What is it?
3.7 of the world's mortality due to AIDS, but 25% of the international health care aid going for that.
Looks like Fimento was right.
Didn't they say Newsweek or somebody say the heterosexual epidemic on AIDS?
Same thing they said about global warming, wasn't it?
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