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Nov. 24, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:24
November 24, 2008, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
You know what I I think, folks, I th I actually ought to name myself an unofficial Obama advisor.
Because all last week I was asking, where is Obama?
I mean, that Rome is burning, and where is Obama?
It's his plan, everybody's waiting for its stability from his plan, whether it's a good plan or bad plan, everybody's waiting for.
Lo and behold, in mere moments, right after this show begins, Barack Obama, the President Select, is going to announce his economic team, ladies and gentlemen.
Greetings and welcome.
It's great to have you here.
Thanksgiving week begins on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network, El Rushbow, back at the Southern Command.
Always great to be home.
Telephone number is 800-282.
There they come.
Right as this program.
Right as this program starts, here comes the economic team to stand behind Obama.
Let's who we have there.
We have uh Geitner, we've got uh looks like Christina Roomer, who's a big tax cut babe.
Did you know that?
She's from UC Berkeley, and she's uh she writes window dressing, I think, but but but she's a big there and there he is, the Messiah has now uh uh uh moved to the podium, uh, ladies and gentlemen.
He's gonna make some announcements that everybody already knows uh are coming.
The stock market today is up a little over 300 points, and this is primarily due to the Citibank bailout.
Uh folks, this this bailout, do you understand the total of these bailouts is now approaching seven trillion dollars?
By the time let me let me where where's the where's the the actual number on heavy?
Federal reserve has pledged seven point four trillion dollars to ease frozen credit, seven point four trillion dollars plus all these bailouts, all these stimulus packages.
I guess Obama and the Democrats think that we're idiots here.
Uh they're repackaging his uh his massive socialist agenda, his massive new deal, uh, as uh as a job stimulus program that will supposedly jump start the uh the economy.
Uh it's just I'm wondering what you well, we know where this is coming from, folks.
That you do you realize we are going to face, for all of you who have been hearing from the drive-by's over the last eight years about how high the Bush deficit is and how punitive this is, and how we got to balance the budget and so forth.
We're looking by the time these people finish, these central planners in Washington, by the time they finish, we're going to have in this fiscal year, which started October 1st, we are going to have a federal budget deficit of 1.3 to 1.4 trillion dollars.
The federal budget in total is just over $3 trillion.
We and where are we going to get the money?
We're not printing the money.
For you you can't just go out and print it.
We are going to borrow it.
We are going to ask people from all over the world, nations all over the world to help subsidize this debt, because our economy still determines the fate of the world economy.
And they just keep saying 700 billion here, seven.
It seems like the magic number, like 95% was the magic number on the on tax cuts, and 225,000 or 250 was the magic number on tax increases.
Now we have this uh uh the this this all these bailouts of 700 billion here, 700 billion there.
I am proud to say that I am one of the brave and few in this country not asking for a federal bailout.
And I am very honored, I'm very proud to uh count myself among those not asking for a federal the reason I'm not asking for a federal bailout, Mr. Snerdley, is that I have brains.
And I know that I am one of the few, the proud, the brave, that's gonna be helping pay for this.
I don't I don't have to register as a bank.
Uh and I I'm perfectly happy to be registered as a as a radio company.
Uh the Democrats Chuck Schumer, he's got they they want to have a stimulus package on Obama's desk in January, the day he's inaugurated of another 700 billion.
Here, listen to Obama describe this.
I said I said that he's uh uh repackaging his his massive uh collectivist agenda as a jobs stimulus program.
This is from his uh the weekly radio address, President elect Obama delivered on Saturday.
We'll be working out the details in the weeks ahead.
But it will be a two-year, nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy.
We'll put people back to work, rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel efficient cars, and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.
These aren't just steps to pull ourselves out of this immediate crisis.
These are the long-term investments in our economic future that have been ignored for far too long.
And they represent an early-down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington.
A government that spends wisely, focuses on what works, and puts the public interest ahead of the same special interests that have come to dominate our politics.
So much here, but he's laying it out for you.
He is he is promising you here a collectivist socialist agenda.
This business of this is this is this is right out of FDR and the TVA and all these makework projects, building roads, crumbling roads, bridges, and so forth.
Uh and this is this is not just a one-step thing.
This is the plan for the future.
Uh early down payment on the type of reform my administration will bring to Washington.
A government that spends wisely.
How in hell can anybody in Washington, I don't care what party they're a member of, how can anybody say that there will be wise spending in Washington?
The spending is out of control.
It's over.
I mean, there's there's there's no discipline whatsoever here.
And this is being done by politicians who want to cement their power.
They are trying to create as many of you in need as they can.
Uh, particularly on the Democrat side of things.
This is this is a rerun of FDR.
In fact, you know, last week I um we we harped on the on the Rom Emanuel soundbite from last Tuesday about the uh crisis here being an opportunity.
And lo and behold, in Newsweek, big long story here by Michael Hirsch and Daniel Gross, entitled Who's Watching the Money, with the economic news worsening every day.
Obama found that he could not ignore the growing power vacuum back east.
So pervasive has the panic become that some critics were starting to point fingers back at Chicago.
Wonder who those critics were.
Wonder who these two guys happen to be listening to.
Who was it last Thursday and Friday was asking, where is Obama?
And lo and behold, Obama has shown up with the naming of his full-fledged economic team.
Let me define spending wisely.
As Obama means it and as the Democrat Party means it.
Spending wisely means spending everything and then some.
Wise spending is a deaf is is this is a term for the government running as much as they can get their hands on.
But listen to this paragraph from the from the Newsweek story.
Some people see political motives in all this foot dragging.
Obama may want to avoid being linked in any way to the policy failures of the Bush era.
Harvard economist Ken Rogoff, a sometime advisor to McCain, says that by not taking ownership of the problem now, Obama can reappear dramatically as his savior on January twentieth.
Like FDR in 1933, thereby reclaiming the commanding heights of U.S. politics for the Democrat Party.
It's exactly the FDR model, says the McCain advisor.
The market may sink another 10%, but then they can win elections for another 10 years.
It makes sense politically to hang Bush out to dry, but Obama has to hang the economy out to dry at the same time.
Obama, in other words, may want to turn crisis into opportunity.
May want to turn crisis into opportunity.
He is turning crisis into opportunity.
This that he is announcing today with his economic team, his speech on Saturday, his radio address, all of this spending.
This has nothing to do with reform.
It has nothing to do with improving the economy.
It will not work.
Not as you and I define work.
It will work for them.
It will work for Obama and the Democrats.
It will continue to create crisis.
It will not create two and a half million jobs.
The government can this just not not private sector jobs.
It will not create two and a half million private sector jobs.
It may create two and a half million government jobs.
They could do that overnight if they wanted to.
And that may be well what they what they intend.
A brief time out here, folks.
We've only just started, and oh, there's a there's a great story today from uh uh the Madison, Wisconsin Capitol Times about Thanksgiving.
The pilgrims, this is the headline of the story.
The pilgrims were really grave robbers.
The real story of Thanksgiving from some anti-American leftist history person.
Okay, quick time out.
Back with more right after this.
Two and a half million government jobs would more than double the federal workforce or thereabouts, if that's what he has in mind.
By the way, is any and anybody want to continue the discussion that Obama is governing from the center, that Obama is a moderate.
This is full-fledged FDR New Deal collectivism that he is outlining.
And I just I watched a little bit or listened to a little bit of his um announcement ceremony that's taking place today, and it is uh pretty much what I thought it would be.
He's he's he's making these radical proposals.
All of this crazy, unaccounted for spending, but he is doing it with an air of confidence and assuredness that uh is is continuation of the image.
It's it's sort of like the way FDR mesmerized people with the fire side chats.
It just inspired confidence.
He sounds like he knows what he's doing.
He sounds like he's in charge.
He sounds like he's got his hands in the till on everything, knows what's going on here, ordering his team around, telling them to get back to him, get something done here soon after he's inaugurated.
And uh g given given the uh the nature of our society day and population, this kind of uh confidence at first will uh will will garner support for uh for what Obama wants to do.
But let's let's take this statement of his, this little excerpt that we had from his radio address on Saturday.
We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges.
Well, you know, there's a little bit of a problem with that.
Guess what's happening?
And it's it we've had stories of this uh throughout the past couple of years.
The gasoline price is now it's it's less than half what it was this summer.
And you know what that means.
It means that ta and people are are driving less, even despite the fact that the prices come down.
Their gasoline usage is down five percent.
That's not insignificant.
The uh tax revenue therefore is down, the price is down, and so people are driving less even with cheaper prices, which means that all of the gasoline tax revenue, federal and state, is less than projected.
So guess what's now being discussed?
Raising the federal gasoline tax, as we mentioned last week, so much.
It's actually kind of disheartening in one way, and another way, of course, it's um, you know, reach around pat myself on the back.
But it is so easy.
I know liberals like every square inch of my glorious naked body, and I know what they're gonna do.
And they're gonna grow government, and if they have any revenue shortfalls, they're gonna find a way to tax those shortfalls back into where they think they ought to be.
So even though gasoline's cheaper, and even though people are using it less, because, by the way, the government has advised them to do this.
The state governments, the federal government told everybody go out, get rid of the SUV, buy the clunker, go out and buy the tiny little lawnmower with a couple of seats on it, save gas, save the planet, don't pollute as much.
And then when people go out and do that and tax revenue to the states and the feds fall, then they have to talk about, well, what are we going to do with this revenue back?
Because they can't do with a dime less.
You and I will be asked to do with a lot less, the government will do with not a dime less.
So we're gonna put people back to work on our crumbling roads and bridges.
Now, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I I travel around the country a lot, and about the only place I see crumbling roads and bridges is in cities totally run by liberal Democrats, cities that have been run by liberal Democrats for most of the last 50 years.
I mean, there's some bridges in New York that look I sh I don't know how they're still standing.
You talk about road conditions and so forth, and liberals, I don't care who the mayor has been, liberals have run that town for I don't know how long.
And it was the same thing in New Orleans with the levees, uh Minnesota and that bridge.
But in truth, how many of our roads are crumbling?
How many of our bridges are falling down?
Do we hear about this every day?
We had one bridge, one calamitous collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, and all of a sudden every bridge in America's in disrepair and is in danger of falling down, and so we need uh $700 billion stimulus package and a bunch of makework jobs to go out and rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges.
Where are they crumbling?
Take a look where they're crumbling and find out who's running the show, and you might have a good idea as to why they are crumbling.
Another thing here wind farms and solar panels.
There's a story in the stack today from a former head of a Ramco, which is a Saudi company that that uh that runs the expiration of their oil fields and the production.
He says we have more oil than anybody in the world can possibly understand.
We have trillions and trillions of barrels of oil.
We are in no danger of running out of oil.
Not just that that we have discovered, but that that we haven't discovered.
There's a lot we've discovered we haven't produced that we could produce.
We've not peaked.
We're nowhere near peaking on oil, and yet everybody's in panic now because of the oil price going up and now the instability of it coming back down, and all this constant, never-ending talk about global warming.
And by the way, you see some whales are stuck in ice already up in the uh near the Arctic Circle.
It's never happened this early in the season.
Uh we need to send some SUVs up there right now and warm it up.
People need to get some SUVs up to the Arctic Circle and start driving around and warm things up.
You know, a little anecdotal story here, and it's what it is is anecdotal.
I moved to Florida in January, February 1997, and for the uh then I've still been here eleven years.
You have been able, we have been able to make book here on one meteorological certainty.
And that is sometime in the middle of December toward Christmas, we're gonna get our first cold snap.
And we're and it's gonna happen.
It always happens.
We always there's been one year where it was 80 degrees out of these past 11 I've been here.
One year where it was 80 degrees on Christmas Day.
The rest of the time, you know, it did dips down cold here when the humidity goes away, as in the 60s and 50s at night, that's some people bundle up and turn on the fireplaces.
We are currently in the midst of our fourth or fifth cold snap since the first of November.
I have never seen this.
I have never, and when I say cold snap, I mean the humidity is gone, uh low temperatures in the uh in the 50s and highs sometimes not even breaking 70, and this week we're gonna have a week uh much like what that Christmas week I just described to you is.
The lows are gonna be anywhere from 49 to 55, and the highs are barely gonna get into the 70s in a couple days.
Today's gonna be nice, then another coal front comes in.
I've never seen this.
I've never seen this since I've lived here.
Now, granted, it's just anecdotal.
Uh so I as you know, I think the whole global warming thing is a hoax, it's a myth, it's just part of the master plan that we see being unveiled today.
It is a reason to tax, it is a reason to limit people's freedom, it is a reason to put government in charge of fixing a crisis, a crisis that will destroy the planet, destroy animals.
I mean, we've been through this uh time and time again.
It's uh it's there's there's no there's no evidence that man-made global warming exists, that it can be proven.
And yet we're plowing ahead here.
So he talks about wind farms and solar panels and fuel efficient cars, alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil.
That's not how you do it.
You free yourself from dependence on foreign Oil by producing your own.
But given his statement here, I've something I want you to think about.
Something I want you to ponder.
Everybody is agreeing that the big three auto execs are overpaid.
But I wonder maybe they're underpaid.
Maybe the big three auto execs are underpaid.
Look at it this way.
You're the CEO.
You're the boss.
You're the Mr. Big.
And a few little Congress people with huge egos assign you a term paper that you have to complete during the Thanksgiving vacation.
And here is what the liberals in Congress want answered in 20 pages, more or less, with your with your new proposal to get your bailout money.
Congress said, show us a plan that will honor all of the overpriced union agreements and wait till you hear the details on how much that actually costs.
I'll get to that in the next segment.
Congress wants to see a plan for the Big Three to turn out cars that environmental extremists are demanding, like Obama.
They want big three automakers to stop producing cars that customers want.
They want the big three to start manufacturing cars that liberals say you should want or should have.
Every time liberals in Congress change their minds, you have to change your production lines.
Or at the same time, you're doing all this to satisfy these people, have no idea how to run your business, you have to make a profit.
These guys aren't overpaid.
There isn't enough money in the world to pay anybody to play the game.
The auto execs are having to play with a bunch of neophytes who have no idea to run the auto business.
They're just trying to turn it in to the latest branch of the environmentalist wacko movement.
We'll be back.
Well, I don't know what to make of this.
Uh when Barack Obama started his news conference, the announcing of his economic team, by the way, no specifics in the economic plan he announced.
He was asked by reporters, could you give us a number?
How big is your stimulus package going to be?
Well, I uh uh I um I uh I'm gonna wait uh from for my uh uh the um uh recommendation from from from my uh team before I get into any of that.
I've I've spoken to Bernacke and I've uh I've spoken to President Bush.
Uh the auto companies, he gave he said they got to get back to him.
They gotta get back to him on how they're gonna retool and how they're gonna structure themselves for uh long-term sustainability.
We're not just gonna kick the can down the road with the bailout.
Man, can I read that right?
That's that that means these guys are gonna have to bend over, grab the ankles, okay.
You want us to go total green, we'll go total green.
You want us to make cars people don't want, that's what we'll do.
Uh you you want us to uh do all of this stuff that you want people to drive that they don't want to drive.
Fine, that's what we'll do.
That's that's what he's that's the pressure that's being put on the um on the automobile companies today.
Now, when Obama started the stock market was at 325.
Uh he started his press conference right as this program began.
That is not an accident.
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, the stock market now is down to just over 200, uh 20478, so it's it's down a hundred and twenty points, 125 points or so since the Mussia began his um meeting announcing his uh his economic team.
Well, once again, there were no specifics announced.
And that's uh that I think is going to be pretty common.
What he's trying to do is sell what he will not tell us he's going to sell us with an air of authority and confidence and assuredness.
Uh don't worry, everything's gonna be all right, I'm on it, my team is on it.
And this'll work at first.
Uh this this will give people uh some pause.
Maybe well, I don't know.
I may be speaking out of turn.
It doesn't appear that it has calmed Wall Street or Wall Street's coming back a little bit now, 226, so it's down down a hundred points.
We should specify that the reason the markets launched up today was the city group city group bailout, uh, not the anticipation of Obama's team.
Uh Obama's press conference called it caused a spike it was as low as 150 points.
But I folks, stop and think about what the auto industry has to do here.
And let me find that little story here about How much it costs the auto industry to pay people who are not working?
Well, too many stacks here today.
I will find it in just a second.
But the fact of the matter is, when you look at what the auto industry is being asked to do here, show us a plan that will honor all these overpriced union agreements, show Congress this plan, turn out cars, the environmental extremist demands, stop producing cars customers want, manufacture cars liberals say people should be driving, and then every time the liberals in Congress change their mind, you have to change your production lines and retool.
And while doing all of this, you have to make a profit.
It is clear.
I mean, I I would not want to be a CEO of the big automaker these days.
What with uh is is headed their way given their needs.
They're gonna have to bend over a whole bunch of times, grab the ankles for whatever sustenance they get from the um from the government.
Let's start on the phones.
Are you ready in there to the transcribe things as we go?
Yes.
Bill in uh Illinois, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Welcome to the EIB network.
How are you doing, Rush?
Just fine, sir.
Thanks.
Hey, I've got uh an answer to why the roads are falling apart and crumbling.
Tell me.
Roads are designed to be maintained after so many years, to be resurfaced, and throughout the years in different states and places, they've deferred the maintenance to save the money or spend the money on other places.
So because maintenance hasn't been done throughout the years like they should have been, the roads and bridges are crumbling.
Well, but are they crumbling?
See, that's that's my question.
Are the roads and bridges really crumbling?
Minneapolis Bridge, uh, that was that was not a uh a design problem.
Or it was an engineering problem.
That was not from neglect.
It wasn't that nobody maintained that bridge.
They finally did uh an investigation, they studied it, and they found that it was an engineering error from the get-goes, a design error.
Um, years before in Connecticut, they had a bridge collapse because it wasn't maintained.
There's a lot of issues with maintenance of these structures that haven't been done that we've got to catch up on, otherwise you will see it.
It's money that should have been spent at first that wasn't spent where it should have been.
When other people there is merit to what you're saying here in the sense that uh uh give liberals a pile of money and they'll and they'll spend it buying votes uh before that they a lot of politicians will frankly spend it buying votes before they uh spend it on its intended purpose.
Bill, thanks for the call.
Appreciate it.
Uh let's see who's next.
This is Steve in Louis.
Steve, great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Well, thank you, Rog.
It's good to be talking to you too.
Appreciate it.
Uh Ross, I'd like to explain to your audience uh a little bit more specifics.
Uh, my wife and I, we are freelance proposal writers for construction companies.
Uh a lot of companies have to hire folks like us because of the mounds of paperwork, the requirements to before they dig anything into the ground.
The government requires feasibility studies, impact studies, diversity hiring, all kinds of things.
Now, these things didn't exist back in the 1930s.
If they wanted to build a new road, they simply hired contractors and they built the road.
Today, over the past fifty years, all of this stuff has to be uh have to go through tons of approvals before they can do anything.
Right, and this is one of the reasons we don't build as much anymore.
You look at the 30s of the Great Depression, look what went up.
The Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, and the two bridges out in the Bay Area.
And we have here in in my hometown, Louisville, the there's been an effort to build a bridge across the river for twenty years.
Now, under Ann Northup, who was a Republican, after about twenty years, they were finally starting to actually build a few things.
But then after a Democrat took North's place, it it stopped.
Now that's what's going on, and and in fact, Rush, the bulk of my work that my wife and I do are is not even here in the United States.
Most of it's in the Middle East in Dubai.
I just got back from the Middle East to Bahrain.
There is tons of work going on over there.
We could do it, but we've got all these rules and regulations Here in the United States, and it is next impossible to even dig one hole in the ground.
Well, and then uh it it's it's interesting, then if we're gonna rebuild bridges and crumbling roads and so forth, uh, how will uh the federal government react to its own regulations when it starts out doing this?
My guess is they'll just overlook them or broom them for a while because Obama's got to show action.
And we're if if we're gonna rebuild roads and bridges, then we better damn well see a lot of people out there on the roads and bridges and not drinking coffee every ten minutes.
If we're gonna rebuild the roads and bridges, don't you think the American people better see a lot of them being rebuilt?
There better be a lot of video footage of a lot of chain gangs and whoever else is going to be out there building these roads or filling potholes or what have you.
And the same thing with maintaining bridges and our precious infrastructure.
We'll see, ladies and this is this is uh uh what what it's a campaign promise, and I know he's gonna continue governing in campaign mode.
Now, I I think Obama's timing is perfect here because he's acting today like Santa Claus.
He has all kinds of goodies that he's gonna give every one of you.
Of course, you're gonna pay for these presents, but he makes you feel good.
You're happy to see him show up, always asking you what you want, but in the end, we know the truth, don't we?
Whatever we say we want, we are going to pay for.
What of the hundreds of billions in taxes we pay on gasoline that was supposed to go into a highway trust fund for maintaining and building federal roads?
What happened to all of that?
What happened?
We already have these systems in place for maintenance of our precious infrastructure.
What happened to the money?
What happened to all that tax revenue?
Well, clearly it's been spent like every other dime has been spent, plus dimes and dollars in the billions and and soon-to-be trillions that they never had in the first place.
John in Libertyville, Illinois, nice to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hey, thank you for taking my call.
You just said something really interesting that I think is kind of uh it really shows why the conservative mindset has failed and continues to fail.
You said that Barack Obama and the Democrats are gonna force the auto industry in the United States to make cars that nobody wants.
Now the reality is that given the fact that we now know that gas prices can be manipulated to shoot up to almost five dollars a gallon, that the reality in Detroit is that they're already making cars that nobody wants.
You can't sell an SUV in this country to save your life.
And making fuel efficient, making fuel efficient cars makes commercial sense.
It's not an ideological thing.
But but it sounds but you turn on the Rush Lembaugh show, and what you hear is, no, they just need to keep on making gas guzzlings for utility vehicles, and everything will be fine.
And it's crazy.
That's not what you hear.
That's what you think you hear.
What you're missing that is implicit in my statements on this is that I believe in freedom.
And I think if somebody wants to go buy an SUV, they ought to be able to buy one.
I just bought one last week, so you're you you think nobody's buying SUVs?
People are buying SUP.
There are people.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Now come on now.
I'm trying to have an intelligent discussion with you about the concept of freedom.
That's what this is about.
I don't want to have to drive one of these little pea brain cars that Obama thinks everybody ought to be in.
I don't want to drive a hybrid unless it's an SUV hybrid.
I do not want to drive, I do not want to drive one of these newfangled electric things.
I just don't.
And I don't want to be forced to have to buy one one day.
Not in not in the land of the home, uh land of the free home of the brave and all that where we have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Of course they're gonna mandate the federal government's gonna bail this business out theoretically.
Look at how they run the school lunch program, look at how they run the curricula at schools.
Once their money is involved, they can tell the auto companies what to do, and there's no question that the greening of the auto industry is one of the objectives here.
And I have, you know, talked to people at General Motors, uh, and and they have you know why they're making these cars that you described.
I didn't describe any kind of car.
You're the one describing cars.
I'm saying, why wouldn't it make sense?
Why wouldn't it make commercial sense to make a sport utility vehicle that gets better gas mileage?
Why is that a problem for you?
It's not.
I don't have a problem with that.
But how come you then how come you have this imaginary idea that Barack Obama is gonna force Detroit to make cars nobody wants?
It seems to me everybody would want that, wouldn't they?
Well, I don't see them making mad dashes out to buy them is the point, and they are available as you said.
I don't see them taking over the market.
We don't have an oil shortage.
You see, all the the premise for all these new kinds of cars is flawed and a lie.
We're not destroying the planet.
There is no man-made global warming.
All of these automobiles, SUVs, are not changing the climate.
And this has been what has forced General Motors to retool because the, you know, enough Americans have bought into this silly notion that they're saving the planet by driving some of these little cars.
They have to give the customers what they want, but this is not what they want to make.
This is Well, Americans have bought into the notion also, and I think quite rightly, that gas prices can shoot up at a moment's notice for artificial reasons.
And that's going to make them say to themselves, why should I buy a car that gets eight gallons?
You know, eight eight miles to the gallon.
There's no logic in that.
And I mean, it just sounded crazy for you to say he's gonna make them make cars nobody wants.
I'm telling you, they're making cars nobody wants right now.
They have been trying to get them to build cars that nobody wants for years, starting with Al Gore's electric car and uh and all these these other things.
But if you misunderstand, wait, wait, wait, wait.
What did the Bush administration do to try to get Detroit to make more fuel efficient cars?
Well, I know the hydro, I know it's all silly.
Look at this, you you're this is ideological in the sense that people who want the government to be the answer to everything, you want to exercise government power in Bush's case, he's just pandering.
He was just pandering to people amidst all the uh the pressure that was mounting on him.
None of this, none of this fits under the rubric of liberty.
You got the president of the United States, the president elect for crying out loud, John, wake up.
The president of the United States and members of Congress are gonna tell the auto industry how to run their damn business in order to in order to get some bailout money, and if they would if they didn't have to pay people that weren't working for them, well, you hear the numbers, it wouldn't be as bad a problem as it is.
Union regulations, I mean, I don't I don't understand why you aren't frightened of this.
If the federal government can can tell uh the auto industry how in the world it must operate, Obama just said this.
We're not gonna give them the money until they give us a long-term plan of sustainability, and it's gonna be on his terms.
That's not in the Constitution, my buddy.
The President of the United States does not have or shouldn't have that kind of power, and we are surrendering it left and right, both corporately and privately and independently, and it scares the hell out of me.
Let me just quote from Obama's own radio address on Saturday.
We'll put people back to work, rebuilding roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, building wind farms and solar panels.
Who is this we business?
These are all the things except for the schools of silver wind farms and solar panels, that's a private sector business.
Once again, if people want it, but we're gonna mandate they have solar panels and wind farms.
We will put people back to work making fuel efficient cars.
And the alternative energy technologies that can free us from dependence on foreign oil.
How's he gonna do that if he doesn't order the auto companies to do it?
This is a freedom issue, folks.
The way this works is not complicated whatsoever.
It's it's it's it's I don't know, you you just let if you let supply and demand work, ladies and gentlemen, then whatever consumers want, Detroit will build.
That's how they make money.
The only reason for the government to get involved is to force Detroit to make cars people do not want.
By definition, you leave it alone, people will buy what they like, and that's how cars get made.
But then you put government regulations, cafe standards, mileage, emissions, all this, and all of a sudden you change the game.
The government's telling the automobile business how to run the business.
And then you give them 15 different gasoline formulations they have to make engines for it And all this rot gut.
And now here's Obama saying, we're gonna produce, we're gonna fuel efficient cars.
And he doesn't know the first thing about doing it himself.
By the way, Chicago Tribune, today, SUV sales stir as gas prices sink.
SUV sales stir, consumer tastes are changing, yes, but people are starting to buy SUVs again.
Despite our previous caller, if you think, if you think that this is a recipe for making all this work, the you know the big three automakers used to be able to play poker with the government all day long.
They held the cards.
As GM goes, so goes America.
After being skewered by Congress and lampooned on Saturday Night Live, the CEOs of Detroit's three automakers, they end up making their return trip to Washington by car as they seek a federal bailout, and they're gonna carpool.
They are going to carpool.
Auto industry planning carpool to Washington to ask for building.
If you think this is not done out of abject fear of the federal government by a private industry, then you don't understand what's going on.
GM factories building SUVs are working overtime to meet the demand, even now.
Details coming up.
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