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Feb. 3, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:00
February 3, 2009, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Hey, great to be with you.
America's Anchorman is away, and this is your undocumented Anchorman with you for the uh uh rest of the show.
And also I'll be here with you tomorrow, and then Mark Belling will round out uh the week.
It's a new affirmative action program for Marx.
There's nothing for Marx, by the way, in the stimulus package.
There's earmarks, but no uh non-eared marks.
So we've decided to have an affirmative action program for Marx here, and Mark Belling will be in to take care of the rest of the week.
And then uh I believe Mark Foley with a uh full supporting chorus uh on uh Monday.
He'll be here for uh Monday show.
It's uh exciting lineup.
Uh we were talking in the last hour about uh about Tom Daschall.
Poor old Tom Dashell.
He's limousine, his it's like Thelmer and Louise, his limousine and his driver got over the cliff now.
And he's withdrawn his nomination uh to be Health and uh human uh services uh secretary.
And uh we were talking um in the in the previous hour about how uh you know what ought to be the Republican end game in this.
And the thing is is that this is the uh you know, we got into this very technical thing about whether he should have paid whatever it is, the two point nine percent Medicare taxes uh that apparently are not part of his tax settlement.
The two and boy, this guy has been suckered now.
Look at him.
He's uh he's paid the back taxes, and he's not even getting the cabinet post.
So this isn't even pay to play, it's pay not to play.
I mean, this is pathetic.
Is this what American politics would used to?
Uh you you you settle your taxes, you still don't get the cabinet position.
But let's, you know, let's look at it from Tom's point of view.
Let's take him at face value uh and let's take uh uh Geithner at face value uh and say, you know, when they say, oh, well, you know, of course I I didn't realize I was breaking the law, it's just all so complicated.
They're right.
It is complicated.
It is complicated.
And that's why when you got a six hundred thousand page tax code or whatever the hell it is by now, that is an abomination uh to a free society.
You should not it it used to be that you'd go into broken down towns, small towns across America, in places in states where they'd uh been Democrat for years and they'd done all the Democrat policies, so naturally the mill had closed down and all the business had moved overseas, and the place is a dump.
And so the mill closes down, the general store closes down, the church still uh closes down, uh, but it still has like seven lawyers in town, because it was like lawyers you needed in America.
Uh you also notice these broken down towns the other thing they have, they've all got an office of HR block.
How small does a small town have to be not to have an office of HR block?
There's no such thing, it's undetectable.
You can have a town of seven people.
It'll still have professional accountants there.
Because w uh whatever you do in America, uh, you know, you can be doing uh uh uh uh just uh very three three minimum wage jobs.
Um my mother-in-law came to stay with me in New Hampshire, she had to go to the doctor.
She goes to the doctor, uh the receptionist very nice to her, says, Oh, you've come to see us, where are you from and all the rest of it.
Uh and uh later that day, after chit-chatting with Tanya uh in the uh receptionist room at the doctor, she runs into her uh up the road doing the evening shift at the diner as a waitress.
You know, people having to do two and three jobs, two, three uh very relatively minor, low-paid jobs.
They need help do they need professional help to do their taxes.
That's what's wrong with the American tax code.
It is too complicated.
Uh the end game here for Republicans ought to be uh calling uh Geithner and uh Dashel and the rest of them on their inconsistency, which is that these guys admit, these guys admit in public testimony and public statements now that they got caught, that this ridiculous tax code is way too complicated, even for a great big financial big shot like Geitner, who can afford all the best advice in the world, and yet they still don't want to change it.
These guys are the best poster boys for uh whatever it is, the uh I think it's the 14% flat tax they've got in Lithuania or Slovakia or wherever it is now.
These guys are the best uh poster boys uh for a uh Steve Forbes type flat tax that there ever is.
This this idea, I mean, I'm I'm with Tom.
Why the hell if some guy wants to give you uh a car to drive around in and a driver, what the hell business is that of government?
And it wouldn't be the business of government if we didn't have this stupid, overcomplicated tax code uh where if you uh you if you receive even if you receive something that isn't money, uh the state regards it as income uh that you're obliged to declare to them.
You know, Alan Keyes.
Now I'm not saying I'm endorsing Alan Keyes for president.
I'm not saying although actually Alan Keyes is to blame for if he'd run a better campaign when he ran against uh Obama for the Illinois Senate, we wouldn't be in this mess.
So it's all Alan Key's fault.
But Alan Keyes has a great line.
I I saw Alan Keys gave a speech, and he goes, if the tax rate is twenty per cent, what proportion of your income uh does the government control?
Uh and uh, you know, people stick their hands up in the audience and they go, duh, you know, twenty percent.
And he goes, No.
The answer is that if the tax rate is twenty percent, the government controls one hundred percent of your income because you have to justify the part you keep.
And that's exactly the process that Geitner and Daschell have been through.
Uh they're having to justify the part they kept.
And of course they kept more than they were supposed to keep.
Uh but the answer to that is a simplified tax code, a simplified tax code that does away with all this rubbish about whether you paid, you know, your 2.9 percent uh Medicare uh uh uh uh taxes on your limousine or your limousine driver.
I mean it's not even clear to me what he did here, whether the limousine has said earlier, the limousine itself uh should be paying uh the uh the Medicare taxes.
What we need here is uh none of these deductions and none of these tax credits.
You know, one of the great things the Democrats have done now, they keep talking about the proportion of uh this lousy stimulus package is so-called tax cuts.
Most of it isn't tax cuts.
Uh what they mean by tax cuts now is tax credits, which are rewards that the big nanny, big nanny, I'm talking about uh, you know, the government nanny, not these two nannies this other Obama nominee had for her teenage kids.
But the government nanny.
That's what it is.
Uh the uh the government daddy says uh, you know, we will reward you, we will give you some little uh little tax credits like candy for agreeing to do what we for agreeing to live the way we want you to live, we will give you little tax credits.
And that's why they're not gonna stimulate the economy uh anymore.
You know what a stimulus is?
A stimulus is if you want to grow the economy, it's not difficult.
Let's uh do it with easy numbers.
You earn a thousand dollars a week, uh and the tax rate is ten percent.
So you keep nine hundred dollars.
That's nine hundred dollars you can pour into the dynamic part of the economy.
You can uh start businesses, uh you can spend it on your neighbors' businesses.
You can put that new $900 out into the world to work.
Uh now, uh next week the government puts the tax rate up from ten percent to twenty percent.
So now you only have eight hundred dollars.
You only have eight hundred dollars to put out there in the world to work.
Uh uh, you can't grow an economy like that.
You cannot grow an economy by raising taxes.
You can only shrivel an economy.
That's all you can do to it.
Uh so the reality is uh that if you want to get money out into the world, it's not good enough to give tax credits for approved behavior.
It's not good enough to do what the Bush administration did, which was send out a uh a check to uh everybody, because that's a one-off check.
That's uh that's what is it they say on the uh on the financial services ads that you see on the cable channels.
Uh present performance is no indicator of future performance or whatever it is.
Uh getting a one-off check is no indicator of future economic performance.
You need to know you need uh a nice hard reduction in specific taxes.
Uh if you get a if you get a uh 20 percent reduction in tax, uh, and that's not just this month, but uh next month and every month afterwards, uh you can adjust your behavior uh to conform to that extra 20 percent that you've got to spread around into the economy.
That's the only kind of stimulus that actually does any immediate uh stimulating that as I said uh jump starts the economy uh the way uh Tom Daschell's driver hops to it when he comes out of giving one of his hundred thousand dollar speeches and getting in the vehicle.
And as we just heard, tragically, tragically, uh Tom Daschall has withdrawn his nomination as Health and Human Services.
And in a sense, I you know, as Tom would say, putting tilting his head and putting on those sort of dancing eyebrows more in sorrow than in anger look, I I feel for Tom.
I feel for Tom.
Uh it would be interesting to see it would be interesting uh to know uh what it is that was going through his mind uh when he decided he wasn't gonna pay those taxes.
But what at core, whether he expressed it this way or not, was the simple rational understanding that he he could do that money was more use to him than it was to the United States government.
And I'm with him on that.
I agree with him on that.
I think I think even I don't know what Tom Daschell uh spends his money on, but whatever it is that he does with it, keeping it for himself and spreading it around.
Well, he's I don't he was a sender from South Dakota.
I don't think he lives there.
He uh he spends all this time in Washington, uh maybe as a uh beach house in Malibu or whatever.
I don't know.
I don't know what he does.
But whatever he does uh with his money is more use than anything the Federal Government is going to be doing with his money.
And that's not hard to understand.
Uh and so the end game here in taxes ought to be using these people as poster boys for a simplified tax code.
Now they're humbugs, because that's the kind of person the Democratic Party uh attracts.
So like a guy like Tom Daschell votes to increase taxes all the time uh because he knows that uh, you know, he's simply gonna skip those boxes when he fills in his tax returns.
Uh that's that's the point.
It's like Teresa Heinz Kerry when John Kerry was saying, well, we need to increase this and we need to increase that.
That year Teresa Heinz Carey, uh her total uh percentage of income that she paid in taxes uh to uh the government was uh nine point something percent.
This is one of the wealthiest women in the world.
The great catch up heiress, uh Teresa Heinz Carey, and uh she only paid nine point something percent in taxes, because she's got all these fantastic advisors who can help her negotiate her way through the code.
It shouldn't be like that.
It's it's an abomination.
It's an offense to uh the the uh principle of equality before the law.
Uh that uh that somebody who uh uh has to pay taxes to the government, that's something every citizen has to do.
Uh and it shouldn't be something that you can only do uh with uh high priced advice.
So this is the best argument yet for a simplified uh tax code, and we should have Tom it's a shame Tom Dashell didn't get in there to be uh poster boy like this guy Geitner.
Uh but I agree with this uh congressman who wants a wrangle rule that you can just uh check on the on the uh on the tax form so that if the IRS decide to come after you, uh decide to audit you, decide to seize your uh freeze your bank accounts, as you can just check the Wrangle rule box or the Geitner box or the Dashell box and say you want the same deal as them.
Uh our legislators uh should be subject to the same rules as every other citizen in this republic.
This is Mark Stein on the EIB network.
1-800-282-2882.
More straight ahead.
Hey, Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Let's go to Reggie in Postfalls, Idaho.
Reggie, good to have you on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hi, Mark.
I just have a well, I have a um a suggestion.
To restore the public confidence in our government, uh, I think that what we should do is demand that all elected officials, Republican, Democrat, whatever, be audited at this point immediately.
And let them see what it's like to um have to go through that process.
I doubt if any of them have probably ever been audited.
And I think that um Dashell is just the tip of the iceberg.
And you know what?
Let the chip fall where they may.
Why should we have to pay our taxes, and then if we mess up, we pay a penalty.
And these people don't even pay a penalty for what they're doing.
You're you're right, you know, and and you're right, it should be done instantly.
Like uh suddenly say, well, uh this is a crisis, we're gonna have an instant audit.
It's not uh it's like those instant drug tests they spring on uh athletes or whatever.
You're not gonna have time to go to the uh men's room and uh flush all the papers down the down the toilet.
Uh we're gonna have the audit right here, right now.
Uh I think that the Republican Party, if they demanded this, let that would restore confidence in the American people in them to they wouldn't oh, it would be un unbelievable.
Well, you know, Reggie, there may be a reason why the uh even the you know what?
We need to get rid of our get rid of the bad guys in our um party too.
Yeah, no, no, I'm uh I'm all out.
I'm with I'm with you on that.
The the the thing about at heart, you know, what what you're what you're saying here is right.
There are enormous perks and privileges that go to being Uh a relatively undistinguished man in public service.
You know, I don't like this talk when people uh venerate so-called public service above all else.
Because uh it's all else, it's all the other stuff that pays for the public service.
The only reason that uh fellows like Tom Daschall and Pat Lahey and, you know, our guys too, like Judd Gregg and all the rest uh can swank around with these uh huge great uh monarch and call retinues is because there are still people in America generating uh enough real business to pay to support all that.
And and the reality is when you look at Tom Daschell, a completely undistinguished man, rejected by the voters uh in his uh in his own uh uh uh state uh and yet manages to without b batting an eye, uh his wife becomes a huge big-time lobbyist, uh, funneling millions of dollars into their joint bank accounts while he's the uh head of the Senate.
Nobody bats an eye, uh nobody bats an eye when he suddenly turns out to be making five million dollars.
For what?
For what?
Tom Daschell, there's no reason to pay five million dollars to Tom Daschall for anything other than the fact that he happens to have a Rolodex with a lot of big shot names in.
So uh if you're uh if you're running some particular industry and you'd like a tax break, he can pick up the phone and get to Washington.
Tom Daschell uh is the face, is the real face uh of uh of public service uh as it has become inside Washington.
I'm not talking about uh, you know, I'm not talking about the state or the county or the municipal level, but uh certainly at the federal level, the idea that a guy like Tom Daschell uh suddenly can cash in his Rolodex for five million dollars uh is uh is a lot of what's uh wrong with the uh political class uh in uh in this uh country.
Thanks for your call, Reggie.
Always like the name Reggie for ladies.
Uh I love I don't know why I don't know why I'm not so keen on it for guys, but I love it for gals.
It's uh terrific.
So nice to talk to uh Reggie in uh in postfalls, Idaho.
No offense to, by the way, I d before I'm uh forced into making the uh shameful public more in sorrow than in anger, Tom Dashell dancing eyebrows apology.
I want to hastily withdraw my slur on men called Reggie.
Uh I like I like girls and guys called Reggie.
I'm very, you know, what uh what is it?
Not metrosexual.
Well, whatever it is.
I'm I'm I'm Reggie friendly, yes.
I'm not I'm not regimented in my Reggie views.
Uh but this is this gets this gets uh this gets right to the heart of it.
You know, the the expansion of the state.
What happens when the state gets so big, which is uh which is the situation we're facing in the United States, uh, is that then uh people who have service in the state or who know people in the state uh who or who are once part of the state can move back and forth between the private sector and the state,
and the private sector, like in all these stupid uh health lobbying groups and uh law firms and all the rest of it who are paying um Tom Dashell millions of dollars, uh the the the purpose of the private sector then becomes just to sort of serve and facilitate and smooth the pathway to the state.
Uh Tom Daschall is more typical of the trend in the United States uh than just his tax returns.
But I agree, you know, I agree.
I would like to see these uh uh uh a kind of instant audit thing uh uh of uh uh of everybody in Congress.
I think uh I think that's uh I think that's reasonable.
That uh it would, exactly.
We need even more auditors.
What's interesting, by the way, about this, is that uh, you know, the auditors, the IRS auditors, they audited Tom Daschell in 2006, and then they didn't notice any of this stuff.
You know, what kind of IRS audit is that?
The rest of us panicked, the rest of us, you know, go out there and uh terrified you hear you're gonna have an IRS.
They didn't pick up any of this stuff.
It was the Obama uh transition team auditors.
So I think we need actually to nominate the Obama transition team auditors to be running the United States Treasury.
They're clearly doing a much better job than the IRS is.
Uh this this uh this gets to the the uh the the the farce uh of uh of this business.
Uh but you know, at heart it is a problem about the size of the state, and that Alan Keyes point uh that if uh uh the the the minute you have systems like this uh effectively uh the government controls one hundred percent of your income.
And you have to justify uh the part you keep.
Uh and that's what's that's what's wrong with the system.
That's why Steve Forbes is right that we need to learn the same lessons that the Baltic states and Slovakia have learned uh and move towards a simplified flat tax.
That's it.
You earn uh you earn fifty thousand dollars, you pay so much, you earn a hundred thousand dollars, you pay so much, there's none of these deductions, none of these tax credits.
That's what's uh free and fair for all.
Everything else just empowers the likes of Tom Dashell.
More straight ahead.
Good to be with you in an era of hope and change.
Hope and change.
It's in the it's in the air.
I'm just looking at this Gallup poll.
Uh Obama has been president for just two weeks, and uh the number of uh Americans who are unhappy about the way things are going uh is now only eighty percent, eighty percent.
That's uh that's that's terrific.
That's terrific uh good news.
I'm sure we can just improve that statistic and get us up to uh bleak and near suicidal uh rating in the uh in the very near future.
Let's go to Elliot in Yorbalinda, California.
The famous Yorba Linda.
Elliot, you're on the air.
Uh Mark, pleasure to speak with you, love your stuff.
Uh one of the things that really frosts me about all this stuff, and I'd like to start a movement that any liberal that votes for the stimulus package or for higher taxes, must reveal every tax shelter and every offshore account that they have that they are using to avoid paying their fair share,
and I'd love to see it extended to all our friends in Hollywood, who I'm sure have only the best uh tax advice to move money to the places where it would be least exposed to taxes.
And by the way, if anybody's doing some research about where our taxes are going, in Germany, if you make over 52,000 euros, which is about 70 grand, your tax rate goes from 15 percent to 42 percent.
Yeah.
So I'll leave you with those thoughts, but I think we need to start a movement to get these people to tell us how they're protecting their money from taxes.
Well, El Elliot, uh, let me let me just say on that business of uh tax shelters.
What is a tax shelter?
Uh what is a tax shelter?
Uh i it means that if you're saying uh some rinky dink uh island in the Caribbean, and you don't have much going for you, uh, you can set yourself up uh uh in a way to offer significant tax advantages to bring people into uh into your territory.
Uh a lot of them, most of them are actually uh ramshackle, the the fairly more the more obscure British colonies.
The Cayman Islands, uh Turks and Caicos Islands, uh Bermuda, Bahamas, uh they're in other words, they're countries in the British tradition.
So in other words, you know that if you uh take a post office box in Bermuda, uh that there isn't going to be a coup and some banana republic guy is going to get in and uh you're gonna lose they're gonna clear out clean out your post office box and you're gonna be uh screwed.
Uh that's that's basically uh uh why uh w the th that's basically the advantage they have.
They're basically these British territories uh in the uh in the Caribbean and other places.
Uh so you know you've got the rule of law, uh you know you've uh you've got a civilized, uh relatively civilized uh regime, uh the you've got the head of state is uh Her Majesty the Queen.
So you know your money is safe if you decide to have some sheltering around.
Nobody shelters stuff in Chad or Sudan or Rwanda.
Uh should we allow tax shelters?
Well, look, that that is competition.
That is choice.
John Kerry campaigned in 2004.
He was very anti-tax shelters.
He was always going on about them.
Uh how big you complain you were talking about the German tax rates, and you're quite right about that.
You're quite right about that.
German tax rates are high, a lot of European tax rates are high.
Um in Britain in the 70s at one point, uh the marginal tax rate was up, I think around uh uh what was it, 89%, uh maybe even higher, actually, at one point, I think for a while in some types of income, it was 97%.
Well, all that does, if you remember the famous uh Britons of the era, uh uh Roger Moore, Michael Kane, Towering Colossae.
They all wound up living in Switzerland or Los Angeles because they didn't want to do that.
Uh so if you have tax rates that are high, you chase out a lot of uh a lot of talent.
Um the other thing, the other way of looking at it is that what is a tax haven?
A tax haven is a choice.
People like choices.
Um, you know, uh if you if you think uh of America, America is a federation of fifty states.
Uh when the taxes get got too high in Massachusetts, everyone decamped and moved to Southern New Hampshire.
Uh in the broader sense, uh the population has been moving from the Northeast, which is a very uh high tax, generally a very high tax states like Massachusetts and New York, to the Southwest, where they've uh been lower tax regimes.
California is exporting people uh because its taxes are too high, because Schwarzenegger, unfortunately has uh decided to go along with the long-term remorseless decline of California instead of reversing it.
Uh and so uh an offshore tax shelter is a choice.
It's it's an option.
It's like if you're in a school, if your kids are in a school in a crummy school district and you don't like being in that school, you move ten miles up to the road and they got another school that's a better school.
Uh that's that's effectively what the what Bermuda and the Cayman Islands uh and the Turks and Caicos and all these other Ramshackle British colonies offer, that uh when taxes get too high, uh you move uh you you uh move your funds.
Mark Stein Enterprises New Hampshire, Inc.
uh suddenly becomes Markstein Enterprises Belize uh Limited.
Now, if you're happen to be from the IRS, that's an entirely hypothetical example, and there's no need for you to suddenly uh start uh get any subpoenas and uh start going through any of the paperwork in my basement.
It's high entirely hypothetical example.
So when I say that Mark Stein Enterprises New Hampshire Inc.
has suddenly become uh Markstein Enterprises Belize Limited, it's just for the purposes of illustration.
No IRS officer listening to this should pay any further attention to that.
Um that's that's the point, that it gives you a choice.
It's a safety valve.
It gives you somewhere to go.
And when John Kerry's was campaigning against that, the way to look at it is this.
Imagine if there were no tax shelters.
Imagine if, for example, as the United Nations wanted, there is a global tax.
Where do you go then?
What's your choice?
Borders, borders, whether they're town borders, state borders, national borders, give you choices.
And in this respect, I am uh pro-choice.
If um if if John Kerry and Co.
so uh uh determined so much to destroy the United States uh that it is no longer worth uh headquartering a corporation in this country, uh then uh good luck to anyone who wants to rent a post office box in Bermuda and move it out there.
Uh that that that is the point.
The the the difference, though, the difference between me and Tom Daschell and Teresa Heinz Kerry and Tim Geithner and all the rest of it is that I'm quite upfront about it.
I think we should have lower taxes, and I think if the taxes get too high, you should have the right to move them to the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Uh what these guys want is to raise taxes on you uh and yet uh avail themselves of all these uh loopholes uh themselves.
Uh and that is what is that is what is wrong with the present system.
Uh this is a great this is a great system if you if you can afford uh uh to open up an offshore account in the Turks and Caicos.
It's not a great system uh if you're just a guy doing a job, getting hammered and getting more and more of your income transferred from the dynamic productive part of the economy to the sclerotic, stagnated Tom Dashell supporting part of the economy.
Uh that is what is wrong uh with the present system.
But generally speaking, I'm in favor of uh these little uh islands in the Caribbean uh, you know, essentially taking advantage uh of the um uh of the uh uh o overly onerous burden uh that the United States uh and other Western nations that they place on uh their uh citizens when it comes to funding largely unnecessary levels of government.
Uh now if you look, I mentioned earlier that uh Slovakia and uh Lithuania and a couple of these other places had gone for the flat tax, the twelve, fourteen, twenty percent flat tax.
The minute you have a system like that, then they're not a lot of Slovakians uh uh opening offshore accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.
The minute you have that, that problem goes away.
Essentially, they're a dynamic response uh to the problem of uh a huge inflated uh tax code that benefits only those like Tom Dashall and Teresa Hines Kerry, uh who are big and powerful enough uh to have uh to be able to afford the advice that will get them uh get them around that thing, get it get them to avoid it, uh get them to fi figure out a way through it uh and get them to keep most of the money.
So they vote to raise taxes on you, uh, but they fully understand uh that in fact they that that their money is doing more use if it's kept with them to spend uh uh than if it's given to the United States Treasury.
I'm consistent.
I want that principle to be applied.
I want the Tom Daschell principle.
I know better how to spend my own money.
I want that principle to apply to all three mil three hundred million Americans uh and not just Tom Dash or Tim Geitner, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and the rest of them.
Uh so we'll uh we'll talk about uh taxes.
We'll also talk about the size of government, I think.
I'd like to say something about that before we're done today here on the uh Rush Limbaugh show.
Mark Stein's sitting in for Rush and more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in on the Rush Limbaugh show today.
Uh Mark uh Belling's gonna be here uh at the end of the week.
It's an all mark week uh while Rush is away.
Uh uh you know what what this whole Dashell and the stimulus pack is really about the same thing, which is really, I think, about the size of the state, the size of the state.
Uh when we were talking uh earlier with Elliot about uh about tax shelters, and I said I said to him, you can imagine what the tax rate uh in the United States would be if uh people couldn't uh uh open accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos.
In other words, uh the minute you can uh th the the constraint on government is that you can always vote with your feet.
You can take your money and your and if necessary yourself somewhere else.
That's what's happening in California.
California uh people who are which is a tragedy, because this was one of the states that uh was one of the great iconic states of America of what you could accomplish.
You could come from uh nowhere and enjoy great success in California.
Well, you can't anymore because Californians work for the state.
Californians work for the state.
Uh Arnold Schwarzenegger has made it clear that he is not seriously interested in attempting to shrink uh not just the size of government, but the ludicrous benefits that go uh wi along with government.
So if you're living in California now, if you're like uh the uh Arnold Schwarzenegger of uh today, when Arnie came there forty years ago, you imagine you get there, you're a penniless immigrant from Austria, uh and you work hard and you make a lot of money and you set up your own business and things work out for you.
No point doing that now.
If there's any penniless immigrants from Austria uh who are turning up in California, waste of time.
That's a waste of time.
The trick to do the trick is to get yourself a nice undemanding job with some branch of government.
It'll have the best benefits, you'll be able to take early retirement, uh, you know, fifty-five, and they'll pay you uh the uh a huge percentage of what your final salary was until the day you die.
Uh what we what we have in California is a system uh in which those citizens not foolish enough to work for the government are essentially fleeced uh in order to pay for a bloated public sector uh essentially using its muscle uh to vote itself more and more uh privileges.
And so people vote with their feet in California and they get out.
How bad can that problem get?
How bad can that problem get?
I don't think Americans realize what they're in for.
Uh that uh essentially Europe is a su a suicide pact.
Uh that uh it's uh it's essentially got unaffordable entitlements, the entitlements that uh the Obama administration wants to introduce here, and it's got no way of paying for them.
Uh they had a survey that came out in London uh last week, which revealed that the uh that over the United Kingdom as a whole, uh government spending accounts for 49% of the economy.
That is at least as twice as much as it ought to be uh for uh Britain to be regarded as a healthy functioning state.
And when you look at the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, it's even worse.
Wales, uh the state accounts for s over seventy-one percent of government spending.
If you go to Northern Ireland, uh the state accounts for 77% of government spending.
Now, obviously there's still a private sector there.
What does the private sector do?
It works for the state.
Uh everybody knows that, that if you've got uh once the government gets so big, there's no point being in the private sector unless you've got uh a government contract.
That's essentially what Tom Dashl is doing.
He gets kicked out by the voters of South Dakota, but the voters of South Dakota uh have no real say in impacting the relationship between Tom Dashell and government because immediately he moves out of the Senate and he gets a job.
Uh the job depends.
He's working for uh legal firms and lobby groups and uh all the rest of it who's uh who uh essentially are interested in contact with the government as a way of uh uh of facilitating their advance.
And every uh you know, every society has that to one degree or another.
You may wonder, you know, if you uh if you fly around uh the United States, you notice that uh little commuter planes, for example, uh tend to be by Bombardier.
Bombardier is a Canadian company based in uh the province of Quebec.
Uh Bombardier actually can't make a plane at a price that any company is prepared to pay for it.
Uh so it has to be massively subsidized uh by the uh Canadian and Quebec governments uh uh to uh to continue to make these planes, which they then sell to U.S. carriers uh and uh generate some income.
But in fact, essentially those planes are being paid for by uh Canadian taxpayers.
That once the state gets so big, uh private companies, the f the few that you get you wind up with a few marquee private companies, uh like these uh airlines and car manufacturers in France, uh who whose power and muscle uh depends on them getting a big-time government contract.
Uh the minute you get the state up to that level, freedom is under threat.
Uh we have a situation in the United States where if this stimulus package passes, it represents such a massive expansion of the state.
And when the state expands, liberty contracts.
Uh Liberty contracts.
Uh, when you listen to Barney Frank, he's perfectly up front about it.
He's perfectly up front.
Uh he said on TV yester uh on, I think it was Sunday on Meet the Press or whatever one of these shows.
Barney Frank said uh that the difference in Europe is that when you're kicked out of your job, you still have your health care.
Uh when you lose your job in the United States, you lose your health care.
That's why Barney Frank wants to introduce government health care.
Uh because they don't see you as a citizen, they see you as a dependent of the state.
They see you like Nancy Killifer, who had to withdraw from uh the Obama administration this morning.
They see you like her teenage kids.
These are teenage kids.
I don't know what they are, fifteen, seventeen, sixteen, eighteen, whatever they are.
Uh they would be regarded as adults in most societies in human history, but she's uh she's got two nannies for them, apparently.
I don't know why.
But that's what Barney Frank wants for you.
You may be 47, you may be 53, you may be 28, but you're not a free-born citizen.
Uh Barney Frank has a nanny, he wants to sick on you because you're not responsible uh to make your decisions on health care and how you spend your money all by yourself.
That's what happens when the state uh expands to the size foreseen in this stimulus package.
This is Mark Stein on the EIB network.
In for us, we'll talk about this and a lot more straight ahead.
Mark Stein on the EIB network.
Uh don't forget Rush Limbaugh.com.
That is the place to go for your new Obama-era Club Gitmo uh t-shirts.
Don't forget that uh uh President Obama has signed an executive order uh announcing that he's uh thinking about setting up forming a commission that at some point down the road will look into the possibility of looking into the possibility of closing Club Gitmo.
So this is instantly at a stroke rendered uh Russia's merchandise obsolete.
But does he whine?
Does he complain?
Does he go uh to the United States Senate begging for a bailout?
No, what he does is he puts up a new sh uh t-shirt, Club Gitmo, when America was safe, complete with the exclusive new water board logo.
Don't worry, don't worry.
It's it's not a scene of torture that you'll be embarrassed about strolling to the mall in.
It's water and aboard.
Uh it's water, there's water, there's the board.
You don't be embarrassed with your liberal friends because there's some jihadist uh having the electrodes clamped to his private parts or anything uh on that t-shirt.
It's a nice, uh gentle, relaxing view of uh water and a board.
It's the new waterboard t-shirt.
It's available exclusively at the EIB store at Rushlimbore.com.
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