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Dec. 29, 2008 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
December 29, 2008, Monday, Hour #2
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24 7 podcast.
And we are back on the cutting edge of societal evolution, the Rush Limbaugh program up and running for this last week of December 2008.
Welcome one and all.
I am Jason Lewis, in for El Rushboat today and tomorrow.
Walter Williams on New Year's Eve, there's a real treat for you, as well as Mark Stein on Friday, best of rush come Thursday.
So lots to uh lots to look forward to right here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Net.
We're glad you could join us.
You know, one more thing on this uh economic stimulus plan or lack thereof, it's going to be a trillion dollars.
They don't know the Barack Obama team really isn't saying uh whether it's going to be 750 billion, eight hundred and fifty billion, a trillion.
You add that on to the Bush bailout, the ill-advised uh, quite frankly, uh Hank Paulson bailout, the Bernanke panic, and what we're doing is setting ourselves up for another stimulus bubble.
You know, we've talked about this before, but let me try to explain it one more time.
If if housing goes up three, four, five, six, tenfold, and all of a sudden we get a surplus of housing, and the prices get so high because of Fannie and Freddie guaranteeing everybody a mortgage, and that's exactly what they did.
Once again, government intervention, and it was people like Paul Krugman and Barney Frank who defended Fanny and Freddie.
Uh sooner or later the prices become too high for people to afford, and the bubble burst.
Now, naturally prices must come down.
But what's the government doing?
We've got to go in there and modify mortgages.
We've got to keep housing prices up.
We need direct aid to homeowners.
We've got to have uh no foreclosure loans.
We've got to have bankruptcy judges intervene and rewrite mortgage contracts.
The common law be damned, the contract law be damned.
We don't care.
We've got to keep this bubble going.
Well, all you're setting yourself up for is a larger burst down the road, solving debt with more debt.
And that's precisely what we're doing here.
And it's never ever going to work.
We had an excess malinvestment, government directed in housing.
That's gotta be worn off.
It's gotta be it's gotta be disabused, if you will.
And once that the housing prices get back to normal, and if we would have allowed Wall Street to fail, we would have allowed bankruptcies to occur, then all of a sudden we reach a natural bottom and we start growing again.
But we're now in an entitlement society, and we can never have a downturn, and the fine-tuners can prevent it, just like John Maynard Keynes thought he could prevent it.
Well, I got a little news for you.
The big government spending in the 1930s didn't prevent the depression.
They exacerbated it.
Herbert Hoover, contrary to Mr. Krugman, was a big spending liberal.
I don't know how this guy knows.
His article today in the New York Times, Mr. Krugman, 50 Herbert Hoover's.
Herbert Hoover raised spending massively.
He raised taxes, and he set up trade barriers.
What is lazi fair about that?
What is free market about that?
Now Roosevelt got in and he doubled down.
He did all of that in spades.
And you know what?
By 1938, unemployment was still nineteen percent.
We didn't get out of the depression.
The spending didn't do it.
If government spending could could provide economic growth, Eastern Europe would have been a juggernaut.
And fundamentally, here's the here's the reason why.
People like Krugman and the Barack Transition team, in fact, Axelrod yesterday said on Meet the Press, well, we're going to give more people money to spend to help get the economy going again.
Really?
At whose expense?
Where are you going to get it?
Now, now, fundamentally they they think, well, as long as people are willing to buy treasury bills at zero percent for a negative return.
Well, we can borrow and borrow and borrow.
But sooner or later, that game is going to be up.
Sooner or later, the treasury bill bubble is going to burst.
And this slump in private spending is going to be over.
And then how are you going to finance a stimulus package of a trillion dollars in new government borrowing for things that are not going to increase the nation's wealth?
The bridge to nowhere did nothing to increase productivity.
I mean, uh a number of infrastructure projects are makework projects, especially light rail, any place west of the Ohio River, save for maybe Chicago.
It is money down a rat hole.
It does not increase productivity, it adds to government union membership.
I mean, let's be honest, the same thing is happening in Detroit.
You think we're bailing out Detroit because of economic concerns?
Think again.
We're bailing out the UAW.
We're bailing out the Michigan Democratic Party.
That's what we're bailing out.
That's why Democrats love corporatism.
You know, the Republicans have an opportunity here to be the party of free markets to say, you know what, we ought not punish corporate America by regulating and taxing them to death, but we ought not subsidize them either.
It is the Democrat Party that is now leading the charge for corporate welfare.
They're not trying to bail out Detroit.
They're trying to take over Detroit.
They're just fine with that.
I mean, the UAW says we're not going to give any more concessions at all.
Kit reminds me what Samuel Gompers, the godfather of unionism, said a century ago.
The enemy of the worker is an unprofitable employer.
Unions have to make the company successful.
Employers have to recognize the contribution of the worker.
What he was saying is you can't love employees and hate employers.
But you say, well, wait a minute.
Why is the UAW being so intransigent?
Because they don't care.
And certainly the Democrats in Washington don't care.
They would love to have government intervene, take over, nationalize the automobile sector, and then control it.
That's what this is about.
It has nothing to do with economic interests.
Now, getting back to the stimulus, however, what's going to happen when sooner or later people aren't willing to loan the federal government trillions and trillions of dollars at zero percent?
What's going to happen when sooner or later we all man up and we say, you know what, I think I will invest in that computer business in my garage.
I think I think I'll open that coffee shop.
I think I will loan to this manufacturing company, and all of a sudden there's a competition for private capital.
Well, the federal government is going to be stuck.
We will have created all of these makework jobs, green schools, wireless internet on school buses, bridges to nowhere called infrastructure, hiring people to dig ditches, hiring other people to fill them up again, and counting that as employment, counting that as GDP.
You know, almost anything the government does are national income accounting figures count as GDP.
It's a horrible Keynesian bias.
We need to rethink, but that's a topic for another day.
What's going to happen?
Well, sooner or later, here's what's going to happen.
The day of reckoning is going to come due.
You can't keep borrowing and borrowing and borrowing, which we are now set to do.
We'll have a trillion dollar deficit now, and we'll have trillions in the future.
And what's what's I guarantee you is going to happen is sooner or later people are going to take a look and say, gosh, putting my money in a zero percent treasury might not be the best place.
I think I'll put it here.
The government will have only two choices to fund their stimulus programs, which supposedly is propping up the economy.
It's just another bubble, with by either massively raising taxes or letting interest rates go up, which quite frankly they should have done the last few months.
I know what you're saying.
That would have really put us in the in a bind.
What they're trying to do is keep interest rates low right now in order to prop up housing and it's not working.
But when people when you and I are not willing to let to loan the government money through this deficit financing scheme, then the government's going to have to raise taxes to fund the stimulus plan, or they're going to have to allow interest rates to skyrocket, so foreign capital will still buy treasury bills, so you and I would still buy treasury bills at 14% instead of zero percent.
Either way, tax increases or high interest rates are gonna kill the economy.
So do you know what Barack Obama, the president's only option is going to be then?
To do away with the stimulus plan.
Well, we can't finance it.
Can't finance it by killing the economy by massively raising taxes, can't finance it by allowing interest rates to go up.
So let's just undo the stimulus plan, and all of a sudden all those people employed are now unemployed.
We can't build 20 bridges to nowhere, and we're right back where we started from, except because the Federal Reserve and their inscrutable monetary policy, because we are monetizing the debt, the dollar will be worth half of what it is today.
You know, you want a crisis.
You let the government keep doing what they're doing.
You want to see the Chinese and other foreign creditors dump the dollar and have a massive run on the dollar.
You know, the Federal Reserve has become the lender of first resort, not supposedly the lender of last resort.
And they can prevent a run on the banks, but they can't prevent a run on the dollar.
And if we keep going down this road, when the economy does turn, we're going to be faced with very, very s severe inflation.
And already the dollar is losing on the foreign exchange markets.
And when that happens and the Chinese dump the dollar, foreign creditors dump the dollar, other people dump the dollar, what are you going to do?
Well, the only thing you'll have to do then is raise interest rates in a very, very severe fashion, try to rein in the money supply, raise taxes, and all of a sudden you've killed the economy that way.
We are laying the foundation of a worse problem down the road by following the likes of Mr. Krugman, by following the likes of a stimulus plan, by all of these false pretenses that suggests all government has to do is wave a magic wand to undo the malinvestment that government imposed.
We would not be where we are today if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not have insured by the trillions bad paper.
That is a government intervention.
And that insurance of bad paper told Wall Street, leverage against it.
Start using your collateralized debt obligations and using that as the basis of it, because don't worry, the mortgages aren't going to go away.
The government's going to guarantee them.
If I've got an instrument here and I know the government's going to bail me out, what the heck?
I'm going to leverage it, and that's what Wall Street did.
So now the unwinding is that much more severe, all because of a savings and loan type induced moral hazard.
All of that is due to government.
None of that is due to the free market.
None of that is due to Glass Steagall being repealed.
None of that is due to a lack of regulation.
All of it is due to government intervention that distorted the marketplace and had us bid up the price of housing.
That is called an asset bubble.
It was created by government and easy money, and there's only one way out of it to d-leverage.
It doesn't have to be the end of the world, but we've got to understand we've got to go through it and get government out so we can recover in with private sector productivity.
Look at it this way.
What's going to be more productive going forward?
Having the government build another bridge to nowhere, build a light rail line in Salt Lake City, where you know four point, you know, four percent of the commuters may use mass transit, which costs forty to fifty million dollars per mile, light rail much more expensive than buses.
Is that going to be more productive for your place at work or your your efforts to improve your station in life?
Or is that money better used by a tax cut, let's say on the means of production, the owners, corporate tax cut, capital gains, dividends, and yes, high income earners.
So they can then take that money, give it to a private sector investor who builds a new plant, who buys the truck driver a new truck, who in fact builds a new assembly line or buys you a new tool, and then your productivity goes up.
Real investment increases productivity.
And you know what, folks?
When your productivity goes up, you earn more.
If you're a salesman and you sell more, you earn more.
If you're on the assembly line and you produce more, you earn more.
That's the only way a rising tide can lift all boats.
If you don't have increases in productivity, then the only way you're gonna get more money is to take it from somebody else.
We usually call that a government transfer program.
Government investment is not going to increase your productivity.
Now, granted, there are some investments we have to have a national defense, a system of jurisprudence, some roads, but you know as well as I do they're going to go on overkill.
The two hundred and eighty-six billion dollar transportation bill in two thousand and five was so full of pork, it was malinvestment.
And that's the fundamental difference between the left and the right today.
I trust you doing with your money, whether you're spending it or investing it for your own benefit, more than I trust a bureaucrat who somehow is omniscient and can say, Oh, oh, I know what Salt Lake City needs.
I know what I know what Seattle needs, I know what Mississippi needs, I know what New Orleans, I'll just do that.
They can't.
And they never will.
And so my point in all of this is quite simply if you want to make things worse, keep having the government involved.
They were the ones that got us here, and now we're relying on them even more.
That is not a recipe for success.
More of the Rush Limbaugh program coming right up when we return on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Your solution for the post Christmas Blues, the Rush Limbaugh program on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, in for El Rushboat today.
Back to the calls we go.
Thanks for your patience.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line is always John in Lake Zurich, Illinois.
You are up first this segment on El Rushbow's big show.
Hey Jason, I just wanted to call in, and uh I know uh Russia's usually fairly dismissive of uh rail-based uh transportation projects.
And uh I agree that the Los Angeles project is probably way overpriced.
However, I think uh I believe that Mayor Riordan, who's no con real conservative, said that was his biggest mistake as mayor going forward with the LA transit scheme.
Yeah, I I and I think uh people should you know the people behind these projects should be more looking at uh you know turning the regular railroad system back into both passenger and freight than doing these separate light rail projects, because I think that would probably be a a better utilization of an existing resource or taking back some of the rail lines that have been turned into bike paths and making them part of a uh upgraded and uh modernized transportation network.
Well, why doesn't this strongly believe that we need to strongly we need to have a choice of transportation modes?
Why?
Uh I for example when prices got really high this summer, I tried to use Amtrak to go from Chicago to Wisconsin Dells.
Right.
Uh they'd been sold out for weeks, uh you know, and they had no excess capacity.
Uh then why is it, my friend?
And by the way, I I just I just fundamentally disagree with this no notion of and this is code for government, uh, a choice of transportation modes.
Well, I'd like to have a taxi pick me up every morning.
So have the government fund a program to pick me up.
Therefore I have a choice.
That is a silly premise.
Well if in fact Amtrak is under great demand and they are not any place except the Northeast Corridor, but i if they have great demand, why don't they raise their fares?
Okay.
And you're going from the premise of making the rail system pay for itself, but the road system and the airline system don't pay for themselves either.
Wrong you are, my friends.
No, you include all of the money spent to build the roads and to run the air traffic control systems.
All that money is coming out of various taxes that we've set aside.
No, you're you're just wrong on that, and I hear this time time and time again for the rail apologists all the time.
And let's just go over these one by one because I think you're a reasonable guy, John.
Uh first of all, do you know what the the um uh the highway trust fund is made up of?
The Federal Highway Trust Fund.
Gasoline taxes.
Gasoline taxes and a few other fees, but primarily gasoline taxes.
Do you know that since nineteen eighty-two the Service Transportation Act has been diverting twenty percent of each increase in the federal gas tax towards mass transit.
Now that is not transit pain for roads.
That are that is gas taxes coming from road users paying for transit.
But the gas tax does not supply every dollar spent to build highways.
Uh it actually supplies most of them.
The other comes from developers who build roads and price that into the price of a development.
The only the only quote unquote modicum of a subsidy you can make for roads is not the capital outlays.
Those are fundamentally self-sufficient.
There is a maintenance factor that is built into property taxes and things like that.
But primarily, primarily, roads are the epitome of user fees in America.
And the money from road users is being diverted to all of these other forms.
Well, I would more than willing, I'd be more than willing to say, look, we're gonna have everybody pay for their mode of transportation.
By the way, airports get their money from where?
Airports get their money, John, from airline landing fees.
Uh yes, there is some money there.
Some?
That's not all of it.
No, but that's uh the bulk of it.
And where does all of the money spent on the air traffic?
But look, if your argument is we ought to privatize airports, I think we ought to.
We do not level.
We do not subsidize.
Look, look, I'll give you an example.
The Hiawatha line in Minneapolis, St. Paul, twelve miles of light rail, right?
Costs $18 million in operating expenses every year.
Do you know how much do you know how much they collect in fares?
Under eight million.
So we've got an operating deficit as far as the eye can see of over $10 million every year.
That sort of ratio is nowhere in sight when road when you talk about roads that primarily pay for themselves.
That's the difference between transit and roads, which are much more of a public good.
I mean, after all, you can in fact remember, you you can in fact ship goods on the roads.
You don't ship goods on light rail lines.
More coming right up after this.
Hold on, hold on just a second.
I I gotta take my blood pressure medication here, guys.
Hold on.
Oh, now I'm ready to go for the last hour and a half of the Rush Limbaugh program.
Greetings conversationalists across the fruited plain, Jason Lewis filling in for El Rushboat today.
I'll be back tomorrow as well.
We've got Walter on Wednesday, Mark on Friday, and the best of rush, New Year's Day.
Don't go anywhere this week other than the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
And of course, on January 5th, week from today, the big guy returns.
We're all waiting for that.
The last caller is well-intentioned as he is.
It's one of my pet peefs because I've been fighting this mass transit preoccupation by the smart growth crowd for years and years and years, every place I've been.
And this is a con.
This I know exactly what they're up to.
You've got to understand the urban renewal crowd.
You know, you you've had you've had liberals in control of major urban areas for 40 years.
And what have they given you?
Well, they've given you high rates of crime, high taxation, and crummy schools.
Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
I mean, things are just jolly.
Well, they're not.
So people naturally left.
They go to the suburbs, and you get urban sprawl.
And let me tell you something.
Urban sprawl is a good thing.
It's cheaper to build a home when you don't have utility infill when you've got barren land than it is to build one in the middle of the city.
But beyond that, people are fleeing, obviously.
You can take a look at all a number of urban areas.
They're smaller today in population, the inner cities, not the metro, the inner cities than they were 30, 40 years ago.
So what's the response from our liberal lefties?
Well, it's well, uh, we could lower the taxes.
We could beef up the schools, more charter schools, more choice.
Uh, you know, actually get some tuition tax credits or some vouchers as the Chancellor of Washington is trying to do, fighting the teachers' union.
We could do that, we could crack down on crime.
Nah, I don't like those.
We want to keep spending.
Uh, here's what we'll do.
We're gonna put up urban growth boundaries so people can't leave the city.
And we're not gonna extend infrastructure, sewer lines, water lines, roads beyond the urban growth boundaries in every major metropolitan area.
And the epicenter of this was Portland, where housing prices went sky high, much higher than other places, because when you limit the supply of development, naturally you're gonna get a run-up in prices.
Well, let me tell you something, folks.
It's happening all over the country.
It's happening in the Twin Cities, it's happening in Charlotte, it's happening in Portland, it's happening everywhere, and it's a smart growth scheme.
That's all it is.
They call it smart growth, and it's about as dumb as you can possibly imagine.
In the name of urban sprawl.
We have no crisis of land.
If you take a look at the Department of Agricultural's Department of Agriculture's statistics for what is developed and what is undeveloped, I think we've got around five or six percent of our total land mass considered urban or developed.
There is no crisis.
This is a scheme to to round you up and keep you from fleeing.
And part of that scheme, high density development around mass transit stops.
They don't like you out in the suburbs with a three-car garage.
Well, that's decadence.
We don't like that.
We're not gonna subsidize those roads out there as if you're subsidizing them.
So they get put up urban growth boundaries, they put up high density development, you get a bunch of smart growth architects, and they say we're only gonna produce condos.
Everybody's gonna live on top of each other, just like Manhattan, gonna turtle and turn the world into Manhattan, and everybody's gonna crowd at the train station, and we're all gonna rush home.
People don't want to live that way.
If they did, they would live in Manhattan.
They want space.
They want a three-bedroom house, four-bedroom house, three-car garage in the suburbs.
That's what this is about, and mass transit is a key component of this new urbanism.
Now a lot of you people in rural areas are saying, well, why does that affect me, Jason?
We don't have that problem in Kansas or Alabama or wherever.
Well, yes, you do.
Because you're paying automobile taxes.
You're paying 18.3 cents, eighteen eighteen point three cents at the federal gas tax.
And that money is being siphoned off to build light rail lines and smart growth development in Minneapolis, in Portland, in San Diego, in Seattle, in Charlotte.
And none of these systems pay for themselves.
Not even not even close.
You know, you take four cities in the country, I think it's Chicago, Boston, Washington, and New York.
Only four cities have a commuter or four cities that's a percent of commuters above ten percent of use transit.
In the Twin Cities, it's about four point eight percent.
It's similar in other mid-sized cities or even large cities.
Nobody uses it.
And yet, to build a light rail system, Denver's gone gaga over this.
It costs 40 to 50 million dollars per mile.
You know what a freeway costs?
Less than half of that.
You know, we've got a new line now.
They're getting ready for the next light rail line in the Twin Cities.
It's already scheduled at 1.2 billion.
I can guarantee you it'll be 1.6 or 1.7.
That previous line I mentioned, the 12 mile Hiawatha line, was slated to cost 400 million, came in at three quarters of a billion dollars.
This 1.2 billion dollar scheme connecting downtown St. Paul to downtown Minneapolis.
Oh, yes, I'm going to get in my car in the suburbs, drive to downtown Minneapolis, get on the light rail line, and go to downtown St. Paul, walk six blocks and do the same coming home.
No, nobody uses them.
That's why they have to give them away.
That's why they can't raise fares.
No one would use them.
The only thing they can do is lower fares so much that it's a freebie to get ridership.
That is not adding to the nation's productivity.
It is throwing bad money or good money after bad.
But you people in rural America are paying for this.
Your gas taxes, the mass transit account, has billions in it, and it's being used to bribe communities to build these light rail lines.
You don't see a thing for it in Topeka.
But the major urban areas need this smart growth development.
We can't keep engaging in urban sprawl.
And it's getting worse.
Now the potentate of pork in Minnesota, Representative James Oberstar, he's one of the nation's great scoundrels.
He stood on the banks of the Mississippi after the I-35W bridge collapsed and pronounced this was this was due to a lack of tax revenue.
He blamed taxpayers for not funding the federal or the uh the highway trust fund enough.
And so he said in order to prevent another I-35W bridge collapse like the one we had in the Twin Cities, we need to raise the gasoline tax five cents a gallon.
He wanted a twenty-three point four cent uh gas tax at the Fed just the federal level.
You add on your your, of course, state and local taxes, and you're looking at 40, 50 cents, dwarfing anything the oil companies would make when it comes to profit.
And now he's back.
Now this potentate of Pork, who's the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, says he wants to take the stimulus package from Barack and divert money from highways to are you ready?
Yes, that's right, more mass transit.
Divert your taxes from roads that might do you a little good.
Now, to be fair, we can overbuild on roads too.
I mean, if you really take a look at the problem of highways, it's one of timing.
Uh you know, if you're if you're traveling today, more than likely, you're not seeing congestion.
You're traveling in the off-peak hours during the weekday, you don't see congestion.
So we need to go to a market-based system of pricing roads.
We could do that through tolls, we could do it through a whole host of systems, but that's not the point.
All things being equal, what's going to do you more good?
A freeway interchange That will pay for itself in development overnight, or billions more for a one mile of mass transit or light rail that costs twice as much that no one's going to ride.
That's why you don't trust government to quote unquote invest.
Their considerations when they invest are political.
We're going to bail out the UAW.
We're going to inflate the number of government workers by getting mass transit employees beefing up that.
Oh, by the way, they'll become union members and contribute to Democrats.
The government invests for political considerations, a return on voting.
You and I in the private sector invest for a return on equity.
That's all you need to know on why we should do the investing, and government should be one of limited powers, enumerated powers, and do a very, very few things and try to do them as best they can.
I'm Jason Lewis.
Went a little long this time.
When we come back to the phones we go once again on the Rush Limbaugh program.
All right, we are back, uh the Rush Limbaugh program up and running for a Monday.
Glad you've uh glad you've tuned us in as you do each and every day, I'm sure one eight hundred-282-2882.
Jason Lewis in for Rush today in Atlanta.
Mike, you are on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Hello, sir.
Hello, Jason.
How are you today?
Could not be better.
Uh let me uh let me say this and and I'll I'll get to my point as we go through here.
First off, uh I wanted to say about James Overstarr.
Yeah, you're exactly right about that guy.
He's bad news.
He's bad news.
He he's the reason we're parking the Delta Queen.
I mean, that's right.
And that's a un and that's a union pay.
That was a union issue.
That's right.
Yeah, and that's the union payback.
But anyway, you talked about that we did not subsidize highways and that we don't subsidize the airlines and that kind of thing.
And the and the actual truth is, yes, we do.
And follow with me here.
You know, Rush says that everybody's historical perspective begins at their day of birth.
Uh I was a logistics and transportation major at the University of Tennessee, one of the top L and T schools in the country.
Uh I've worked in the railroad industry for 16 years now, and including railroad history, uh, while I was in college.
And here's what I can tell you.
If you go back and study uh where transportation, the the pricing and cost and payment structure that we have in place now of how transportation is paid for in this country.
It is not market-based.
It has not been market-based since at least the 1920s.
Uh and therefore what we have in this country is a socialized transportation system that has gotten market forces so out of whack that we have developed into an automobile society.
Uh when you look at I I gotta interrupt you here real quick.
Okay.
You you're coming dangerously close to this notion, and I hear it from a uh from folks in Atlanta all the time.
Well, you can't build your way out of congestion.
All we do is we build another road and the cars fill it up.
Well, I'll tell you what, why don't you close down a few freeways uh in Atlanta and see what congestion does then?
The inverse of that logic.
And when what the best government can do, because we do have the government building roads, and I'd be more than willing to essentially privatize that and let oil companies keep their gas tax and build roads if you really want to get libertarian about it.
But the point the the point I'm saying is government uh uh always, always has a misallocation of resources.
I don't care what it does.
It it does not spend money as efficiently as the private sector and it never will because there's no market discipline there.
But when they're working the right way, they can see trends in development, and they say, Oh, people are moving to the suburbs.
Should we build a freeway, a beltway around the city?
Should we build an interchange here or there?
And when the roads follow the people, that's as close as you can get to a market development.
And it's my contention that when that interchange is built, you add the gas taxes that are consumed, you add on to the development on the interchange, which increases the property tax base, some of that money, and I think it's a modicum, goes to maintaining the roads, roads by almost in fact, I'll give you a perfect example.
The in most Department of Transportations, Mike, there is a a cost-benefit analysis done for every project.
So if they build an interchange, will it be a one-to-one ratio, or will we actually get a return on this investment?
Almost every mass transit and rail project is negative.
For every uh dollar you spend on a light rail system, you get back.42 cents or 42 cents on it.
Whereas almost every road project, you know, freeway interchange turns out to have a positive return.
And that's from the the frankly the DOT's own analysis.
Well, and I agree with that.
But again, I'll go back to what I said before.
Because we have socialized the transportation system in this country to such a degree, we don't have true market forces at work.
Follow with me here.
Back in the you talked about developers that built roads and things like that, and and then the taxpayers begin to maintain them.
When you go back to uh the turn of the last century, 1900 to 1925 or so, what you had, if you'll notice, and and I I don't I I'm pretty sure the twin cities would probably fall into this as well.
But if you look at most cities of any growth and size at that time, uh the subdivisions that were being built, the quote unquote urban sprawl, but you know how most people uh built their uh uh um most developers actually built light rail lines to get people so that they would have convenient access to those new subdivisions.
Uh and then again, you also have the fact that the automobile came into existence and became further and further refined technologically.
However, the government then got involved and said, This is how we're going to do things.
They the regulation on the railroad industry was that uh they were regulated in a way that said basically the railroad industry is the only mode of transportation and all other modes of transportation were given a tremendous benefit uh uh advantage over the railroad industry.
And I'm not talking about uh I'm not talking about just passengers.
We can't do it we can't do an historical tour de four here.
What what what I think I know where you're going with this, and if you know, first of all, the railroads got monopolies from government before they were, you know, the came out of favor.
But uh what what I'm saying is simply this.
And I want you to follow with me here.
If in fact we turned into a market system as you desire, and frankly, I wouldn't be opposed to that either.
I think we ought to privatize airports.
Uh, I believe Heathrow or Gatewick is privatized.
Uh I think we ought to do that.
If we did that, or we privatized roads where your license fees would be paid to uh somebody who's running the road other than government.
Oil companies would would have a fee instead of uh the government having a tax.
Oil companies would, they would want to build roads, otherwise they have no use for their product.
Automobile companies could have a fee, the same thing.
All I'm saying is if you went down this privatization road, roads would not go away, airlines would not go away, airports would not go away, but if in fact mass transit had to pay for itself, it would be gone in a New York minute.
And I'm even talking about New York.
No, I'm not saying it's going to be uh gone overnight.
What I'm saying is in New York, Chicago, Boston, where it is somewhat viable, these places run billions of dollars in deficits that have to have the government bail them out all the time because riders of mass transit are not willing to pay the full cost.
That's why the fares don't go up.
Same with Amtrak.
I would argue if you take a look at all of the money that's siphoned off of your gas tax and other fees, license fees, uh automobile users are more than paying the full cost.
I'm Jason Lewis.
More coming right up, so don't go away.
All right, we'll squeeze in one more call before the break at the top, but uh never fear, another hour coming right up on the Rush Limbaugh program in Chicago.
Al, you're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
Good afternoon.
All I can say is ditto ditto ditto.
What you're saying is absolutely correct.
I was in the housing market selling flooring to builders, most of whom are out of out of business or working at uh 7 Eleven's today.
Uh the uh the amount of uh mortgages insured by Fanny and Freddie, I heard this recently, rose from four to seven trillion dollars in a matter of a few years.
And one point six trillion of subprime.
I I I watched as builders raised the prices of the their townhomes as single family homes twenty, thirty, forty, fifty percent in a few years.
Right.
Not because of cost, but because demand was so great they were selling before they even broke ground.
I also want people to look at the the effects of law and you know, they talk about regulation.
Look at what's happening in New York, the fifty billion dollar meltdown.
The SEC knew about that nine years ago.
They closed their eyes to it.
So people who believe government regulation is going to protect us, yeah, go talk to Bonnie, go talk to Schumer.
Remember that's a great point.
Remember the Keating Five?
Uh government regulation is never going to match government intervention or the political interests.
So the regulators will be bowled over.
You you got a great point, and let's let's try to put it in perspective here.
What you're saying is the government, through this subprime lending and through Fannie and Freddy and so called affordable housing, engaged in a stimulus program to build homes and the bubble burst.
How different is that in the stimulus program we're getting re getting ready to fund now?
I agree with you also that in the future our biggest fear should be inflation because the monetary policy of today mirrors the early 70s when uh Johnson with the war and the Great Society ramped up money, yeah.
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