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Oct. 13, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:29
October 13, 2008, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hey, folks, greetings, a little warning here today.
Going to be a little hoarse.
Today it was a raucous weekend here at the EIB Southern Command, and I used my voice at loud volume throughout much of the weekend, dealing with various festivities that were happening, having to speak over raucous loud music hired by me.
Nevertheless, so I just wanted to give you a little heads up on that.
I'll do my best to limit the hoarseness.
I'm a highly trained broadcast specialist, and I know how to breathe diaphragmically in a way to prevent as much hoarseness as possible.
Great to be with you.
Another week of broadcast excellence, 800-282-2882.
If you'd like to be on the program, the email address, lrushbo at eibnet.com.
Let me sum up where we are right now.
We've got it, 21 days to go, 22 days to go.
And I think the clearest way to look at where the campaign is is to conclude that Senator McCain is now campaigning on Obama's terms.
Now, Senator McCain did have a firebrand speech just now in Norfolk with Governor Palin, and he came out swinging on some things.
We'll see.
We've got a big debate.
What's the debate tomorrow night?
Big debate.
Is it Wednesday night?
Which is it?
Wednesday night?
A big debate on Wednesday night where Senator McCain says he's going to whip Obama's you-know-what.
Now, my preference is that when you have a marketing plan, you don't announce it.
You just do it.
And besides, when you say, how long is it going to be before somebody in a drive-by says, that's a racial comment?
That's a racial.
You say going to rip poor Barry and poor Barry's you-know-what?
I predict to you, my friends, it will not be long before that association is made.
And this is what I mean.
The clearest way to look at the campaign right now is to conclude that McCain is campaigning on Obama's terms.
Obama has dictated what McCain can campaign on and how he can campaign.
He did the same thing to Hillary.
And if McCain or his supporters step outside the box that Obama has built for them, then they're viciously attacked as racist or whatever.
I mean, yesterday, Ann Kornbluten, the Washington Post, comes out with this big, I mean, the headline all across the front page, race interjected into campaign.
It is clearly an attempt to shut people up.
It is an attempt to intimidate people.
And it's right next to that story, by the way, at least on the website, is a story about some poor African town, country, village, or whatever, where they say that the best thing could happen to the people of this town is for every baby to be aborted because health care is so bad and so forth.
It is just, and that's, of course, not a coincidence.
That's designed to support the pro-abort position of Obama and Biden and to cut into Sarah Palin as well.
So what you have to do is you have to accept Obama's terms and his reality, and you have to engage as he demands.
He can throw any punch he wants from any direction, but McCain has to play by the Marcus of Queensbury rules.
And the greatest example of that, we've got audio to back this up coming up, is the notion that McCain's crowds are raucous, prone to violence, getting dangerous out there.
And some of these people are saying, Senator McCain, we want you to go out and fight for us.
Yes, yeah, we're going to do that.
We're going to do it.
We respect.
He praised Obama's judge selections over the week.
Did you hear this?
I'm sure Senator Obama will make fine choices, the Supreme Court, if he wins.
It's almost like McCain was endorsing Obama over the weekend.
So, you know, like I told you last week, folks, we're going to have to try to drag the McCain campaign across the finish line, and we're not going to quit for the next three weeks.
Now, something, there's a lot going on this weekend, and I'm sure a lot of you may not have heard some of this.
There was a story that just popped up over the weekend.
After consulting with Barack Obama, Democrat leaders are likely to call Congress back to work after the election in hopes of passing legislation that would include extended jobless benefits, because of course the economy is going to continue to be rotten, money for food stamps, and possibly, possibly a tax rebate.
The bill's total costs could reach $150 billion.
Officials stressed that no final decisions have been made.
They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they didn't want to preempt a formal announcement.
House Democrats have announced plans for an economic forum today to help Congress develop an economic recovery plan that focuses on creating jobs and strengthen our economy.
Now, there is not one element of Barack Obama's stated economic plan that will accomplish either of those.
You do not raise taxes on small business.
You do not raise taxes on individuals, the producers of the country.
You do not raise capital gains taxes and punish risk takers and create jobs and strengthen the economy at the same time.
You do just the exact opposite with Obama's plans.
Now, something that I was, in addition, thinking about over the weekend, yesterday afternoon, if most Americans are so poor, why did the Democrat Congress, including Obama, vote to increase the FDIC insurance to $250,000 per account?
Why?
Why did this happen?
And that's per bank.
So if you've got $150,000 or $200,000 in one bank and the same amount in another bank, they're both insured.
That has to be.
Why raise it to $250,000 per account?
Why raise it if everybody's so poor?
And I finally figured it all out.
Now, it's going to take me a little while to explain this to you, and I'm going to give it my best shot because it's somewhat complex.
You know, one of the abilities we have here is to make the complex understandable.
That figure, $250,000 is everywhere you look in Obama's campaign.
He is going to raise taxes only on people who make over $250,000.
But in truth, he's going to raise taxes.
He has voted to raise taxes on anybody who makes over $42,000 a year.
But in terms of his campaign rhetoric, there's that figure of $250,000.
Now, if you go back to 1984, Mondal, Walter Mondale, in a debate with Reagan, promised to raise everybody's taxes while saying that Reagan was going to as well.
It's just that Reagan won't tell you, and I just did, Mondale said.
Then Mondale said that rich, somebody said, well, what's rich?
He said $60,000 a year.
Well, even if you adjust for inflation for the last, what would it be, 20 years, some 24 years, you don't get $20,000 or $60,000 becoming $250,000.
$250,000 is the magic number that Obama and his campaign have decided on that fits the perfect play when they throw the class envy card.
Now, if most Americans do not have much money, And yet we're going to insure bank accounts, FDIC insurance, to $250,000 per account.
Why not just bail out those homes where the mortgages are $250,000 or less?
I'm asking this rhetorically.
Stick with me.
Hang in there with me on this.
It goes even further because Obama is telling a bald-faced lie about defining small business.
What is a small business?
Obama and his surrogates have been saying that most small businesses don't earn over $250,000 a year.
But the Small Business Administration has a different view.
And I went, I looked at a post at Patarico.com that explains a lot about Obama's tax plan and small businesses.
Now, this figure of $250,000 and his claim that most small businesses do not earn over $250,000 a year is a lie.
But there is the number again.
What he's trying to do is go after as many employees as he can.
He knows damn well that most employees earn less than $250,000.
He is counting on the fact that the drive-bys will not report the total fabrication, the lie of misinformation about the value, the worth, the income, the receipts of small businesses.
So that figure of $250,000 is out there to most employees who don't earn anywhere near it.
If he says that 95% of all small businesses earn less than $250,000 a year, they will not be worried that the small business they work at will have a tax increase and therefore might have to lay off people.
But he's lying through his teeth about the number.
And I have the facts and the figures here to prove it.
We're going to go through this.
The Nancy Pelosi comment that a post-election special session would require harsh measures.
And then Stenny Hoyer, I don't know if you heard this.
Steny Hoyer said that as soon as the election's over, they're going to reimpose the ban on drilling offshore everywhere.
Harry Reid has already done that in the Senate.
He's already said that.
The fight over taking away the right to vote in a secret ballot before being forced into a union is something else the Democrats have on their agenda after the election.
So they are assuming they have this in the bag.
They're already making plans, legislative plans, to raise taxes, to roll back the ban on offshore drilling, to redo or redo everything they have done for political reasons during the campaign.
They're going to put it all back in place.
They are going to have Obama approve all of this, and they're actually going to start governing before Obama is nominated or is inaugurated as if he already has been.
Now, you might say, well, wait a minute, Bush could veto it.
I'm not going to send it up there for Bush to veto it.
They're going to start working on this.
Now, the poll spread today is, again, all over the place.
It's 11 in Newsweek.
It's 10 in time.
It is 5 in Rasmussen.
I think 4 in Zogby.
And most of these polls are now starting to tighten.
Some of you may say, how can that be?
Don't ask me.
But they're starting to tighten.
Now, remember, the pollsters, at the end of this process, they want to be right for their own future credibility.
Some of the pollsters are deciding, I think.
Some of them are actually honest.
Some of them are still using the poll to manipulate public opinion.
It's not an 11-point race right now.
It's not a 10-point race.
And of course, we've got a great story here on these independents.
You know what you independents ought to do?
You ought to put a McCain Palin sign in the front yard and the other side of the sidewalk in the front yard, put an Obama-Biden sticker sign.
They'd put both campaigns bumper stickers on your.
They're still running around saying, I don't know what I'm going to do.
I can't figure it out.
I'm going to decide.
This is a crock.
Basically, what you have here, and this is a sad thing, Mr. Get 40% of the American people who do not want the socialistic change Obama is proposing.
If 40% of the American people do, the other 20% are too disengaged while thinking they're the elites and smartest people in the room to understand what's going on.
They're the ones who get caught up, well, we've got to change things.
Well, I like the way the guy sounds.
Well, he sounds intelligent.
So you add a percentage of that 20%, that's the undecided, the moderates, the elites, whatever you want to call them, to the 40% who want to go socialist.
And then, of course, you have a recipe there for potential disaster.
And it's that group that McCain is afraid to offend by being partisan, by being forceful against Obama, and so forth.
And the sound bites of McCain trying to ask his audience members to calm down here and show respect.
And so, we've got all that coming up.
Lots to do today, as always, and will be as always, including your phone calls.
By the way, the economy is not all bad, ladies and gentlemen, in New York City.
Prostitution has not suffered a drop off despite the economic meltdown.
So it's still a great time to be morally bankrupt in New York.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
Ha!
How are you?
And welcome back.
Rush Limboy here on the cutting edge of societal evolution.
Bill Crystal, writing today, an op-ed in the New York Times, says it's time for McCain to fire his campaign.
He says that what McCain needs to do is get rid of the whole campaign and start over these last three weeks and make the case for a broadly centrist conservatism.
Now, you know, Bill Crystal and I know each other, and I've been a friend of Bill Crystal for a number of years.
Bill Crystal, however, was one of the early supporters of Senator McCain back in the 2000 presidential race.
And, of course, I was not.
And moving on to this year, Bill and his friends, like David Brooks and so forth, also at the New York Times, were constantly urging us to understand that McCain was the ideal candidate because he could cross the aisle.
He could pick off Democrats.
He could pick off moderates.
He could pick off independents with his honor and his story of heroism and all of this.
And these are the people that said we need to redefine conservatism.
What is centrist conservatism?
I don't know what centrist conservatism is.
I think centrist conservatism is probably what Senator McCain believes himself to be.
I know he says he's a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, but let me ask you a question.
Throughout this whole campaign, forget the primaries, because what happened in the primaries is an anomaly.
But throughout this whole presidential campaign, when was the one time Senator McCain surged?
It was when he moved not to the center, but to the right, when he chose Sarah Palin.
What is it for the first time that actually excited people in the Republican Party about his campaign?
It was the selection of Sarah Palin.
And then they hid her for a while.
Now, this, what, what I hate to see about this, I am not gloating.
What I hate to see about this is this is the exact kind of thing, this is the exact kind of campaign that those of us who had worries about Senator McCain a year ago, six months ago, nine months ago, eight years ago, this is exactly what we saw coming to fruition.
But don't forget, there was and there is a battle in the Republican Party for its heart and soul.
The country club blue-blood Republican media elites trying to wrest control of the party from the conservative base that has made the party a dominant and even landslide victorious party since the 1980s.
So now exactly what you and I knew would happen, as was advocated by the original supporter center.
Now that it's happened, they want to fire the campaign.
These are the people who ought to be so happy with the way this campaign is running because this is exactly what they wanted.
This is the kind of campaign.
They wanted somebody nice.
They wanted somebody respectable.
They wanted somebody with honor.
They didn't want any negative ads.
They didn't want any negative this.
They didn't want any conservatism.
They thought conservatism was a loser.
They thought conservatism needed to be redefined.
They thought conservatism had worn itself out.
You and I know that conservatism will never go out of style because the fundamental and foundational building block of conservatism is liberty.
Individual liberty.
And in this country, individual liberty will never go out of style.
Now, some of these 20% who think they're the smartest people in the room, the so-called independent moderates, undecided, whatever you want to call them, who get caught up in specious things determine how they're going to vote.
This guy sounds smart.
He looks nice.
He's suave, what have you.
They have no idea what's in store for them.
40% of the country does have an idea what's in store for them.
Our 40% says we don't want socialism.
The other 40% does.
And here are these 20% in the middle who are going to be stunned if they end up voting in a majority way for Obama.
They're going to be shocked to see what kind of country this is going to be.
And then eventually somewhere down the road, they'll come back and join us because they are not going to like the encroachments on individual liberty and freedom and income earning and the punishment that will be aimed at people who take risks and who succeed.
So the people on our side, look at, don't misunderstand.
This is not gloating.
It's not nanyin nanyin nanya.
See, I told you so.
It's just frustration.
We could all outside the Beltway see this.
And the architects of this are now the ones throwing up their hands in frustration.
God, this is horrible.
What a rotten campaign.
This stinks.
The fact that it took them till three weeks before the election to figure this out.
Doesn't matter, folks.
Don't get depressed.
Don't get depressed.
We still have our chances here.
We're going to take them.
Okay, now back to this small business thing.
This is very important.
Those of you out there, forget what party affiliation that you have.
Forget your ideological orientation.
Those of you who own small businesses and those of you who work at small businesses, I want to speak to you directly and in a pure business fashion, right to your heart.
I'm going to obviously throw some politics in because lies are being told by the Obama campaign through and through and not corrected by the drive-bys about small business.
And that figure of $250,000 is key.
It is everywhere Obama speaks.
It's used all the time when he talks about tax policy.
Now, what is a small business in America today?
Obama says that most small businesses do not earn over $250,000 a year.
That is clearly a lie.
It is impossible.
It cannot be true.
Your own instinct, you in small business, know full well it can't be true.
Now, the employees of small business might believe it.
Most employees don't get to see the books.
But if you're an employee of small business and there are five or six other of employees in your small business, and that's a small business, just add up your combined salaries and find out if your small business has enough to pay them.
If you're making $50,000 a year at a small business and there are five of you, that's $250,000 right there.
If there are three of you and one's making 30,000, one's making 70, one's making 60,000.
You can see how just the number of employees will get you close to what Obama says is the top of most small businesses.
That $250,000 is key because he wants all of you who don't make that amount of money to think you're not going to get a tax increase.
Now, remember, Obama's got this new coalition of voters, the 30 to 35% who pay no income tax in this country.
Not only do they not pay income tax, they want you to pay more.
They have seen the benefits of no income taxes.
They've been told they're the backbone of America.
They've been told they're getting shafted.
They've been told the rich are getting all the tax cuts.
They have been told that all that wealth and prosperity out there is being denied them by the rich.
And they pay no taxes, no income taxes, federal income taxes.
So they're thinking they've been screwed, that they've been shafted.
Obama's playing to them, and he's telling them, because you've been shafted for so many years by Bush and so many years by Reagan, we're going to get even with the people who've shafted you.
And that's that magical figure of $250,000.
And he's using it in a way that is an out-and-out lie.
They have been saying that most small businesses do not earn over $250,000 a year, but small business administration has a different view.
And I have a post here from October 7th of this year from Patrico's Pontifications.
And it's entitled Obama's Tax Plan and Small Business.
And the genesis for Paterico putting all this together was Obama at the town hall presidential debate saying this about his tax policies.
And it's according to a CNN transcript.
Quote, only a few percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year.
So the vast majority of small businesses would get a tax cut under my plan.
Now, the U.S. Small Business Administration defines a small business according to its average annual receipts or the number of its employees.
Now, here are some examples.
I know numbers are hard to follow, but this will not be because I want you to keep a sharp, just keep in your head the number 250,000 because that's the operative number that Obama uses.
Remember, only a few percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year, so the vast majority of small businesses would get a tax cut.
Okay, here, let's look at the maximum average annual receipts by industry that a business can have and still be classified as small business by the SBA.
Crop production of all types, $750,000.
Keep that $250,000 figure in mind because every business that I'm going to list here, every small business, is far larger than $250,000 in receipts.
Yet Obama says most small businesses Do not make over $250,000.
So crop production, $750,000.
Animal production, except for cattle and chicken and eggs, $750,000 a year.
Cattle feedlots, $2.5 million.
Small business.
Chicken and egg production, $12.5 million.
Small business, according to the SBA.
Forestry and logging, $7 million.
Did you know that forestry and logging has many operators that are small businesses to $7 million definition of a small business by the SBA?
Fishing, $4 million.
Irrigation, sewage, and water supply, $7 million.
Housing construction, $33.5 million.
These are various areas and the size of your business.
For example, if you're in housing construction and your business is over $33 or under $33.5 million, you're considered a small business by the SBA.
Now keep in mind, Obama says the vast majority of small businesses don't earn more than $250 million.
Let me keep going.
Heavy and civil engineering construction, $33.5 million.
Dredging and cleanup, $20 million.
Concrete framing and other housing contractors, $14 million.
Car dealers.
Do you know some car dealers are small businesses?
Those of you who work at them do.
If you own a dealership or a series of dealerships valued in your receipts, these are your annual receipts, are between $23 and $29 million, you're a small business.
RV, motorcycle, and boat dealers, $7 million.
Furniture, hardware, clothing, and sporting goods stores.
If you have one of those and your receipts are under $7 million a year, you're considered a small business.
Electronic stores.
Now talk about circuit cities, the best buys, and all this.
If you're a mom-and-pop electronic store, $7 million is the cutoff line for you to be called a small business.
Supermarkets, gas stations, department stores, $27 million.
Anything over that, you're not a small business.
Anything under it, you are.
Pharmacies, $7 million.
Now, keep in mind, $250,000.
Obama, in the presidential town hall debate, only a few percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year, receipts.
So the vast majority of small businesses would get a tax.
The truth is that if he's going to implement a plan that people over $250,000, personally or small business, subchapter S, filing on their personal return, if he's going to have a tax increase on anybody more than $250,000, 99% of small business is going to get a huge tax increase.
And the very little guy that Obama claims to want to help is the very guy that's going to get clipped here because once these taxes go up, the first instinct of the small businessman or woman is to survive as a small business.
And if your taxes go up and you have an economy like this and you cannot grow for a little while because people don't have a whole lot of disposable income costs their taxes are going up too, what are you going to do?
You can't keep paying people if your business is going down.
Your job is to have your business survive because you have to go through the up and down cycles.
You're going to have to lay people off.
The business cannot purposely lose money for humanitarian reasons for a very long time.
If it does, it'll go out of business and nobody will get anything from it.
I listed for you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17 categories of small business.
Not one of them would qualify for a tax cut under Obama's plan.
And there are probably some small businesses that are under $250,000, but they are so tiny.
They are so small.
They might be sole proprietorships.
Now, there are a whole lot more examples.
We're going to post all this at rushlimbaugh.com.
There are a whole lot more examples at the link.
Most of the industries in the table, such as manufacturers of food, beverages, apparel, print, oil, gas, plastics, plumbing, machinery, computers, on and on and on, are considered small businesses based on their total number of employees instead of average annual receipts.
Now, in those industries, the cutoff between small and large businesses ranges from 500 to 1,000 employees per business or industry.
Now, I'm going to tell you what.
If you have a small business with anywhere between 500 and 1,000 employees, I will guarantee damn to you your annual receipts are higher than $250,000, and you too are going to get Obama's tax increase.
It is going to be a personal income tax rate increase.
For those of you that file on your personal reform of subchapter S on your personal return, you're going to get your own marginal tax rates go up.
You're going to have a capital gains tax increase.
And it's likely that at some point down the road, Obama will shore up and raise corporate taxes in the midst of an economy that all the so-called experts say is going to take a while for it to rebound here.
Now, the Down Jones Industrial Average is up almost 600 points right now.
It's at 581.
We're over 9,000 at 9,032.
And of course, that's him.
But why?
Because the feds and everybody else has taken over all these banks.
So the supposed free marketers on the street here are getting all happy about socialism and nationalization.
And don't forget, in the midst of all this, we've got Pelosi and Reed and Hoyer planning a special session after Obama wins to start this process of tax increases going, to roll back their ban, to eliminate their ban of weeks ago on offshore drilling.
They think they've got this in the bag.
Obama is running around using this $250,000 figure for every tax increase he's planning because he figures 99% of the people in this country are employees.
And they will also believe that their business will not get a tax increase because Obama is smart.
Obama is suave.
Obama is smooth.
Why it's so nice to have finally a smart guy that will be leading and speaking for America, lying through his teeth.
Now forget politics here, folks.
We are talking about if this ever happens, if this actually happens, with 95% or more of all small businesses and the corporate tax too going up, we're talking about your standard of living.
We're talking about your quality of life.
We're talking about your ability to save.
I don't care whether you buy stock or you've decided to put the money in the mattress.
You're going to have less of it.
And eventually the oil price is going to rebound and go up.
It's just, it's going to happen.
Something awfully suspicious about that dropping from $130 to $80 two weeks or three before an election.
But it's what it is.
And of course, everybody's putting out this news.
Largest single drop in the gasoline price in history, 30 cents.
From 380 to 330.
Average across the United States.
I have even more on this small business stuff.
These numbers get a little bit harder to translate on radio, but it is from the Census Bureau, and it's the receipt size of firms.
Latest, most recent data we have for this 2002 receipt size of employer firms.
And it illustrates here quite readily that just take this, the $100,000 to $499,000 figure that we mentioned earlier.
There are 2,387,780 firms.
There are 2 million establishments.
There is about 8.8 million workers.
The annual payroll total is, well, forget those numbers.
If you look at this breakdown and you add up all the firms and all the revenue and all the employment, there is no way that the vast majority of small businesses have only receipts of $250,000 a year.
There are a total of 5,697,759 firms we're discussing here as small business.
1.2 million of them have less than $100,000 in receipts, which makes them sole proprietorships.
2.3, almost 2.4 million are between $100,000 and $500,000.
And then as you go higher, the numbers decrease.
But when you and them all up, you find that it is, no matter how you look at it at this point, whether you look at it as number of employees, whether you look at it as receipts, there's no way Obama's even close to the truth on this.
What a teachable moment I have here for you.
I love teachable moments.
I just got a couple of emails.
I checked them.
There may be more than two, but I just checked.
Rush, when you talk about receipts, a small business's receipts, $250,000 yes, are you talking about gross or net?
Folks, you're asking the wrong guy.
The onus here is not on me.
You're asking the wrong guy.
We don't know if Obama's talking about receipts or profits because nobody's asking him.
And I'm not the one promising to raise your taxes on this.
The little squirrel Obama is.
Somebody needs to ask him, are you talking about receipts or profit?
You talking about gross or net?
We don't even know if he's including inventory.
Folks, do you understand?
In a small business, you can have one person that runs a realtor shop.
You can have one person that runs a catering business.
What about inventory?
How do you throw the inventory?
How do you calculate that in this $250,000?
We do not know because Obama is not saying.
Nobody's asking if he's talking about net profit, gross profit, or gross period.
We have no idea what he's talking about, and neither does he, because he is lying.
The $250,000 number is the key.
It's designed to get most Americans thinking that they're going to get even with the people who have stolen everything from them and have gotten unfairly wealthy.
He is using that $250,000 figure to secure the votes of people who want to see everybody at $250K or over get their taxes raised.
The $250,000 figure on FDIC insurance guarantees is just a further way to promote that number.
Everywhere you look, Obama's magic number is $250,000.
A brilliant caller last week, if you didn't hear this, who said Obama and the Democrats are out there saying they are for the American dream.
In Obama's world, the American dream ceases to exist once you get to $250,000.
Well, Rush, do you mean net worth?
Do you mean annual income?
Do you mean, I don't know, folks, because nobody's asking Obama.
I don't know if his definition of a small business of $250,000, which he says the vast majority have receipts or are smaller than $250,000.
I don't know if he's talking gross or net.
Don't ask me.
The onus is not on me to explain this.
Ask him.
Or get your friendly drive-by.
Here's the real point.
Doesn't matter because he's lying because the number isn't anywhere close to being accurate in the first place.
So don't get caught up in net or gross.
Get caught up in screwed or free.
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