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March 12, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:34
March 12, 2009, Thursday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
All right, hold on.
Hold on, let me just check this.
Okay, it's thawed.
It's unfrozen.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome back.
I should say welcome once again to everybody.
I am El Jacebo in for El Rushbo today and tomorrow.
Big shows coming your way, but I got to tell you, it has been cold in the upper Midwest.
I'm telling you, it has been cold.
I think we have set a record in the upper Midwest for the number of days, number of mornings below zero in 2008, 2009, which can mean only one thing.
Al Gore gave a speech someplace last night because it was below zero last night in the Twin Cities.
And every time Al Gore opens his mouth, another Arctic blast comes in.
I mean, the guy is a walking contradiction.
Anyway, how the heck are you?
It's great to be back in the Attila the Hun chair at the Conservative Institute, the, of course, Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Contact line remains the same, 1-800-282-2882.
Boy, this economy is something.
I'm telling you, this economy is bad, folks.
It is really, well, I'll tell you how bad the economy really is.
It is so bad that my financial advisor, Bernie Madoff, won't return my phone calls anymore.
I don't know what's gotten into the guy.
I just call and I call, told me he had a couple of hot stock tips for Enron and WorldCom, and boom, can't get a hold of the guy.
It's a rough economy.
It's a rough, well, don't worry, though.
The second stimulus package will cover it all.
Have you heard about this?
The first stimulus package did so well, we need another one.
If this is not classic liberalism, I don't know what is.
The idea that in the private sector, if something doesn't work, capital dries up.
In the government sector, if something doesn't work, you fund it even more.
Think about sex education, if you will, for a moment.
That worked really well, so now we keep funding it.
Quite frankly, you could talk about government schools if you want to.
By the way, speaking of that, John Stossel will join us in the second hour today and in the first part of the second hour, Rush's exemplary monologue on separation of power.
So Rush may be gone physically, but verbally, he will join us today and tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we'll replay the CPAC speech in its entirety right here on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, too.
So Rush, gone physically, but still with us.
Isn't that comforting?
The second stimulus package, though, now they are backing off.
Nancy Pelosi said this week she's keeping the door open for a second stimulus bill.
David Obey, there was a report that the Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, Uber liberal from Wisconsin, had his staff start drafting a second stimulus bill.
Now, according to the Politico, he's denied that.
Comforting?
I don't think so.
They also deny that the Obama plan isn't socialism, so you can take it for what it's worth.
But a number of Democrats, like Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware, are saying if there's an appetite for a second stimulus bill, not in my office.
Even Barney Frank said it's too soon, but of course, hedged on that says, well, we don't know what the appropriate policy will be in six months.
We've got to let this thing, in other words, we've got to let this thing really fail.
Then we can start talking about another stimulus package.
Folks, some of us warned you, El Rushbo, El Jacebo, most of those of us on the right warned you that the government cannot create demand.
It is impossible for the government to create demand in the economy, the old Keynesian demand curve.
We're going to move the demand curve.
And once you get more demand, more spending, then the economy will recover.
They can't create demand without offsetting demand someplace else.
If you want to know what a stimulus plan looks like, if you want to know what it's like to rob Peter to pay Paul, which invariably ends up with a sore Peter, or I mean, the guy gets mad, wouldn't you?
If you want to know what that looks like, look at housing.
We tried a stimulus plan for housing.
Now we're doubling down after the catastrophe.
But did we not try a stimulus plan for housing?
We had Freddie and Fanny nationalize housing, throwing in bad credit, as much money as you could spend, anybody could get a loan.
We had the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates way too low.
We had savings coming in from the foreign markets, buying up all those mortgage-backed securities.
I'm telling you, we had a veritable stimulus plan for our housing markets.
And I will tell you, it was a disaster.
We had an asset bubble.
Pretty soon, the housing prices outpaced our ability to buy them and they collapsed.
We, in effect, it was even more than a stimulus plan.
We nationalized housing.
Freddie and Fannie were in effect.
You want to take a look at what nationalizing the banks might look like.
Look at what happened to housing.
Freddie and Fannie nationalized the housing market by having the government-sponsored enterprise with an implicit taxpayer guarantee tell the mortgage broker, don't worry, if you make a bad loan, you give credit to somebody with a bad risk, we will take it over for you.
And therefore, you induced the moral hazard.
Everybody was getting a loan under the sun.
Had a job?
No.
Have any credit?
No.
Got a, you know, any assets?
No.
Okay, here's the loan.
Sounds good to me.
And they would give the loan, knowing full well that, well, I'm just going to dump the loan off to the secondary market, Fannie and Freddie.
And so Fannie and Freddie had $5 trillion worth of mortgages they were slicing and dicing up and sending out to Wall Street.
And they didn't worry about it because they knew that it was backed by the taxpayer.
Well, lo and behold, we ended up, as many of us predicted, bailing out Freddie and Fannie.
And now, guess what?
We're back to growing Freddie and Fannie once again.
The Federal Reserve is even buying their debt, which is clearly inflationary if nobody pays back the mortgages.
If the Fed comes in and buys the junk mortgages from Freddie and Fannie and they're not paid back, it's no skin off the Fed's nose.
They issue all this fiat money out in the economy.
They don't get paid back, so the money doesn't come back.
You've created trillions of dollars of literally paper money that eventually is going to cause prices to rise.
You know, a lot of people have advice.
A lot of people have had advice for Republicans.
And I've heard some people say, don't overreach on this.
The economy will eventually recover.
Don't do that.
Let me disagree a little bit.
I think the GOP or the loyal opposition to Mussolini, I mean President Obama, all right, I'm going to catch some flack for that.
I don't mean it in an oppressive way or in an imperial way.
What I mean is the policies, the corporate statism, the kind of it's a loaded word, but Italian fascism, if you want to call it that, where we end up nationalizing businesses, whether it's Detroit or the banks, and then we tell them exactly how to run, is very, very similar to what happened in that era.
But, you know, look, I digress.
The point here is here's what the loyal opposition can guarantee coming out of these failed economic policies that more and more people are starting to realize.
And it's really quite simple.
Everybody, if you're opposed to Barack Obama and Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress and the big spending, more debt than all the other past presidents combined, we will have more debt than all the other past presidents combined in the matter of a couple of years.
In fact, we've got more debt right now in the first 20 months of this administration after the 2010 budget than Bush build up in eight years fighting a couple of wars.
That's how much we're spending.
The result of that, I guarantee you, and the GOP should stand on this, is taxes are going up.
We know that.
Prices are going to rise and interest rates are going to rise.
Doesn't mean you have to predict a Great Depression.
It may be more conducive to a Jimmy Carter a la stagflation malaise scenario.
In fact, I think that's exactly what's going to happen if and when the economy starts to turn.
But the economy will never take off.
And it will never take off going back to our economic analysis because every single dollar the government spends, it has to get from someplace else.
Every single dollar the government spends, whether they tax, whether they inflate, whether they borrow, comes out of the private economy.
It is a zero-sum game.
So if the government says we're going to spend this money and create a job here, we're going to have people working to make certain our schools are green.
We're going to give money to the National Endowment for the Arts.
We're going to give money to Amtrak, which has failed to show a profit for decades.
And think of those jobs it's going to create.
The money has to come from somewhere.
And so if you create a job there, you destroy a job in the private sector.
If you borrow money from Jason or Rush, that means that's less money I'll have to loan to a business via a bank deposit or anything else that might create a job someplace else.
There is only one sane economic policy for this country, and that is fostering growth and increase in supply.
You can't, you cannot, as a matter of economic policy, create demand because however you create demand by raising taxes, by borrowing, or by inflating, it reduces demand elsewhere in the private economy.
What it really boils down to, my friends, is quite simply this.
Either the government will choose what is produced, where the venture capital is going to go, either you've got these omniscient bureaucrats who know exactly what you and I want for the next generation of computers, the next automobile, you name it.
Or the markets will choose.
You and I, millions, billions of people making choices, putting their capital to work where they think it's most profitable.
And I haven't even mentioned market discipline.
And that's the beauty of the free market.
If you and I make a mistake, the market is not perfect.
We're going through a market correction right now because we had a government-induced bubble.
We had a government-induced housing bubble thanks to a stimulus plan for housing.
Now we know the result of that, don't we?
So it's, no, I would argue that that's government-induced, but once in a while the markets make a malinvestment.
But here's the difference.
When you and I invest in a business and the business goes under, the capital dries up.
They don't get any more money.
We learn our mistakes, the market corrects, and we move on.
And that's why if you let the market operate, you get these tiny recessions, the ebbs and flows, the vicissitudes of the market, if you will, control it, and you never get these great depressions.
But if you allow government to invest, like we did with housing, we overbuilt, we subsidized it, we had easy money, easy credit.
You get these massive asset bubbles, these massive malinvestments, and when they burst, you've got a crisis.
And that's where we are.
And I'm not saying there's an easy way out.
What I'm saying is maybe it is time to do nothing.
Maybe it is time to let the market find its natural bottom and get the government the hell out of the way so we don't run into another housing bubble and we will recover as we always have.
It's a novel idea, I know, given the obsession these days for capitalism with a human face.
That's socialism.
That's a euphemism for socialism, and that's exactly what's going on.
You know, the New York Times today, before we break here, the New York Times had an op-ed, the false charge of socialism.
Barack Obama says, I can't even believe people are charging me with socialism.
I can't believe I have to answer this question at the Seatback Conference.
You know, socialism was being bandied about as a way to describe this administration.
And the New York Times, no, it was politico.
My bad.
The Politico wrote the false charge of socialism, not the Times.
The author says, socialism is no longer perceived as a threat to the United States.
Charges about liberals as socialists then have more than a whiff of unreality about them.
You know, this author is living proof we have yet to win the war on drugs.
Because I don't know how anybody could say that.
Let's take a look at what we're doing real quick.
Let's see.
We are using the tax code now, not as a method to raise revenue in a neutral manner to fund the limited functions of government.
We are using the tax code as a method of redistribution of wealth only.
We are loading, top-loading the tax code so a very few citizens will fund government and the rest will get a free ride, which will breed social and class class divisions.
That is pure socialism.
We are nationalizing health care out of the Dashel book.
You read the book because that was the plan, and that's going to be implemented.
And quite frankly, it will lead to rationing.
Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCoy, she's watched this.
She's written about it.
She knows exactly what's going on.
We're nationalizing health care.
We thought about nationalizing the banks.
We, in effect, with Freddie and Fanny, have nationalized housing.
We're regulating your energy use via cap and trade.
We're running up debt that the government has no hope in repaying.
And we're letting unions take over businesses by removing the secret ballot.
Can you say that's socialism?
I think you can.
Nice going, Politico.
19 after the hour.
I'm Jason Lewis in for El Rushbo today.
We'll get back to your calls 1-800-282-2882 when we return.
Talent on loan from Rush.
I am Jason Lewis.
Minnesota's Mr. Wright back in here in the Attila the Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Great to be here today and tomorrow.
Tomorrow, the Rush CPAC speech in its entirety.
Today we'll get Russia's take on James Madison and separation of powers.
That's coming up with a little monologue replay in the second hour, followed by John Stossel.
I think this is a veritable calvicate of stars here on the program.
I really do.
I don't want to be immodest about it, but I really do.
So you don't want to go anywhere.
1-800-282-2882 to the phones we go on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Colorado Springs, Dan, you are first up today and welcome.
Jason, I appreciate you taking my call.
You know, I don't understand why we didn't do the same thing that we did back during the SNL crisis.
We already have a system for dealing with toxic assets like this.
It's called Resolution Trust.
We could have taken $5 to $7 trillion of committed financing, picked all of these toxic assets up at mark.
We would have had to.
We're expecting banks to take that.
We then put them on the market, sell them at whatever, 50 to 70 cents on the dollar.
We take 50 to 7 trillion.
The difference would be the amount of the bailout.
Well, the problem is that now we're committed to $13 trillion over time, and we could have maybe reduced this thing to $5 trillion.
Well, and the other problem is, of course, the Fed has doubled its balance sheet by simply buying up all of these bad pieces of paper, not just Treasury bills, effectively writing a credit on the Treasury's checkbook.
But the Fed is now buying up all sorts of instruments out there, all sorts of debt.
They're going to go into consumer loans.
They're going to go into Fannie and Freddie again, buying up more of that.
They've gone from $800 billion to, what, a $2 trillion balance sheet.
When those loans are not paid back, the Fed has effectively injected a trillion dollars into the economy without any commensurate increase in the GDP.
You know what we call that in economic terms?
Inflation.
Oh, there's no question.
You know, the other scary thing is to think about this.
Jimmy Carter was pretty much, and his administration was responsible for the RTC the time, and he's responsible for this one.
What are we ever going to learn?
You've got to, look, the moral hazard, I believe, was responsible for the savings and loan crisis.
What Dan's talking about is the Resolution Trust Corporation that was created to buy up all of the bad loans the savings and loans institutions made, and then we buy them up.
We made everybody whole, so we pay 100%.
We only sold them for 70 cents on the dollar, and the difference was the bailout of the RTC.
Now, the reason that occurred is because in the dark of the night, there used to be a representative, St. Germain, who decided to extend federal deposit insurance, Dan, to savings and loans at $100,000 per institution.
And so, what people would do is they would divvy up their big assets if they had a million bucks.
They'd go to 10 different banks, put in 100 grand to each one, and they were covered by whom?
By you and me, the taxpayer.
Now, the savings and loan executive said, Hey, I can make a loan.
I'm not going to worry whether the debtor is a good credit risk because if they don't pay me back, the government's going to insure me through the FSLIC.
And that's exactly what happened with the savings and loan crisis.
That's exactly what happened with Freddie and Fanny.
When you have a government institution, whether it's a government-sponsored enterprise, or frankly, if you really want to get radical about it to a big extent, deposit insurance, it removes that sort of cautionary discretion.
If I know, for instance, the actual insurance model never reimburses you 100%.
You've always got a deductible, you've always got a copay.
And the reason is, if you're reimbursed 100% or 110%, you're going to be less careful about watching your house.
It's amazing how fires start up when people can actually get more from the insurance claim than they can when their house is worth X amount of money.
And so, that effectively, government policy, government regulation is what got us into these messes.
Now, as to a resolution trust model in this particular scenario, that was originally the plan of TARP and buying up toxic assets to a degree.
The problem is they don't know how to price the toxic assets.
You've got all these financial institutions, formerly Wall Street, which is now defunct, but you've got all these institutions with all these mortgage-backed securities.
What do you pay them?
If the face value is $1,000, do you pay, you know, and the market says they're worth, who knows, 50 cents on the dollar?
If you pay them $1,000, you put the taxpayer on the hook for the difference.
If you pay them 50 cents on the dollar, well, what does the government need to buy them for 50 cents on the dollar for if that's the market price?
So, that's the problem there.
We've got to get back to, quite frankly, private sector insurance, where people have to say, look, here's my business model.
Here's the people I'm lending to.
Here are the mortgages I'm handing out.
Now, if you want to sell those instruments in the secondary market, a real insurance company is going to say, I'm not going to buy that unless you make certain that person is credit worthy.
The government says, Don't worry about it.
We need affordable housing.
Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, they say we need absolute affordable housing and make the loans.
We don't care.
The taxpayer will make them good.
So, you get into this bizarre situation here where everything we do is geared almost to another federal bailout.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line here for the Excellence in Broadcasting Network, LJ Spo, in for El Rush Bo.
Like the ring.
That sounds good.
Great to be back once again.
Now, let's pick up where Dan left off there a moment ago, and that is the notion that there could have been a way to get us out from under this.
The fact is, when you had a malinvestment the size we did in housing, the market had to correct.
We are in such an entitlement mode in this country right now, thanks to the left, that we think that there should never be a correction.
The time should always be good.
You shouldn't have to save money for a rainy day.
Things should always go up and up and up.
And I'm not altogether certain, and it's easy for me to say from a distance, but I'm not altogether certain that had we not panicked, and I'm talking about Hank Paulson and quite frankly, the former president, President Bush, who once said, apparently, I don't want to go down as Herbert Hoover.
Well, Herbert Hoover spent money like a drunken sailor, and then FDR doubled down and spent even more, and both of them failed, failed because government cannot get you out of a recession with more government spending, as we talked about in the first monologue.
Both of them failed to get us out from under the Great Depression.
And my view is things have been demonstrably worse since we started down the bailout mania, since we, in effect, substituted bailouts for bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy is the solution to this.
Bankruptcy means assets are then reallocated to the most productive sectors of the economy.
And we are trying to avoid bankruptcy at every turn with these bailouts.
And all you do is keep inefficient competitors in business, dragging down the efficient competitors.
When you try to save everyone, you save no one.
And I'm not altogether certain that had we not panicked over Bear Stearns, had we decided just to let them fail, that we might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, let alone had we not spent money like as we're doing, if we had let the market correct the way it had to.
Now, it would have been sharp.
It would have been severe because of the height of the asset bubble in housing, but that was due to government policy.
That was due to Freddie and Fanny and a federal funds rate that was in negative territory for a number of months, if not a year or two.
You know, Ken Lewis, the chairman of Bank of America, said not long ago that there's been no tightening.
There's been no credit crunch.
He quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the banks have tightened lending standards after a period in which standards were too lax.
But according to Federal Reserve data, bank credit has actually increased over the course of this recession.
The business lending is trending up modestly so far in 2009.
Mortgage finance volume is booming as a result, as a result of low interest rates.
So I'm just wondering if we weren't sold a bill of goods.
And there's other data to show this, that consumer credit actually was not.
Now, there was an area of kind of flat growth in late 2008, but was it depression era territory?
I don't think so.
I think we have created kind of paralysis by analysis, a recession of uncertainty.
No one knows what the government is going to do.
The government, when they act, it's usually the law of unintended consequences.
It does more harm than good.
And we have created a self-fulfilling depression policy.
Not to mention the administration talking down the economy.
Certainly candidate Barack Obama bashed the economy at every turn.
And so you get this psychological business cycle effect.
You get the uncertainty to the extent that people weren't getting credit.
One of the reasons was nobody's balance sheet was transparent because you didn't know if they were going to get a government bailout or not.
I'm going to wait and see if this outfit gets a bailout.
I have no idea how.
And because we substituted bailouts for bankruptcy, we had no healthy companies left.
I shouldn't say no, but you get the drift.
If the weaker competitors are allowed to go into bankruptcy and yes, fail, capitalism without failure is like religion without sin, somebody said the other day.
You can't have it.
If they were allowed to fail, then guess who would survive?
Healthy people with good credit risk with a growing economy.
There is no easy way out.
And every time government acts, it screws things up.
And what drives me eternally bonkers in this entire debate, the very people that got us into this mess, the Barney Franks, the Chris Dodds, the Barack Obamas, the Hillary Clintons voting for affordable housing mandates in Fannie and Freddie, voting to fund Fannie and Freddie, don't worry, they told us time and time again, they're not a liability.
Of course, Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad and company, Franklin Reigns, you name them, they were all getting sweetheart mortgages from countrywide, and then countrywide shoved off their bad debt on Fannie and Freddie, and then Dodd and company made certain Fannie and Freddie had a lot of your tax dollars behind them.
It's called a quid pro quo.
And yet the very people that got us into this mess are now the ones we are putatively listening to to get us out.
Can you give me a break here?
It just is amazing to me.
Now, the tide may be turning because people are now rediscovering what socialism really is and they're not liking it.
I got a kick out of this L.A. Times headline today.
Obama calls for earmark reform, signs earmark-laden spending bill.
Huh?
This is like humpty-dumpty through the looking glass.
Words mean exactly what I want them to mean, no more, no less.
Barack Obama runs, I'm going to go through line by law in every earmark.
And then he signs the first bill that is full of 8,000 earmarks, $7.7 billion.
He signs it.
Says, well, you know, I really didn't want to sign that, but I felt it was necessary.
I was ready for him to say, you know, I really didn't want to get Joe Biden on the ticket, but I felt it was necessary.
I can understand that.
If you take a look, according to the House Appropriations Committee, Republican staff of the House Appropriations Committee, if you combine the omnibus bill, the earmark-laden omnibus bill that Barack signed, Barack Obama signed yesterday, and you combine that with the stimulus bill of $787 billion, $800 billion, you would not believe how much we have increased government in the span of just a couple of months.
Now, I could throw on the TARP funding, the other $700 billion.
I could throw on the Fed's activism in buying up not only Treasury bills, but bad commercial paper.
They're going into consumer loans for crying out loud.
They're going to buy those up.
And if the consumer doesn't pay back, then the taxpayer just says a weaker dollar.
We're debasing the currency to the degree that these people default.
But just get to the budget here real quick, and then I want to get back to the phones.
The agricultural department, combining the stimulus package with the omnibus bill, goes up 45% in one year.
Commerce, state, and justice, 41%.
Financial services, 43%.
Interior, 45%.
Labor and health and human services, 91%.
Transportation and housing and urban development combined, 139%.
And energy and water, 151%.
That was reprinted from the Wall Street Journal source was the House Appropriations Committee, Republican staff.
You cannot spend on this level without serious economic dislocations in the private markets.
And I believe, and you ought to wonder, you know, I'm pontificating now, so bear with me, indulge me here.
You wonder why all of these lifelong Democrats, Rush was talking about this the other day, are now coming out, frankly, and saying, the plan isn't working.
Warren Buffett, we've fallen off a cliff.
The government sending mixed messages.
Jim Kramer, lifelong Democrat, wealth destroying.
I don't know where Santelli resides, but a number of Democrats are now seeing the light, but yet they still support these guys.
Talk about cognitive dissonance.
But you want to know why they're flummoxed.
And the reason is simply, they don't get it.
The Democratic Party has been hijacked by the socialist left.
That's why these apologists in Politico and Harold Meyerson and the Washington Post and elsewhere are trying to rename socialism.
It's like not calling a liberal a liberal, rename them a progressive.
Now it's a new capitalism, capitalism with a human face.
I remember when I was in graduate school, the left-wing profs would never call it socialism or communism or collectivism or totalitarianism.
It was always, well, we need mixed, a mixed economy.
Let's call it capitalism with a human face.
Yeah.
Whose face was it?
That's the question.
And so these guys that now have spent a lifetime in the financial markets are a little bit perplexed as to why, gee, why is the administration doing this?
We didn't sign on for this when we supported them.
You guys don't get it.
The Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of ACORN, of moveon.org, of MSNBC.
Their goal is not economic growth.
This is not an economic policy.
This is a political policy to grow the public sector deliberately at the expense of the private sector because Democrats know when you grow the public sector, when you have more government employment, when you have more people getting a check from government, presto, ergo, those people tend to vote for the guys writing them the checks.
Government.
Democrats.
That's the goal in this entire disaster.
It has nothing to do with economic policy, just like cap and trade has nothing to do with energy policy.
It is about growing government and making certain that the Democrats stay in power in perpetuity by getting everybody on the dole.
And if you get everybody on the dole, those people are going to vote for the guy writing your check, giving you the cash, and that would be their own liberal member of Congress.
I'm a little long here.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back, get to Glenn, George, Bill, and the rest of the calls right here on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Don't go away.
All right, let's carry on with a few calls.
1-800-282-2882 on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I am Jason Lewis, Glenn in Orlando, Florida.
Welcome to the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Good afternoon.
I just want to say I enjoy all of us listening to your radio show.
And you better, you're so surprised that Washington doesn't have a problem with Russia and you all because I think you all hit the nail on the head most of the time.
I wanted to concur with you.
I was just, my problem with what they're pulling is it just denigrates the general IQ of the entire nation, the mental aptitude by elevating people that would otherwise be unsuccessful.
It gives a false impression of success where they should be failure.
I'll give you an example.
I'm 56 years old, and I've never had any children, but at a certain point where I thought I would be a responsible adult and a good father, me and my wife, we're about the same age, and we agreed a few years ago that it would be irresponsible to bring a child into this world for us because we could not give them a good college education and good medical care, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So it was a sacrifice, however, melancholy that we made.
But by allowing people to be successful in endeavors where they just, I find it depressing.
Then eventually you'll have a whole generation of simple-minded doves running the country.
Well, you bring up a great point, and we talk about the moral hazard a lot.
When we bail out companies, are you inducing more bad behavior because they feel they'll get bailed out?
It's not any different than some irresponsible teenage son that keeps getting bailed out.
But I would categorize it as you would, and that is we are now engaged in a full-scale, all-fronts, war on responsibility in America.
The entire government induces the moral hazard.
If you think about the mortgage relief plan, all that's required for you to have your mortgage modified now, and better yet, a bankruptcy judge tell the lender to go take a hike.
We're reducing your payments.
But all you need to do is make certain that you can't afford something.
That's it.
All you need to do is make certain you bought a house you couldn't afford.
And when the housing price went up, you took out a home equity loan, went on a vacation, bought a big screen TV, and now the house price went down and you're underwater.
Can't make payments.
You qualify.
Now, contrast that with the guy that did not buy the $600,000 house, being responsible, as you suggested, and bought a house he could afford or she could afford, kept up on all the payments.
And even though the house price has gone down a little bit, you're still in the black.
Guess what?
You don't qualify.
All that's required for any of this government stimulus, bailout, any government program is irresponsibility.
Why should I say for retirement?
I'm told Social Security is there for me and I'm entitled to it, even though it's bankrupt.
You know, Social Security in the year 2017 or 2019, I can't remember which, will now spend more than it takes in.
You know what they're going to do then?
They're going to go to some little filing cabinet in Virginia and pull out a bunch of IOUs.
That is the Social Security surplus.
It's been spent.
They're going to redeem those IOUs and the government's going to say, we don't have any money.
How are we going to redeem these?
But because that occurred, that was the natural result of promising people, don't worry, Social Security is there for you.
Medicare is there for you.
Medicare already requires government bailout.
It doesn't collect enough in the payroll tax to fund Medicare.
So naturally, what did we do?
We expanded it with Part D. You've got a situation where, why should you buy health insurance?
Health insurance ought to be free.
What did I see the other day, a funny cartoon, The Wizard of Id, one of my favorite cartoons, and they got the president or a president-like figure saying, I promise you free health care.
I promise you more food stamps, free transportation, free housing, and I promise you jobs.
One guy says, what do we need the jobs for?
It's so true.
You do all the things right in life, and you get penalized.
You work harder.
You take on a second job.
You get thrown into a higher tax bracket.
This is not the American experiment as Thomas Paine envisioned.
Saskatchewan, wow, how about that?
George, you're on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Hi.
Good afternoon, I guess.
It's morning here.
Well, wherever it may be.
Pardon me?
Wherever it might be, yes.
What I wanted to say is both you, Jason and Rush, should look at the example of Saskatchewan, 60 years of socialism, and how it hasn't worked.
And in the last year and a half, we've had a change in governance here, conservative.
And I'll tell you, this province has turned around.
The oil industry is here, the gas and the oil.
We have our potash is going good.
I mean, we've got everything here, and we've opened the doors to the world to come here and invest.
And for 50 years, with the NDP government, they have put so many hoops and red tape and problems to have people come in and invest.
Our young people get trained in the university.
They're assisted by government.
They become doctors or pharmacists or veterinarians or whatever.
They leave.
And we have been losing our youth here for 35 years.
I'm up against the clock, George.
Great point.
I don't know how many times Americans have to reinvent the wheel.
I mean, if socialism, if government spending could get you out of an economic depression, Eastern Europe would have been an economic juggernaut.
The Soviet Union wouldn't have collapsed.
You've got places like China and Asia and South America in some quarters, although in some quarters it's going back the other way, that are rediscovering the fruits of capitalism and private property and free minds and free markets.
The point is you would think America would get it finally.
But I'm afraid that doesn't calculate the sophistry of the mainstream media, the sophistry of the nonprofit community, the sophistry of academia, who are all committed, I'm afraid, the all is a little bit strong, the vast majority of whom are committed ideological socialists.
And they don't care about the economy is not it.
They don't care.
They would rather have an equal distribution of poverty and make certain it's equal than an inequality of wealth, even if that means most people would be wealthier.
It is perverse, and we have to keep fighting it.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.
I guess Jefferson was right back after this.
All right, real treat coming up, gang.
Next hour, right after the break at the top, we're going to replay Rush's monologue of his guiding principles in opposition to Obama, Barack Obama's administration.
We're talking about Federalist Paper 63, James Madison's separation of powers.
That's coming right up.
And then following that, we'll do a quick segment.
And John Stossel of ABC will join us.
Jam-packed.
Second hour coming your way.
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