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March 12, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:21
March 12, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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All right, as promised, second hour underway on the Rush Limbaugh program, and what a jam-packed hour we've got.
John Stossel, a little later from ABC, new special coming up.
And Monday last, I believe it was, Rush had an exemplary monologue on his fundamental opposition to the Obama administration's economic plans and otherwise.
And he kind of couched it in separation of power's terms, a la James Madison.
We're going to replay that for you right now.
Take a listen and enjoy.
See, I realize, ladies and gentlemen, I realize this because we've got the data to back it up.
The audience of this program is literally multiplying at geometric progressions, proportions.
There are new people tuning in.
Quite understandably so.
And as I've always said, you know, it takes some devotion to this program, some weeks, some days, to understand the context in which things happen.
We illustrate absurdity by being absurd.
We play all these sound bites from uh Warren Buffett and from uh Barton Biggs and Jim Kramer, all of these people who say in soundbite after soundbite that they profoundly disagree and are terribly disturbed about Obama's economic policies, but they the boy they love the guy and they supported a guy and they and they dog, what a great family.
Oh, ho, ho, this guy's just wonderful.
I voted for him.
I support the guy.
And I realize that people listening to this way of making a point who are new to the program.
Why are you being so loud?
Why are you why are you making the point?
And see, if you're asking that question is a good question, and it it the answer to it is is found uh in this statement.
The people who listen to this program regularly have knowledge about me and this program.
One of the things they know is that I love this country.
Another thing they know is that I love people.
All conservatives love people, and we are colorblind.
We don't look out over a group of people and see, oh, there's a group of women sitting over there, and there's a group of blacks.
We oh, there's some Hispanics.
Oh, there's some Walmart voters, oh, there's some people who think the era of Reagan's over.
We love the country, we love people, we love our and are in awe of the founding of this country and its blessings by God and the recognition in our founding documents that we were all created with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
We conservatives three all see all three of those things under assault.
Uh I want, we in this audience want the best for every American.
We want everyone to succeed.
We do not want our country to fail, and we do not want individual citizens to fail.
Against that knowledge, understanding, and given, here we have an administration which is implementing policies that are anathema to the founding of the country, in our view, my view.
We have an administration implementing policies that are destructive to the way this country was founded.
They are destructive to the uh opportunities for happiness and prosperity that this country has provided for 230 years, and we're alarmed by it.
And I see that a lot of other people are alarmed by it too, but they don't have the guts to say so per se because they are afraid of having happened to them what has been happening to me with the White House and the media trying to destroy them or ruin their reputations or what have you.
So they they're cowed, and they have to say, oh, we love the guy, and I love the family.
Oh, it's so wonderful.
I voted for the guy.
Policies are disastrous, but we voted.
Well, to me, uh, this is not about hero worship, and it's not about anything historical to do with his election.
He's all our presidents now.
He's he's uh and his policies are what matter.
Doesn't matter anything else as far as I'm concerned.
He doesn't get a pass on implementing policies that destroy the nation's past and its founding simply because he's new, historic, a young, smart guy, and lovable and likable.
Look past those things because it's the people of the country I'm concerned about.
It is the country itself I'm concerned about, not a a single individual.
Deborah Saunders, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, sent me a note during the program yesterday, and I got around to answering it afterwards.
And she wanted to take up this whole I want him to fail business, and she wanted.
Could you send me the original statement?
Could you send me when you first said this?
And I said, sure, it was January 16th.
It was a Friday, and it was the top of the last hour of the program.
And I said the same things then that I said now, just said to you.
And I said, why would I want somebody who is antithetical to the nation's founding to freedom and so why why would I want somebody to succeed in destroying that?
It's perfectly sensible.
And I was got to thinking about this, you know, the Federalist Persons and the Constitutional Convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers.
Now stick with me on this because this is a fundamental point to try to explain, especially to those of you who are new to the program, what it is that guides me.
The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature.
Our founding fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So we divide power.
We divide power between the states and the federal government.
We divide power within the federal government, and we further divide power among three separate branches of government.
We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other.
These are called checks and balances.
And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.
The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind.
That's what keeps the next guy honest.
The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king, is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding.
This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king, and above all, the king must succeed.
In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong.
That's the whole purpose of checks and balances.
It's the whole purpose of dividing power is to ensure the president fails when he's wrong.
The framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do.
If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, they wouldn't have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn't have saddled him with a free press, and they wouldn't have made him face re-election every four years.
They would have made him a king, whom no one could oppose.
If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding, simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn't have the form of government that we do.
Now, conflating the president and the country, and by that I mean assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country's best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult.
And I fear that that's what we have right now.
We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it's epitomized by Jack Welch, it's epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Kramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong.
It is horribly wrong.
But because there is a fear to oppose, because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interest of the country simply because he's Obama, that's what gives you a cult.
And the worst part of it is that many of these people who were making hay over this limbaugh once Obama to fail garbage know full well, ladies and gentlemen, that what I just told you is the case.
This is not an honest debate going on here.
As we have demonstrated in the first hour of the program with the Warren Buffett sound bites and the Barton Biggs soundbites and the Jim Kramer sound bites.
It's not an honest debate.
What's happening here is the most cynical kind of down and dirty politics by people who not only wanted George W. Bush to fail, but worked night and day to ensure that he failed.
I say to you again.
If the founders wanted a situation where the government was about one official succeeding, then George Washington would have accepted the role he was offered as king.
But we have separation of powers.
We have division of powers.
All of this is designed to ensure that a president fails when he is wrong.
And the framers wanted the country to succeed.
Let me add to this.
Byron York today, writing at the examiner.com, DC Examiner.com, why the founding fathers would want Obama's plans to fail.
James Madison was not specifically contemplating Obama nor Pelosi when he wrote Federalist No.
63, but reading the document, one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the U.S. Constitution.
It's clear that James Madison knew their type, Obama and Pelosi.
And he knew that they would come along again and again in American history if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.
Obama and Pelosi, along with our most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a great opportunity, as the president put it last Saturday.
They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that great opportunity to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand.
And they are the types the founding fathers wanted to stop.
In the Federalist Papers written 221 years ago, James Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives, an upper body he wrote, maybe sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.
For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on the errors and delusions of the people, the founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, and senators, by the way, were originally chosen not by the people but by state legislatures.
From Federalist number 63.
There are particular moments in public affairs when the people stimulated by some irregular passion or some illicit advantage or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.
There are times where the people misguidedly may call for measures, which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.
In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow mediated by the people against themselves until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.
Let me translate this for you.
There are going to be times that demagogues are going to come along.
There are going to be times that people who are power hungry who are going to take advantage of a crisis to say they've got all the solutions and they're going to ram all these things through.
The solutions have nothing to do with the crisis.
They're just selfish desires of the demagogue.
The people, because of the crisis going to go along with it, even though in rational moments they would reject it all.
We need an element to stop this.
We need an element to protect the people from the kind of leaders who would abuse them, mislead them, and ergo.
One of those devices was the United States Senate.
Of course the economy is a crisis.
But if Obama had his way, everything would be treated as if it were a crisis.
Health care is a crisis, environment's a crisis, education's a crisis.
Those areas are not crises, and it's the Senate's job to delay action on them until Obama's power to stir popular passion fades.
And I was just talking about this with Mr. Snurdley.
Because we were in his office at the top of the hour, and there's Obama out there making his health care initiative today.
And Snerdley's getting all worked up about it.
My gosh, every day it's a new initiative.
It's health care here, it's card check there, it's this, that, and the other thing.
Where's the bill?
I said, Snerdley, you're missing the point.
There need not ever be legislation on this.
Don't you understand what's happening here?
Let me tell you people.
He goes out and says, let me take advantage of this opportunity to health care reform.
Health care reform will get you a job.
Health care reform is one of the reasons the economy's taken.
You need better health care.
Who doesn't?
Oh, Obama's gonna get his health care.
Mabel, Obama's gonna get his health care.
Obama.
Why, he's gonna educate our kids better.
So the approval numbers stay up.
And as long as the approval numbers stay up, all the approval numbers need to stay up, is the right rhetoric from Obama.
You don't have to do anything, even though he's gonna try to ram a lot of stuff down our throats.
He doesn't have to.
As long as he keeps the approval number up, then Warren Buffett's gonna back down, and Jack Welch is gonna back down, and Barton Biggs are gonna back down, and everybody else is gonna back down as long as because they're gonna be afraid.
So we have to remember, folks, we don't have a king.
We have separation of powers.
We have a system designed to ensure that the president fail when he should.
Back in a second.
You know, Rush really hit on something there, and and that uh that has been uh uh the subject of a lot of debate since he made those comments about wanting the president to fail.
And fundamentally, I I've thought about this as well, and it seems to me the the critics of Rush on this particular comment uh are operating on a couple of false premises.
I mean, he was very cogent in his analysis you just heard.
But let me see if I can add to that by by whether you want the president to fail or not is based on whether you think his policies are detrimental or are cathartic.
If you think they're good, you want them to succeed.
If you think they're bad, obviously, if you think this stimulus plan is going to make things worse, as I mentioned earlier, we had a stimulus plan for housing, we know how that turned out.
If you think obviously you would want him to fail, would you not?
But more importantly, there's another false premise here, and that is how you define patriotism in America.
Patriotism is not some sort of slavish devotion to a nation state.
If that's where all if that's what patriotism was, or to that particular leader, uh, we would be honoring, we would be honoring the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians and anybody, because anybody can be patriotic to a country.
Usually those countries require community service.
Oh, I guess we're going down that road as well.
No, no, no.
Patriotism in America, and this is why America was different.
This is why it was called the American experiment, was devotion to an ideal.
And the ideal, the ideal is individual rights and liberty, not mob rule.
And the checks and balances, and I think most importantly, federalism, which Thomas Jefferson said was the true theory of the Constitution, preserves the individual rights.
That's the key in all of this.
We are not a nation that says, well, if one guy's got a billion dollars and we're some sort of Jeremy Bentham utilitarians, we ought to just take his billion dollars and divvy it up, the greatest good for the greatest number.
No, I don't care if it's the last billionaire on earth.
It's his money, it's her money.
We have no moral right.
We have no legal right to confiscate it because we have individual rights.
And that's what's paramount.
And that's why we have checks and balances.
And then that's why we are a republic and not a democratic mob rule.
We're not a monarchy which says the minority, a minority of one may rule, and we're not a democracy which says the mob may rule.
We are a republic, a filtered deliberate democracy with those checks and balances.
And again, I think dual sovereignty or federalism, states' rights is the most important one that checks the power of government.
Lord Acton was right.
I don't think we want to go down that road.
All right, we are back on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Welcome once again, everybody.
You all know our next guest, John Stossel has been an award-winning journalist for ABC for well since before electricity.
No, I'm not saying John's that quite that old, but he is uh certainly uh one of the best known journalists at ABC and one of the uh one of the ones that you can rely on to actually provide a little balance in the mainstream media today.
Joining us now, the venerable reporter, the redoubtable John Stossel on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hey John, how are you?
I'm good, Jason.
Thanks for having me.
Uh it's good to have you on.
Uh let's talk about this special you've got here on Friday, March thirteenth, bailouts and bull.
I don't know what should be first, bull or bailouts.
Or bailouts are bull.
Yeah, how about that?
This i this gets to the crux of your your um libertarian views on the economy of which I share, and it just seems to me that maybe we're we're learning the lesson all over again.
I don't think we've learned it.
We still have the attitude that of course government must act.
Well, maybe this hasn't worked, or maybe Gertner didn't present it properly, but we know government can solve the crisis and stop the pain.
And what a conceit.
Yeah, it is Hayek's fatal conceit, isn't it?
You you think of the second stimulus package, believe it or not, that's being bandied around, John, and that is proof positive of what you're you're suggesting that we you know the old adage of if something fails in the private sector, the capital drives up, dries up, if it fails in the government sector, they get more money.
Yeah, regulation failed.
We need more regulation.
And I mean, they say, What do you want?
Sure should be to do nothing.
Well, look what's happened with something.
Maybe it's time to give nothing a chance.
If we'd let the free market operate and this had happened, people would be saying, look, this is just demonstration that the free market fails.
And what they're promising sounds like a Viagra ad.
Stimulus.
Economy have performance issues, hard to achieve and maintain growth.
Stimulus is right for you.
And you know, and you know that size, well, that's pretty good too.
Yeah, you've got to want to.
What exactly include hyperinflation, devaluation, horrible debt, growth of welfare state.
Stimulus has never been proven successful, so it should not be used in the hopes of achieving actual growth.
Well, look, look, when I say r relearning the lesson, um I'm talking about some of the comments coming from lifelong Democrats, Jim Kramer and uh I guess Jack Welch.
I never knew Welch was a big Democrat, but uh apparently some are saying that.
Certainly Warren Buffett has been.
That's how people relearn the lesson.
Now you're right.
It just seems like we learned the lesson.
We learned it during Carter, and frankly, uh FDR has had a pass on revisionist history because the New Deal did not get us out of the depression by 1938, unemployment was still twenty percent.
But when you go through the hard times that government induces, uh are are you saying that the country is so far down the road that people are just going to adopt sort of the European superstate and say, oh, we need more, or are we going to reject this sort of statism as we did in the late 1970s and and turn to the economic right?
Well, that's why I'm doing a special Friday.
I hope to at least explain to people that that when Steuer or President Obama say all the economists agree that they don't.
And three hundred and fifty plus have signed a petition saying they say government action will make things worse.
And I interview some of them Friday, and uh I they make points that convince me.
Well, the the money has to come from somewhere.
What When you whether you tax, borrow, or inflate, the only way you can finance government, it doesn't grow on trees, all are detrimental to the economy.
So it really is, if you try to get government to create demand, it's a zero sum game, isn't it?
It has to come from somewhere.
It's like the old Bastiat story where somebody says, well, let's break the s shopkeeper's window, because that'll create jobs.
And yes, it does.
It creates a job for the glassmaker and the person to clean up the mess, but it ignores the unseen part, which is that the shopkeeper had money he might have spent on a new shirt or a pizza, which he now has to spend on the glassmaker.
So just taking money from one part of the bathtub and putting it into another.
Yeah, and and the the real thing that's going to be hazardous is when the the economy wants to turn around when the private sector gets its confidence back after being beaten down by all of the comments tearing down the dollar, tearing or not the dollar but the economy where is it going to get the capital to grow?
I mean there's there's only and and you've talked about this before there are only two fundamental ways for people to gain wealth in a in a society.
One is for everybody to increase their productivity in a rising tide, everybody gets wealthy at the same time at growing economic pie, or two, to take money from somebody else and what I think they'll end up doing, since they don't have the guts and I'm hope they don't raise taxes and they won't cut spending, I think they'll just inflate the currency.
Well what yeah I I well look that we're taking on levels of debt that the government can't possibly hope to repay.
I mean we're we're looking at $3.2 trillion dollars in the first twenty months of the administration yeah the easiest thing to do and when the Fed goes out in the private capital markets and buys up not only treasury bills but buys up consumer loans they're going to buy up, they're going to buy up Freddie and Fanny, which was the epicenter of this crisis you know that's really something that that people don't understand.
They talk about deregulation and and this and that.
The fact of the matter is if you take a look at all of the things that have hurt this economy, a a an inscrutable monetary policy of easy credit, f uh Freddie and Fanny nationalizing housing and giving credit to people who shouldn't get it that wasn't the free market was it, John?
No, Bush didn't really give us a free market.
He was he talked about it but under Bush they added more pages of regulations to the Federal register than any president before and the housing and financial markets have always been manipulated to encourage people to own their own homes.
Fanny and Freddie were never market devices if they were and they had their own money at risk they would have made smarter decisions.
Yeah it it really is quite amazing yet that that in your particular field the mainstream media for for the most part it's a lack of regulation that caused the problem when I I'm still trying to figure out what regulation was not enforced, what regulation was repealed other than Glass Deagle, but that helped the economy didn't hurt it.
I don't know what they're talking about.
I know it drives me crazy.
And if there were more regulation if Hillary were regulator in chief invariably let's say it was let's say credit default swaps are the problem then there would have been a credit default swap trade association that would be shoveling money to the politicians and Hillary would say well they're not the problem and they would end up regulating some of the good innovation.
I like to say we've already had a stimulus plan.
It was for housing how did that turn out so now we're going to go have the solution to too much debt is more debt.
It's like we're blowing air into a popped bubble and in hopes of avoiding any pain and the magical thinking of pretending that politicians can make pain go away the m the prices have to reach a natural floor so they can start to grow again.
We do a calculation for Friday's show that uh even if you don't include the Fed's six trillion pledge which maybe we'll get back but just the stimulus and the Fanny and Freddie stuff it's sixteen thousand dollars per taxpayer haul it around on a shovel.
That's just the start the special on 2020 this Friday bailouts and bull that's this Friday March 13th with John Stossel and it's not just the conceit of the ruling class part of what you talk about it is the expansion of government everywhere and that's why I'm starting to believe that really the the people behind this aren't adopting an economic policy.
This is a social philosophical political policy.
I mean we've got one last Bastion of markets in education.
And frankly, it works pretty well, and it's called preschool.
If I want to send my child or your child to a school, I go out and find the best one I like.
I give them money, they provide a service.
And guess what?
If I don't like it, I can withdraw my patronage.
The Obama administration and certainly the Democrats in Congress are and the National Education Association are hell bent on expanding, quite frankly, union membership by now nationalizing the rest of education.
It sounds so good.
But they've done such a great job with K through twelve, we should now give them another year.
And Obama said uh Tuesday that for every dollar we invest in this, it returns more than ten in lower prison costs and increased productivity.
And this is based on a study of uh the Perry Preschool, where they studied fifty-eight kids and had tremendous intervention.
The teachers went to the parents' homes, and the kids had low IQs to begin with.
And from this they extrapolate that there will be high quality government preschool.
And of course it's nonsense, and if it happens, it'll drive out all this good competition that exists now for preschool.
Plus, taxpayers will have to pay not just for poor people's kids, they'll have to pay for your kids and my kids, and what a scam that would be.
All right, hold that thought.
I want to come back and pick this up and a few other topics for this Friday's special with John Stossel of ABC back with more when we return.
Don't go away.
We are back with John Stossel of ABC and me, Jason Lewis, filling in for El Rushbow, it's L Jaspo and L. John Bow.
I don't know if that sounds right, really.
John, let's pick up where we uh left off vis-a-vis the um uh education issue.
And let's be let's be blunt about this.
Whether it's preschool, and this is why this is so troubling, or K through twelve, or to a lesser degree, I guess, higher education, sooner or later, right thinking people, real patriots, will have to start using the P word.
Uh the P word, and let's be blunt, means we've got to look to privatization.
I mean, we've got what, $14,000 per pupil every year.
We've got dropout rates in the 30, 35 percent uh area.
We've got international test scores that are at the bottom.
At what point d can some brave politicians say, maybe we ought to look at a market model for K through twelve, let alone the nationalizing preschool.
Well, some at least are saying that and talking about vouchers, though it gets shouted down.
I mean, i i that number you use, 14,000 per student, and and some people it depends how you calculate it, and some people say it's not quite that high.
But do the math.
If you get a classroom of twenty kids, that's almost three hundred thousand dollars.
Obama says we're not spending enough on education.
Think what you could do with three hundred thousand dollars per classroom.
This is a government unionized monopoly that's just eating money, and they want more.
And isn't it odd that our our civil libertarian friends who uh and in some cases they're correct, but they they want limited government, they want government out of the bedroom, they want uh consensual crimes to be lifted, and frankly, as you know, as a Bill Buckley conservative, I'm I'm sympathetic to some of that.
But they are the first ones more than willing to turn over their kids to state-run education.
Where is their government suspicion?
Well, they're all told that their school is above average.
Charles Murray, when he makes speeches, he says, you know, half the kids are below average, and he gets booed for saying that obvious statistic.
You know, the uh British philosopher Disraeli, 1874, quote, whenever is found what is called paternal government, there is found state education.
It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Uh boy, that sounds a little bit conspiratorial, but that sure sounds like preschool universal pre-care or pre- uh day daycare.
For Friday's special, I confront one of the big advocates of this and and point out that look, Oklahoma's had universal pre-K for years, so is Georgia.
They've dropped in scores compared to other states.
And she says, Oh, but we're gonna have high quality universal pre-K.
That'll be different.
And the kids are so happy in these classes.
Yeah, and you've inflated the union numbers.
I mean, these people are all going to be government workers that'll all all will presumably join the union.
It's mac's of a uh political conspiracy, if anything else.
But what about Head Start?
Head Start gets another billion dollars in the stimulus package.
Hasn't that been a remarkable success story?
No.
And that's few people realize that, that the data show that by grades three and four, the advantages of Head Start have worn off.
So even this most famous program has no demonstrated benefit.
Speaking of privatization, before you go, and the special once again is uh this Friday, ABC 2020 bailouts and bull.
Uh speaking of privatization, we've got to talk about transportation.
Um there is in the transportation urban planning community this obsession with smart growth with high density, getting people out of their cars and into the mass transit station, which doesn't work very well any place west of the Ohio River.
Uh they want to cram lots down into this the super small sizes, and it really has taken up a whole new agenda platform or or part of their agenda is certainly the smart growth to uh get rid of the automobile.
Is that the right way to go for transportation?
Well, that wherever they try it, it doesn't work.
Wherever they try it, the buses run empty.
The they calculate the rides per passenger mile, and it would be cheaper to put everybody in a Mercedes taxi cab than to subsidize all this mass transit.
Look, I live in Manhattan, and and it's a good thing we have it, but even there, people say, well, that's an obvious role for government.
Few people realize that private companies built New York subways, and then the government forced them to give them up.
And not only that, that even the you know, they always look at ridership, and obviously when you've got that concentrated of a Manhattan situation, you're going to have mass transit, but it still runs massive deficits, as does the transit system in Washington, Atlanta, and now they're spreading this, and it's just remarkable when there are other ways to reduce congestion.
These all of these uh mass transit schemes have failed to reduce congestion, and that was their, you know, the the the backing or the excuse for it, wasn't it?
It was.
Friday will show some of the private highways that have wonderful advantages that are much more practical than these big mass transit boondoggles, and they don't cost taxpayers anything.
But just before we're out of time, I want to mention my favorite piece for Friday that that um Barbara Aaron Wright with her book Nickel and Dimed convinced half the country her books required reading in high schools and colleges that life is over for the middle class.
And times are tough now, but uh the middle class has been doing better than ever.
America still is the land of opportunity, and we'll show you this kid who goes to South Carolina with $25 in his pocket, and within one year he has thousands of dollars in the bank, his own apartment, his own car, and he did it just because he worked hard and got a roommate and uh didn't spend forty dollars on pants like Barbara Aaron Rice did.
He says she wanted to fail.
And I confront her about that, and that's lots of fun.
It's amazing how responsibility still works.
Imagine that.
John Stossel, this Friday, 2020, the special is called bailouts and bull on your ABC station.
John, always a pleasure.
Thanks for stopping by.
Thank you, Jason.
Back after this, we'll try to get it to the top with a call or two, and then we've got another hour on the Rush Lumbaugh, so don't go anywhere.
I am looking forward to the Stossel special on Friday, especially the education part.
We have got to uh have a clean break with this notion that, oh, the common school has been a uh, you know, a feature or a facet of American history since day one.
No, it wasn't till Horace Mann and the gang convinced a whole lot of people that government should have a monopoly on education that we've gotten into this trap.
The schools aren't run for the kids for the most part.
They're run for the vested interests, the unions, the employees, and a whole host of other political considerations.
We spend we spend five hundred and thirty-six billion dollars a year on education.
It has trebled in real terms over the last thirty-five years.
Fourteen, fifteen heck, if you get into the inner city, you're looking at seventeen, eighteen thousand dollars per pupil.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in fact, through a tuition tax credit, if you choose a parochial school, you choose to home school, you could get the money back you spend on private education in the form of a tax credit, so you don't have to pay twice?
Wouldn't that be choice?
Wouldn't that be a good thing for your child?
This this is a command and control government monopoly.
And until we inject some market incentive and market discipline into education, they are never going to have enough money.
You're never gonna have your school district say, you know, that last tax increase, that ought to do.
I think we're okay.
Never.
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