All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 16, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:08
December 16, 2008, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Boy, that is a rough weekend.
I got to say, you know, regardless of how you feel about the president, President Bush had a rough weekend.
I don't know what his advisors were thinking if you really think about it.
I mean, they throw him in a war zone.
He gets a couple of shoes thrown at him in a press conference.
Outside the door, there's shooting, robbery, pillage.
And that was just the meeting he had with the big three in Detroit.
Why send him there now?
I don't.
Did you hear about this?
Well, obviously you heard about it because all MSNBC has done is replay the disgruntled Iraqi journalist who threw the shoes at Bush, which, by the way, he definitely dodged, I might add, came up with a pretty good line.
I think they were size 10.
But I don't know how many times I've seen this.
Apparently, the guy's disgruntled.
He's in fear of Iran taking over the country and all of this.
But one thing you can say about the president, I mean, this is going to be his legacy that he's putting his entire presidency on.
He kept the country safe for eight years in office.
And a lot of people wouldn't have said that possible on 9-12.
The idea that we wouldn't be struck again.
I don't want to speak too soon, but some are fearful that that may not be the case going forward.
We shall see.
Now, obviously, as I've said, and Rush has said earlier, there are some drawbacks to this.
And I think the biggest drawback was this whole notion of compassionate conservatism, which was kind of a code word for throwing in the towel on fiscal restraint.
And now we are nationalizing industries quicker than Bill Clinton's looking at interns.
I mean, this is really getting out of control.
So we'll talk with Trent Franks.
He's a member of Congress from the 2nd District, Arizona, voted against the automobile bailout.
We'll talk about spending, the trillion-dollar deficit that we've got for this year that we're in right now.
The fiscal year for the Fed starts in October.
How to fix the Republican brand.
And it's quite frankly easy to fix the Republican brand.
Because lots of things, Snerdley, are in fact easy or they're simple.
They're just difficult.
And, you know, to say no to people is difficult.
It's not complex.
It's not this esoteric notion that, oh, how do we fix the Republican brand?
Try saying no to a few special interests.
Don't go along with the environmental left.
Stand up and educate the public.
Right now in the environment, we've got no opposing party.
And naturally, if you let the Sierra Club educate people on global warming, even when it's four below in the upper Midwest, people are going to believe the only guy in the arena.
So you've got to stand up to this.
Look, it's quite simple.
We've got to disavow this notion or disabuse ourselves of this notion that the political party comes ahead of principle.
When you elevate loyalty to a party or a faction, as Madison put it, over principle, you're done.
And that's what we've done.
We have had for far too long too many little Republican apparatchiks in Washington, in the consultancy crowd, in elective office, working for the government, who quite frankly don't care if government grows or not because they still have a job.
Indeed, their job might be more secure.
And those people, the political class, have no stake in the fire.
You've got to get over this idea that the goal is not electing Republicans.
The goal is shrinking government.
And Republicans are in the way of that and have been in the way of that almost as much as Democrats when it comes to spending over the last eight years.
And therein lies the problem.
It's not complex.
It is difficult.
It is hard.
And that's why politicians don't want to do it.
Now, going back to the last hour, some interesting conversations on this.
You know, look, if you're going through a rough patch, if the good times are followed by bad times, that's when people panic, you know, like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.
They panic and they think because we now live in an entitlement mentality, an entitlement state, that the business cycle ought to be repealed, that there should never be a downtime.
Well, it will never be repealed.
There will always be bad times after good times.
And there will especially be downturns when you've got an artificial asset bubble that government created in housing.
And the only way to get out from under that is to let prices find their natural bottom, let industries fail and get to a recovery stage where all of a sudden the market clears and we can move forward.
But yet, we have a generation of Americans, witnessed by a couple of calls last hour, who don't believe time should ever be bad.
They certainly don't believe in saving during the good times for the bad times.
And so naturally, they want the government to do something.
They want more laws.
They want to bail out Detroit.
They want to bail out the banks.
They want to bail out anything that moves, which of course just prolongs the day when the next artificial boom will bust and the bust will be that much bigger.
What do you mean, how can you have things and save, Snerdley says?
That is the purpose.
Saving is good.
Saving provides capital for productivity increases.
This whole notion that the economy is driven by consumer spending is hogwash, absolute Keynesian hogwash.
The economy is driven by one thing and one thing only: productivity increases, and that comes from capital being saved by Americans.
We've had negative savings rates in the last few years.
Now they're starting to go back up.
But when government comes in and says, I think we'll crowd out savings by borrowing or even by taxing, yes, taxing crowds out savings, especially on the upper income folks, and direct taxes on capital gains and dividends.
That's a direct crowding out of private capital so the government can build a bridge to nowhere and call it an infrastructure project.
Well, we're much better off allowing private savings to fund, oh, I don't know, a new tool for you to use on the job site, a new assembly line machine, a new truck for the truck driver.
All of that capital allows one thing that's crucial to a growing economy: productivity increases.
And when your productivity goes up, whether you produce more widgets on the assembly line or whether you're a salesman and you sell more, you can now make more money without having to rob anybody else.
This is key.
There are only two ways to get wealthy in any society.
One, produce more.
Two, take from somebody else.
Now, we just elected an administration that believes in the latter.
I happen to think that a rising tide lifting all boats by everybody earning more money is a much more cohesive, much more, shall we say, less Darwinist society.
But if you merely hire government to say, you know, I'm going to take $30, $40 billion from, oh, I don't know, automobile workers in Alabama and Tennessee and South Carolina, and I'm going to give it to Detroit because I've got to keep the union strong.
I'm a Democratic congressman.
I've got to keep those funds flowing.
I've got to keep Michigan as a Democratic stronghold.
Have you created anything?
No, it's a net wash.
Governments don't invest.
Governments consume.
Anything the government creates, they first destroy elsewhere.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman was right.
And so this is a classic dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, survival of the fittest.
If your party's in power, you have the power to take from some people and give to your constituencies.
Where capitalism, not the anarchy of laws and programs, capitalism where there are clear rules, the rule of law, private property, prohibitions on force and fraud, when those rules are in place, and yes, that does require limited government, why, there's only one way people get ahead, and that's to cooperate.
It's not to beat your neighbor over the head.
You get thrown in jail.
It's not to defraud people.
You get thrown in jail.
It is to produce a product that people want.
I don't know why anyone would call that social Darwinism.
I call that the epitome of a just and moral society.
The only way I can get rich is being the best talk radio host I can.
Rush has proven that.
Rush Limbaugh's success actually paved the way for people like me, paved the way for salesmen making lots of money in every radio station across the country or every talk station.
It's called trickle-down economics.
And it actually works.
Now, our friends on the left believe in trickle up.
You're going to take money from people who produce and give it to people who don't.
And that's going to reignite the economy.
Little problem with that, it's called history.
It never has.
It never, ever, ever has.
And it won't this time.
Here's the real danger in Barack's stimulus plan that is now going to approach a trillion dollars, we are told.
In fact, what was this story that Snerdley gave me here?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday, Democrats are preparing for a massive economic recovery bill in the range of $600 billion.
$600,000, there's been talk that the stimulus package.
Now, this is on top of the bailouts now.
We've got bailouts amounting to a trillion.
You've got a stimulus package, another $600 to a trillion.
And you've got the Federal Reserve whose balance sheet has expanded by a trillion dollars now.
We are in a spending government orgy right now.
And the real danger, in fact, I think it's happening as we speak, is we are creating another asset bubble.
I mean, in a microcosm, it might be Treasury bills.
They're going to pop pretty soon.
Nobody's going to loan money to the government forever for 0% or 1%.
So what's going to happen is, you know, understand this.
We got into this mess because of the government.
When Fannie and Freddie were protected by Barney Frank, who now has inadvertently but honestly called the Detroit bailout welfare on 60 Minutes, Freudian slip their barn, when they were bailed out, Chris Dodd, you know, getting these sweetheart deals from countrywide, countrywide didn't care because they could offload their bad debt to Fannie and Freddie, which they did, and then Chris and Barney would protect Fannie and Freddie from any particular real limits.
That was not free market capitalism.
That was a government-sponsored enterprise.
When Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of HUD, told lenders you got to up your loans to affordable housing types, to subprime level, that was not free market capitalism.
That was an anarchy of rules.
And of course, the bailouts.
The bailouts.
Well, let me add one more thing as we got into this mess.
When the Federal Reserve kept the federal funds rate ridiculously low at 1% by buying anybody's T-bills they could find, when the Fed and the Open Market Committee buys Treasury bills, they create money out of thin air.
They might as well just put a credit on the Treasury's checkbook.
And they're doing the same now with investment banks.
They're taking investment banks on their balance sheet.
They've never done that before.
A whole host of companies.
And when they do that and they buy their assets and they own their assets, they create money out of thin air.
Now, the last time we did that, we've had three asset bubbles.
In the tech stocks in the 1990s, that burst in 2000.
Housing, that burst in 2006.
Commodities, that burst this year.
So our solution to this government leverage, if you will, our solution to Fannie and Freddie, our solution to creating fiat money is now, are you ready for this?
Are you sitting down?
Do even more of it.
The Federal Reserve now says they're going to buy $600 billion worth of Fannie worth of Fanny paper.
Isn't that how we got in the mess to begin with?
Of course it is.
Buying junk mortgages and then having the taxpayers bail everybody out.
The Federal Reserve is creating money out of thin air like nobody's ever seen.
That money is going to find something to bid up.
And I think once the recession is over, we're going to see roaring inflation a la Jimmy Carter again.
We've got the very same people that got us into this mess doing the very same things ostensibly to get us out.
This is mind-boggling to me and to most economists I speak to.
If government spending could end a recession, we would have done it.
But in the 1930s, when we had the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Great New Deal, guess what?
We supplanted private investment, we raised taxes, and by 1938, unemployment was still hovering near 20%.
It's not going to work until we start encouraging production.
I don't know what this fascination is with an anarchy of taxes, an anarchy of rules, an anarchy of law.
That is not the epitome of what the American experiment was supposed to be about.
1-800-282-2882.
More calls when we come back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Once again, behind the golden EIB Mike, I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchor man, filling in for America's real anchor man, El Rushbo.
He will be back tomorrow.
No fear, folks.
In the meantime, check out the website, rushlimbaugh.com.
Contact line here, by the way, remains the same: 1-800-282-2882 to the phones we go.
This segment in beautiful Rockford, Illinois.
I was just there last spring.
Scott, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, Jason.
Thanks for taking my call and greetings from the corrupt state of Chicago.
Hey, you know, the connecting of the dots of 9-11, it kind of parallels with this global warming thing.
We got scientists like Richard Alley, who've been punching ice cores in Greenland, evaporating to find out what the atmosphere is.
Al Gore's got his Nobel Peace Prize, and Al Obama yesterday announced another Nobel Peace Prize guy.
Has anybody explained scientifically how the first two ice ages began and warmed up and ended, and the little ice age began and ended because nobody was burning fossil fuels back then?
You know, I always love these Al Gore moments where every time Gore or James Hansen of NASA, who's been corrected so many times it's hard to keep track now, but every time they make a pronouncement, a snowstorm follows.
Have you ever noticed that?
Every time they say something, you know, this weird Arctic blast hits the southeast or mudslides with ice in California, and they're out there pontificating.
You know, this is going to be the second year in a row with below average temperatures.
We've been flat since 1998.
Even if you go back to the post-World War II era, the greenhouse gas era, we've seen a net warming of 0.2 tenths of a degree Celsius.
Fundamentally, you're on the right track, my friend, and that's this.
How on earth do you make a political movement all revolving around changes in the weather as though they're odd?
Well, I agree.
They can't even get a seven-day forecast right, but they're going to tell us what's going to happen in 10 years.
Well, I mean, think about this.
The weather changes, therefore we've got a crisis, and liberals have to have a crisis.
That's the only way people give up freedom if they think there's a crisis.
How do you do that?
The weather has always changed.
There's never been a normal temperature.
You point out the medieval warming period, the little ice age, and now we may be going back into another mini-ice age due to solar flares non-existent on the sun's surface.
But fundamentally, I've never understood this, and that is the Earth's climate changing is not unusual.
It is the par for the course.
And it's been proven scientifically, but it doesn't fit the fundraising moment, I guess.
It just, it's staggering what they're doing to us.
Now you're talking.
Follow the money.
And we've spent, I mean, that is so true.
How many billions upon billions of dollars?
I think the Bush administration has spent $43 billion on climate change.
And supposedly that's not enough.
We've got the World Wildlife Fund running commercials for fundraising based on the poor polar bear, which, by the way, is increasing in population.
How much money has the Sierra Club raised so they can file a lawsuit in your hometown to block a bridge based on global warming fears?
It's all about money and using, and by the way, cap and trade, cap and trade, a lot of people on the carbon exchanges are going to make a lot of money.
Of course they are.
Did you know that the guy leading the bailouts, Hank Paulson, was the co-investor with Al Gore in a group that doesn't get much attention anymore, or never did, to buy carbon offsets?
Oh, I wouldn't doubt that at all.
It's just amazing.
And, you know, on a sidebar note here, what's going to happen with this Franken thing?
Because if he gets in there, we've got another loon that's going to go right down the global warming path.
Yeah, well, today the canvassing board in Minnesota is counting the challenged ballots.
There was a setback for the incumbent Republican Norm Coleman when they said that, as opposed to legal precedent, believe it or not, here we go down the Florida pike, has opposed to legal precedent that Franken can try to make the absentee ballots, which were late, which did not comport with the rules, count without a lawsuit.
Now, normally, if you want to challenge absentee ballots in Minnesota, you have to file a lawsuit, and it becomes an officially contested election.
The state canvassing board, made up of four judges and the Uber left-wing Secretary of State, the Acorn ally, Mark Ritchie, ruled that, well, we think the absentees ought to count, and we'll let the counties count them.
Well, the counties have no idea.
They're told, on one hand, state precedent says, if you don't get the absentee in there on time, you don't count it.
And if somebody wants to challenge it, you file a lawsuit.
But that's been thrown out the window now.
So it is a bit of a mess here.
We'll know more in the next month.
All right, Jason.
Have a good day.
Thanks.
Yeah, same to you.
Thanks for calling.
Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Jeremy, you're next on the Rush Limbaugh Program.
Hi.
Hey, Jason.
Greetings.
I have a rebuttal of the first caller's comment that capitalism taken to its extreme becomes socialist Darwinism.
The problem is, if you take away capitalism, you take away a person's opportunity to acquire wealth, unless that person is in a place of power, i.e. absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
What we've forgotten in America is that government is not our final authority.
God is.
If you take God out of the picture, you allow man who is innately corrupt to legislate morality or to assign a God.
Example of that is global warming.
This has now become a God to some and a platform of extortion for those in absolute power.
I'll tell you how it's become a god to people, and it's quite simple.
The idea that any change in the weather is evidence.
It gets colder, evidence of global warming.
It gets warmer, evidence of global warming.
It is certainly a faith-based movement, oblivious to evidence to the contrary.
It's quite amazing.
All right.
Speaking of the bailout mania, let's talk to one member of Congress who had the temerity to stand up to the UAW, to the Sierra Club, to the CAFE standards, and even to the big three by courageously and correctly voting against the auto bailout that the Bush administration has now capitulated on, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Joining us now from the 2nd District of Arizona, Representative Trent Franks.
Trent, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh Program with me, Jason Lewis.
Jason, you're doing a good job today here, buddy.
It's great to be with you.
We are having some fun.
Let's talk a little bit about this whole notion that we can spend our way out of this recession.
If you take a look at just the Bush administration in the last eight years, the federal budget has exploded by a trillion dollars.
We should be going gangbusters.
When in history has government malinvestment in make-work programs, in paying people not to work, when has that ever lifted an economy out of the doldrums?
Well, Jason, I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, the highway of history is littered with the wreckages of nations that thought that they could create productivity and that they could maintain and make markets better than the free enterprise could.
And they've always failed, without exception.
They've always failed.
And I don't know why we are so hell-bent on trying to repeat the lessons of history, but it seemed like the only thing we learned from history is that we do not learn from history.
And I don't know what the answer is, but it seems like we keep doing it again and again and again.
I mean, this is the best.
And this really is a bailout.
This would be the sixth bailout.
This would be the sixth bailout.
Well, and really, this is bipartisan.
This is, or I should say, non-partisan.
What I really fear is we are doing the same thing that Hoover and Roosevelt did.
It's an absolute historical myth that Roosevelt or Hoover believed in this laissez-faire free market capitalism.
He increased spending.
He passed a tariff, and he increased income tax rates.
Roosevelt doubled down on it.
And by the eve of the World War II, we were still in a depression.
I'm in fear we're doing the same thing.
That's a big question right now that we're having to deal with.
Jason, are you still with me?
Yes, I am.
Go ahead, Trent.
I'm sorry.
And that is that if we're not careful, we've got a very real recession on our hands, and we could turn it into a depression.
You know, when we had the last big recession, when the 29 came, they thought, well, we'll tax the rich.
And I think they taxed people that were making some, I don't know, equivalent over a million dollars a year now.
And it sent the entire economy into a total depression.
It was a disaster.
And we forget that this is an amazing machine, this economic engine the United States has, but you toss a wrench into the wrong gear, and things can come apart very quickly.
You know, you pointed out all the bailouts.
You're quite right.
This is the sixth one.
Let's add them up as we go.
Obviously, we had Bear Stearns.
We had AIG.
We let Lehman go, sending uncertainty into the marketplace.
We bailed out Fannie and Freddie, the real matchstick that lit this fire.
We had the TART program.
We've got the Federal Reserve expanding its balance sheet.
That's a euphemism for creating fiat money by a trillion dollars.
We are up to a trillion-dollar deficit this year.
Barack's stimulus plan will add another $600 billion to a trillion.
Just where again is the money going to come from?
Well, see, there is the fundamental question that everybody should ask.
The bottom line, when they talk about bailout, that has the idea that you're actually pulling somebody out.
In a sense, all you're doing, we're taking one hole and digging a hole, a different hole in the taxpayer's pocket and filling the other one.
We really haven't created any new value, any new productivity, any new equity or capital.
All we've done is switch the burden.
And that will not help this economy in the ultimate reality.
It just won't do it.
And I think that sometimes if we could just remember, one of the reasons we're the most productive nation in the history of humankind is because people with their own capital make very careful, well-thought-out decisions, and they have to invest it in a way that will precipitate the most productivity.
And economy is all about productivity.
And when government spends money, usually it's not very effective toward incenting productivity.
And that's the bottom, bottom line.
You don't have to be an economist to understand that.
But unfortunately, some of the most powerful leaders in our country still haven't learned that lesson.
Now, we are talking with Representative Trent Franks, 2nd District, Arizona.
I think Barney Frank gave it away Sunday on 60 Minutes when he inadvertently slipped up and said, well, it's welfare.
The auto bailout is welfare.
And that's, frankly, and I don't mean to demean any hardworking individual in Detroit or any place else.
But if your business has problems and it is not allowed to fail, we might as well just hand checks to people.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
And, you know, the reality is, and I'm going to be partisan here for a second, Jason.
There is no doubt in any reasonable forensic analysis of this downturn in the economy that it came directly.
It was precipitated directly from Democrat policies, whether it be the Community Investment Reinvestment Act or whether it be all of the backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all of the things that they did, whether it be suing, you know, when Acorn sued Chase Bank, they changed all of the lending practices.
The genesis of this meltdown was a Democrat genesis, and that doesn't seem to be very well known to the public.
And now to hear those same people that caused this, they're the ones going to come around and solve the problem.
It makes sense to me.
Look, there's no question, Congressman Franks, that in fact you had Chris Dodd and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank protecting Freddie and Fanny from any reasonable limit on their mortgage portfolio.
And that was the epicenter of all of this.
When you tell lenders they've got to lend out junk and you tell them the government will buy it and we'll insure it, you set ourselves up for a bailout, not unlike the SNL.
But let me remind you, let me challenge you a little bit.
The Republicans had control up until 2006.
You had a Republican president.
You had a Republicans majority.
What happened?
That's a good segue.
And I say this in all deference to my Republican colleagues.
You know, some of us that have a very conservative voting record, I mean, I challenge almost anyone, and I apologize if it sounds self-centered, but I challenge almost anyone to have a more conservative across-the-board voting record than I do in the Congress.
I consistently rate in the top two or three, and we've been telling our very beloved colleagues that if they didn't start acting like Republicans, if we were just Democrat light, that not only would the voters reject us, but those policies that are created as a result of that would ultimately be a disservice to the country.
And that has been completely true.
I guess, you know, they say when it gets completely dark, you can finally see the stars.
And it's gotten pretty dark for Republicans lately.
And maybe we can now see the stars and find our way back home.
I hope so.
You know, you know, first thing they have to do is quit listening to their enemies, whether they're fellow Republicans or obviously the media.
And that's one thing.
You've got this group of people who, to whom big government is not a problem.
They do just fine with big government, whether they work in campaigns, whether they're consultants.
Their only goal is to win.
And if winning becomes your only goal, then you'll do anything to do it.
The purpose of this enterprise is statesmanship.
And statesmanship requires people to do the unpopular thing and say no and lead on the environment and lead on fiscal restraint.
And frankly, the Republican Party has not done that.
Well, I couldn't agree with you more.
You know, the old statement that being a politician means you look to the next election.
Being a statesman means you look to the next generation.
And the irony of it all, though, is if we truly did the right thing as statesmen and looked to the next generation and did the noble and right things, I truly believe it would awaken the nobility in our countrymen and that we would actually do better politically than we've ever done.
You know, let's get back to the bailout, vis-a-vis Detroit.
We've got 113,000 autoworkers that are not part of the big three that are now going to be taxed to, in fact, pay for bailing out their competitors.
Can you tell me how they should react?
Yeah, that's the circular logic to all of this.
It just doesn't make sense.
I mean, Fred Bastiat put it best.
He said, you know, that government's that great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.
And you keep doing that, and all of a sudden, now you're the one paying for your own bailout.
And it just gets completely ridiculous.
And Bashdia also had the great line, the best way to make the law respected is to make the law respectable.
And I don't think we've done that.
What I just Jumps out at me every day.
I read now the FDIC wants to bail out mortgages by demanding mortgages be modified, even though the controller of the currency said, well, even the modified loans end up defaulting anyway.
And so we'll have that bailout by telling people, well, if you work hard and you're paying your mortgage on time, well, you need to pay or you need to put the FDIC in a guarantee mode for other people that aren't doing that.
We are inducing the moral hazard once again to behave irresponsibly.
Well, you're exactly right.
But there's even a further point.
The only way we're ever going to be able to climb out of this hole is to create incentive for the private sector to come to the rescue and begin to buy some of these securities and begin to level up the playing field.
And they'll never do that when they're afraid the government's going to come in and rewrite all the rules and change the worth of the money.
That is, I mean, that is spot on, Congressman.
That is so important.
We are in a recession of doubt and uncertainty.
GM can't float debt at 40% interest rates.
So why is that?
Because people don't think they're going to make it unless they go and reorganize.
Yeah.
No, you're exactly right.
This economy is not just about free markets.
It's about trust.
And in fact, trust is more important even than the free market aspect of it.
When individuals who have capital can trust that, first of all, that the laws are going to be maintained and that the government will enforce private contracts and say, hey, you agreed to do this.
You have to do that.
When people can't trust what they're doing, they simply, regardless of what the potential return is, they avoid that.
And that's what happens in a depression.
The money doesn't just disappear.
People think that the money just melts in someone's mind.
As you know, it goes back in people's pockets.
They say, I'm going to be able to do it.
I'm going to put a business situation.
I'm going to put it in my pocket.
Therefore, it's not in circulation.
Therefore, productivity comes to a grinding halt.
Yeah, and that's the rationale for the big spending move in Washington.
They're saying, well, gosh, we've got this Keynesian liquidity preference, and people are hoarding money, and they're injecting liquidity.
They can inject all the liquidity they want.
People are just going to turn around and buy Treasury bills.
And so now the government's going to engage in a misallocation of resources by building bridges to nowhere.
And none of that is going to get us out of this malaise.
You know, the only way, as you point out, to get us out of this is to, quite frankly, let the market clear by letting the healthy companies survive so that people can see that they're healthy and then credit will flow again.
You're absolutely right, Jason.
You've got to run for Congress.
Get off this radio gig and do something that's important.
That's too much fun.
I get to talk with people like you.
Representative Trent Franks, 2nd District, Arizona.
Stay strong over there.
I really appreciate your time and, quite frankly, your voting record.
Well, God bless you, sir.
Thank you for all you do.
I appreciate the Russian Baugh.
Without Rush Limbaugh, we'd really be in the dark.
Especially me.
Representative Franks, thanks so much, my friend.
We'll come back.
Your calls on the way on the Russian Baugh program.
1-800-282-2882 are thanks to Congressman Franks joining us next hour, Congressman Gomert, Louis Gomert, on the tax holiday proposal.
Instead of adding to the national debt by spending money on make-work projects, i.e. a stimulus plan, why not cut taxes for increased production?
Why not cut taxes on capital?
Why not increase incentive?
What would be better for you in this tough time, a tax reduction?
I mean, I hear, you know, Barney Frank and others saying, we've got to save 3 million jobs.
And by the way, they're being very generous with the jobs numbers there.
There are 239,000 auto workers employed, and you have a number of suppliers, whether it amounts to 3,000 is anybody, or 3 million is anybody's guess.
But save those jobs.
Well, what would be better for your economic status, your job, your income, instead of running up a trillion dollars next year in the deficit for a stimulus package, cut taxes.
It would be the same amount of debt.
Cut taxes a trillion.
The debt load is going to be the same whether they spend or cut taxes.
One little difference.
When you cut taxes, the economy tends to grow because there's more incentive to work and save and earn.
Right now, there's no incentive because nobody believes anybody's healthy enough to work and save and earn.
Anyway, we'll talk about that next hour as we continue on the bailout talk, which is now becoming rather obsessive, I think, on the part of Washington.
To the phones, we go in Joplin, Missouri.
Gary, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
How are you?
I'm good, sir.
How are you?
Oh, fantastic.
By the way, outstanding program.
I need to talk to somebody about adding an extra hour for you.
Well, that's very nice.
Thank you.
Anyway, the reason I'm calling, a couple quick comments.
I own my own business.
And by the way, inspired by Rush a couple of years ago to start it, I'm coming from Chicago, one of the few or one of the many hidden Republicans that still live there trying to figure out how to turn that state Republican again.
I'm trying to figure out how we can take advantage of this low price in gas that's available.
And maybe my mind is just a little bit too simple on this, but what if Bush were to do some type of massive purchase, which is what the OPEC nations want, which is to increase demand at this low price.
And then when the price goes up, which everybody's anticipating in spring, sell it back to the distributors at a lower cost than what we would pay for it and use the difference in price to pay down the deficit.
Well, you're talking about government arbitrage.
Is that too simple?
No, I mean, you're talking about government arbitrage.
The only problem with those, I'm not going to call them schemes, but plans is you set a precedent.
It's like bailing out a company.
Even if the government guesses right, which rarely they do because they're making their bailouts based on political interests, governments invest for a return on voting.
You and I invest for a return on equity.
There's a huge difference there.
We make, you know, there's a reason nobody wants to give GM money even at 40%.
They're smarter than Barney Frank.
Now, that doesn't narrow it down much, but you get my drift.
Oh, yeah.
And once you allow the government to engage in bailouts or arbitrage that you're talking about, what's going to happen next?
They're going to have Fannie and Freddie, and they are going to buy mortgages at, they're going to borrow money at 4% because Fannie and Freddie had this implicit line of credit to get lower interest rates.
And then they're going to arbitrage and live off the interest by buying mortgages at 6%.
But they bought all junk.
And I shouldn't say junk, all junk, but $1.6 trillion worth of junk.
And now we've got the bailout.
I agree.
I mean, we're running into a problem here where no one's trying to, everyone's trying to figure out how to take advantage of the gas, even though they don't have jobs, even though they don't have the ability to keep the economy going because the gas is so cheap as it is right now, at least in terms of the last few years.
Like I said, along those lines, somebody came up with a plan a few months back.
I can't remember who it was now, but they said, why on earth, when oil prices were high, didn't we sell out of the strategic petroleum reserve and then take part of that money and buy futures contracts, which were much lower than the current price to replenish the reserve.
Right.
Again, is it that easy?
I don't know.
Well, anybody, you know, anybody can buy a futures contract or most anybody, but the question is, do you really want to allow the government to go down that road?
Got to move.
Thanks for the call.
Appreciate it.
Bowmanville, Ontario.
It's John.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program and excellence in broadcasting.
Hi.
Jason, excellent to be talking with you.
Same to you.
Okay.
You know, when this Blagojevich thing broke, the first thing that struck me is leopards don't change their spots very much.
And Illinois, Chicago, and the politics being the same, I wondered how much Obama paid for his seats.
Legislatively, he did nothing, whether it was in the Illinois legislature or whether he came to federal politics.
You know, if you find out what he paid, the most important thing would be who paid the money.
And you'd probably.
I don't know that, well, yes.
I don't know that Barack Obama said, I'll pay for this seat.
I don't think he did.
I do think he was appointed, anointed by the powers that be to be the next guy to be the big Illinois politician, and things have worked out for the vested interest.
Yes.
I don't know that that's actually, you know, Barack Obama going in there and buying the seat.
Your overall point's a good one, and this is why some of us are suspicious of Fitzgerald and the whole rush to judgment.
And that is, this is politics as usual.
And frankly, it's not just Chicago.
I mean, it's politics everywhere.
I got to go back after this.
All right, as El Rushbo might say, ran a little long in the last segment, so we'll have to cut this one short.
▲
Export Selection