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Jan. 8, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:12
January 8, 2009, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Well, the insanity that we spoke of yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, continued this morning with uh a campaign speech by President Select Barack Obama, a rehash of campaign rhetoric from his uh successful presidential campaign on the economy.
And it is pure insanity.
As we discussed yesterday.
Great to have you here, Rush Limbaugh at 800-282-2882, the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
I just heard something that frankly surprises me.
I was watching a little post-speech commentary from our friends in the drive-bys, and Nina Easton, who is a Fox News contributor and analyst.
I think she's uh I don't know if she writes for Fortune magazine, so she writes now for business audience.
She used to be the Washington Bureau Chief for the Boston Globe.
Uh she got out of there in the nick of time before the New York Times company had to declare bankruptcy they own the Boston Globe.
At any rate, she said that the business community is signed on to this.
The business community is all for the Obama economic plan because of the tax cuts that are in for business in the Obama economic plan.
Now, when the speech began, the Dow Jones industrial average was at 50, down 50.
As we speak now, ladies and gentlemen, the Dow Jones industrial average is down about 95.
So it has fallen 45 points, yet the business community is behind the speech behind the plan from the get-go.
There were no specifics announced today.
And by the way, the drive-by's, I have a very, very detailed story here.
The uh the drive-bys are very, very well, they're not concerned yet, but they are starting to note that there haven't been any specifics in any of Obama's economic plans.
And today's speech, we have sound bites of it coming up, was just another series of airy platitudes rehashed from the campaign.
But essentially, what we're going to do here, and what's happening is we are being led by somebody who knows nothing about economics.
And his speech today was uh a tantamount admission of that.
We're told, though, since he doesn't know anything, that his economic team is superb.
Uh, his economic team is made up of uh, you know, a bunch of big government types, and we are told that the economy is so bad.
It is so bad that only government can get us out of this.
Only the government can get us out of this, ladies and gentlemen.
And then he said later on in the speech that we are going to have to get back to a new economy for the 21st century, where hard work is once again rewarded.
Now, I bought choked, ladies and gentlemen, because that's the exact opposite of what his plan is.
His plan taxes the hard working.
His plan taxes achievers.
That's where he's going to get some of the money that he's going to give away to people who aren't working and to unsuccessful businesses.
Is Nina Easton comment that business is on board here?
Well, I looked at some of the plan they did get somewhat specific in the in the 340 billion dollar tax cut plan, and it's there aren't any tax cuts in there.
There are welfare payments for unemployed people, people who don't play pay taxes at all, income taxes, and there are uh business write-offs for businesses that lose money.
But there are no tax cuts for people who are stimulating the economy.
Who stimulates the economy, by the way?
We're being we how many, how many how many deficits have we been running as a nation budget deficits annual for how many years now?
And yet this recession still happened.
We've already tried this.
It was just two months ago, two months ago, that we tried this very circumstance.
We have been stimulating the economy in a robust way, according to the way the left defines it.
And still, the one tells us it's getting worse.
And it's going to get worse.
And just like they sold the first 700 million.
We've got to do it now.
We can't wait.
It's a crisis.
We cannot wait any longer.
Our country can't afford to wait, and we are being micromanaged and hurried into a blunder of historic proportions.
This plan, if it happens, as has been designed by Obama, is Jimmy Carter times a trillion.
This is basically printing as much money as humanly possible.
Because folks, we don't have the value to back up the money that we are spending.
We're not borrowing as much as we're going to spend.
The Chicons have sent out uh, you know, little warning notices saying, hey, you know, we may not continue to purchase your debt anymore.
Uh, and it's it's it's a bunch of foreign nations that have been purchasing our debt, T bills and all that.
We're having to print this money, and we are unloading it.
We're gonna unload this printed money on favored industries and unions and populations to promote left-wing policies and entities, such as the green movement, Democrat mayors.
We're gonna hand out massive welfare payments to non-taxpayers, and we're gonna call it a middle class tax cut.
Jimmy Carter times a trillion.
If this happens, as envisioned by Obama, this is gonna go down as the uh uh the biggest economic blunder in American history.
Go to the audio sound bites.
We'll start here with uh uh see.
Well, uh let's get may as well do this because it's right.
I just sometimes I cringe at playing sound bites of myself.
Well, because I can say it myself rather than going to but we'll go, we'll go to the audio sound bites.
This is November 5th, last year.
This is what I said about President select Obama.
Obama's campaign will never end.
His governance as president will be as a constant campaign.
Clinton never stopped campaigning.
The war room mode never shut down.
And I think it's gonna be the same thing with Obama.
Yeah, well, it is.
This speech today was a campaign speech.
It was platitudinous.
It was it was it was perfect Obama.
Say nothing, but say it in a great way that inspires people, make them think they heard all kinds of great things.
We have to do it.
It's like a State of Union speech, actually.
We're gonna have to do this, we're gonna have to do that, and we gotta make sure that we do this, and we got and we don't have much time to do all this.
We got to do it now, but we're gonna do these great things.
We're gonna have new chairs in a classroom, new desks in a classroom, we're gonna have better teachers, we're gonna have more teacher pay, we're gonna have safer roads and safer bridges, we're gonna have an outpost on Mars, and then we're gonna have an outpost on the moon, and then we're gonna have clean drinking water for everybody, including my brother in the hut over in Kenya.
We're gonna it never stopped.
It was a laundry list that just kept going, and I could just see people out in the audience, a typical Obama voter, swooning.
You can see Oprah Winfrey jiggling so much in happiness that she loses 20 of the 40 pounds she gained last year.
Okay, so constant campaign mode.
Gloria Borger, last night on CNN, had this to say.
I was talking to some uh folks in the transition who are very involved in this speech, and it was described to me as akin to a campaign announcement.
They said, think of it as the beginning of a sustained campaign.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
Should there be any of you out there who doubt me, don't anymore.
Don't doubt me.
I know these people, like every square inch of my glorious naked body.
Difference is I don't think it's wise to run a presidency as a campaign, but Gloria Borger thinks it's marvelous.
Thinks it's absolutely cool as it can be.
All right, let's take a brief time out.
We'll come back and we'll play little excerpts of the speech.
By the way, this is this was a brilliant move in one way.
Brilliant brilliant, because nobody is talking about plexico Burris, nobody is talking about Lloyd Burris, and nobody is talking about Roland Burris.
Except Bobby Rush, and we have the soundbite.
Sit tight, we'll be right back.
Your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, emitting vocal vibrations coast to coast.
Great to have you here.
We come to you live from the Office of America's anchor man here at the EIB Southern Command.
It was only two days ago, ladies and gentlemen, that we heard these words from the president select Barack Obama explaining why he has refused comment on the war between uh the gazukas in Gaza and the Israelis.
I think the need to adhere to one president at a time is particularly important.
The need to adhere to one president at a time particularly important.
By the way, rockets were fired at Israel today from Lebanon.
When rockets are fired from Lebanon, it's the Hezbos, so the Hezbos and the Gazukas are now teaming up against the Israelis.
Hezbalah.
Hezbalah has announced that they are investigating.
This is an O.J. Simpson line.
Hezbollah is investigating who fired the rockets.
The drive-by media lapping up saying we'll help try to find out who fired the rockets from Hezbollah.
Now, let's hear 9A again.
This is Barack Obama two days ago.
I think the need to adhere to one president at a time is particularly important.
This morning, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, Barack Obama, the president select, gave a major economic address.
Only government can provide the short-term boost necessary to lift us from a recession this deep and severe.
Only government can break the cycle that are crippling our economy.
That's why we need to act boldly and act now.
We did reverse these cycles.
We did that already.
That's why we need to restart the flow of credit and restore the rules of the road that will ensure we did crisis like this never happens again.
But it will happen again because recessions are cyclical.
So here he is here basically with a this is a lie.
It's not, it's folks, this is not something that's just wrong.
This is not a disagreement among people.
This is proven fact.
Governments do not break economic cycles.
They cannot.
If government could do that, there would never be a recession.
There would never be depressions.
It would be smooth sailing 24-7 if government had this kind of power, but it doesn't?
Well, it it has the power to interfere, but it does not, it is not the means.
Who stimulates the economy?
Who stimulates what will be the definition of economic recovery?
The real definition of economic recovery.
Will we say after Obama's first well, forget Obama for a second?
Let's go back to the first $700 billion.
Last October, we had to have that done too.
It was a crisis.
It was an emergency.
Only government can do it.
We had to do it then.
We had to get credit flowing, had to do all these things.
We were told that that was the solution.
That's just a couple short months ago, and here we are back, and now we're going to do it again, only this time over a trillion dollars.
How come the economy's not fixed?
No, no, I'm I'm I'm not trying to be facetious.
I'm asking this as a serious question.
Why isn't the government fixed?
If government doing this, now follow me.
I'm just I know I'm too logical here.
And I know, ladies and gentlemen, that being right does not win elections.
But that's not what this program is about.
This program is about informative, accurate, truthful education.
And a good time had by all at the same time.
So this is this is I'm not advising anybody on.
I'm just we we we need to be as as as well informed as possible.
And taking what Obama just said here, only government can do this.
Well, we've done how many bailouts now?
We've had 700 billion here, 350 there, we've had a stimulus package or two since last spring.
If government is the only entity that can break the cycle, why is the cycle not broken?
And why are the markets not reacting as though the cycle has been broken?
If government, what Obama just said here, and believe me, he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that's what I'm trying to illustrate here.
He literally does not know what he's talking about.
He does not understand economics.
He understands the empowerment of government.
He understands the growth of government, he understands the strengthening and the enrichment of the Democrat Party for 50 years.
That's what he understands.
He does not understand the economy.
If all of this government spending, all of this printing of money, all of this borrowing of money, all of this recycling it with bailouts here And bailouts there, why aren't the markets going, yeah, okay, why isn't the recession over?
If only government can do this.
Well, the reason the recession isn't over because government doesn't fix recessions.
Who stimulates the economy?
What are we hoping happens here?
The only who who are the people that make the country work?
That's the better question.
Who are the people that make the country work?
It's all of you.
It's all of us, gainfully employed, seeking to improve our lives, creating new jobs, ideas, inventions, services.
Economic growth is more people earning, earning higher wages, and paying higher taxes in the form of lower rates, more tax revenue.
Who stimulates the economy?
Is it the person who hires people?
Is it the person who gives them raises?
It's the person or the organization that creates ideas and products that people want to buy.
Those are the people who stimulate the economy and what's happening to them and Obama's plan.
No tax cut for them.
Obama, by the way, in his speech and everything's on the table.
No, it's not because he didn't mention tax cuts.
The tax cuts he has mentioned prior to today are just Joe the plumber wealth transfers to people who are not working or who have lost money in business.
And the people paying for it are those who have persevered, worked hard, continue to employ people, and are showing a profit.
Those are the people who stimulate the economy, and those are the people are going to get punished.
Liberal Democrats believe in the downtrodden.
They believe everybody's a victim.
They want as many victims as possible.
That's what Obama's speech was about today.
Was making as many of you think you're a victim of whatever capitalism, and only your benevolent government can fix this.
We need to restart the flow of credit, restore the rules of the road.
The government that destroyed the housing market.
The government that had a large role in destroying the domestic auto industry is now saying only they can fix things.
Here is yet another Obama excerpt.
We have already tried the wait and see approach to our problems.
And it is the same approach that helped lead us to this day of reckoning.
And that is why the time has come to build a 21st century economy in which hard work and responsibility are once again rewarded.
How is hard the that's I just had to laugh?
Come to build a 21st century economy in which hard work and responsibility are once again rewarded?
There's only one way to do that, and he's not doing it, and that's cut their taxes.
The people he's talking about are paying 50% of their income and taxes.
Let me ask you a question.
Those of you who are employees, let's say that your boss pays you a certain amount of money, and government tax law requires that of what you make, over 50% of it will be deducted from your paycheck in addition to the taxes you pay that you don't see, like in the gasoline pump at the grocery store, wherever you pay sales tax.
The people that own and operate businesses face those tax rates of over 50% state, federal, cost of doing business tax, whatever the taxes are.
What if you, as an employee, had to pay 50% of what your boss pays you in taxes?
What would you do?
Would it be profitable for you to continue to work?
Or would you be livid?
The people that are going to be paying in part for this brilliant, compassionate stimulus, are those who are already doing the hard work and are not being rewarded for it.
They're being punished.
It is the slackers.
It is the people who have not run businesses that are earning money that are going to be bailed out.
It's the people who have not played by his precious rules that are going to be bailed out by the people who are obeying the rules and who are paying the freight.
He's right to say we need to get back to the day where hard work and responsibility were rewarded.
Unfortunately, he lives in a political party that does not believe in that philosophy at all.
Otherwise, he would be talking about cutting taxes.
He would understand where the real stimulus occurs in an economy and where this comeback will occur.
Because it always does.
Do you know what the average lifespan of a recession is over the course of United States history?
Twelve to twenty-four months.
And then magically, we start to come out of it without the government being involved.
This is going to delay that.
This is going to prolong and sustain this recession.
And Obama's out there telling everybody.
We will be back.
Barack Obama said in his speech this morning that we've already tried the wait and see approach to our problems.
And it's the same approach that helped lead us to this day of reckoning.
You know, we're trying to be respectful of the Messiah and the new president-elect and so forth, but frankly, that's Baldur Dash.
We have not tried waiting and seeing.
We have been in crisis mode for six years.
For six years, our friends in the drive-by media have been trying to convince you that we are in a recession.
For six years they've been trying to do that, all for the express purpose of getting rid of Bush and Republicans and electing Democrats.
Finally, a recession happened.
We have been in crisis mode since last summer.
We've been in crisis mode perhaps even longer than that with the presidential campaign.
But certainly, we have been in crisis mode since October.
We have not been in a wait and see attitude.
We have not been in a laissez-faire attitude whatsoever.
We have been hands-on to the point that government has never never been this hands-on.
We're getting close to already outspending what FDR did in the New Deal.
Obama calls it wait and see.
No.
The approach that led us to this day of reckoning is the approach defined by Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, by Barney Frank of Massachusetts, by Franklin Rains, and Jim Johnson at Fannie Mae, by Angelo Mozilla at Countrywide, by Acorn, the community organization group that pressured banks all over the country to make loans to people who couldn't afford them.
And that whole game plan was set in motion by none other than Jimmy Carter.
It was ignored for a while, then picked up by Bill Clinton and intensified in the late 90s.
We are where we are, precisely because of meddling liberal Democrat members of government, and sadly a lot of Republicans in the last three to four years have to be included in this as well for this irresponsible spending that has been taking place.
And once the government spends it, the private sector doesn't have it.
The private sector is where stimulus takes place.
The private sector, the average American, that's who makes the country work.
If the government and its actions guaranteed economic prosperity, Wall Street should be throwing parties because we have spent already close to a trillion dollars in stimulus.
And isn't it amazing how no impact?
In fact, it's gotten worse.
They all admit that it's gotten worse, which means we need to spend another trillion, and we need to overspend by a trillion dollars a year for perhaps the next three to four, while at the same time they tell us this is the recipe for prosperity.
This is a disaster.
This outdoes anything Bernie Madoff ever even conceived of doing.
And like Bernie Madoff, the future victims of this are so excited, their tongues are practically on the floor as they suck up all the excitement out there.
They pant away.
They can't believe their good fortune in having America loved once again.
Somebody who can speak, somebody who will not embarrass the United States, may destroy it, but he will not embarrass us.
Here's more.
This is Obama, the president select, ramping up the crisis mentality.
If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years.
Stop taking a minute.
Recessions come out of their cycles in 24 month periods.
If you just leave them alone, wait and see is what works.
Recessions, it's the average length of time for a recession in America.
Depression's a different thing.
What now, Snerdley?
What's the problem?
Mm-hmm.
I'm not suggesting benign neglect.
I'm not suggesting benign neglect.
I am suggesting that we have the undertaker in charge of the body before it's dead.
Think of Washington as a giant funeral home, and we are the living.
And the undertakers are not changing their jobs.
Their jobs are to prepare bodies for burial.
We are on the conveyor belt heading into the funeral home.
Most of us are smiling like stupid idiots at the prospects for our future.
All because some guy who can put ten words together, which say nothing makes them feel good.
All right, here's the rest of this bite.
Reach double digits.
Our economy could fall one trillion dollars short of its full capacity, which trends.
already has.
Look, you know, I can stop this after every word and analyze it.
But I'm not going to do that.
Because I don't want to appear hypercritical of the new president.
Because, quote, we all want him to succeed.
Take me off the bus, folks.
I don't want to be on the bus to successive.
If this is how it's defined.
Why should we want somebody to succeed who doesn't have the slightest clue what he's doing and doesn't understand economics?
Why should we want him to succeed?
I'll tell you why our guys are saying that, because they're a bunch of pantywaste cowards who are afraid to stand up for their own principles because they're afraid if they do so, they'll be called racists.
Or roadblocks.
Or gridlockers, even though they don't have the ability to stop anything.
...into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four.
We could lose a generation of potential and promise.
25 years.
As more young Americans are forced to forego dreams of college or the chance to train for the jobs of the future.
In short, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.
See?
Ramp up the crisis.
Your kid can't go to college.
Wink wink, that might be the best thing for your kid, by the way, is to find some other way to get educated rather than by a bunch of liberals.
Uh, and of course, you won't get job training.
Nope, nothing.
It's it's gonna get bad out there.
And then, and then Obama.
See if this doesn't sound like to you, he uh his admitting that the plan won't even work.
This recovery plan alone will not solve all the problems that led us into this crisis.
What?
We must also work with the same sense of urgency.
Yeah.
Stabilize and repair the financial system we all depend on.
We did not Wall Street wrongdoers to slip through regulatory cracks.
They did.
No longer can we allow special interests to put their thumbs on the economic scales.
This recovery plan alone will not solve all of the problems that led us into this crisis.
It won't.
The Messiah's confirming what I have said in my analysis isn't gonna work.
No, but here's the reasoning gonna work.
We must also work with the same sense of urgency to stabilize and repair the financial system.
Folks, we did that.
It's called TARP.
We did that.
We have stabilized the financial system, don't you know?
Oh, pay no attention to the stock market.
Pay no attention to office rentals being down.
Pay no attention to the reality.
We fixed it.
That's what the 700 billion dollar bailout of the financial.
We bailed out a bunch of banks, we made them whole, we bailed out a my AIG, bailed out a bunch of people.
Uh we um and and the banks, of course, did exactly what I thought they would do.
They didn't lend the money.
They saved it.
They was Sarbain's Oxley was supposed to fix all the ethical stuff with the Enron stuff.
Yeah.
Sorry, but well, it didn't work because people took their companies private to avoid Sarbanes Oxley.
Those that didn't take their companies did hurt.
It did, folks.
We have bailed out the financial system.
What I'm trying to say, we've bailed out every.
And if government action fixed this, we should all be throwing parties because we should be confident that no matter we've if 700,000 people lose their jobs next month, it doesn't matter because the government has acted and that's the fix.
Wall Street Journal has a column today.
Just this paragraph.
He wants to talk about the Wall Street wrongdoers and so forth.
The Congressional Budget Office reports that some $240 billion of the new spending bailout money is for the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Congress will also want to keep in business, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as part of its nationalization of the mortgage market.
So that $240 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may never be repaid.
Though only last year our salons and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were assuring us that Fannie and Freddie were no threat to taxpayers.
Fannie and Freddie were no threat to taxpayers.
They're fine.
Well, we just bailed them out, 240 billion, they're not going to have to pay it back.
Think of this in Madoff terms.
Think of it as Congress having stolen from the taxpayers as a result of its Fannie Mae scam, nearly five times what Bernard Madoff made have stolen from his clients.
And yet the very people that led to the problem have now fixed it by a scam five times the size of Bernie Madoff's, and Obama today says, no longer can we allow wrong street uh Wall Street wrongdoers to slip through the regulatory cracks.
We put all this to song, ladies and gentlemen, to illustrate exactly uh, ladies and gentlemen, just what the gambit here is.
They love the crisis, they want the crisis to continue, they're going to continue to stoke it, as Barack Obama sings in the song recession.
It was just a few short months ago that we will learn the reality that massive debt unpaid led to disaster.
And here we just listen to a presidential address promising more.
Promising more.
Now the drive-by's, as I said, they are nowhere near critical mass or critical mode, but they are beginning to ask, or no, they're not yet even asking.
They are noting that there are no specifics here.
I have all that coming up, uh, ladies and gentlemen.
I do want to get to some uh phone calls first before the uh first hour ends.
We'll start in North Canton, Ohio.
Mark, I'm glad you called.
Great to have you here.
Thanks, Rush.
Um, my question is how did 40% of the approximately 40% of the population end up not paying any federal income tax?
And what would need to be done for that to be reversed?
Well, the original intention of this, I mean, it to go back to where this all started.
First, the 38%, 40% figure is uh is pretty accurate, but it includes the people who are in the poverty quintile.
Okay.
So there's that that bunch never pays income taxes.
Well, they shouldn't.
Right.
They're in the working poor.
The working poor.
Now what happened, you know, when Ronald Reagan took office, you know what the top marginal tax rate was in uh 1981?
It was 70 percent.
Top marginal tax rate tax rate 70 percent.
Now, very few people paid it.
The top marginal rate is the is the rate you pay on the last dollars you earn.
But back then there were so many deductions, so many so-called tax shelters, that very few only stupid idiots ever reached the 70 percent figure.
But the idea was look, we need to simplify this.
Uh, and so the first round of Reagan tax cuts took the 70 percent to 50, and by the time we got to 1988, the rates were fifteen and twenty-eight percent.
There was a bubble for some people that made them pay 31.
In exchange for that, all those shelters were taken away, and all the tax shelters and The uh the the various uh deductions uh that most of them were swept away.
Simplification.
By the way, this led to a doubling of revenue in the Treasury throughout the 80s, 500 billion in 1981, close to uh 500, whatever it was, it doubled it to uh almost a trillion, but 900 and some odd billion dollars.
Uh, with cutting the rate from 70 to 28 percent.
Now, in the process of this, uh that 15 percent rate was designed to be as fair, 15 percent would be a as a flat tax would be a great rate for everybody.
What happened along the way, uh Reagan left office, uh, George Bush broke his promise on no new taxes.
We ended up with something called the earned income tax credit.
Yes, I'm familiar with that here.
The earned income tax credit uh combined with the uh uh what is that other thing that I'm having a mental block on that other tax?
AMT, the alternative minimum tax.
The combination of the the alternative minimum tax started out as a way to make sure that people who earned lots of money but paid no taxes paid some.
That now affects a whole bunch of people, uh unintended consequences.
But the alternative minimum tax has basically resulted in welfare payments to the people above the poverty line, up to the percentage of 38 to 40 percent who are not longer no longer paying taxes.
Personal exemption was raised.
The reason for this uh this this happened during the 90s primarily with Clinton tax policy.
And the reason for this was exactly what's happened now.
To get as many people, because there are far more people who earn fifty thousand dollars or less than there are people who earn two hundred and fifty thousand dollars or more.
And if you get all those people, let's even say seventy-five grand, you get all those people seventy-five grand or fifty grand and under on your side, you outnumber the people that make over two fifty.
Sure.
And that's what the objective was was to get as few of those people paying any income tax while at the same time blaming the plus two fifty crowd for not paying enough when their burden increased.
So it was a political ploy to get as many people to oppose legislation that would ever cut taxes.
Do you think it could ever be reversed?
Uh by one-term president, yes.
If he had a Congress that was of his party.
We'll take a brief time out, we'll be back.
We have barely scratched the surface of this taxes stuff here today.
Uh the Rush Limbaugh program, but it's apparent, ladies and gentlemen, that uh President select Obama is launching a war to save the U.S. economy.
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