Rush Limbaugh Program - February 2, 2009, Monday, Hour #3

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Feb. 2, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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February 2, 2009, Monday, Hour #3

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	That's right.
	You're listening to Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh.
	I am the man that created penicillin.
	No, no, no, that was Bill Clinton.
	Come on, let's be honest about this.
	Al Gore gets the internet.
	Seems appropriate.
	Bill Clinton gets penicillin.
	Seems appropriate.
	Boy, getting a lot of emails into the program on this caller from Peoria who is going on and on about the virtue of the federal government, uh, let's see, uh discovering uh marketing, making it useful.
	Apparently a lot of people don't believe Leslie from Peoria.
	I have not researched this particular topic.
	And fortunately I haven't had the haven't had to.
	You know, if you're really getting into the whole penicillin debate, I just I don't know.
	I just comments, people citing Pfizer and um pharmaceutical companies in the 30s and 40s doing this.
	There one particular website I did see, though, or one email I saw said the fellow from London, the uh bacteriologist, I guess, he uh he was not the guy that invented it.
	So we'll trust me, we'll get right on that here at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
	Third hour now up and running on the J on the uh Rush Limbaugh program, Jason Lewis, as I say, in for El Rushbow.
	Great to be here with talent on loan from Rush, Rush taking a well-deserved week and a day off.
	I'm in today.
	You've got Mark Stein next couple of days, Mark Belling Thursday and Friday, and then I'm back on Monday.
	L. Rushbow returns a week from tomorrow, tan rested and ready.
	1-800-282-2882.
	That's 1-800-282-2882.
	The contact line remains the same.
	Get into this whole debate, though, about whom to trust for capital investment, and it really comes down to a fundamental faith in the markets, a fundamental faith in humans, a fundamental faith in freedom.
	Because we do not have this dichotomy of political liberty and economic liberty.
	Free markets and private property and capitalism are just the economic dimension of human liberty.
	You can't you cannot have political freedom without economic freedom.
	Now it just so happens it produces the highest standard of living the world has ever known.
	But that's a byproduct of capitalism.
	The very existence or the reason for our belief in capitalism is that our economic actions ought not be governed by a bunch of potentates in Washington or your state capitol.
	That we ought to be free to choose where to invest, where to purchase, where to save, what have you.
	And when you supplant that with government, you end up with a conflict of interest.
	Governments do not invest for an economic return.
	You and I invest for an economic return.
	You and I will say, I'm going to loan you money at 5%.
	You're going to develop a product and you're going to make that money and you're going to get a 6% return or a 7% return.
	You're going to live off the spread, and I'm going to get my 5%.
	Creditor and debt and debtor both gain.
	A rising tide, if you will.
	Government doesn't do that.
	When government invests in a stimulus plan, they first have to either tax, borrow, or inflate.
	That's what I mean when I say governments don't create.
	Because anything they invest in, anything they spend money on comes out of the private economy first in the form of inflation, taxation, or deficits or debt.
	So all you're doing is you're shifting demand.
	You are shifting supply.
	Governments can't create new wealth.
	They can't create new demand.
	They can only redistribute it.
	They can only shuffle it around.
	And that's what they're trying to do.
	They're trying to change the composition of the economy.
	The composition of a market economy where you've got 70% of our economic activity governed by free people making free choices, and 30% governed by government edict.
	They want to make this 60% determined by government bureaucrats and 40% by the market.
	Or more.
	But there's the conflict of interest.
	What do you think a politician's greatest interest is?
	They don't invest for a return.
	They invest for a political calculated return.
	One of the reasons that people are suspicious of bailing out Detroit is, let's be honest.
	These people are trying to bail out the UAW.
	They're trying To bail out Democrat Michigan and keep it in Democrat hands.
	You know, it's getting so ridiculous in the wake of Tom Dashell and has 128,000 failure to pay back taxes.
	Remember, there's two sets of rules out there.
	Now GM wants another bailout.
	GM, remember when when they did this debt for government equity swap or something to that to that akin, they got they basically had their debt bought down.
	For let me try to put this in layman's terms for you.
	If in fact somebody reduces your debt, let's say you owe somebody $50,000 in your business, and you put that on the books as a liability and you pay it off incrementally, uh, you amortize it or whatever the case might be.
	If all of a sudden they say you only have to pay us back $25,000, and you've already expensed that, you're supposed to report that as income.
	That's what it is.
	If you borrow something at $50,000 and you only pay back $25,000, that's income.
	Well, GM has all of this income from the government buying down their debt.
	And now they have a tax bill for it.
	So what are they doing?
	They're going back to the government saying, Oh, we don't want to pay the taxes on the government buy down of our debt.
	So we need another bailout.
	Now I like GM.
	They make great cars, better cars than people think.
	The American automobile manufacturers are actually doing better than people realize, but uh we cannot go down this road where government picks winners and and losers.
	And if if indeed we had some executives that instead of going along with government would stand up to government and say, you know, uh Mr. Frank or Mr. Dodd or Mr. Schumer, you're the one that put us out of business.
	You're the one that put the SUV effectively out of business with CAFE standards.
	You're you're the one that's demanding environmental regulations that is making it very difficult for us to manufacture.
	You are the one that has imposed a corporate tax rate, second highest in the world, and you throw on Michigan's taxes, and they're probably first highest in the world.
	Number one, you're the one that is putting us or making us uncompetitive.
	Relieve us of those burdens, and we won't need a bailout.
	Now that's a market approach.
	Unfortunately, too many executives today are more interested in in simply going along to get along.
	But just remember this.
	The reason that government investment or spending doesn't work and will not stimulate is fundamentally this.
	They don't invest for increases in productivity.
	They're not investing like you or I would invest.
	They're investing for what vote can we buy?
	Oh, the UAW, we'll bail those out, folks out.
	Renewable fuels, we'll bail those folks out.
	We've got an article here from last week that says the ranks of organized labor rose by four hundred and twenty-eight thousand in two thousand and eight, the biggest annual gain since the government began compiling data back in eighty-three.
	Oh, wow, unions on the march again, right?
	Well, not really.
	Public sector unions, let me translate that for you.
	Government unions.
	The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFSME, have accounted for most of the last year's increase.
	Government workers rose to 37%.
	I'm rounding up 36.8% from 36% in 2007, the private sector stayed flat.
	You think that's by coincidence?
	Fat chance.
	They want to get as many people on the government roll, as many people in a government union as they possibly can.
	Gee, I wonder why.
	Oh, yes, AFSME is essentially an arm of the Democrat Party.
	Contrary to the Beck decision, they they coerce dues out of their members, or any other union for that matter, and then they give it and they campaign with it and they they do everything under the sun to elect more Democrats to get a larger government check.
	This is the political design of stimulus bills and bailouts.
	It has nothing to do with economics.
	It has everything to do with investing for a political return.
	And besides, even if you believe this Keynesian stimulus nonsense, it's not even a Keynesian bill.
	They're talking about we're going to invest in infrastructure.
	That's what we're going to do with our stimulus bill.
	Keynesianism To prime the pump doesn't make investments.
	It doesn't supplant private investment for or government investment for private investment.
	It spends.
	It wants to pump up consumption.
	If this were a pu a pure effort to jumpstart the economy with more spending, which is fatally flawed anyway, because all you're doing is increasing government spending and reducing private sector investment spending.
	But regardless, if they wanted to do that, they would simply be handing out rebate checks.
	They would be handing out checks to poor folks, you name it.
	No, no, no, no.
	They're building infrastructure jobs, green schools, green alternative energy, mass transit.
	Do you know what all of those things have in common?
	Those are permanent realignments of the size of government.
	A stimulus bill would inject some capital into the markets and then be withdrawn when the recovery occurs.
	This is a permanent expansion of government and the organized public sector unions.
	That's what they're going after.
	And that's why the whole thing's a fraud.
	And it's not going to work anyway, because there's only one way that investment spending pays for itself.
	If if I save my money in a bank, and a bank then takes that money and loans it to an owner of a factory, and the owner buys new tools for the assembly line, allowing his workers to put out more product the next year, the workers become more productive, they can then demand more wages because the company is producing more.
	And with that increase in production, they pay me back the savings I lent them.
	Everybody wins.
	Now I ask you, will building another bridge to nowhere, another mass transit line in Salt Lake City, will the greening of your schools, putting vegetation on roofs or whatever the heck they're going to do, will that increase anybody's productive capacity?
	It will not increase the productivity of the nation's economy.
	So when the entire bill comes due, all trillion dollars worth or more, where are they going to get it to pay it back?
	They're going to extract this in taxes later on out of an economy that has not grown because of a lack of productivity increases.
	That's why it won't work.
	That's why Carter failed.
	That's why the New Deal failed, contrary to conventional wisdom.
	And that's why the Republicans should have nothing to do with any of this stimulus nonsense.
	Wash their hands of it and say, Democrats, you want it.
	Liberals, you want it.
	It's your baby.
	And by the way, they need to market that to every American who's listening.
	Don't get in there and pull a Charles Grassley or an Orin Hatch and say, oh, we're just going to tweak this and then we're going to work with the Democrats.
	Then you'll get blamed for the debacle.
	The Republicans in the Senate ought to do what they did in the House.
	All vote no and walk away.
	And let the Democrats own this nonsense because the day of reckoning is coming.
	I'm Jason Lewis, Infor Rush.
	Your calls when we return.
	And greetings once again, conversationalists across the fruited plain.
	I am Jason Lewis, Minnesota's Mr. Wright, in for El Rushbow.
	Good to be here on this momentous Monday.
	You know, uh a couple of other stories I want to get to before we get back to the calls this third hour, 1-800-282-2882, the contact line, and that is the notion that uh Barack Obama may tap Judd Gregg, the Republican from New Hampshire for uh the Commerce Department.
	This may happen as early as uh today.
	I don't know that uh it's happened yet.
	Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't.
	But the point is, uh it's creating some Republican angst.
	If in fact Greg gets the appointment for commerce and takes it, you've got a Democrat governor in uh New Hampshire that would appoint more than likely a Democrat to fill the seat, a temporary vacancy.
	Now, where's the Senate right now?
	Let's see, we're getting close to this uh filibuster proof majority.
	The Democrats now hold the fifty-six seats, but of course the two independents caucus with them, which is why you can never trust an independent.
	Fifty-six seats, that's fifty-eight.
	Al Franken's lead in Minnesota is holding it's a slim lead because we had to find a thousand votes for Al in Minnesota, and by God, the Liberals here found it.
	And the ones that didn't find, they made up.
	That's in court right now in a in a uh technically contested election or a confirmed, not confirmed, but in what is actually called a contested election.
	People think a contested election is when you do the recount.
	It's not really until you file the lawsuit, and the lawsuit has been filed and they're in court right now in Minnesota.
	But should Franken uh convince the rest of the liberals in Minnesota to stand behind him, that would be the 59th seat, and then you would get uh what a Democrat holding the power from New Hampshire, that would be sixty.
	And that would limit debate and hold off a filibuster.
	Now what's fascinating about this, and by the way, this is the Commerce Department for Bill Richardson, the first nominee who withdrew citing a grand jury investigation in how um into how state contracts have been issued from a California company that also contributed to some of his causes Bill Richardson, Tom Dashell, Timothy Geitner change you can believe in.
	So what I find interesting about this though, and my old buddy Dr. John Lott brought this up to me the other day is uh is there a quid pro quo here?
	Is the White House trying to get a guarantee from Governor Lynch of uh New Hampshire that if they appoint Greg, uh the governor will appoint a Democrat and maybe get into that 60 filibuster proof Senate.
	And if that's the case, excuse me for being so hyperbolic or so inflammatory, but how is this any different than blogo?
	Pay to play, trading Senate seats.
	I mean think about this political bribery was Obama you know willing to pay somebody off to get a Senate seat you know what what kind of a guarantee what would be in it for New Hampshire or this particular Democrat in New Hampshire.
	Greg should just say no and stay in the Senate, not take the commerce I know I know what the Republicans are up against.
	They don't want to be seen as obstructionists.
	They want to be seen as going along to get along they want to be seen as doing all of the things that got them in their pickle right now.
	There's only one way to stand up to this and that's to stand up to it.
	And you're going to take your lumps initially until you are proven right.
	You know that's leadership.
	Leadership is not swaying with the wind leadership is going against your contemporaries going against the conventional wisdom and then being proved right later on.
	That's leadership previous caller also brought up this Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act named for a woman who said she wasn't aware that she was discriminated against until she neared the end of her contract or end of her career I should say at Goodyear tire in rubber.
	You see what happens what happened was they gave her a bad review and so she didn't get a raise and then this thing went back what?
	I want to say it went back a couple of decades, but years and years.
	So she they got a bad uh performance evaluation Lily Ledbetter did she apparently at that point didn't realize what the the uh evaluation really was was discrimination.
	Oddly enough she had this epiphany a decade, two decades later and said, oh, I was discriminated against and every paycheck I've had since then was discriminatory.
	So therefore we'll have to use all of those years in the damage model, compound them with interest, and we're looking at a jackpot justice deal here.
	Well the Supreme Court naturally ruled against her five to four, I think it was last year, because the statute the law clearly said that claims for wage discrimination must be filed within a hundred days 180 days excuse me some cases 300 days of the discrimination not ten years later and the reason you have a statute of limitations here is quite simple the defendant has rights and if the defendant company has evidence
	a performance evaluation or a witness 20 years later that that evidence may be destroyed.
	The witnesses may be dead that's why we have statute of limitations and all sorts of criminal and civil judicial proceedings but no no no the Congress went to work and they simply rewrote the law.
	Now the law, the Ledbetter bill, says there will no longer be any time limits on such discrimination claims.
	No, here's what I can't figure out.
	If you've been discriminated against, if you got the bad evaluation, but you don't know it, Oh, were you really discriminated against?
	You know, I am so I am so mad at you for this evaluation, and then you walk off for twenty years later.
	Uh no, of course, this was a trial lawyer gift, an absolute gift.
	Even in the bill, as the caller intimated uh last segment, um you can have a third party file the claim, or you can file discrimination for unintentional acts that result in paid disparities.
	This was a payoff to the trial lawyers and a payoff to the now gang who still labor under this false pretense that women are paid seventy-seven percent of what men earn, which is hogwash.
	Every economist will tell you that back after this.
	Back on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis reminding you, can't we all just get along?
	Well, sometimes I guess.
	But let's let's disabuse ourselves of that policy as conservatives, and let's start actually opposing what's going on.
	1 800 282 2882, back to the call as we go.
	Pensacola, Florida, Larry, you're on the Excellence and Broadcasting Network.
	Yes, sir, and good afternoon.
	Um and I I just did catch part of your comments uh a few minutes ago, but um I guess what crossed my mind is we've had eight years of lower taxes and eight years of Republicans in charge.
	And look where we are.
	Why do we think that those policies are gonna do us any good now?
	Well, what do you mean by lower taxes?
	My tax bill isn't any lower.
	Well, didn't uh wasn't that one of uh George Bush's big uh blank of the platform is we're gonna lower taxes for everybody, and we want to continue the tax cuts and uh Right.
	And uh look where we are today.
	What do you mean look where we are?
	I I would argue to you, my friend, that in fact had we not uh reduced the marginal tax rates in two thousand one and then really in two thousand three, we wouldn't have had five years of economic growth.
	The dirty little bit.
	Larry, let me finish.
	Larry, let me finish.
	Okay.
	Look where we are.
	Guess what, pal?
	I'm the host, you're gonna hear it again.
	All right.
	The five years of uninterrupted, uninterrupted economic growth would never have occurred had we not reinvested in the economy through incentives.
	Can you you don't know what we went through?
	We had a a tech stock bubble that burst.
	We had nine eleven.
	I mean, why didn't the economy go into great a Great Depression then?
	Now, as to why were we borrowed money?
	The public leveraged themselves beyond all means.
	They bought they couldn't afford, they they borrowed against their home equity, they matched out their credit cards, and all of a sudden we can't afford to pay for it.
	Really?
	And why did we do that, do you think?
	Why did why did people do that?
	Well, what what would you call a trillion dollar stimulus bill being financed by borrowing?
	Well, the only right now, as far as I understand, there are only four ways to get money in the system, and three of them aren't working.
	One is people aren't buying, two is businesses aren't aren't uh they're going under foreign people, foreign investment's not coming in.
	So the only way we can might get money in the economy right now, good, bad, or ugly, is the federal federal stimulus bill.
	So I see borrowing so now borrowing is okay.
	You got a double standard here.
	Tom Dashell doesn't have to pay taxes, it's okay, but if it's a Republican, I'm confused here, Larry.
	You just said we borrowed money, and that's what got us into the trouble.
	So the answer in your mind, since your guy is in the office, is to borrow more, and it's okay.
	No, we've got right now.
	That's not okay, but right now we're at our ropes.
	We got people that are going hungry, we've got people being front of their homes, we've got people out of jobs with no health insurance.
	Larry, what's the what's the un Larry?
	What's the unemployment rate right now?
	Well, in Florida, it's pushing about eight point seven.
	All right.
	What was it in nineteen eighty-two and nineteen eighty-one?
	Oh, I'm I don't I don't know.
	I just think that's a good thing.
	It was well over it was it was about eleven percent, well over ten percent.
	In the Great Depression, it was twenty-five percent.
	Larry, if you want a filibuster, you can do that with your relatives.
	Let me get a word in edgewise, and then you can answer.
	The point is this this so-called recession is nowhere near the calamity that the people who are talking down the economy would have you believe.
	And unfortunately, when people talk down the economy, it reinforces a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes people a little hesitant to invest.
	Secondly, my friend, the answer is not to spend more money.
	We spent money on housing, you're right about that, Because the government told us to, the Community Reinvestment Act, artificially low interest rates, and something called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had nothing to do with tax cuts, but but what was a classic liberal program for a taxpayer guarantee?
	And that's what got us into the message.
	Who was at the helm for the last eight years?
	I agree with you that the Republicans were were AWOL on really getting serious about spending and about going after Fannie and Freddie.
	Now they did try, they did propose some limits to Fannie and Freddie, but I think there's a case to be made they didn't try enough.
	I agree with you on that.
	But that has nothing to do with tax rate reductions.
	Do you think the economy would take off more if we raise taxes?
	Why isn't Obama repealing the Bush tax cuts right now, Larry?
	We've got to put money in the economy, but real quick, one other quick just wait, wait, we put money into the economy.
	What does that nonsense mean?
	It has to do so people can afford to pay their mortgage so they can get that four percent uh rate they're talking about.
	So boost stamps are expended, so unemployment's expended, so people are still hungry, I guess.
	Oh, for the one thousandth time, if the government puts money into the economy, they first must take it out.
	Where do you think this stuff originates?
	On trees?
	No, we borrow it.
	That's why it's bad.
	But we right now we've got to do that.
	But let me ask the another point real quick.
	You mentioned that uh let's give businesses uh tax breaks so they can uh b uh uh bill more widgets.
	Well, who's gonna buy widgets from the economy's like?
	What good's a business what I mean, businesses are going broke because nobody's buying the product.
	What else are you gonna do?
	Gotta go to the bank and borrow money.
	You know, if the lawyers really want to sue somebody, I think we should sue every single teacher in America for a dereliction of duty when it comes to the social science known as economics, because the vast majority of Americans apparently just don't get it.
	Demand is not going to do a thing for the economy.
	If I had people beaten down your door to buy your goods and services, but every profit you made was taxed at ninety percent, would you keep producing even though the demand was there?
	We're talking about right now the economy.
	I'm not saying it's good.
	Answer the question, Larry.
	That would not help right now.
	Demand is not the answer.
	Supply creates demand.
	The answer is to get production up and running again, get people hired to produce, and when those people are hired, they get paychecks.
	The demand will be there.
	Government can't create demand.
	How does the government going to create demand?
	If they borrow money out of the capital markets, that's money that would have been spent in the private economy on something else.
	So you reduce that demand and you give it to Larry so his demand goes up.
	It's a zero sum game.
	Larry, the what I'm saying, what I'm telling you is the only way we can grow is for more production to ensure to ensue.
	Well, see, my nut we I don't want to tie up any more, you tie you up anymore, and I do appreciate your comments, but see the the the problem we've got is producing what?
	See, people aren't buying General Motors or Ford or Chrysler.
	People aren't buying they're buying it's a world economy today, it's a global global economy.
	So that's another problem that this business let's produce more.
	That's that's a myth.
	That ain't gonna happen to be a good thing.
	Well, no, no, they they're producing they were producing up until the uh incoming administration talked down the economy and we panicked with the bailout.
	They were buying a lot of cars, not necessarily from Detroit, but plants in South Carolina in Tennessee and Alabama were humming right along.
	The question is, do you want government to choose the winners and losers, or do you want consumers to do it?
	Larry, thanks for the call.
	Ironton, Ohio, Carl, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Uh hi, Jason.
	Um really enjoy when you fill in.
	Thank you.
	Um the point I want to make is you were really spot on about your observation about uh the the Senate needs to steer clear of this.
	All these Republicans need to steer clear of this bill.
	And uh as I telling your screener, my my point is, I don't know if you recall, but last in the late eighties when George Bush won was running for president, he made a promise, no more taxes.
	Read my lips, no more taxes.
	And the Democrats, Tip O'Neill and all of them talked him into uh raising the taxes.
	So he broke the promise.
	They all put their arms around him, oh, you're doing really great.
	This is terrific for the country.
	You did the right thing.
	It was it nine months later when he started running for office, you start seeing these like wanted posters, these ads, these negative ads coming up.
	Can you trust the man who breaks his word?
	So uh it it just frustrates me that these Senate people would even even it would even be in their mind.
	They would even phantom about voting for something like this.
	The the Congress did the right thing, and I'm really proud of these guys.
	And they should they should just look to the past, what they did to Bush, what Tipp O'Deal and them guys did to Bush, because it'll come back to bite them every time.
	And this was the real downside of the Hank Paulson bailout phenomenon, the panic that hit Washington in September, and by the way, heralded the end of the John McCain campaign.
	When he went along with the bailouts, which have done nothing.
	We d you know, we're getting more data in every day now, Carl, to show that we did not have a credit crisis, a frozen credit market to the extent that people thought we did.
	In fact, there was a piece I read not long ago that said actually bank lending it went up rather health healthy in a healthy way in two thousand and eight.
	We we this was a self-fulfilling prophecy with talking down the economy.
	The government panicked.
	We went into bailout mode, and unfortunately, Paulson took the administration along with them, and you know who's going to get the blame for it?
	The Republicans and the Bush administration.
	Exactly.
	And it's just uh i it really is.
	It boggles the mind.
	It's not good policy and it's not good politics.
	Thanks for the endorsement, Carl Bewell.
	I'm Jason Lewis, Inverell Rushbow.
	More of your calls when we come back.
	I know everybody keeps emailing.
	They keep emailing us, calling us, telling everybody, look, it was Sir Alexander Fleming that got the Nobel Prize for penicillin.
	No, it was Al Gore, the guy that created the Internet.
	He did the penicillin thing, too.
	Apparently, though, it wasn't some guy in Peoria.
	That's that's the only thing that I know.
	Welcome back.
	I'm Jason Lewis.
	Let's go to uh Radcliffe, Kentucky.
	Jeff, thanks for waiting.
	You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
	Hi.
	Hey Jason, how are you doing?
	I'm doing very well, sir.
	Uh all I wanted to say was that uh you know, Western Kentucky, Central Kentucky, whatever, you know, we we got hit by the ice storm.
	Right.
	Everybody lost power.
	Mm-hmm.
	Okay.
	Uh the guy that made the comment from Etown uh about, you know, Katrina and everything, they they can't compare what we're going through to what they went through.
	I've been down there.
	I've been down there, I've been down to Gulfport.
	They still don't have houses.
	There's guys, there's people still live living in hotels.
	I don't have any power at my house.
	I have water, but I don't have power.
	I had to drive to Indiana to try to find a generator, but I have family up there and and I have money put back for emergencies like this.
	Because they progressed.
	The point I think that's a fair point.
	I think that's a fair modern point.
	But I think what sticks in the craw of some people on the whole Katrina thing is the now I wouldn't say revisionist history, it hasn't been that long, but the can the conventional wisdom that it was a total collapse of government that resulted in all of the displacement, all of the carnage, all of the human tragedy.
	And in fact, that's not true at all.
	If you take a look at well, the great what was the great Chicago fire of what, 1871, uh the San Francisco earthquake of the early 1900s, I believe Houston and Galveston got hit.
	That was long before FEMA and the American people figured out a way to get out from under it.
	It couldn't just be the fact that FEMA wasn't quite efficient.
	That cannot be the sole problem in New Orleans.
	There's got to be something endemic in that community that in fact has been told time and time again that someone will take care of them.
	Well, the entire the entire government down there collapsed.
	I mean, nobody knew what to do.
	I mean, nobody down there really knew what they were going to do.
	If you're going to blame water everywhere and they couldn't they couldn't do anything with it.
	Well, these people too far away.
	They didn't have jobs anymore because the businesses were closed.
	But it's been used to bash Bush solely.
	That's all my point is.
	I'm saying you look at Negan, you look at the governor of Louisiana, then the then governor, and they have absolutely as much culpability in this.
	But there's a larger point.
	And the larger point is there were businesses in New Orleans that handled their employees just fine without government, got them relocated, got them out of harm's way.
	There were other instances in American history, massive hurricanes on the Texas coast.
	I mentioned the, you know, the biggies, the earthquake in San Francisco, the Chicago fire, you name it.
	What you know, the whole mentality here, the whole premise here is oh, the reason Katrina was bad was government wasn't doing its job.
	I just categorically reject that.
	That's all.
	And you can have These anecdotal instances, it may not be equivalent to the folks in Kentucky in the ice storms, and I think that's a fair point.
	But you've had people living in floodplains.
	You've had great Midwestern floods where people have behaved and reacted differently than some of the people in New Orleans did.
	Not to beat up on New Orleans.
	It's a great city.
	But there were elements in that city that have been kind of guided along all of these years that Sugar Daddy government was there to take care of them and give them anything they need.
	And uh I think that was one of the things that was in evidence when a catastrophe hit.
	People didn't know what to do.
	We're sitting there waiting.
	And then the looting occurred and all of the rest.
	That's the only point.
	Thanks for the call.
	Let's try Fred in uh Whitney Point, New York.
	Hi, Fred.
	Hi.
	Thanks for letting me on.
	Sure.
	Yeah, my point is that Reagan, I guess when he started out, uh he cut taxes and got it going.
	But then uh the people uh uh were of his mind bent uh they uh wanted to starve the beast, as written in George Will's column today.
	Mm-hmm.
	And uh so there was a I got news for you, it wasn't successful.
	The government's budget doubled in the nineteen eighties.
	Yeah, I understand that.
	They um they should have brought the taxes back up to pay for it if they weren't willing to cut the cost.
	Really?
	Yeah, well, hey, trying to spend, you've got to make it.
	So your idea of being fiscally conservative is spend as much as you want, just make certain you raise taxes.
	No.
	Well, you just said so.
	Not quite.
	What I'm saying is is that uh they went in uh put six times the national debt.
	You know, we're paying eighteen percent on the servicing net debt that was run up by thirty years of Republican debt up.
	Uh Fred, Fred, if you're going to play this game, please get your facts right.
	Uh what was the G the uh deficit as a percent of the GDP at its highest level during the Reagan years?
	Uh I would say somewhere around twenty perhaps or less.
	Try try about six percent.
	Yeah, that's we're talking which which which way we're gonna inform we're ta well, it's called the U.S. statistical abstract.
	Uh it it is the six we're talking about the deficit is a percent of GDP.
	The Obama, the Obama bailout stimulus deficits will be in the trillions and maybe as high as twelve or thirteen percent of GDP.
	How do you feel about those?
	Yeah, that's what sometimes you have to dig somewhere else.
	I see.
	So if Reagan if Reagan borrows six percent of the GDP to win the Cold War, bad.
	If Barack borrows twelve, thirteen percent of the GDP to simply add to the government roles, good.
	You are too transparent, Fred.
	Nah.
	Hey, Reagan didn't win the that war.
	The Russians lost it.
	They fell on a sword.
	Just happened after 74 years.
	What a coincidence.
	Bye-bye, Fred.
	Back after this, folks.
	You know, I still can't quite figure out how the Bush tax cuts starved the beast, however, if you take a look at that statistical abstract of the United States, revenues to the federal government went up about three quarters of a trillion dollars after the Bush tax cuts.
	After the capital gains tax cuts, you had more capital gains realizations.
	This is a classic supply side model.
	If you want more of something, increase the reward for doing it.
	So there was no starving of the beast with the Reagan cuts or in fact the Bush cuts.
	The dirty little secret here is, though, it really doesn't matter how you finance government, whether you tax, inflate, or borrow, it all comes out of the private economy.
	So the the issue we've got to focus on is the government budget, not the portion that's financed by borrowing, the portion that is the total government budgets.

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