All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 13, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
January 13, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
And we are back, geared up, galvanized for the second hour of the Russian Limbaugh program on this lovely frigid Tuesday.
Getting cold down in the southeast.
It's getting cold all over.
It's almost enough to make you believe global warming is kind of a political hoax, but I'm not going to go that far.
You may be wondering what I'm doing here.
What is Jason Lewis doing back behind the golden EIB mic?
Well, I didn't expect to be here today either.
Got a call late yesterday afternoon from the gang at EIB saying, hey, we got an emergency.
Can you fill in tomorrow for Rush?
I said, oh, yeah, sure.
What's going on?
Well, we really don't know.
All we know is Rush got this call and he's up in Washington today.
It may have to do with what he said yesterday.
And you might want to know what he said yesterday and may shed a little light on this.
So here is El Rushbo in yesterday's program.
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, Saks Fifth Avenue has to move over to Lexington Avenue.
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 the jewelry play, if those things have to start discounting and people who normally spend their money there start looking for discounts, 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 has to know about this.
Well, we all do now.
Well, lo and behold, no sooner than Rush says that, and he gets a call from Washington yesterday.
I need you to come up to Washington.
And that's where it stands.
I obviously don't know what's going on.
Most people don't know what's going on.
I've given you what we know, and we'll find out the rest, I guess, tomorrow.
Whether, in fact, you know, he's giving advice to the transition team or what's going on in Washington with Rush being gone.
All I know is I got a call late yesterday.
Can you fill in?
And you know me.
I'm a trooper.
As of now, I can fill in.
And I'm here doing my best.
El Rushbo back tomorrow.
I can hardly wait what he has to say.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
How about this?
Obama now visiting the Hill to ask Democrats to approve the bailout.
You see, he had asked Bush to get the rest of the $700 billion, $350 billion.
Bush went along with this.
And now the only problem is the Democrat majority and a few Republicans are saying, oh, we're not just going to hand over another $350 billion to the next Treasury Secretary to Getner.
We don't know.
He may be like Hank Paulson.
And we don't like the way that's going.
That's kind of odd because these guys were the biggest cheerleaders for Hank Paulson.
The Democrats and the liberals in Congress were the ones that convinced us, along with moderate Republicans, back in September, got to go along with the bailout.
If we don't have a bailout, what was Paulson's words?
Something like, God help us.
You know, we're starting to get more and more economic information trickling in from economists, from websites, from a whole host of sources that are saying the credit crunch may have been oversold.
That indeed God may not have had to lend us a hand had we not bailed out Bear Stearns, which started this.
You know, I've got my own psychological analysis here of what's happened to the country since September.
And by the way, the political ramifications are still being felt.
John McCain was on a roll.
It wasn't until he went to Washington and capitulated, along with the Republican Party, on the bailout that his number started to tank.
And now this bailout is setting the stage for profligate spending as far as the eye can see.
Remember those Reagan deficits?
$200 billion as far as the eye can see.
Try trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
Trillions of dollars.
And everybody says, oh, well, you know, we're all Keynesians now.
We've got to spend this money to prime the pump as though that's ever worked in the past.
It's quite remarkable, the turnaround.
But the bailout has failed to work.
And it's failed to work because what's happened here, this recession, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The government panicked.
They panicked in the face of a downturn.
They panicked in the face of the mortgage asset bubble bursting as it had to.
All artificial bubbles burst.
When you create easy money, the money's going to find some asset to bid up, whether it's tech stocks, whether it's housing, whether it's commodities.
That can't last because once they go so high, nobody can afford them.
And the bubble burst.
And by the way, alluding to the last hour, doing that for automobiles isn't going to help because these bubbles are only as good as long as government keeps buying them or keeps funding them.
Sooner or later, the money runs out.
Well, what's happened here is because the government panicked, God help us if we don't do this.
We've got to have a bailout.
Trillions of dollars.
Everybody actually believed these guys.
They believed the experts who never saw this coming.
A few of us did.
A few of us were talking about reforming Fannie and Freddie that had $5 trillion worth of mortgages, that were giving out bonuses.
Instead of lowering mortgage rates, they were playing the spread so they could give out bonuses to all their Democrat buddies, bailing out countrywide so it could give a sweetheart deal to Chris Dodd and Ken Conrad and everybody else under the sun who's a liberal.
Some of us saw this nonsense.
But now everybody else believed it, or they did at that time.
And so what happened to the American psyche, the psychological aspect of markets?
They froze.
They hunkered down.
What's the article here, Kit, you passed my way?
I think it was something along the lines of America hunkers down, a nation of savers.
Washington Post.
Well, it's all become this self-fulfilling prophecy, and spending won't change that.
A government stimulus plan will not get businessmen to invest if they're being told the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
We now have a recession of paralysis.
We don't know who's going to get the next bailout.
We're waiting for the next government stimulus plan.
Nobody's doing anything.
Where had we not gone down the bailout road where we had actually let Bear Stearns fail?
And by the way, that wasn't a systemic risk, as some people suggest.
It wasn't a deposit-taking financial institution.
It was a non-deposit-taking.
It was Wall Street.
Had we done that, and then, of course, we let Lehman Brothers fail.
There was no coherence here.
It was a knee-jerk panic reaction by people who've never run a business in Congress.
And so now all the Democrats who are being asked to approve the second half of this bailout bill, $350 billion, were the ones cheerleading it the first time around.
So you've got President-elect Obama with the outgoing President Bush pleading with Congress, give us the second installment, the $350 billion.
Why should they?
Now, granted, there's a little nuance here, but why should Republicans support this at all?
NASDAQ has created an index, an index to track only bailed out companies.
And this is great stuff.
It's the government relief index, and they track firms that have been bailed out by the government.
Guess what?
They're way down.
It was down 6% late last week, and I think the markets have, what, they've gone down this week, so they're probably down 7%, 8%, maybe 10% by now.
It's failed to lift us out of the economy.
You know, the Republicans can make a strong policy statement as well as a good political statement by saying, we're not going to release the other $350 billion.
We're not in the business of bailouts.
We're not in the business of having government prop up losers at the expense of winners.
We're going to let the market clear.
We're going to let bankruptcy fix this thing.
And when bankruptcy occurs, the bad credit goes by the wayside, and the only people who are left is good people who have good credit.
And then you're going to get capital flowing again to those companies.
But right now, if you're loaning money to somebody, you have no idea how transparent their balance sheet is.
They may be getting a government loan or bailout.
You have no idea.
You have no idea who the winners and losers are.
This is a recession of uncertainty, not unlike what happened in the late 20s and 30s, to which the FDR New Deal exacerbated.
I need to remind you, by 1938, after 10 years of profligate bailouts and spending and tax hikes, unemployment was still above 19%.
We could be going down that road where instead of going through a, yes, a sharp contraction and then getting out from under it and over, letting the bad actors fail, we could be just stretching this thing out for years and years and years.
To show you how insane this whole policy is, Barney Frank and company say, well, we may consider the second $350 billion.
We may clear it so Barack has it on day one to bail out more firms, but only if it's used to prevent home foreclosures.
Now, there is an ethical breach here.
Why you?
Why the folks who have been doing the right thing in very, very tough times?
Paying the bills, getting the kids to school, going to work, having a second job, and paying your mortgage on time, not to mention the tax burden, why you should bail out anybody.
You know, when people can't pay their mortgage, it's not the end of the world.
It is not as though they've got a mortgage in Australia where they can go after the negative equity.
You know, in Australia, if you borrow $300,000 and your house is now worth $250,000 and you walk away, they can go after you for the other $50,000.
The mortgage company or the lender takes over the house.
They sell it for $250,000, the market price, but they still loaned you $300,000.
They're out $50,000.
They can go after you.
Not in America.
The laws right now in America are very, very friendly to the debtor.
All you do is walk away.
All you've done is pay a little rent.
You walk away, you downsize.
Why is that such a horrible thing?
By trying to prop up housing once again, all we are doing is going back to the very problem that got us in this mess, an artificial stimulation of one sector of the economy.
Let the housing prices fall, and you know what happens?
And I know a lot of people don't want to hear this.
Look, I've taken a bath on my house.
I don't like to hear it.
But once the prices reach their natural equilibrium and they're more affordable, guess what happens?
People start buying homes again.
Instead, what the Democrats are proposing is to reform the bankruptcy law so that all you have to do to get out from under, paying your mortgage, is get a liberal bankruptcy judge to rescind the contract.
It's called a mortgage cramdown.
What they actually are proposing is you not only get to not pay the full mortgage, you get to stay in the house.
There's no collateral for the lender.
It's the breaking of a contract.
Isn't there a little clause about the states not being able to impair the obligation of contracts in the Constitution, but it's just fine for federal bankruptcy judges?
So can you believe this?
One of the reasons your credit card, a debt service, is 16%, 17, 18% is the creditor knows half of that, but a lot of that is going to get wiped out if people don't pay their debts and they have no recourse.
One of the reasons mortgage rates are 6% or 5% is at least the lender knows, well, if they don't pay me, I can take the house back and sell it and try to recoup the loss.
Now, the Democrats, apparently contingent for this next TARP installment or installation, is, well, we've got to have this mortgage cramdown bill.
And therefore, judges can simply say, well, we're just going to redo the contract.
You know what's going to happen?
I'll guarantee it.
I'll guarantee you what's going to happen.
Your mortgage is going to go from 5.5% to 10.5%.
And what's that going to do for housing?
This is the insane aspect of allowing these congressional dilettantes who've never seen a P ⁇ L in their entire life and can't manage the federal government's finances to actually intervene in business decisions.
Folks, we've lost our collective minds by entrusting these guys like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Tell me about your business acumen again, gentlemen.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh, and you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
All right, here we go.
Back to the phone calls on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis, having more fun than a human being should be allowed.
Let's see, Scott in Cape Cod, you are first up this segment on EIB.
Hi.
Yes, thank you for taking my call, Mr. Lewis.
I'd like to say that America is in a depression as we speak, and there's a list of villains that have caused this, namely greedy Wall Street bankers.
You have Alan Schwartz, who ruined Bear Stearns.
The government had to bail out Bear Stearns for billions.
Richard Fult destroyed Lehman Brothers.
Well, we didn't have to bail out anybody, but the government did.
Right.
And Richard Fold destroyed Lehman Brothers.
And in my opinion, that started our depression.
Henry Greenberg required a $75 billion bailout of AIG.
No, Hank Greenberg said I could save AIG without the federal money.
Let's be clear about this.
Robert Rubin, the $350 billion bailout, he asked the Citibank.
Alan Fishman destroyed Washington Mutual and then stole millions on his way out.
And then, of course, Bernie Madoff, $50 billion Ponzi scheme swindle.
Alan Green Spam, the ex-Federal Reserve chairman, in my opinion, is the architect of all this.
So the common denominator is that these greedy and ruthless international Jewish bankers on Wall Street have called the compression.
Come on, come on, come on.
Why would he want to bring ethnicity into this?
The point here is government did not have to bail them out.
Government chose to.
So, I mean, look, here's the fundamental problem why Wall Street exacerbated what was clearly a government scandal.
One of the things or one of the reasons that ostensibly we had to bail out all of these Wall Street firms and banks as well was because of their mortgage-backed security inventory, their collateralized debt obligations.
They were taking and they were selling credit default swaps, a form of insurance on mortgage bonds, on everything else.
They were securitizing all these mortgages.
So you've got a government institution.
It wasn't a Jewish cabal.
You had a government institution insuring bad loans.
So your friendly lender or a mortgage broker goes to, or somebody comes up to them and says, well, I really can't pay you back and I really can't do this and I really don't have much of an income.
That sounds good to us.
Here's a mortgage loan for $300,000.
Why would they do that?
They did it because the people running Fannie and Freddie and Congress told them they had to.
Andrew, Cuomo, and HUD, I want more loans to the lower classes.
We want more affordable housing.
All of this.
Now, here's the deal.
The lender was more than happy to do it because he knew Fannie and Freddie would buy the mortgage.
They would be then off the hook.
And then what Fannie and Freddie did is they would securitize the mortgage.
And people on Wall Street and average investors would buy these CDOs or would buy securitized mortgages.
They'd chop them up and they'd sell them off.
Now, think about this for a moment.
If you're on Wall Street and you can get 7%, 8% instead of buying a Treasury bill or a CD at 3% or 4% or 5% or whatever the case might be, and there's an implicit guarantee that the federal government will bail out the mortgage that's paying you 7% or 8% if it goes bad.
What are you going to do?
If I were on Wall Street, I would have done that.
I would have been along on all these mortgage-backed securities.
And it just wasn't Wall Street.
It was internationally as well.
Because of the guarantee.
Think of the savings and loan crisis.
When we guaranteed those deposits at your friendly SNL, they made bad loans.
But they didn't care if the loan wasn't serviced because they knew the government would take over the loan and the taxpayer would bail it out.
It's the same thing.
We've induced the moral hazard.
That is the fault of government.
And investors are always going to go down that road.
I mean, by your analogy, you would condemn anybody that bought a Treasury bill because it has the full faith and credit of the government.
Well, that's why people do it.
Now, should you rescind the full faith and credit clause?
I don't think so, or the full faith and credit guarantee.
But you certainly don't insure private investments.
And that was the crux of the debacle.
So when, in fact, the mortgage bubble burst and people said, oh, God, I guess I can't pay back this mortgage, all those loans went south.
We ended up bailing out Fannie and Freddie to the tune of, I think it was $200 billion initially, maybe three.
And now the Federal Reserve is back buying more of their assets, starting last week, buying $600 billion.
We're going down the same path.
So the point here is this was a classic case of not capitalism run amok.
This was a government-induced recession, a government-induced bubble that burst.
And if you want to get rid of that from happening again, if you want to forestall that, you dismantle Fannie and Freddie.
You get rid of them.
And you tell everybody making a mortgage in the private markets, you know what?
You're going to have to find a secondary buyer that doesn't have government insurance.
And that will rein in irresponsible lending in a New York minute.
That's right.
Want a new mortgage?
Declare bankruptcy.
Well, that should do wonders for lawyers anyway.
More bankruptcy, more Chapter 13 is being filed.
By the way, the controller of the currency has some new data out and says that within eight months, if you go in and modify a mortgage loan, which many of them do voluntarily, you can't pay your mortgage.
The lender says, well, a little of something is better than a lot of nothing.
We'll give you a break on interest rates or principal forgiveness or something along those lines.
But now this data, this new data in shows that 58% of modified loans in default or are excuse me, are in default again.
So almost 60% of the mortgages that were modified, they gave you a break, are back in default in eight months.
And yet now we're going to have this mortgage cramdown bill passed as part of the stimulus package and maybe even part of the bailout if some of these guys get their way that's going to say, well, we're going to allow a judge to do for mortgages what they've done for credit card interest rates.
Jack them up.
This policy is so backwards, it boggles the mind.
On the one hand, they keep talking about, well, we need to stimulate housing, which, as I've said, I think is a mistake.
We already had a housing stimulus plan.
It was the last eight years of easy money in Fannie and Freddie.
And now they say, well, we're going to stimulate housing so that people aren't foreclosed upon.
And therefore, that's going to do wonders for the housing market.
Going to keep the bubble reflated, if you will.
But then they're going to jack up mortgage rates by allowing this mortgage cram down.
Nobody in their right mind is going to make a mortgage loan for 5% anymore when they know it can be reduced to 3%.
They're going to make a loan for 10%, 12%, 13% and reduce it to 12%.
So that's not going to do wonders for the housing market by jacking up mortgage rates, is it?
There is no coherent policy, whether it's the bailout, whether it's stimulus.
This is seat of the pants government make work.
I hate to be so harsh on government, but here's a news flash for you.
I tend to be a bit skeptical on all things government.
They don't do much good.
They screw things up, except maybe for fighting wars.
And that's usually not done very efficiently, but at least they can get the job done.
On everything else, it would be wonderful if we could have a renaissance, a reawak awakening of what the proper role of government is in a free society.
And the operative there is free.
We don't want the role of government in a European society.
We don't want the role of government in a Chinese society.
We want the role of government in the tradition of an American free society, and that was limited.
And it was limited by enumerated powers in the Constitution.
And up until the early part of the 20th century, it was limited by judicial constraint, if you will.
Strict constructionism.
Now, Katie barred the door.
I mean, all bets are off.
We've got unlimited government.
And all you need when you have unlimited government is a mob.
And if the mob wins the election, they get the spoils, they get the goodies, and the rest of us are SOL.
Is that the kind of doggy-dog society you want to live in?
That's the difference between the rule of law and the rule of men.
The beauty of a higher law, a constitutional law, the beauty of originalism, where judges actually say, well, gosh, the government doesn't have the power to do this.
Case dismissed.
The beauty of that is that it doesn't go by the whims of despots.
That despots can't do anything they want.
That's what Adams meant by the rule of law.
But when you unleash the Constitution, when the Constitution is an evolving, breathing document that changes over time to mean anything the nine jurists say it means, you have no Constitution at all.
And what you've got is the rule of men and their whims, the rule of the mob and their whims.
You've replaced the American Revolution with the French Revolution.
And we all know how that worked out for Robespierre.
To the phones we go, 1-800-282-2882, Debbie in Gulf Breeze, Florida.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, Debbie, and say your weather's a little better than the Twin Cities today.
Oh, it's fabulous here.
I love living in the panhandle.
I'm a New York girl, and then I came down to Florida, and then my husband's job took us all over.
He is a physician, by the way.
He works very hard, and he's very underpaid.
But you know the story about medicine, so I don't have to go into that.
But I just thought it was so gracious of Bush.
And by the way, you're right about the mortgage crisis.
And I don't think people should be walking away from their houses.
If they can pay the mortgage, some year it'll go back up.
You have to have some place to live.
And I think I'd rather pay my mortgage than move all my furniture.
Well, you might have to downside.
I don't fault people if they get in a bind and they've got to walk away, I suppose.
But I do fault them if they expect to stay in the house and redo a contract.
A contract is your word.
That's right.
If we start breaking contracts, commerce breaks down.
That's right.
And I don't think the government should be involved in private sector.
I mean, it's very bad.
But what I really called about was President Bush.
I mean, I know it's not the topic that everybody's been talking about, but I don't realize, you know, I don't know if people realize how absolutely unprecedented and how gracious this president is with Obama coming in and how much he really wants him to succeed.
I think that when they sat down and they had, you know, when he was passing along the secrets, you know, that you never know when you're running for president.
But I'm sure that Mr. Obama's jaw dropped to the floor when he heard everything that he had no privilege of having knowledge of before.
You know, I mean, there's just so much that we all don't know.
You know, we surmise it, we think about it, but we don't really know what he's having to do.
It's a 24-7 job for eight years.
I mean, you really don't get much time off there.
Why, the next thing you know, Obama might plan to keep Guantanamo Bay open for another year or two.
You know, I think that he's going to realize that these people should, nobody wants them.
No other country wants them.
We should never put them in our jails.
I don't know if you know it, but I'm going to tell you that down here in Florida, you know, people don't realize it.
I live in small town USA now.
Every town that I've been to has a mosque, and they're well placed.
The people are well distributed.
And they go into the Islamic fundamentals.
They go into our jails down here, and they convert the people that are sitting in the jails.
And I hate to say this, you know, there's a very large African-American population in there.
And they go in, and the reason I know this is because I knew somebody that had gone in because they had DUI, and they told me.
They said, you couldn't believe it.
They come in and they, you know, they sit down and they pray and they convert these people.
And, you know, they're building a whole army of people.
And it's just amazing that people are just not aware of what's really happening in this country.
And the book that Bridget Gabrielle had written, Why They Hate, if everybody read that book, they would understand what's being proposed.
But Debbie, just like the last caller that wanted to blame everything on a Jewish banking conspiracy, not every Muslim and not every Arab is a bad person.
In fact, I think one of the mistakes we made, and Bush was right on this as well, was the Dubai ports deal.
We need to reach out to moderate Arab countries and moderate Arabs and say, we want to bring you into the fold, if you will, to the group of civilized nations.
And we've got the CHICOMs running our ports, but we couldn't have Dubai, a Dubai company, do it.
That was a slap in the face to the moderate movement there.
And I think that's a mistake.
So I think we've got to be careful on both sides.
But your overall point, I think, is a fair one, and that's this, that Barack Obama has now got to be causing great trauma amongst the hardcore moveon.org lunatic left out there because he's faced with now the same problems that Bush had, that everybody criticized in a cavalier way.
Gee, if you close Guantanamo, are you going to bring him here?
Yeah, let's put him in Barney Frank's district.
Let's put him in Henry Waxman's Beverly Hills district.
You're going to do that?
Well, no, you can't do that.
Were you going to engage in rendition and send them back to their own countries where they'll be treated much more harshly, beheaded or what have you?
Well, we can't do that.
So what do you do?
Well, now we know Obama's plan to get rid of Guantanamo may take a year or more.
It isn't quite as easy.
And that's what people are going to realize.
He's keeping a lot of the intelligence people on.
Gates is going to stay on.
I think it's rather fascinating to see how the pressures and the burdens of the office may tend to moderate Obama on these foreign policy decisions.
We can only hope, anyway.
Thanks for the call.
I'm Jason Lewis back right after this.
Rush in secret meetings in Washington, D.C. today.
He'll fill you in tomorrow.
Have no idea what's going on, but he will definitely be back tomorrow to fill you in.
Should be fun.
So get ready for that.
1-800-282-2882 back with me, Jason Lewis, Minnesota's real anchorman in for America's real anchorman.
Well, how appropriate.
You know, speaking of the last call, here's the one thing, and I think it was mentioned on one of the Sunday talk programs this weekend, and Kid mentioned it in my ear a moment ago, but it is so true.
As we look through the Bush years in the prism of time, look, I'll be blunt with you.
I think the spending record is going to be dismal.
I think Bush, quite frankly, hurt the Republican Party on spending.
But remember, he had a Republican Congress that could have reined in spending too, and they didn't.
And that's why the Republican Party has its nadir or is in the, you know what, right now.
But say what you will, we have not had another attack on American soil since 9-11.
And through the prism of history, through the expanse of time, that is going to be more prevalent, more obvious, more of a diamond on the Bush resume than you can possibly imagine.
Now, contrast that or juxtapose that if, in fact, God forbid, Obama gets there, everybody's Messiah, and all of a sudden there's an attack.
I mean, if I'm the Obama transition team, and this is one reason why the hard left may be a little disappointed in the incoming president, not closing Guantanamo, keeping Intel.
Maybe he might even send his attorney general like Clinton did to Congress to tell members of Congress that they have the right to authorize warrantless searches, i.e. wiretaps, for national security reasons, because they know if there's another attack on American soil under his watch and there wasn't under Bush, that will speak volumes.
And that's the real handoff, if you will, that Obama should be the most concerned about.
And frankly, America should be the most concerned about.
So say what you want about Bush.
He can leave saying, I kept the country safe.
And in the old days, that's all a president was really supposed to do, ward off external threats.
That's why we had a constitution.
We have the police powers provision.
We have state charters and state constitutions.
We have state budgets to handle those domestic items of internal improvement.
The new federal government, and the framers never would have ratified it had they thought anything else, was primarily to keep the country free, to keep the country safe from external threats.
And that's what Bush has done.
He can say that as he leaves.
Zach in Orlando, you're up next on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hey, Jason, how you doing?
I'm doing very well, sir.
You know, I'm a college student, and I've been listening to what you guys say and everything, and I agree with it.
But where I'm a little, I'm frightened to think that where I'm at, almost every class that I take, they're preaching completely the opposite of what you say.
And I know that that's got to be, it's not just where I'm at, it's got to be schools everywhere around the country.
And I just kind of wanted you to weigh in on that and tell me how we're supposed to keep coming out and recruiting people, preaching the message as much as we can.
But we have these kids out there.
They're sitting in class with me, and, you know, they look at me like I'm from another planet when I have a comment.
You know, it is a paradox to me that the Republican Party or conservatives keep funding the enemy.
We have something that I call institutional liberalism in America, and it's been a perfect plan executed by the left.
They have gotten so much money.
Acorn gets federal money for crying out loud so they can go out and register people illegally.
We've got colleges of higher education, and I'm using the term loosely, that are nothing more than incubators in the social sciences anyway, of hardcore leftism.
We've got K through 12 government command and control education that does the same on global warming and everything else.
We've got the nonprofit community that are nothing more than conduits for the welfare state.
We have all of these institutions.
Oh, did I mention the media?
That literally swamp anything else.
Swamp, you know, well, conservatives have talk radio.
Yeah, well, you've got the media, you've got television, you've got Hollywood, you've got nonprofits, you've got higher ed, you've got K through 12.
Anything else you need?
Newspapers?
And it's very, very difficult to run up against the cacophony of that hard left.
The only thing I can tell you is the only way to get out from under that is to be perfectly blunt here and say, defund them.
Well, and my next thing was, my parents combined make roughly $100,000 a year.
I don't get anything to go to school.
I get no financial aid or anything like that.
My question to you is: do you think it's fair that there's kids sitting in there?
And I'm a good student.
I have a 3.7.
There's kids sitting there next to me failing classes, getting everything paid for because they don't know who their father is or something.
They don't make as much.
There is this interesting, you've got a great point there.
There is this interesting phenomenon of what the Democrat left or the media or certainly every liberal would call rich and where their station is in the economic strata today.
By that I mean if you're uber rich, if you're George Soros or you're a Hollywood icon or whatever the case might be, you don't have to worry about not getting a Pell Grant.
And if you're poor, of course, the government will pay your college.
They will pay for most of it.
In Minnesota, they expanded health and human services so much in the last budget session that now going to college counts as a work requirement to get welfare.
You can go to college on welfare in the People's Republic of Minnesota.
Good thing we've got great weather.
By the way, it's still about 10 below.
The point, of course, is what about people who make, got a husband and a wife, they make $55,000 apiece.
So they make $110,000.
You know what the hard left will say?
You know what the Marxists in Congress, and let's call them what they are, will say?
$110,000?
Why, that puts you in the top 10% of income earners in the country.
You think you're rich?
You think you're super rich?
Fact is, it's enough to get you by.
Is it enough to retire on?
Is it enough to pay the kids' schooling?
Is it enough to pay the bills and college?
No, it's not.
And you are exempted from all the goodies because you're considered, according to the tax incident studies, of being in the top 10%.
And by the way, you are paying the bulk of the taxes as well in this country.
So there is a problem with what we'll call the comfortable in the middle.
And nobody's looking out for them.
Great point.
Got to go.
I'm Jason Lewis.
More coming right up, so don't go away.
You know, it's almost a cliche in conservative talk radio these days to point out who's really paying the burden.
But going back to something I fondly call Lewis's law, we have so top-loaded the tax code that we're creating, once again, a self-fulfilling prophecy of a welfare state.
By that is, when you exempt the bottom 40%, according to the CBO, from paying any income tax and you top-load it on the rich at $110,000 a year, the people at the bottom are always going to support higher taxes when they don't pay them.
And what I like to call my law is any tax that's levied must be borne by all.
That will keep social divisions and class warfare from happening because if you want to raise that tax, then everybody's got a stake in the game.
We haven't done that with a progressive income tax, which is why it's so insidious.
The more you earn, we don't index the income tax for work.
The more you work, the more you earn, the higher proportionately you pay.
Can you think of anything that's more anti-work, more anti-self-reliance, more, quite frankly, unfair?
If you're making $110,000 in your household, you don't get the Pell Grants, as the previous caller was suggesting.
You know, you've got what they call the pep and peas phase-outs, where you don't get all the exemptions that everybody else gets on your income taxes.
You don't get the subsidies.
But guess what?
If you're making $110,000 in your household, you're in the top 10% of income earners, and you're paying, get this, 70% of all the federal income taxes.
If you're in the top 5%, making a whopping $154,000 a year, why, you're a lucky ducky.
You get to pay the top, or you get to pay 60% of the income tax burden.
▲
Export Selection