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Dec. 16, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:08
December 16, 2008, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Boy, that is a rough weekend, I gotta say.
Let's, 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 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, they're shooting robbery pillage.
And that was just the meeting he had with the big three in Detroit.
I I d 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 uh threw the shoes at Bush, who, uh which by the way, he definitely dodged, I might add.
Came up with a pretty good line.
I think they were size ten.
Uh but I don't know how many times I've seen this.
Apparently the guy's disgruntled, he's a f in fear of Iran taking over the country and all of this.
But uh 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 912.
The idea that we wouldn't be struck again.
Now you 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 is uh 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 the Trent Franks.
He's a member of Congress from the second district, Arizona, voted against the automobile bailout.
We'll talk about spending the trillion dollar deficit that we've got for uh this year that we're in right now, the uh fiscal year for the Fed starts in October, uh how to fix the Republican brand.
And it's quite frankly, easy to fix the Republican brand.
Because lots of things, Snerdly, are in fact easy or they're simple, they're just difficult.
And you know, it's it's to say no to people is difficult.
It's not complex.
It's not this esoteric notion that how do we fix the Republican brand?
Uh 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 in in the upper Midwest, people are going to believe the only guy in the in the arena.
So you've got to stand up to this.
Look, it's quite simple.
You we've got to disavow this notion or disabuse ourselves of this notion that the political party bec uh 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 apparatchics 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 have no stake in the fire.
Uh you've got to 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 uh uh, you know.
Look, if 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 uh Hank Paulson.
Uh they 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.
Well what I 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 a government to say, you know, I'm gonna take thirty, forty billion from, oh, I don't know, automobile workers in Alabama and Tennessee and South Carolina, and I'm gonna 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, got to keep Michigan as a democratic stronghold.
Have you created anything?
No, it's a net wash.
Governments don't c 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 this is a classic dog eat dog 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 a 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 uh trickle down economics.
And it actually works.
Now, our friends on the left believe in trickle up.
You're gonna take money from people who produce and give it to people who uh don't, and that's going to up uh you know, reignite the economy.
The little problem with that is called history.
It never has.
It never ever, ever has.
And it won't this time.
Here's the real danger in in Barack's stimulus plan that is now going to approach a trillion dollars, we are told.
In fact, what was this story that uh Snurley gave me here?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said yesterday, Democrats are preparing for a massive economic recovery bill in the range of six hundred billion.
Six hundred there's been talk that the stimulus package.
Now, this is on this is on top of the bailouts now.
So we've got a bailouts amounting to a trillion.
Uh you've got a stimulus package, another six hundred 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 gonna pop pretty soon.
Nobody's gonna loan money to the government forever for zero percent or one percent.
Uh so what what's going to happen is has you know, understand this.
We got into this mess because of the government.
When Fanny 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.
Uh 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 Fanny and Freddie from any particular real limits.
That was not free market capitalism.
That was a government-sponsored enterprise.
When Andrew Cuomo, a secretary of HUD, told lenders you gotta 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 uh, you know, 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 with their 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 percent.
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.
1800, 282, 2882, more calls when we come back on the Russian 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, L. Rushbow.
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, uh, you know, the connecting of the dots of 911, uh, it it kind of parallels with this global warming thing.
We've got scientists like Richard Alley, who've been punching ice cores in Greenland, uh evaporating to find out what the atmosphere is.
Al Gore's got his Nobel Peace Prize in 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 has been corrected so many times it's hard to keep track now.
But every time they make a pronouncement, it you know a snowstorm follows.
You ever notice that?
Every time they say something, uh you know, uh this weird Arctic blast hits the southeast or mud slides with ice in California, and they're out there pontificating.
We 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 point two 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 uh 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 gonna tell us what's going to happen in ten years.
Well, I mean, the whole 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 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 uh solar flares non existent on the sun's surface.
You but but but fundamentally I've never understood this, and that is uh the earth's climate changing is not unusual.
It is the 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.
You 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 forty-three billion dollars on climate change, and supposedly that's not enough.
Uh 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 gonna 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 uh 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 uh it's just amazing.
And and you know, on a sidebar note here, what's gonna happen with this Franken thing?
Because if he gets in there, we've got another loon that's gonna 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 um, as opposed to legal precedent, believe it or not, here we go down the Florida pike, as 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 uh secretary of state, the acorn ally, Mark Richie, ruled that uh, 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.
Um uh good greetings.
Uh I have uh rebuttal of the first caller's comment that capitalism taken to its extreme becomes socialist Orwinism.
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 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 a sign 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 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 uh talk to one member of Congress who had the temerity to stand up to uh the UAW to the Sierra Club to the Cafe standards and even to the big three by courageously and correctly voting against the uh the the auto bailout that the Bush administration has now capitulated on, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Joining us now from the second district of Arizona, Representative Trent Franks.
Trent, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Jason, you're you're doing a good job today here, buddy.
It's great to be with you.
Uh we are having some fun.
Let's let's talk a little bit about this whole notion that we can spend our way out of this recession.
Uh 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 is 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 and uh uh make markets better than the free enterprise could.
They and then they've always failed without exception.
They've always failed.
And I don't know why we are so hellbent on trying to repeat the lessons of history, but it seems like the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
And I 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 a good thing.
And this really is a this will be the sixth bailout.
This would be the sixth bailout.
Well, and it really this is bipartisan.
This is or I should say nonpartisan.
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 uh Hoover believed in this lause I fair free market capitalism.
He increased spending, he passed a tariff, and he increased income tax rates.
Roosevelt doubled down on it, and by you know the eve of the World War II, we were still in a depression.
Well, I'm I'm in fear we're doing the same thing.
Jason, are you still with me?
Yes, I am.
Go ahead, Trent.
Sorry.
And that is that if we're not careful, uh, we've got a very real recession on our hands, and we could turn it into a depression.
Uh, you know, when we had the last big recession when the twenty-nine uh came, they they thought, well, we'll tax the rich, and I think they taxed people that were making some, I don't know, be 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 in the United States has, but you trust a wrench into the wrong gear, and things can come apart very quickly.
You know, you pointed out all the bailouts.
Uh you're quite right.
This is the sixth one.
Let's add them up as we go.
Obviously, we had Bear Stearns, uh, we had AIG, and we let layman go, sending uncertainty into the marketplace.
We bailed out Fanny and Freddie, the real the matchstick that lit this fire.
We had the TART program, uh, we've got the Federal Reserve expanding its balance sheet.
That's a euphemism for creating fiat money uh by a trillion dollars.
We are up to a trillion dollar deficit this year.
Barack stimulus plan will add another six hundred billion to a trillion.
Uh just where again is the money going to come from?
Well, see, there is the fundamental uh question and everybody should ask.
The bottom line, when they talk about bailout, that has the essenti uh the the uh uh idea that you're actually pulling somebody out.
In a sense, all you're doing uh we're taking one hole and digging a hole, a different hole in the taxpayers' 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 uh 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 uh precipitate the most productivity.
And economy is all about productivity.
And when government spends money, usually it's not very uh effective toward the incenting productivity.
And that's the the the bottom bottom line.
You don't have to be an economist to understand that.
But unfortunately there's some of the most powerful leaders in our country still haven't learned that lesson.
Trevor Burrus Yeah we are talking with Representative Trent Frank, second district Arizona.
I think Barney Frank gave it away Sunday on 60 minutes when he inadvertently uh you know slipped up and said well it's 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 if your business has have has problems and it is not allowed to fail, we might as well just hand checks to people.
Well I I I couldn't agree more.
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 analysis of this downturn in the economy that it came directly it was precipitated directly from Democrat policies,
whether it be the the community investment reinvestment act or whether it be all of the uh backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and all of the things that they did, whether it be suing you know when Acorn sued uh Chase Bank they changed all of the the the lending practices this what the genesis of this meltdown was a Democrat genesis and 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 and and solve the problem.
Look, there's no no question, Congressman Frank or uh Franks, that that in fact you had Chris Dodd and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Barney Frank ba are protecting Freddie and Fanny from any reasonable limit on their mortgage portfolio and that was the epicenter of all of this when you when you tell lenders they've got to lend out junk and you tell the govern tell them the government will buy it and we'll ensure 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 Republican's majority what happened?
That's a good segue and I say this uh in all deference to my McCupin Republican colleagues.
You know some of us that have a very conservative voting record.
I mean I I challenge almost anyone and I I 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 this, 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.
Yeah 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 you've got this 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.
You know the purpose of this enterprise is 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 and frankly the Republican Party has not done that.
Well I I couldn't agree with you more you know the the the old uh statement that uh you know being a politician means you look to the next election being a statesman look means you look to the next generation and the irony of it all though is if we truly did the right thing as statesman and look 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 uh vis-a v Detroit uh we've got a hundred and thirteen thousand auto workers 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 that's the circuit you know the 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 it just gets completely ridiculous.
The best way to make the law respected is to make the law respectable.
That's right.
I don't think I don't think we've done that.
What I just, you know, 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 uh 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.
Uh we are sending the moral we are inducing the moral hazard once again to behave irresponsibly.
Well, you're exactly right, but there's uh even a further point.
The 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 uh you know level up the playing field, and they'll never do that when they're afraid the government's gonna come in and rewrite all the rules and change the worth of theories overnight.
So 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 forty percent interest rates.
So why is that?
Because people don't think they're gonna 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 uh in fact, trust is more important even than the free market aspect of it.
When 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.
Uh when people can't trust what they're doing, they simply, regardless of what the potential uh return is, they avoid that.
And that's what happens in a depression.
The money doesn't just disappear.
What what people think that the money just melts in some of the goes back in people's pocket.
They say that's the big spending situation.
I'm gonna 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 uh move in Washington.
They're saying, well, gosh, we've got this Keynesian liquidity preference and people are hoarding money and they are injecting liquidity.
They can inject all the liquidity they want.
People are just gonna 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, second district Arizona, stay strong over there.
I really appreciate your time and uh quite frankly, your voting record.
Well, God bless you, sir.
Thank you for all you do.
Appreciate the Rush Limbaugh show.
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 Rush Limbaugh program.
1-800-282-2882, our thanks to Congressman Frank's uh joining us next hour, Congressman Gohmert, Louis Gohmert, on the tax holiday proposal instead of using 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 say we've got to save three million jobs.
And by the way, they're being very generous with the jobs uh numbers there.
They're two hundred and thirty-nine thousand autoworkers employed, and you have a number of suppliers, whether it amounts to three thousand is anybody or three 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 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, uh we'll talk about that next hour as we continue on the uh bailout talk, which is now uh 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.
Uh anyway, the reason I'm calling, uh, a couple quick comments.
Um I own my own business, and uh, by the way, inspired by Rush a couple of years ago to start it.
Uh I'm learning from Chicago, one of the few uh or one of the many hidden Republicans that still live there trying to figure out how to turn that state Republican again.
Um I'm trying to figure out how we can take advantage of this low price in uh in gas that's available.
And I 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, uh sell it back to the uh 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 arbitrary.
Is that too simple?
No, I mean you're talking about government arbitrage.
The only problem with those, I'm not gonna call them schemes, but plans is you set a precedent.
It's like bailing out a company.
Uh, even though if 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 percent.
They're smarter than Barney Frank.
Now that doesn't narrow it down much, but you get my drift.
Oh, yeah.
And and once you allow the government to engage in bailouts or arbitrage that you're talking about, what's gonna happen next?
They're going to have Fanny and Freddie, and they are going to buy mortgages at uh they're gonna borrow money at four percent because Fanny and Freddie had this implicit line of credit uh to get lower interest rates, and then they're gonna arbitrage and live off the interest by buying mortgages at six percent, but they bought all junk, and I shouldn't say junk, all junk, but one point six trillion dollars worth of junk, and now we've got the bailout.
So I agree.
I mean, uh we're we're we're running into a problem here where no one's trying to f 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 uh the ability to keep the uh the economy going because the gas is so cheap as it is right now, at least in terms of the last few years.
Um 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.
I I I don't is it that easy?
I don't know.
Well, anybody, you know, anybody can buy a futures contract, or most anybody, but the the question is do you really want to allow the government to go down that road?
Got a 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.
Um, you know, when this Blagoyovich thing broke, uh, 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 uh Obama paid for his seats.
Legislatively, he did nothing, whether it was in the uh Illinois legislature or whether he came to federal politics.
So, 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 for the uh 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 of Fitzgerald and the whole rush to judgment, and that is uh this is politics as usual.
And frankly, it's not just Chicago.
I mean, it's politics everywhere.
I gotta go back after this.
All right, as L. Rushbow might say, you ran a little long in the last segment, so we'll have to cut this one short.
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