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Sept. 29, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:26
September 29, 2008, Monday, Hour #2
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Greetings and welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.
Rush Limbaugh here, the EIB Southern Command, dedicating today's Dow Jones Industrial Average, at the moment down 292 points, to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reed, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd.
Great to have you with us.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 and the email address ilrushbo at EIBnet.com.
Mr. Snerdley told me during the break here at the top of the hour that he's received a bunch of phone calls from some of you who are angry that I am not detailing the agreement that will soon be voted on in the House of Representatives.
That's right, my friends, I'm not detailing it because the details are irrelevant.
The Treasury Secretary's been empowered to do whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.
You can go through this and you can read the details all you want, but let me tell you the truth here.
For everybody you hear, every person you hear saying this is going to strengthen the market, it's the exact opposite.
The market cannot possibly be strengthened by virtue of this bailout because the market has yet to work.
The market's not being allowed to work here.
The losers haven't been flushed out.
We're papering over the losers.
The market is not working.
This is not the market fixing this.
And the market is the only thing that can fix it.
This is a temporary patch to deal with people's psychology while at the same time toying with their psychology by creating this crisis mentality in everyone that something has to be done or else we face Armageddon.
We face a depression.
And isn't it fascinating?
Don't you find it curious that all this is taking place 35 days before a presidential election with the Democrat candidates mantra being change?
I mean, we can get into the specifics of this if you want to.
Yeah, the Acorn stuff was taken out, but Acorn's going to get what it wants if there are not structural changes here in the market.
You know, what led us to this is fear of being accused of racism and political correctness.
Well, if you want to boil it all down, well, and that's what led to Republicans not having the guts when they ran the Congress to actually stop this.
The second thing that's driving this is the Democrat Party's desire to steal the country, to simply take it and make it over as their own.
I just, I find it fascinating.
You can go to the details all you want.
To me, this is about the very people who broke it now saying they can fix it while they're blaming other people for having broken it.
And they're putting themselves in charge.
It's mind-boggling when you stop and think about what is really happening here.
The details, to me, are not the point because the details are not even things that we can count on.
I mean, this is going to come out in installments.
There's supposedly accountability.
There is supposedly new regulation.
Well, we had all that when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going in the tank and the regulator was destroyed by the Democrats in a hearing, audio soundbites that we just aired for you.
I want to read to you again the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and then I want to read to you the purpose of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.
Here's the preamble of the Constitution.
It's not insignificant.
The Constitution is the framework, the foundation of our capitalist system.
It is the reason that we have remained a great, the greatest country in the history of earth.
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Nothing in there about ensuring the general welfare, just promoting it.
Here is what is being proposed by the Congress being voted on today.
Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 purposes provides authority to the Treasury Secretary to restore liquidity and stability to the U.S. financial system and to ensure the economic well-being of Americans.
Now, you can go get all specific you want.
You can go look at all the details that you want of this bill, of this piece of legislation, and you can go to the things that were in it that have been thrown out, the bad things that were thrown out.
You can look at some of the good things you think have been thrown in.
Treasury Secretary, authority to ensure the economic well-being of Americans?
That's endless.
That's limitless.
That's absurd, and it's known as socialism.
We're about to pass a law here that has, as its stated purpose, the Secretary of the Treasury ensuring the economic well-being of Americans.
That's a frightening statement to me.
Is that the job of the Treasury Secretary?
What the heck kind of law is this?
And who is he?
Who is any Treasury Secretary?
I don't need to read another word.
I don't need the details.
Congress is giving the Treasury Secretary the job of ensuring the economic well-being of Americans.
I'd call that central planning.
I would call that an assault on the foundation of our economy.
I'd call that a capitulation to people who have every intention of imposing change like we've never seen.
The kind of people who would use police to strip away First Amendment rights.
The kind of people who intentionally lie and campaign ads because they know they'll be held unaccountable by the propaganda ministers and the drive-by media.
The Treasury Secretary can't ensure anything anyway, and he shouldn't.
An honest man would resign if he was told that that was his job.
You mean to tell me my job now is to ensure the economic well-being of Americans?
Sorry, I can't do that.
Tell me how the hell I am supposed to pull this off, especially with you guys providing oversight here if you don't like what I'm doing.
And then what happens if we get a Republican Secretary of the Treasury in here who goes against what your intentions are?
What's going to happen to him after you guys in Congress get through with him?
It's, I don't know, folks.
This is just, everybody's falling prey to the crisis.
Everybody's falling prey to the manufactured crisis.
I don't doubt that something needs to be done, but the market is where whatever needs to be done needs to happen.
And it's not happening in the market.
It's happening in Washington, D.C.
It's happening on however number of pieces of paper the legislation is.
The market works.
I'll tell you what's going to happen.
Miraculously, sometime after the election, if Obama wins, you wait and see how within a week, two, maybe a month, crisis has been averted.
Everything's fine now.
Vaughn got it fixed.
It was the right thing to do.
The legislation electing Obama.
And then the market's going to come back.
Markets in this country always do.
They're going to come back booming and bigger and ever going to come back strong for a while.
And these guys are going to take credit for it.
And they're going to claim this is how you do it.
We can now manage the markets.
We can see to it that you will never lose your home.
We can see to it that you will never ever have to miss a car payment.
We can see to it that you'll never ever miss a credit card payment.
Well, because we're going to ensure the economic well-being of every American.
We're going to ensure the economic well-being of every American.
And so when the economy comes back, everything goes roaring and strong for a while, the credit is going to be given to government.
So keep a sharp eye on all this.
It's, I mean, if, you know, I just, I sit here and I'm stunned.
We're being told if we don't nationalize the home mortgage market by this afternoon in the House and Wednesday in the Senate, stock market's going to crash.
The Great Depression 2 will begin.
We're told this.
Once we nationalize the home mortgage market and once we nationalize bank liquidity, those sectors of the free market will perform much better.
By the way, you should know this.
There are some people, if you want specifics about the bill, there are some people saying, hey, those of you who are about to be foreclosed on, you may still be.
This bill is not going to stop a lot of foreclosures.
Well, then tell me what the hell is it being done for?
You answer the question.
If the Treasury Secretary's job is to ensure the economic tranquility or whatever the hell else, well-being of the American people, and even after this, some of you are going to lose your homes, then what the hell is going on?
What the hell is this about?
I repeat: if this was Armageddon, if this is the crisis leading to the Great Depression II, Armageddon, life-changing events as we've never seen them before, why wait till now to pass the bill?
Why not pass it last Monday?
Why wait for the Republicans if it's that crucial?
This is what leads me to believe it is not the crisis.
We're being told.
This is a political ploy right out of the left-wing Democrat playbook.
Crisis is the easiest way to manage the behavior of a frightened citizenry.
That's what's going on here.
Brief time out here, ladies and gentlemen.
Sit tight.
We're going to get to your phone calls.
We'll parse the debate in the next hour because people want to talk about the bailout right now.
So we'll do that when we come back.
Okay, let's get you in on this.
People chomping at the bid out there.
Telephone number 800282-2882 will start with Joan and Boca Raton.
Great to have you with us.
Hello.
Hi, how are you?
Fine.
I'm not so good.
I'm sitting here watching C-SPAN.
It's a joke.
It's a total joke sitting here watching Pelosi shake her finger at them and tell them that it's the Republicans' fault.
And it's how can the Republicans vote yes on a situation like that?
I just can't believe it.
Well, it's what I was talking earlier.
I know, I heard you, and I couldn't believe you were saying everything I was going to say.
It's look at they don't.
This is this is.
I mean, I'm reluctant to even say what this is really about.
And they certainly, people who get votes aren't going to say it.
That's the problem.
This is a let me just let me just fire both barrels.
The left in this country, the extreme left, the far left, and the media are not going to stop until, in their minds, people in this country, whoever's alive, whenever it happens, pay for slavery.
So, what you have here, you have people who are afraid to oppose any of this because the primary beneficiaries are minority and poor people.
And then you have the Democrats ready to pounce on that.
You racist, you racist elitist, you only care about the rich and so forth.
The Republicans don't have an answer for that that I've ever heard that they feel confident using.
So, this is the power of political correctness.
This is the power of holding racial accusations, racist accusations, over people's heads.
Right, you know, that's getting old, too.
Well, see, this is, I think it's old to most of the people in the country.
But keep in mind, that's not how this is being portrayed in the media.
The truth of it, once again, is not being portrayed in the media.
The truth of this is being swept under the rug, and it's been replaced by the notion that we've got Armageddon here.
We've got the Great Depression, too, next week if we don't do this.
No, we've got an election coming up, and that's what this is all about.
This is an all-set up thing that's exactly right.
And, you know, and I don't like being manipulated like this.
That's, you know, this is wrong.
Well, here's the answer to this.
And I, you know, we're all going to have to be self-starters on this.
We had a call last week, Joan, from a woman in Chicago.
There were three in a row, and I can't remember which city this one was from.
Might have been Virginia Assembly.
Desperate to get some McCain yards.
It was New Jersey.
Desperate to get some McCain yard signs.
Call the McCain campaign.
Make your own signs for crying out.
Well, she couldn't get it.
Well, she wants the official ones.
Yeah, she could do that.
But here's the point.
You can't detect much of a McCain ground game out there in a lot of parts of the country.
And my point here is that, again, I say this, it is a waste of time for all of us to sit around and wait to be inspired and led by somebody in our party, the nominee on down, to excite us to get it to turn out and vote.
We're going to have to do that on our own.
The way to answer this is to take this anger.
You're angry at Pelosi blaming you.
You're fed up with being manipulated.
You don't like it.
Barney Frank, I wouldn't buy a used car from him.
Exactly.
Well, you can't vote Barney Frank out of office, but you can certainly keep Obama from getting in.
Absolutely.
And so turnout is going to be a self-starter thing in this election.
Well, I've tried.
Every time I talk to anybody, I tell them that, you know, this is not the answer.
Obama is not savor.
Okay, right.
Let me say it a different way.
Get your anger to the polling place on Election Day.
That's essentially what it is.
Let your anger at all of this, at whoever get you to the polling place on Election Day.
Absolutely.
Because we can't afford Obama.
It's Obama's buddies.
It's Obama's groups.
It's Obama's organizations that have brought us here.
It's Obama's party that has brought us for all a finger wagging a Nancy Pelosi.
You know, it's frustrating at the same time to hear people on our side not understand this, not get it.
A bunch of, you know, some people on our side, supposedly in the media, just so lazy to not even have the professionalism to justify what they're being paid to go out and properly inform themselves.
We got media people on our side who want to be seen so much as down-the-middle and fair and nonpartisan that they don't even educate themselves on these things.
They can't get past the traditional clichés that dominate every election.
So in this case, if you're waiting around for leadership, it doesn't appear from your elected officials are going to get a whole lot.
Just Act on your anger and your frustration, and you do that at the voting booth on Election Day.
Thank you, Joan.
I appreciate the call.
This is Erin Idaho Falls.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hi.
How are you, Rush?
Just fine.
Thank you.
Good.
Hey, you know, you said you're not going to detail this plan, but to me, this plan sounds exactly like what was brought up last week.
I mean, McCain rushed back to Washington, and, you know, the House Republicans, they had this new thing, and economists are saying, you know, why don't we insure, revoke Sarbanes-Oxley, all that.
But, and, I mean, honestly, I've been watching this, and I'm amazed at all of these talks over the weekend.
This is what we have come up with?
Nothing different.
We haven't come up with anything different.
Nothing substantively that has any conservatism in it, correct?
Exactly.
And I can't imagine that there's Democrats out there that feel okay about handing over their wallet book to companies who have mismanaged their money.
I don't feel okay about that.
Let me tell you something.
The people in Washington are being inundated from people across the country by people across the country who don't support this.
But the Democrats' answer to that is, well, we've got an important role here in that saving the country.
And if the voters don't understand it, we've got to take the heat for it.
Well, obviously, they don't listen to the people because, I mean, I've emailed, I can't imagine that there's not a lot of people out there emailing their senators and their representatives.
But, you know, I mean, I thought that's what they were there for, to be the voice of the people.
Well, yeah, look, Representative Republic, that's, you know, we don't have that.
If this were a direct democracy, yeah, they'd have to do exactly what we say.
But even then, not everybody in their district is going to agree about what to be done.
So that's not the case.
They listen to us sometimes.
They listen to us on the Dubai Port deal.
Well, they listen to you.
I was for the Dubai Ports deal.
And they finally got the message on illegal immigration, but they're still trying to trickle that back piecemeal.
But sometimes they ignore, sometimes they don't.
This is election year politics.
This is about Democrats trying to steal the country.
And they'll deal with the fallout later.
But as is the case in a lot of elections, I think everybody gets caught up in what the drive-bys report.
Everybody gets called up in the polling data, caught up in it.
Like today, all the tracking polls have Obama up minimum six, some up eight, being attributed to the debate, being attributed to the economic crisis.
I don't see any serious polling of just how angry people are all over this country about this.
I think, you know what, you know what?
My big desire, I want to see on November 5th, the morning after, I want to see the media so shocked that some of them are thinking about jumping out the windows of skyscrapers, not Wall Street people.
I want to see the Democrats so shocked that the Democrat National Committee has to be guarded by psychiatrists to make sure the people inside do not go insane and have to be sent to an asylum.
I want to see such a landslide.
You know what?
The Democrats have engaged in here.
Partisan attacks.
They're out there saying Republicans caused this.
Nancy Pelosi, wagging your Republicans caused this.
And then they say they need the Republican votes.
They go out and make all these partisan attacks, and then they make these bipartisan demands.
And it's the exact opposite.
There is no doubt about whose feet to lay blame here.
About at whose feet?
Me, the Democrats.
Where are we going?
Indianapolis.
Nate, glad you called.
Glad you waited.
Welcome to the EIB network.
Hello.
Yes, Rush.
Real quick, I just wanted to say Mega Dittos, and Meghan Diddos to my father-in-law who got me hooked on you about a year and a half ago.
Thank you, sir, very much.
Real quick, I just wanted to foreshadow a little bit.
Wanted to know what's going to happen with all the assets the government, when they buy this $350 billion, $450 billion worth of assets.
Five years from now, what's going to happen when they sell them all off?
Who's going to get first dibs on all those investments?
Tell me, I don't want to play a guessing game here.
Tell me who's going to get them.
Well, the politically connected, those making campaign contributions to all our fellow or non-fellow Democrat party.
Probably all the Democrats still running the show.
That'll probably be the case.
I just want to see five years from now.
I kind of want to hold you to a rush when these come up for auction.
I just want to know what happens with all these.
Well, one of the problems with them coming up to auction is they got to peg a market price to them.
Who knows when this is all going to happen in terms of when the auctions are going to take place?
But yeah, folks, we have a chance here to profit here.
You know that?
Yeah, we're going to profit.
They're going to write us all dividend checks.
Yeah.
We're going to get dividend checks when all these profits roll in.
And then after we get the dividend checks or what's ever left over, they're going to reduce the cost of Social Security.
They're going to take rid of some government fraud and government.
Well, you're going to do all these wonderful things with all the profits, these assets.
Yeah, right.
Exact opposite.
I don't care who they sell these things to.
It's a fate of complete.
They're going to be sold to their cronies.
What's going to happen, folks, what's going to happen is that all the money generated by this, if this transpires, is going to be the money that Obama spends before these assets are even sold in order to build even more social programs and a bigger government.
You remember the peace dividend?
Remember the 10?
What was it?
What was the surplus that the Clintons were reporting at the end of their two terms?
His huge surplus.
Of course, it vanished, didn't it, when Bush took over?
It vanished after, but there was this huge surplus.
There was no surplus.
They just said that as given an excuse to start spending even more money.
Understand what's going on.
Liberalism is liberalism.
The liberals are in the process of stealing the country.
It's going to take, if they succeed in this, folks, it's going to take a generation to roll this back.
And it will get rolled back because it's going to fail.
And if you think that you're in a disaster now, you wait till the government's running more and more and more of the private sector, the market, or what have you.
Why on earth would anybody with a brain want the same people who caused this in charge of it?
Where is the evidence that the government running a program works?
Everybody that's a beneficiary of a government program is complaining.
The VA, the veterans, are complaining.
People in poverty are complaining.
People that are beneficiary of anti-discriminatory programs are complaining.
People that are supposedly the beneficiaries of low down payment mortgage, they're complaining.
Everybody's complaining.
People that are on Medicare complaining.
People on Medicaid complaining.
People that have already been forced to depend too much on the government for their health care complaining.
People on Social Security complaining.
Parents who have to use the school lunch program complaining.
Now, I know the complaints are generally not enough money, but hey, get a clue.
It's never going to be enough money because the government doesn't produce anything.
All it does is take what other people produce.
I mean, there's not the only people that are not complaining are people like me.
I don't get a damn thing from the government that I want.
Some of it's forced on me now and then.
The unhappy people in our society, not all, there are exceptions, of course.
The unhappy people in our society, the truly miserable, the truly angry are those who are depending on somebody other than themselves for their wants and needs, and somebody else can't do it because somebody else is out working for themselves.
This is so fundamental, it makes me wonder how we lost this argument.
Or if indeed we have, I'm not sure.
Here's Renata in Detroit.
Hey, Renata, I'm glad you called.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Well, hello, Rush.
I cannot believe I got through.
My son will be ecstatic when I'll tell him I spoke with you today.
Well, I'm ecstatic that you get to speak with me today.
Well, Megan is from Detroit.
Thank you.
I wanted to make, I just wish some of the reporters would check the condition of the houses that are being foreclosed.
Rush, they are worthless.
Absolutely worthless.
What do you mean?
Check their condition.
I invest.
You mean they're dilapidated, falling apart?
Yes.
Because nobody's maintaining them?
Nobody.
The rats have moved in.
The bobcats have taken over like they have in some houses in California.
Exactly.
And some of the houses that the Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac would give loans for $150,000, I can go and buy that house for $1,000 now.
Wait a second.
Wait a second.
Yep.
A house that was foreclosed on for $150,000.
A Freddie Mac house that was worth $150,000 to just, that's what it costs to buy?
Yes.
You can go buy it now for $1,000.
Where in Detroit?
Yes.
That may be true then.
At Rush, I personally bought because I go and check the houses before I buy, so I can see maybe 1,000 houses in the last year.
I can't believe you buy a house for $1,000 that was $100,000.
$1,000.
But you know what, Rush, those are the houses that you have to practically gut it down and start all over again.
So what you're looking for is just a land value.
Yeah.
Well, yes, I have experience with that, but not in these circumstances.
Look, I think that's kind of unusual.
That's true.
Most of these foreclosures cannot be bought for $1,000.
So you don't want to give people the wrong idea.
But they are worthless.
I mean, who wants to buy a foreclosed house in a neighborhood where everything's been foreclosed and nobody's mowing a lawn and keeping the property up, maintaining it in the city?
Well, exactly.
I'm talking about Detroit, the areas that people don't want to move in.
The government was giving loans to people that, like, you know, we're talking about they can't afford the houses.
They're just walking away, ripping the cabinets, taking off, taking even the toilets off, the sinks, everything.
And then you walk into that house and the roofs are falling down.
Because they know nobody is going to come after them.
Exactly.
And the banks can't keep up on maintenance with those houses.
Even in the areas that you, you know, that's dirty.
See, that's a good point.
That is another little hidden aspect of this.
The banks, for all the people out there that have been foreclosed on, you think the banks love it.
The people in this country, too many people, have bought into the notion that the libs have put out there, the class envy arguments, that Walmart likes to kill their customers.
So does big tobacco.
The big automobile likes to build unsafe cars that kill you.
Drug companies, they don't care if you die.
We've created this notion that the very engine that produced the greatest country in the history of the earth is out to kill its citizens.
And so when the bank forecloses on you, you think, those dirty rotten capitals, they never wanted me in the house anyway.
They hate me.
The last thing a bank wants to do is have to take on the expense of maintaining a house or a whole bunch of houses and mowing the yards.
The banks are not into that.
The banks, frankly, if you get down to brass tax, other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they didn't want to make these loans in the first place.
There's no responsible banker in the world left to his own devices that would have made these loans.
They were forced to make these loans by the people now who are going to run the system again after claiming to have fixed it.
We'll be back.
Stay with us.
What is vote is tight is very tight.
221 against 1964 in the House of Representatives.
We're getting close here to the point where the Democrats don't have the votes to make up the difference here.
223 to 199.
So basically we've had 422 votes here.
And that means we've got, what, 13 outstanding.
Well, we're probably going to bring everybody in here.
Guam's going to vote.
Puerto Rico is going to vote.
The D.C. delegates are going to vote.
Bring in all kinds of people to vote here.
We'll probably empower Obama's grandmother, maybe the guy in the hut, be able to vote.
Let's see, 223, 199.
Now, the market, what do the markets do?
Oh, gee, the market thinks it's going to fail.
The market's down 672.
The market is down 680.
They think that it's going to fail.
What do we got?
What does that say?
223, 224 to 201.
That's 225.
This is going to be nip and tuck.
We're happy to give you play-by-play here, ladies and gentlemen, on the vote on the bailout on the floor of the House.
Market down now 682.
224 to 202.
By the way, they're out of time.
Time has expired.
This always happens.
Time has expired, but the votes keep trickling in.
Now, what's interesting here, before the vote started in the House, there was all kinds of conventional wisdom out there.
Nobody, you know, nobody wants to be the last one to vote here.
Nobody wants to push this one way or the other.
There's a legacy vote there.
So this is the vote whereby you are never forgotten.
This is like comparable to an Iraq war vote or some such thing.
226 to 203.
Is that what that says?
226 to 203.
So that's 229.
There's no way.
They need 217 to pass it, and they've got them.
Market now, it's coming back a little bit, down 570.
NASDAQ down 139.97.
Change the subject here for just a second, ladies and gentlemen.
This is from Jonathan Martin at the Politico.
This is sick.
This is an outrage, and nobody's going to care.
Barack Obama's campaign earlier this month sought to find a rape victim to appear in a campaign commercial according to an email obtained by the Politico.
Kirsten Stewart, Director of Public Policy at the Family Violence Prevention Fund, served as a conduit between the campaign and victims and women's advocates.
Obviously, it's a big ask.
I haven't seen a script, but presumably it'll be a brief.
This is what happened to me.
We need somebody who will fight for women like me.
These are the guys to do it.
Stewart wrote in September 15th email.
Again, it's just my assumption, given how these things usually go.
Stewart is a former top aid to Representative Maurice Henshey from New York.
So the Obama campaign would have a crew in Washington hoping to film that week.
She didn't respond to a message.
You hear me?
I know the House vote's going on, but Obama went out there, ladies and gentlemen, and sought a rape victim to tell her story in an ad.
Well, why do you have to seek one?
I thought it happened so much in this horrible country.
You can just find one walking down the street.
Hey, we know you've been raped.
Come in and do a commercial for us.
Well, isn't that what the feminists have been telling us?
Sick, sick, sick.
And nobody is going to care.
Okay, where are we on this?
We're at 228 to 205.
Market now coming back down only 515.
It was down 670.
Time remaining there.
How many outstanding votes are there?
I'm having trouble reading this because it's so far away.
Any outstanding votes?
It's right on the screen.
Is there any outstanding votes up there?
Can't see it.
All right.
Let me grab a quick phone call here.
This is Joe in Teaneck, New Jersey.
Joe, welcome to the EIB Network.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Mega Dittos from Teaneck, New Jersey, and it's an honor for me to talk to you.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to comment.
I heard the clip of Maxine Waters talking about desktop underwriting.
Just so your listeners understand what desktop underwriting is all about and why that has created a problem and has brought us to the crisis today.
Because that was a software that Fannie May came out with where you just input the borrower and the loan gets approved and it's been very liberal in getting those loans approved so people can get into houses.
And one of the things that it's been very liberal with was the debt to income.
So you can have a 65% liability against your income and the system would still approve it.
You can have a 65% liability against your income?
Yes, and that is gross income.
That's not even a problem.
Wait a second.
Wait a minute.
When you say the system would approve, you mean the fanny, any bank lending making a mortgage, the system back then would have approved it?
And it's yes, and it still approves it above the 55% as we go.
Now, Joe, hang on just a second here because financial terms sometimes elude people.
Explain as briefly as you can.
Brevity is a solo wit.
65% liability on your income.
What does that mean?
That means if a person is making $4,000 a month, 65% off of that is $2,600.
So they can have $2,600 in obligations between their mortgage and their credit cards or car note.
So they make $4,000 a month.
Gross.
We're talking gross.
We are talking gross.
And so if I understand this, so the lending institutions will underwrite an additional $2,600 as though you have that as income on top of the $4,000.
No, what they're saying is that if you're making $4,000, you can spend $2,600 a month just in liability.
Okay, okay.
The rule of thumb, if I remember this, when I was shopping my first house, was one-fourth.
Your mortgage payment could be one-fourth of your monthly net.
Otherwise, you're going to be in trouble.
And now you're saying they moved that up to 65%.
It's been 65%, and in the past couple of months, they've lowered it to maybe about 55%.
But Freddie Mac is still offering about 59 or 60%.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Well, now that explains quite a lot, too, because these lending institutions are being forced.
I've seen some of the guidelines.
Pay no attention to income.
Income should not be a determining factor.
And by the way, let me give you a brief thought here before I have to go to the break.
Thank you, Joe, very much.
A brief thought here before we go to the break.
It looks like that the bailout vote in the house has failed.
I just, I'm having trouble reading the screen because they're only using one-fourth of the screen while showing the Dow Jones board and everything else.
It looks to me it's 227 to 206 right now, which is 433 votes.
There's no way that they can come back.
The Democrats can win this.
Now, what this tells me, ladies and gentlemen, and this bodes, I think this has interesting implications for the election.
Do you realize a lot of Democrats had to vote against this?
The Republicans did not have the votes to stop it.
The Republicans did not have the votes to pass it.
The Democrats could have passed this in the House without any Republicans helping them out.
Some moderate Republicans joining in.
So a lot of Democrats opposed this.
What does that tell you about the people, the bitter clingers, the people in certain sectors of the country that vote Democrat but are not, you know, they're not totally liberal?
Quite a thing here.
So it looks like it's failed.
The House votes it down and the DJI now at 4,391.
So it's coming back after this.
We'll be back.
All right, what they're doing here, folks, they're browbeating 11 members of the House to change their votes.
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