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Jan. 13, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:14
January 13, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
What?
What's going on here, friends?
I'm telling you, Rush is supposed to be here, but is not.
This is very, very strange.
I'm trying to I'm trying to explain this to you.
Well, here's what happened, apparently, as you heard Rush say yesterday, there may in fact be something more interesting going on.
Let me let me put it put it to you in his own words.
Here's what Rush said yesterday.
Now remember, Obama said, show me what works and we'll do it.
Well, the AP, AP's own or Obama's own news service.
AP Obama, when the rich stop spending, all hell breaks loose.
When the rich start looking for bargains, Sachs Fifth Avenue has to move over to Lexington Avenue.
When the when Macy's is shutting down all over the place, when Bergdorf Goodman has to put things on sale, you're in big trouble.
Tiffany Groff, all his jewelry place.
If those things have to start discounting and people who normally spend their money there start looking for discounts, it's in we're in trouble.
And the AP said this, bemoaning the plight of retailers.
So clearly, something needs to happen in order to restore confidence here, to create economic growth, which will filter through to all levels of the economy.
And it seems to me, folks, that the simplest, the fastest, and the most direct way to do this is to bail out the rich.
If we are going to save our economy, the bailout of the wealthy cannot wait.
The rich need a bailout.
The rich need further tax cuts.
This is what is necessary.
I would be willing to personally present this plan to President elect Obama because it has worked.
I am confident.
And I'm just offering a personal trip, nobody even me has to know about this.
Well, I'm telling you, gang, that is all I can tell you.
That's all I can do is let you know what Rush said yesterday.
I get a call late afternoon yesterday.
They need somebody to fill in for El Rushbo, the king.
All I know is he's in Washington right now.
So he gets a call from Washington.
Then I get the call to fill in for him, and he's there right now.
That's all I know.
That's all I can tell you, but maybe the president-elect has had an epiphany.
Maybe, in fact, maybe in fact he's getting advice.
I don't know.
We're just speculating here.
I'm in the dark just like you are.
But the fact of the matter is Russia's gone, last minute thing, he's in Washington, and I'm here filling in for Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, and glad to be here back at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
But how interesting is this?
How interesting is this when you consider that Obama has so much capital going on.
He really does.
He's got a a lot of people behind him.
A lot of folks like Barack Obama.
Now, granted, he had the media covering for him.
Uh he kind of disproved the old Lincoln maxim.
You can fool most of the people most of the time.
So I'm not going soft on you, but he does have some political capital here, and think what he could do.
I think that's essentially what Rush was alluding to.
If you want a stimulus package, you've got to get a return on the investment you make.
The return is a tax cut across the board to grow the economy.
Then when the economy grows 6, 7%, 8%, we can pay back the money we borrowed to cut the taxes, grow out of deficits.
Remember that?
In fact, Reagan was right, we did grow out of the deficits.
Now we could do that.
We could have a stimulus package, you know, to cut taxes across the board.
We don't have a spending crisis.
We have an investment crisis.
We're spending money like drunken sailors, but as the Gipper used to say, that's not fair to drunken sailors.
We can't get people to invest the money.
So what's happening is the Fed is creating money, they're buying T bills, uh, like nobody's business, and then the banks are turning around buying those treasury bonds back.
And so the only people that have money right now is the government.
And they're going to have this great stimulus package that will include more bridges to nowhere, the greening of schools, more mass transit, and more pork.
Now I ask you, what's the return on that investment for this economy?
There's going to be no return.
You're going to have stagnation.
And then when the bill comes due to pay back these trillion dollar deficits, we're going to have to pay it back out of a shr a shrunken, if you will, economy, or a stagnant economy, which will kill any incipient recovery we've got going.
That's the insanity of all this.
If if the President elect is listening to El Rushbo, here's an idea.
If you really want to spend the money, and frankly, the money's much better left in private hands.
But if you really want to spend the money, you don't waste it on more light rail projects from LA to San Francisco that are not viable.
You don't waste it on mass transit for San Diego or Denver or in the open spaces west where nobody wants to get out of their car.
You don't waste it on pork or even bridges to nowhere or fixing bridges that that in fact aren't in need of repair.
Do you know since 1990, the number of structurally deficient bridges?
Dr. John Lott did a study on this, or did some research on this, has actually gone down.
So we're going to build a number of things, we're going to have a malinvestment with a stimulus package.
We'll build things that don't add to the productivity of the economy.
That is a zero sum game.
It's worse than that.
But if you're hell bent on spending, you you bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., how about this?
How about spending on building nuclear power plants?
We'll take these trillion dollar stimulus package, we'll borrow all this money, we'll build the nuclear power plants, and then we'll have abundant, clean, cheap energy for the foreseeable future.
That might be a stimulus package that might work.
They're not going to do it.
Indeed, what they're talking about is more a money down a rat hole in solar, in wind, in biofuels that don't work.
Indeed, they can't work without subsidies, so the subsidies will have to go on in perpetuity.
Where once you build a nuclear power plant, it's over.
You can return the money back to its rightful owner.
Not with these green subsidies.
So we invest in the wrong things.
Look, if all we're talking about is creating public works jobs, well, what the heck?
Why don't we instead of a deficit of 1.2 trillion in fiscal year 09, why don't we have a deficit of three, five, six, eight trillion?
You know, you may have been involved in some of these debates in your particular community about building a baseball park or building a football stadium or a basketball arena.
And the apologists for sports welfare, and I love sports, but I don't want to subsidize them.
These guys have a lot of money, they can build their own parks.
But the apologists say, well, look at the multiplier effect.
Why?
We'll build this stadium and that money will turn over time and time again, as though it wouldn't turn over if it were left in the private economy.
Of course it would.
But the multiplier effect is specious anyway for a number of reasons.
But if that's the case and building one stadium in your community to subsidize sports welfare, why don't we build five?
Why don't we build six or seven?
If one football stadium or basketball arena is good, let's build ten of them.
Think of the multiplier effect, the silly Keynesian multiplier effect everybody talks about.
Well, obviously you can see that would be a malinvestment, a waste of resources, because we don't need that.
That's exactly what's going to happen with this stimulus package.
We're going to build things, we're going to quote unquote invest in things that don't have a return on investment.
And there are a couple of things we could have invested in that might have had a return.
You could have invested in, as as Rush alluded, tax cuts across the board.
You know, there are a couple of kinds of federal deficits.
There's the federal deficit where the government budget goes up, and we increase the deficit by spending more.
That has a very deleterious effect because you're taking capital out of the private sector and you're spending it or giving it to bureaucrats, and they get to choose what is invested on.
And remember, government never invests for a return on equity.
Government invests for a return at the ballot box.
So we're bailing out Detroit.
Why?
So we can keep the UAW afloat and keep Michigan in democratic hands.
But that's not an economic interest.
That's a special political interest.
That's why, frankly, I hate to be too too blunt about this.
You just can't turn over your money to government and expect a return on their investment.
They waste money.
They consume money, they don't invest it.
Now, if you have a deficit from a tax cut, however, and you don't raise the overall government budget, you just cut taxes And you borrow the difference.
Why that is a return on your investment because the economy grows.
If in fact there's a greater reward for work, for savings, for investment, surprise, surprise, people tend to do more of it.
And we grow out of those deficits, and we have a larger economy, we pay back the bonds, and all is well and good.
But that's not the kind of deficit we're talking about.
Barack Obama said yesterday or the other day he's going to reinstate the estate tax, which is going to be a drag on capital formation.
He says he's going to do away with this $3,000 business tax credit.
Obama Shell's jobs credit proposal for businesses.
That will be a drag on on you know, remember an investment in the private sector is labor.
And that's going to be a drag on more labor being employed, if you will.
So what I'm saying is, and I think what Rush was alluding to yesterday before, and maybe that's why he was called away unexpectedly, was that if you really want to stimulate the economy, we know how to do it.
But you don't do it by building tr mass transit lines where nobody rides them.
You don't do it by building bridges to nowhere or making schools green.
You do it by by making certain there's a return to the overall private sector economy on the investment.
And nuclear power plants might just have that return.
Naturally, the government then is not going to do it.
Tax cuts would have that return.
Naturally, they're talking about raising taxes.
And this is the this is the dirty little secret of this entire well, let's call it what it is, Ponzi scheme.
We've had a stimulus program.
We've had one.
You know what was what it was called?
The housing bubble.
The government spent money on housing, Fanny and Freddie.
They insured the subprime loans.
They told any lender out there you make a bad loan to any Joe Blow that comes along, don't worry, we'll guarantee it.
The Federal Reserve was creating money like nobody's business, an orgy of fiat money creation, making certain that interest rates were low.
And so we had a stimulus program, not unlike what we're talking about now for housing.
What happened?
We got more housing.
We had a housing bubble.
In fact, housing prices outpaced income, and that's why the bubble burst.
Pretty soon nobody could afford a house.
The bubble burst, and now we're recovering from that last stimulus program.
Now we're set to have a stimulus program for quote unquote infrastructure and green schools and transit and government makework jobs.
Guess what?
That bubble's going to burst too.
The day of reckoning is going to come when people realize you know what?
I'm tired of loaning money by buying treasury bills at zero percent to the government.
I'm not going to do that anymore.
And at that point, the government will have to either massively raise taxes or let interest rates go up because the Chinese may dump the dollar, or foreign creditors say we're not going to loan you money at zero percent.
We want fourteen percent.
The inflation may be back.
The Fed will have to tighten eventually, snatch the punch bowl from the party.
So when that happens, guess what?
The government will have to raise taxes to fund a stimulus plan to keep it going.
They'll have to let interest rates go up to attract the foreign capital, both of which will kill the economy.
Then they'll have to rescind the stimulus package, and all of those make work jobs will disappear overnight, just like the housing industry.
You're starting to get the picture here.
I tell you, I hope Rush, I hope Rush has this meeting.
I mean, we don't know.
I'm just speculating.
And I hope somebody listens up in Washington in the uh transition team, as it were.
I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright filling in for America's Mr. Wright, right here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Talent on loan from Barack Obama's advisor.
No, that would be talent on loan from Rush.
I am Jason Lewis filling in for the great one once again.
Glad to be back, glad to talk with all of you.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
I can hardly wait.
We know he's in Washington, as I said, but we don't know what's going on except what he said yesterday, so we'll find out tomorrow.
Tune in to, of course, the Rush Limbaugh program each and every day.
In the meantime, always at Rushlumbaug.com up on the web.
In the meantime, let's go to as well the phones, one eight hundred, two eight two eight eight two Amy in Elgin, Oklahoma.
You are first up on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hey, Jason.
Hi, Amy.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I'm very excited.
I can tell you what else you are.
I'm sorry?
I can tell you what else you are.
What?
Warmer than I am.
This morning, this morning in the Twin Cities try seventeen Al Gore degrees below zero.
No, we're not there yet.
Well, the reason I'm calling is because I am frosted about something as Rush would say.
The my husband works for a rural electric electric cooperative producing coal fire generated electricity for much of rural Oklahoma.
Yeah, you we know the most abundant and cheapest kind.
We are the Saudi Arabia of coal in this country.
Absolutely.
And um we have been under fire, we as I'm including myself, we have been under fire from different organizations for years.
We've lived in Colorado with the tree huggers and they would sue everybody involved in the coal-fired industry.
Well, my husband um his employer went to the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's meeting this last week, and those people have decided to throw in the towel about these carbon emissions.
They just want to create their own way of paying for these carbon emissions instead of fighting it, instead of saying Obama and all of their supporters and the tree huggers are wrong.
They're throwing in the towel.
And they say, you know, these other cooperatives, if you don't get on board with us, then you're not going to be allowed to make these decisions with us.
It's very upsetting to me that instead of a nation whose leaders in these industries are fighting for us and saying there is no such thing.
We cannot improve what we have much better because we have the best in the industry.
We're throwing in the town.
Yeah, it really is quite amazing.
The whole the whole environmental movement is become a faith-based religion, and and what's happening is the pressure is so great on industry that they're just caving.
You know, I can remember in the darkest days of the revolution.
Well, I can't remember, but I've read about it.
The darkest days of our revolution, Thomas Paine wrote, These are the times that try men's souls, not the time, you know, this is not the time for summer soldiers or sunshine patriots.
And yet you look out of the landscape today, Amy, and quite frankly, especially in business, and the bigger the business, the less spying they have, the more the more they behave like government.
And what's happening is they're all capitulating.
It's funny that you brand up our founding fathers because this morning I was thinking the same thing.
If these men had been at that time, we would not have the nation we have now.
And there are some dirty little secrets in the coal-fired power plant business, as in nuclear.
The government only designates a few uh people or or uh financial institutions who can loan to these people.
And so those few that can make these loans to build and increase our power plant production, the tree huggers go in and sue them.
So they they back off.
They're not going to invest in this when they're going to be tied up in lawsuits for years.
But the government only designates those few.
So, you know, there's those little secrets in the industry.
And I have written with Congressman.
Amy, I gotta go, but it it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What what happens is, and this is a great con being perpetrated by the uh the left in the media, in government, in the nonprofit community, the institutions of liberalism which have us surrounded, they get in the marketplace to screw it up enough, whether it's Fanny and Freddie,
whether it it's you know small business loans, whether it's uh top to bottom control and education, whether it's the financial institutions and some of the credit you're talking about in the coal industry, whether it's environmental regulations, they get in there and they screw up the markets, and then what happens when we get the usual manifestations of government interference?
They blame the markets.
And it's been an uh an amazing con, the idea that this downturn is a failure of capitalism.
No, it's a failure of Fanny and Freddie.
It's a failure of government stimulating the housing market artificially.
It's a failure of easy, ridiculously easy money in this ongoing inscrutable Federal Reserve monetary policy, which is going to bring about stagflation in a year or two.
Then none of that has anything to do with free markets.
It is all government invention or intervention.
And it's the same with with energy.
We are being told after 14 billion dollars and no gain in efficiency, windmills are the future.
And yet you only get twenty nine percent efficiency.
That is, they only run twenty-five to thirty percent of the time.
You have horrible horrible side effects from windmills with ice sheets in the north flying off the blades, killing people.
You've got a crisis in in energy when it comes to biofuels.
They don't work, so the ethanol industry is asking for a bailout as part of the TARP funds.
When we've got what we need, coal, abundant, cheap, clean coal.
We've got nuclear.
We've got oil offshore and an Anwar.
The government won't let us at those things.
What does that have to do with a free market for crying out loud?
Absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
So I I wish people would disabuse this notion that uh capitalism has failed.
All right, back with Minnesota's real anchor man.
I am Jason Lewis, glad to be here sitting in for El Rushbow behind the golden EIB mic once again, as I mentioned, Rush mysteriously up in Washington today.
Find out more tomorrow when he returns.
In the meantime, we are in charge here.
Sounding like Al Haig.
As of now, we are in charge at uh the Excellence in Broadcasting Network 1 800-282-2882.
The politico today, stimulus slots, more cash for schools, just what we were referring to in the monologue.
Federal aid for education could grow as much as $140 billion under the uh two-year economic stimulus bill now taking shape in Congress.
Do you know this this stimulus bill, trillions of dollars on top of trillions for the bailout?
We're gonna go from a budget of of, you know, we've got three trillion already.
Uh during the last eight years, we spent another trillion.
So if spending was going to get us out of this economic malaise, it should have already done so.
We went from two trillion uh in two thousand roughly to three point one trillion today.
Now that's eight years.
In the span of a year or maybe two, we will take that federal budget from three trillion to over four trillion dollars.
This is the greatest orgy of federal spending that heretofore has never been seen in America.
Uh good luck with that.
Now, what are we going to do with the schools?
Well, we're going to make the schools more productive.
Well, let's see, you you take the uh the areas of the country, Washington, DC, New York, uh, you know, Miami, some of the areas, in fact, Minneapolis and St. Paul are right up there as well, that spend the most per pupil.
We're talking about fifteen, sixteen thousand dollars per pupil, just happen to have the lowest test scores.
So throwing more money at this ought to work, right?
Well, the goal, quote, is to maintain services and forestall layoffs of public employees, says the politico today of the stimulus plan.
Now we get to the crux of the matter.
It is not investing for an economic return.
It is investing for a political return, the National Education Association.
And again, if you want to just create public works jobs, we can create them out the wazoo.
It will do nothing for economic growth.
Zip zero nada.
And that is the Achilles heel of government spending.
The money we create, the income we produce will be spent.
The question before us is who's going to spend it?
A bunch of bureaucrats who are immune from the marketplace.
There is no market discipline.
If they malinvest, if they make the wrong investment, you know what they do?
They just throw more money at it, or you're going to leave it in the private sector, where profits decide where the money goes, where economic interests decide where the money goes, and if you make a bad investment, you go bankrupt and no more money goes down a rat hole.
That's a simple question.
That's a fundamental economic question.
We know what works with empirical data.
If you think the spending works, take a look at Eastern Europe.
I I don't know why we're going down this old demand side road again, but let me just say flat out, people like Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis have said, I I'm warning you, and they will say, as Rush is so eloquent about saying, I told you so.
To the phones we go once again in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Dick, you are next up on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hey, how are you doing?
Thank you.
Sure.
I like everyone else who followed the stimulus bizarre story and uh the idea of going out borrowing more money.
Uh watch the attacks on the automotive industry, and I I like the comments from the woman in Oklahoma.
If I were one of those three auto execs and we're being told off, you know, questioning my judge business judgment by people who have just, as you say, thrown money and you know, buried us into God knows where, um, I'd have got them walked out.
But my question is, and it's key to what you've been talking about this morning about using government bailouts versus stimulating the private sector.
Why doesn't the government just say, for instance, that if you buy an automobile from uh the big three, which is the people we're giving money to anyway, not giving it to Toyota and this on, why don't we just make the payments say up to four hundred dollars tax deductible for three years or something?
The car the rental companies, the commercial institutions, the private individuals that would buy cars, I think would would go a long way to solve this, and you'd have real commerce taking place and real jobs being preserved and real you know economic uh activity versus just borrowing money and giving it to them.
I don't understand what I'm saying.
Well, but but you I I look I understand your frustration.
We're we're we're going down this road of trying to stimulate the automobile industry.
Does that sound familiar?
I mean, we're we're giv well, let me finish.
Let me finish.
We're we're giving you know GMAC all this money.
Now they're gonna be a a bank, believe it or not, so they can get the Fed to give them even more money, so they can offer zero percent loans on General Motors cars, which doesn't do much for Ford, by the way.
So we're trying to stimulate car buying, we're giving them a bailout.
Didn't we do this with housing?
Didn't we didn't we keep interest rates artificially low with Federal Reserve policy, monetary policy?
Didn't the Freddie and Freddie and Fanny buy up all the mortgages so lenders could keep loaning and loaning and loaning to people that shouldn't have got credit?
What happened then?
The government should not be in the business of picking and choosing industries to stimulate.
And across the board, and let me be blunt about this, marginal rate tax cut, starting with the top rates, because there's a dirty little secret out there, Dick.
Poor people don't open factories.
People with money create jobs.
People with money who want to maximize their investment and have more money, they need labor to do it.
They need capital, but most importantly, they need incentive.
Now now that's the sort of e you know, economic recovery plan or stimulus plan that would work.
And if you've got to borrow some money to do it, fine.
But uh, you know, look, maybe your point is better than the bailout, but I'm just saying, why do it for just cars?
Well, I I agree with you to a point, but there has been a lot of wealthy corporations that have taken their investment and gone overseas, which is a whole separate issue.
But if people are worried about our dependency on oil, you haven't seen anything until there's an interruption in the flow of goods from China.
Because if they are bird, you know, bird flu quarantined, if they have a tsunami, if we have any kind of problem, you stop the flow of just everyday goods from China for 40 days, and we are in such deep trouble you'll never see it.
We don't even sustain ourselves on a daily basis.
You can't buy a tool, you couldn't have a birthday party.
Uh what scares the heck out of me is just na uh that we don't sustain ourselves in the everyday living that we do in a country that doesn't sustain itself ought to worry a lot more about the state.
Well, then we need to start then we need to start lowering the corporate tax rate, which is the second highest in the industrialized world.
And by the way, when you add in state and local taxes like California and Minnesota and New York, you have locations where corporations are paying the highest tax rate in the world.
So why don't we stimulate all American corporations and try to prevent some offshore investment by lowering that?
Well, you'll get no argument on me because corporate taxes altogether ought to be abolished.
Somebody's got to educate the American people that when you work for a corporation and your corporation is taxed, you are all taxed.
You just didn't see it.
It's a dirty little trick because if that money was stayed with the corporation, I wish American corporations were the biggest strongest in the world.
Here's what Barney Frank, here's what Barney Frank and Chris Dodds say to that.
They say, Well, no, no, no, corporate taxes aren't passed along in unemployment in higher consumer goods or in lower dividends.
We will just have all of the CEOs and all of the corporate profits eat those taxes.
They'll just work for nothing.
The people in a corporation have to understand that when their corporation is taxed, that's money they didn't get.
It's tautological what you're saying.
Obviously, every serious person knows this, but I'm just telling you, liberals, the big government politics of NV crowd say, Well, here's when the corporation has to pay higher taxes, the only the only people who will suffer will be the fat cat executives.
And of course, people do not work perpetually for nothing.
Well it's and then the corporation shuts down.
Well, this is this will be really reactionary, and I'll let you go.
I very much appreciate the time.
But if you look at there's something that people a document that people don't read in its entirety very often, it's a declaration of independence.
And if you read the entire document, You will see that what is cited there over and over again are economic and personal freedom issues.
And the charge in the Declaration of Independence is basically when your government doesn't serve you, you put it aside and get one that does.
I just wonder if George and Ben Franklin and Jefferson were alive today watching the government chastise three of the biggest corporate heads in the country.
What if they wouldn't just be squirming and say, don't take that from them.
Well, look.
You're not going to get any argument.
You're not going to get any argument from me on that.
Indeed, uh the part of the problem and part of the reason the support for Detroit is soft amongst free market conservatives such as myself is because the corporations didn't do that.
Instead, they went there begging, hat in hand, give us a bailout instead of standing up to these dilettants in Congress who've never run a business in their entire life.
Instead of standing up to the greenies, the big three are going green.
They got in bed with government in order to get the bailout.
There are no John Galt.
There is no Atlas Shrugged out there where you've got men of the minds willing to stand up and say, hell no, well, you're the one that put us in this mess, undo the regulations, quit banning SUVs with these cafe standards, and we can make it on our own.
Instead, they say, we'll go along with everything you say if you pay for it.
That is not exactly American self-reliance.
And one other thing on the on the Jeffersonian handiwork and the Declaration of Independence.
One of the drafts there, and it may have been Jefferson's earlier draft, I can't quite recall.
But instead of, you know, w they they talked about governments uh preserving uh life liberty in the pursuit of happiness.
And when governments don't do this, when they infringe upon our rights, we have the uh the the prerogative to revolt.
One of the drafts said we had the duty, we have the duty to revolt.
I'm wondering when the next rhetorical, of course, revolution is going to come.
Not a moment too soon, I'm afraid.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line for the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, the Rush Limbaugh program up and running for a Tuesday.
I am Jason Lewis filling in for Rush today.
He'll be back tomorrow to tell us all about his trip to Washington today.
It's an enigma wrapped in a mystery, I tell you, but we'll find out from Rush tomorrow on that.
In the meantime, back to the call, San Francisco and Rich, thanks for waiting.
You're on the big guy show.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, thanks for taking my call.
Everything you said this morning makes complete sense, and it's extremely frustrating that nobody in Washington is really listening.
But I'll tell you the thing, though, we're talking about Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.
You know, they're Democrats.
They do what they do.
Who I'm really mad at, who I really am getting burned at are the Republicans in Congress who are willing to bend over and and they're just happy to take the t the table scraps from the dinner of the Republicans or from the dinner of the Democrats just to stay in power.
And that is not leadership.
That is if you want to be a Democrat, they should change party.
If they're going to go along with everything a Democrats say and not challenge them and not stand for conservative principles, they should switch parties and become Democrats because they are not conservative Republicans.
I can't tell you how mad that makes me.
No, I think there isn't a a real Republican, and let me well, I shouldn't say real Republican, real conservative in the country who isn't still frustrated with the GOP.
You would have thought they would have learned their lesson in 06 and 08 when moving towards the middle.
And I don't know why Democrats on the fiscal side aren't doing handstands over the Bush uh Republican Congress years.
They spent more they spent just as much money as Democrats did.
Uh the the education budget skyrocketed.
What is the figure here I've got from the statistical abstract of the United States?
Education spending on elementary, secondary, and vocational education uh was uh what uh just about uh fourteen billion uh f uh sixteen, seventeen billion, to be fair.
I've got five year increments here.
Now it's over forty billion.
Uh we've got the the uh largest entitlement expansion with the Viagra for Larry King program, Medicare Part D, that by the way, the Republicans vetoed or or would not pass when Clinton tried to get it installed.
They went with that.
We've had a huge budget explosion.
We've got the bailouts now.
If the Republican Party were serious about rounding up the base and getting them energized, the people like you, Rich, they would say no on the second installation of the TARP funds that Obama wants Bush to get, and Bush is going along with that, and they would all vote no on the stimulus package.
I want to see a clear distinction between Republicans and Democrats.
I don't want this blur anymore.
And it's what's been Biden nuts, and I'm sure a lot of conservatives are being driven nuts by this, is that you can't tell who's the conservative and who's the liberal anymore.
They're both voting the same way.
And uh and the reason why Sarah Palin got everybody so energized, if somebody they thought finally there actually is a conservative in the Republican Party.
And yet after the election, they just savage her.
It was just uh unbelievable what they did to her.
Well, there have been a couple of stories here, uh real clear politics, and yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, where you had inside advisors, inside Republican types admitting taxes will have to be raised.
Just admitting this basically throwing in the towel on this, you can't get a lid on spending.
Uh raising taxes is a fate accompli.
It's coming.
And that sort of th that sort of courage in the political arena is not exactly inspiring for those of us that still believe in limited governments and the chains of the constitutions when it comes to what government may do.
Uh I and I don't understand.
Not only is it not good policy, it's bad politics.
If being a liberal Republican was the salvation for the party, uh the Republicans would own the northeastern part of the United States.
That's where they're getting creamed in the Northeast.
And yet we're trying to protect them, as Rush said uh the other day.
Yesterday, I think he was talking about that.
Yeah, you know, Democrats if the Republicans want a strategy for winning seats in the House and seats and and getting power back in Washington, they need to go to forget about Asians and Hispanics and focusing on color and things like that.
They need to focus on what's common to everybody, and that's personal responsibility.
The only person who can improve my position in life is me.
It is not the government.
The only government can only take things away from me.
The only person who can do better by myself is me, and that's what the Republicans need to get back to.
Well, now you're really getting into some philosophical weight lifting here.
Um the bottom the bottom line, if you really look at what the framers intended, really through the the uh eighteenth and uh most of the nineteenth century was the government had one goal.
One goal was to keep us free.
It was not to keep us well fed.
If you want to help somebody with regard to assistance, that's what people do.
That's what Americans do.
But if the government goes down that road, it's gonna provide subsidies for transportation, subsidies for food, subsidies for cash income, subsidies for education, everything.
Well, that is at war with keeping people free.
You can't keep people free and give them what they want at the same time, because in order to give them that, you've got to infringe upon somebody else's freedoms.
Now the real scary part here is have the American people simply decided, well, capitalism and freedom doesn't work anymore.
We're gonna throw in the towel and we're gonna go along with European style socialism.
And that's yet to be determined.
We shall see in the next few years, but the omen is not good.
And if we don't get some real leadership out of the party that purportedly is the party of liberty and freedom and and low taxes and less regulation, then who's gonna give the leadership?
Maybe the third party and the Republicans will go by the way of the Whigs.
We don't know yet.
Anyway, got a move.
I'm Jason Lewis, in for rush today on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
All right, time to squeeze in one quick call before the top of the hour, but two more hours of the Rush Limbaugh program coming your way, so don't go anywhere.
Rockford, Illinois, Scott, you're on EIB.
Hi.
Hey, Jason Lewis, thanks for taking my call.
Sure.
Uh yesterday I was watching the secretary of uh labor designate that didn't want to answer the card check questions.
And when I listened to Obama's stimulus plan, you know, twenty percent or less of the workforce in the United States is unions, and the only people that are gonna do the jobs that Obama's talking about are unions.
So this is nothing but a build the union program.
Why do you think they're so intent on bailing out Detroit?
Well, exactly.
They're bailing out the UAW.
They're bailing out Gettelfinger, they're not bailing out the car companies.
They're bailing out votes.
Precisely.
They're trying to keep Michigan solidly in the Democratic column.
And here's here's the other nuance here.
Actually, if you look at the private sector, union membership is far below twenty percent, and you're looking at seven, eight, nine percent.
Because frankly, in a in a global economy, it just doesn't work.
You know, people always say, Well, what happened after World War II?
We we had all of these great jobs, all of these unions, because we had decimated our competition.
We had bombed, you know, uh Europe, we had bombed Japan.
Now they're coming back, they're producing goods, we have to compete, and we have to get competitive, and the unions just don't get that.
Now, but the real plan here, and this is part of the stimulus plan where you're gonna have six hundred thousand new government jobs is to get the most powerful growth in the union membership, government unions up and running.
And that is really a serious, clear and present danger because you know, when they need more money, they just go to the taxpayer.
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