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Aug. 4, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:41
August 4, 2008, Monday, Hour #3
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Ha, ha, ha, ha, how are you?
Greetings.
Welcome back.
Broadcast Excellence hosted by me, Rushland Boss, starting our next 20 years as we kick off a full week of broadcast excellence here.
Great to have you with us, as always.
Telephone number if you'd like to join us, 800-282-2882 and the email address lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Yeah, I just saw this.
This is from Saturday.
The New York Times, your neighbors may turn up their noses, but keeping your gas-guzzling SUV or buying one coming off a lease might be a smart move.
The fact is that not many people want your big vehicle right now, if Friday's new auto sales data are any indication.
Total SUV sales are down 43.3% this July from a year ago, according to an outfit called Autodata.
Now, as for used vehicles, while they almost always fall in value over time, Jack Nearad, the executive editorial director and executive analyst of the Kelly Blue Book, says that the rate of depreciation on large SUVs over the last six to eight months has been about twice what is normal.
Given the plummeting demand for big vehicles and the rise in gas prices that's responsible for the market turmoil, it is probably tempting to ditch your own SUV and trade down to something smaller.
But many experts suggest sitting tight for a variety of reasons.
Here are some questions to consider if you are tempted to get rid of your gas guzzler and some tips for figuring out whether it may be more financially sensible to hang on to it for a little longer.
What is the true cost of a trade-in?
If fuel prices are behind your urge to drive a smaller vehicle, here's what you need to consider if you own a bigger one that you want to get rid of.
First, how much does fuel cost you now and how much will it cost with a new car?
Then, how much could you get for your old car and how much more money would you need to come up with to acquire a new one?
Philip Reed, the senior consumer advice editor at Edmunds.com, was on the tennis court a month ago and a friend asked him what he ought to do about his Ford Escape SUV.
I said, you probably don't want to hear this, but the best thing is to keep driving it.
Mr. Reed said his colleague Huddled come up with a way to help consumers do the math, and the result is the gas guzzler for gas stipper, gas guzzler for gas sipper trade-in calculator at edmonds.com.
Anyway, without burdening you with a bunch of numbers as details, is a small car practical?
You'll be tempted to play with the Edmonds.com calculator by swapping your hulking Chevy Suburban for a tiny Honda Fit or an itty-bitty hybrid of some sort.
But let's get back to reality for a moment.
It's nice to fantasize about tripling your fuel economy, but you might have a trailer to tow, or perhaps you're larger than average and are not comfortable in small cars.
It takes the New York Times to help people figure this out.
Let me tell you something, folks.
I can tell you after this weekend, I know that I'm a little large for a smart car.
I do not have to read the New York Times to figure this out.
I also know that a smart car could not tow a boat that I don't have.
But if I wanted to go get a boat, I know this thing won't, this thing would barely tow a lawnmower.
So after all of these years of people being shamed into getting rid of their SUVs, now the New York Times, of all places, comes and says, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
It might make sense for you to hold on to that car.
You might have a large family.
You might have to tow a lot of things.
You might have to pick up a lot of goods at Costco to feed your large family.
And you can't do this in a subcompact.
Really?
Amazing how stupid the drive-by media think we are.
Yeah, and that is.
It's an interesting assumption.
The assumption in this story is that you people can still afford food.
And not only can you still afford food, you can afford lots of it.
You need an SUV to haul it all home.
As you know, Barack Obama, the most merciful Lord Barack the Messiah, is very offended, as is his campaign over the McCain ad featuring Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, portraying both Obama and his voters as celebutards.
So while whining about being compared to vacuous pop stars, Obama spends Saturday night with three of the dumbest celebrities on the face of the earth.
Saturday in South Beach, Florida, during a fundraiser at the set nightclub for Senator Obama, Matt Damon said this.
This comes down to a very simple choice for all of us.
If you like the direction the country's going in and you like what's happened in the last seven and a half years, you should definitely vote for John McCain.
But if you want a candidate who rejects those policies and not only rejects them, but the vision for what needs changing and how to change it, then Barack Obama's your guy.
Now, this is at a nightclub on Saturday night.
Now, you would think, if the Obama campaign is so distressed and so upset over one ad with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in it, that the word would go out to these pop culture celebrities, cool it for a while.
No, I mean, let's face it, folks, we all know it's Saturday night, South Beach, at a nightclub.
What's going on in there is not politics under normal circumstances.
It's the last thing going on in there.
And for now, these guys to have this big bash Saturday night at the set club talking about Obama in a fundraiser shortly after the campaign so ticked off over McCain's Britney Spears ad indicates that they still don't get it because when here's Jennifer Garner, who starred in the ABC series Alias and who recently married, well, not a couple years ago, married Ben Affleck.
This is a fundraiser at the set nightclub for Obama, Saturday in South Beach.
Ultimately, I just feel inspired by him, and I don't think anyone in our generation, or we haven't had that experience in our generation, we haven't had a political leader that was inspirational and made you want to get involved in the way that he has.
This is why they're called celebutards.
This is why they're just.
And then here's Affleck, the proud husband, his expert opinion of the Paris Hilton Britney Spears ad at the set nightclub in South Beach Saturday night at a fundraiser for The Messiah.
It's about the images that you select and trying to be kind of as pernicious and sneaky as possible.
At the end of the day, people come in, they pull the lever for the person they want to make their life better.
For me personally, that's Barack Obama.
How about, would you pull a lever for yourself, Ben?
What has Barack Obama meant to your movie career, Ben?
What, for that matter, with John Kerry?
What has John Kerry meant to your movie career?
Or to your role now as a father?
You have a couple kids with Jennifer Garner.
What has any government figure done to enhance any aspect of your life?
Anyway, so here you have it.
Three more Britney Spears and Paris Hilton types at a nightclub Saturday night endorsing Obama while the Obama campaign whines and moans about the Britney Spears Paris Hilton ad.
We're not through.
I know Paris's mother's man.
Well, her name, let's see, it's what's her mother's name?
The father's name is Rick, Kathy, Rick and Kathy Hilton.
And apparently they're big contributors to McCain.
But nobody knows what Paris is.
I mean, nobody knows if she's a Republican or Democrat if she's made any donations if she's even voted.
Nobody knows that.
Rick and Nancy Hill.
Well, I'm not looking.
I'm not going to go there.
I just.
There's nothing to be gained by going there.
There just isn't.
And you're not going to tempt me in it.
No, I'm not going to talk about how people parent their kids.
I'm just not going to do it.
I'll just say this.
The last problem Paris Hilton had is being in an ad.
I mean, the smallest problem she's got is being in a John McCain ad.
It might have even helped in some way.
But we're not through here, ladies and gentlemen, because another living paragon of vacuity, Gwyneth Paltrow, who used to be engaged to Bradeth Pitt, she's urging Americans to vote for Obama.
But, of course, Gwyneth doesn't live here.
She lives in the UK.
So this is a new votefromabroad.org.
Vote from abroad.
And by the way, abroad is one word.
Don't misunderstand.
Vote fromabroad.org TV ad narrated by many figures, including the London-based actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
I don't know who the other people are here.
Start now, right now.
If you're a U.S. citizen, you can vote from wherever you are.
From anywhere.
Luxor, Egypt.
And Shanghai.
Dubai.
Timbuktu, Deshoku.
Johannesburg, Siberia.
Buenos Aires.
In Canada, can be voting, which is not America.
I'll be voting from London, but you can vote from anywhere.
Every single vote will count.
Where on earth will you vote?
Votefromabroad.org.
Absentee ballots for Americans.
I'm voting Democrat.
There's a voice there that sounds just like the woman we have in our Obama commercial, the Valley Girl.
I think U.S. Americans should vote for change.
And because the past is so like yesterday.
Hey, we have to take a brief timeout.
So the, you know, the Hollywood crowd, timing couldn't be better as the McCain campaign.
And oh, not just McCain, the Obama campaign, but not just them.
Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer were beside themselves yesterday, wringing their hands over all these ads, how horrible they are.
And here come an endless parade now of more pop culture celebrities endorsing Obama, including voting for him while away.
From the United States.
As citizens of the world, no doubt.
That's right, a man, a living legend, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, a prophet, a general, all-round good guy, Rush Limbaugh, serving humanity simply by showing up to Houston.
This is Ernest, and we're glad to have you on the program, Ernest.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
This is a great honor, Maha Rushi.
And I just wanted to say earlier, there was this guy on there talking about the team effort.
I mean, that's just another way to water down conservatism.
That guy is not a, you know, he's a liberal.
He was calling from Atlanta.
He's in the airline business.
And, you know, he's sick and tired of the bickering between Republicans and Democrats while solutions to problems go by the wayside and don't occur.
And yet he cited an example where he and other pilots working with his airline on something to do with their auxiliary power unit enabled him to save X number of gallons or dollars worth of fuel in a year.
And I pointed out to him that the government had nothing to do with that effort.
It didn't require teamwork.
It required economics and the free market.
Oh, absolutely.
And well, that's the main concept.
And that's drilling is what's going to work.
Drilling is what's going to make our economy continue to be great.
The other thing I just wanted to say very quickly is that for Barack Obama to say that $700 billion, because I know that $700 billion has been thrown around by a lot of different people lately, that's my money, okay?
The consumer, us, the American taxpayer, the consumers are the ones that made that possible, along with a free market economy.
And Americans need to wrap themselves around that concept.
That's something that I want to do.
You know, market economics is not taught, which is why it's not taught sufficiently in lower levels of education and barely in college.
It's why I try to spend as much time on it as possible.
Two things about his call.
I forgot.
I wanted to have an addendum to his call after he'd hung up, and I forgot to get to it.
But this old argument, we've got to stop bickering.
We just all come together and stop playing politics to come up with solutions.
Which it just sounds wonderful.
But here's my sincere question.
If you're an average American, you're a citizen, and you pay the average amount of time to the news over the course of living your life since about 2002.
Let's throw out 2000 of Florida aftermath.
After 9-11, and after that brief moment in time where we were all doing kumbaya, working together and getting along for the week that that lasted, if you're paying scant attention to the news from 2002 to present, how in the world can you not conclude that the vast majority of the people bickering are liberal Democrats?
That the vast majority of people who are totally enraged and angry in this country are liberal Democrats.
How can you actually look at George W. Bush and see somebody who has not tried to get along with the other side, letting Ted Kennedy write the education bill, working with other Democrats on immigration and other aspects to show that they could put all the bickering of the 90s behind us?
The problem with working together is you must have a common objective.
And this is the problem.
And I know this is going to sound extremely bold, ladies and gentlemen, but the objectives of free market conservatives and capitalists do not jibe.
They do not mix with the objectives of today's leftist Democrat Party.
So how in the world can you work together when, well, look at we want to increase the supply of oil.
We know that there are gazillions of barrels of oil in shale and offshore waiting to be drilled, waiting to be mined and waiting to be refined.
And we want to do this for a whole host of reasons, so we're not as dependent on other sources of oil, so there'll be more supply and the price will come down, and that we'll have a little insurance here against dependence on other people for something that's crucial.
A country cannot get along without oil.
On the other side, we have just today the Democrat Party's presidential nominee has declared war on oil.
We've got a new platitude.
We must end the age of oil in our lifetime.
Now, you tell me, ladies and gentlemen, where in hell we compromise and come up with an answer that we can all be happy about.
When one political party wants, at least based on what they say, wants to do everything they can to demonize oil and demonize energy, by the way.
Energy itself now is a demon.
Energy is polluting the planet, destroying the planet, global warming, climate change, all this stuff.
When one political party wants to advance its ideals to enhance and enrich themselves and increase their own power at the expense of the liberty of individual citizens, and one political party or one movement wants to do everything it can to deregulate and get obstacles out of people's way so that they can use their ambition and become the best they can be, where is the compromise?
Where do the two sides go to sit down and talk?
Once they get there, what do they talk about and how do they get along?
The differences in the views of the future for this country and the world held by conservatives and leftists is stark.
It's 180 degrees out of phase.
They're diametrically opposed.
The leftists in this country see an imperfect America in a constant state of decline that is deserved.
Conservatives see an opportunity for continued growth and prosperity for children and grandchildren to maintain this is the greatest nation for the good of all humanity in the history of the world.
When one side sees their own country as the problem and the other side sees their country as the solution, somebody tell me where we go to start getting along with that.
How do you come to it?
It's like trying to compromise between victory and defeat.
How do you do it?
Do you postpone defeat for two years?
Does the left say, okay, we'll let you win in 10 or we'll let you win halfway?
Where do you compromise?
There's no room for compromise here.
What has to happen is defeat.
You have to understand the concept of good guys and bad guys.
And the right is the good guys.
Ask this $700 billion that the caller refers to.
I'm going to ask this is how much we supposedly spend.
The phrase is, United States spends $700 billion a year buying oil from terrorist dictators who want to wipe us out.
Fine.
Who's spending the $700 billion?
I asked this question in the first hour of today's extremely relevant, poignant, penetrating program.
Who is spending the $700 million to buy oil from foreign sources?
No, I'm asking you.
I want you people to think about it and come up with an answer.
Who's spending that money?
All right, folks, you've got to hear this because I'm sure most of you did not.
It happened this morning on PMS NBC, DNC-TV, on Joe Scarborough's show.
The columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert, was the guest.
Bob Herbert bent out of shape over the Britney Spears Paris Hilton ad run by McCain, but he thinks it's a racist ad.
This guy is, when you listen to this, there's only one conclusion.
He's got to be, well, I'll tell you what, you figure it out on your own.
He refers here to the Washington Monument.
And what he means is the victory tower, the victory column in Germany.
He got that confused.
But anyway, the discussion is about, and he wrote an op-ed about this.
He's upset about this McCain celebrity ad because he thinks it's racist.
And here's the discussion they had on the show today about it.
There is an image right there in that very beginning of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And there is an image of the Washington Monument.
Look at the beginning of that ad again.
And you tell me why those two phallic symbols are placed there.
Pow!
Right at the very beginning of that ad.
Isn't that the victory column where he made his speech?
And also the, well, it looked like the leaning town.
So you explain to me why there are two phallic symbols immediately in those first few seconds of that ad.
And I put it in the context of the ad that was run against Harold Ford in 2006.
And you explained to me why you have these scantily clad women, or women known to be scantily clad, women who have trouble keeping their clothes on, only in ads where the candidate is a black male, where the person being attacked is a black male.
Why is that?
Coincidence?
Can you follow this, folks?
First place, he thinks that the Leaning Tower of Pisa is not in the ad.
He thinks that's what the Victory Tower is.
And now these women, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, are not shown in a state of undress in the ad.
So he has to throw in that most of the time they don't have very many clothes on.
And then why in the two phallic symbols and two white women who sometimes very rarely wear clothes put in an ad for a black guy?
So that's why this ad is racist.
I know it's convoluted.
This is not meant to be understood.
This is meant to laugh at.
This is meant to go, what?
The reaction is supposed to be, what the hell is he talking about?
Now, this is Bob Herbert, who has published in the New York Times, the same New York Times would not publish McCain's op-ed, but publishes this lunatic drivel on a regular basis.
John in Wilmington, North Carolina, welcome, sir, to the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush.
Congratulations in advance on the next 20.
Thank you very much, sir.
I appreciate that.
I just want to paint a little visual for you here.
If oil is such a demon, can you imagine what we'd all be like right now if we were still riding horses?
That's pretty much the same principle of what they're talking about with solar and wind right now with the technologies they have at hand.
This is true, but they're doing it a little bit more subtly than that.
Because while they're on this big push to demonize energy and oil, carbon footprint energy, as Obama said today, we've must end the age of oil in our lifetimes.
So we've got to get rid of oil, but they don't want you thinking about what we do without it because they have people believing that we're looking, somebody has the secret to alternative fuels.
We're just not telling anybody what it is.
The oil companies and the automobile companies are conspiring to keep this really remarkable new magical energy off the market so they can reap profits on the backs of the poor American consumer, blah, And the fact is, you're right, there is not anything even close.
There's nothing on the drawing board, ladies.
There's nothing in anybody's brilliant mind yet that even comes close to replacing oil and what oil does and how it is used.
There is nothing.
And here we've got Gore saying, get rid of it in 10 years.
And here we've got Obama saying, end the age of oil in our lifetimes.
I don't care what you come up with.
There's no way you're going to power your automobile with a solar panel.
You're not going to power it with a windmill or a propeller on the back of it that has no other source of energy.
It ain't happening.
And most of the cities in America will not let you drive a horse through their streets with a horse dropping manure every five blocks, spreading disease all around.
It isn't going to happen, folks.
There's nothing out there.
And yet, the Democrat Party en masse is doing everything they can to prevent the expiration discovery of more oil when there's nothing on the horizon in even in the most brilliant mind out there that could replace it.
I don't know.
This, this stuff, it just the common sense of all this is so plainly visible and easy to grasp, and yet it seems to escape a lot of people.
On the other hand, I look at the polling data and I see that Obama is now even with McCain.
If you throw in the leaners, McCain's up 47, 46.
If you throw in likely voters, McCain's doing even better than that.
Whatever these platitudes of Obama's are, they're not connecting.
He doesn't have this massive.
He had a 15-point lead not long ago.
He got no bump.
It got just the exact opposite of a bump coming out of Germany and a whole foreign tour.
In fact, it hurt him.
And these pronouns that he's making, while we have the drive-bys proclaiming that he's something special, something unique, something has never before happened in American politics.
He's not.
He's just a traditional, standard, radical leftist who's come out of the Chicago machine.
There's nothing new about him whatsoever.
And if he doesn't have a 10 to 15-point lead going into late October, he's toast.
Because I'll make you this prediction.
If they're tied at 46, 47, what it is right now, that's going to equal a McCain plus 50 percentage point win.
Because this election is a referendum on Obama.
Oh, speaking of it being a referendum on Obama, let's grab audio soundbite number 22 and number 23.
Yesterday on Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer spoke with David Brooks of the New York Times about McCain.
And Bob Schieffer says, You've written a lot of stories.
You've chronicled many McCain campaigns.
You were one of the early writers on the Straight Talk Express back in 2000.
Are you surprised by the tone that this campaign seems to have taken?
Some of us who were on that bus, this is not the campaign we were hoping he would run.
And frankly, this is not the campaign he was hoping to be run.
And this is how they explain it.
They got no attention.
They could not break through.
So they decided Obama is the race.
Be still my beating heart.
David Brooks, one of the conservative intelligentsia seeking to redefine the Republican Party and redefine conservatism.
This was not the campaign we were hoping McCain would run.
This was not the campaign he was hoping to be running.
And they got no attention running the campaign that the Wizards of Smart wanted him to run.
Because the campaign they wanted him to run was a campaign where he would guaranteed lose.
McCain was running a campaign that would guarantee lose.
And now they're all upset.
Oh, no, this campaign, we've lost such a golden opportunity.
But they couldn't break out.
They couldn't get notice.
So they decided Obama's the race.
Obama has always been the race.
So then Schieffer says, well, so what you're saying is the McCain campaign has decided to make this election a referendum on Obama?
They feel they have no choice.
And I think they're sort of right.
They're half right about that.
But this is going to be insufficient for McCain.
Because if the race is somebody who's offering change, Obama, who you have doubts about, versus somebody who's not offering change, well, they'll go with the change even with the doubts.
So McCain has to come out with a much more positive agenda, something that shows he's different from the Republican Party.
And they haven't told that story yet, particularly well.
This is a conservative intelligentsia, and this is the kind of thinking that has given us McCain as the nominee.
And this is the kind of thinking that is inspiring the McCain campaign.
And what did he just say?
McCain has to come out with a much more positive agenda, something that shows he's different from the Republican Party.
Mr. Brooks, he has done that with flying colors.
With your or whoever else's advice, McCain has secured the fact that he is not a Republican.
He has made it plain to everybody else that he is different from the Republican Party.
He proudly says so.
A positive campaign.
A positive campaign could be defined as someone who's finally starting to laugh at the silly presumptuousness that we are being sold about Obama.
Back to the phone, Stephen, Fort Walton Beach, Florida.
You're next.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Hello.
Hello, internal conduction dittos from the Fort Long Beach.
Good to be on the show.
Hey, if Obama wants to move away from the age of oil, he's going to destroy the commercial fishing industry and the entire boating industry because they run on internal combustion engines powered by, you guessed it, gas.
Yeah, these are little things that the Obama people do not ponder or think about.
Gussie went away.
Who's next on this, Frigo?
Where are we headed next?
Hmm.
Russ in Reno, Nevada.
You're next.
I'm glad to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Oh, Russ, F-250 4x4 driving 460 cubic inch V8 gas guzzling dittos from Reno, Nevada.
Thank you, sir, very much.
What I would like to comment on is earlier, you had an individual and then the guy with Edwards saying that doing a trade-in and going for a downsizing your vehicle wouldn't make sense.
Well, it certainly wouldn't make sense in my case.
One, I would end up with a vehicle that wouldn't serve my needs.
It'd be a smaller pickup, even though it would get slightly better gas mileage.
I would lose money on my trade-in because 4x4s and SUVs of that type aren't desirable right now.
Yeah, that's one of the things that the article was pointing out.
And on top of that, your insurance premium goes up.
You've got to pay your registration.
And in my total payback for that, and I'm looking at three or four years down the road.
Exactly right.
Plus, there's another factor in that.
Rush, your cell phone's breaking up.
There's another factor in this.
You don't want to get rid of your Ford F-150 or whatever it is you're driving around out there, 4x4.
You don't want to get rid of it.
And there's all these leftists out there pressuring you to get rid of what you like that you need.
And you're not doing it.
By the way, folks, I meant to mention this earlier.
You know, we always appreciate the efforts of our sponsors, and I forgot to thank them last Friday.
We're going for the 20th anniversary business.
Last Thursday night, and I printed this out, and I should have mentioned it Friday.
It just slipped my mind with everything going on.
But I got the greatest note.
I got a note from a woman who had just that previously in the week heard about Carbonite, which is the off the online server backup for your computer data.
And she thought it was faster because she didn't have any way to back up her computer.
She'd never thought about backing up her computer.
Nobody ever told her about it because you don't back up your TV.
You don't back up your coffee pot.
So she said she decided to check into it.
She got it.
Two days later, her computer blew up.
She fried the hard drive.
She lost.
It was a brand new computer.
She lost everything on it, but she didn't because she had it backed up at carbonite.com.
And it really does provide a lot of stress-free use of your computer.
It's a simple way to back up without going out and buying a bunch of equipment yourself.
It is extremely economical.
43% of people lose irreplaceable files like pictures, things that are really crucial, digital music, emails, contracts, all of these things.
And you can try Carbonite free at carbonite.com.
Don't even need to give them a credit card to see how it works.
Just use the offer code Rush to get a special offer.
That's Carbonite.com.
We are always thrilled to death here when the people who patronize our sponsors are ecstatic and pleased with the results.
And this is a great illustration of that happening.
Now to Albany, where the New York Giants are preparing for their Super Bowl defense, this is Ken.
Welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
Hello.
How you doing, Rush?
Excellent to outstanding.
Nice that you asked.
It's an honor for me to be on the phone with you today.
Thank you very much.
I just had a question for you.
There's only one explanation of why they would interject race into that on PSM and BC earlier today, and that's they're knee-knocked for Obama out there.
That's the only reason I can think of.
And one other thing, Rush, why do you give Riolinda such a hard time?
I'm originally from Rio Linda, and I left about 12 years ago to join the Marine Corps.
Jan, have you gone back?
Every now and then on vacation pretty much.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But have you gone back there to live?
No, sir.
All right.
You were there, you grew up there, you live there, you go back on vacation, you get in there, get it, and get out quickly as you can.
Now, I love Rio Linda.
Riolinda was, you know, driving around learning the community.
When I moved to Sacramento in 1984, and I'm driving out around so I can have some knowledge of the city because I haven't lived there very long when I started my program.
And I drove through this place and I was stunned.
All the, you know, the cars up on concrete blocks with no tires and no wheels and the refrigerators and stuff on the front porch.
There's the main drag of town.
I offered to move there and upgrade property values if they changed the name of the town to Limbaugh, California, but they rejected that.
So they've just, you know, Riolinda's been a pet community.
And I want everybody who listens, they're big fans out in Rio Linda.
And sometimes things might be confusing to them here.
And I just want to make sure that they get it.
And, you know, some people might think that Riolinda makes Albany look good now, especially given the welfare state, recessionary state that New York is in.
John, in Libertyville, Illinois.
Hello, sir.
We have one minute, but I wanted to get to you.
Hi.
You've always been a big proponent of the inefficient vehicle, the gas gather, the SUV, what have you.
And you've steadfastly maintained that the only thing at work in the high gas prices is supply and demand.
But if fuel-inefficient vehicles demand more fuel and therefore reduce the supply, isn't the supply and demand argument roughly analogous to saying we're all paying more at the pump because of the preponderance of inefficient vehicles?
So because I have a gas hog and I use a lot more gas than you do, I am affecting supply and demand.
Therefore, supply would be much greater if I would join you in getting an efficient car and a price would come down.
Is that your theory?
Sure.
I think we're all paying more at the pump because of the preponderance of the money.
But then you don't have a free market because somebody's got to apply pressure on me to get me to drive something I don't want to drive.
Besides, when that happens, sir, your gasoline taxes, state gasoline taxes are going to go up because they're not going to be receiving as much revenue.
There's no win here, sir.
You can do the right thing and still get screwed.
Tomorrow, my friends, among many other things, we're going to be discussing how the economic times at present are also affecting the wealthy and the rich.
They are not happy.
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