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March 12, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:30
March 12, 2009, Thursday, Hour #3
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And thank you, Johnny Donovan.
In fact, hell has frozen over for most of the northern half of the country.
Thank you, Al Gore.
You're going to believe me or your own eyes?
I think that's what Al Gore must say every time he gives a speech these days, because he'll go off pontificating about the dangers to the to the earth, global warming, we've got to have a six hundred and forty-six billion dollar cap and trade tax, and then an Arctic blast comes through.
And people say, Well, what about the evidence there, Al?
Look, I'm tired of arguing.
Are you going to believe me or your own eyes?
There was a a uh what was it, the Wall Street Journal put on this environment seminar, and apparently Bjorn Lomborg, the global warming skeptic, who's a devout environmentalist, uh, cornered Gore with a question and said, Look, do you want to debate me?
Are you finally going to debate me?
Don't don't we don't you think we ought to get to the bottom of this?
And Gore just, you know, reverts almost like uh like a robot back to this we have gone through this chapter and verse.
And since you people out there are so stupid, I'm gonna talk slow.
There is a consensus on global warming.
It's a consensus between the political hack, James Hansen of Nassau, and me.
That's good enough.
And he says, No, I'm not gonna debate anybody, effectively.
He's dodging all these debates, and so they they keep repeating the lie over and over again, and enough people believe it, and we're a nation of sheep, it seems like, and enough people believe it, yeah, global warming, got to do something about that.
Well, get ready for a massive tax on the bottom ninety-five percent of earners in America.
It's called cap and trade.
And it's coming.
It's proposed in the Obama budget for 2010.
It's going to be six hundred and fifty to seven hundred billion dollars.
Everything that moves will be taxed.
Your car, a manufacturer, a retailer, a trucker, a shipper, it doesn't matter.
We have gone so over the cliff on this bizarre obsession with a climate that hasn't changed uh an IOTA.
If you think about this, how how long have we been even had a thermometer?
150 years, middle of the nineteenth century, perhaps?
And the earth has been around how long?
And we're gonna take a microcosm, a few decades from 1976 to 1998, and we're gonna say, well, forget about the other billions of years.
This proves it.
We've got a crisis.
We've even gone so far off the deep end here, friends, that thanks to the energy bill of 2007, signed again, signed by Republican administration, we're going to import CFC, mercury-filled light bulbs in your house, whether you like them or not.
The old cheap, efficient, incandescent light bulb is an endangered species.
You can't go out and spend 40 cents, fifty cents on a bulb that works just fine.
You're gonna have to spend 350 or 4 bucks on a CFC, fluorescent light bulb that doesn't work half the time, especially if you hang it from the ceiling, that doesn't work in cold weather, that doesn't come on immediately in case there's a burglar in the house, you want to scare them with a light switch.
But more importantly, it's got mercury in it.
If you break the thing, you've got to call the hazmet team.
We don't even have choice in light bulbs in America in 2009.
Hey, but what are we worried about, totalitarianism or oppression or command and control government?
We've got an imperial government right now that's telling us for the love of the Almighty what kind of light bulbs to use in the name of global warming.
When today in Minneapolis, St. Paul, it was below zero on March, what is it, twelfth?
Uh i I don't know what it's going to take before people wake up, but something becomes fashionable and it's hard to uh to get the empirical evidence in front of them.
Much like education, you know, the government has your kids.
Because there's no choice in education, you buy a house, you can't afford a private school, you can't afford homeschooling, the government gets your kids.
So, in effect, the local school board says, Look, we got your kids, and if you want this not to happen, you you pay more property taxes.
You pay more state taxes.
The bulk of most state budgets is now goes to education.
And if you don't, or else.
Now that's a form of political extortion.
But because we're an entitlement society, when your kid is in a public school, why nothing's too good for Johnny or Susie, so you tell your neighbor that they need to have their taxes raised so you think your kid will get a better education.
Sooner or later, we're going to have to have an epiphany when it comes to education.
The idea of government schools ought to be an anethema to a free thinking people.
Now, frankly, if you want to means test it for poor people, we could go down that road.
But how much sense?
Think about this, friends.
How much sense does it make for somebody in the suburbs who does very well?
So let's say you got a husband and a wife making $50,000 a year, $100,000 income.
Here's the deal.
You could afford education on your own.
Just give me my property taxes back, give me my state education taxes back, and you could afford it easily.
But no, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to take your money, then we'll give you free education.
Can you imagine if they did that with groceries?
Here's what we're going to do to make certain everybody has access to groceries, because that will drive the economy.
It's a public good.
Can't survive if you don't eat.
We're going to tax everybody, but then we're going to have government grocery stores, and it's going to be free.
How would that work?
Well, I would go to the grocery store and I would pick steak each and every time until the government started to ration and micromanage.
Now, we need to be clear about this.
And Barack Obama, I think it was yesterday, talked about, well, I'm going to talk look at Merit Pay and the usual apologists, the acolytes, uh the the the you know, the media were saying, ooh, isn't this edgy?
He's taking on education.
You've got to be kidding me.
Do you know what the president of the National Education Association said?
The most powerful union, maybe in the country?
I got news for you people.
Your local school board was supposed to be a buffer between the taxpayer and what the district wanted to spend.
Forget about it.
The local school board is a mouthpiece for the NEA.
They are bought, controlled, bought, and sold in a New York minute.
They aren't watching out for the taxpayer.
They are the marketing campaign for the next tax increase for government schools.
And you think Barack Obama's gonna challenge the people that elected him?
The National Education Association contributes, their members contribute to political campaigns.
According to OpenSecrets.com, they contribute about 96% to Democrats.
A whopping 4% for Republicans, at least until they corrected the error.
Oh, we voted for who?
96%.
They are an arm of the Democratic Party.
Your school district is an arm of the Democratic Party.
Now I know I'm going to get emails from conservative teachers and conservative employees say, hey, that's not fair.
You're painting a broad brush.
I am arguing, I am arguing the rule, not the exception.
And the rule is if you're getting a check from government, if you're in a member of the NEA, I think I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, I think you're going to vote Democrat.
Because they're the people promising you more.
So when Obama says, hey, uh, you know, uh we're going to have merit pay.
Ooh, taking on the teacher's union.
No.
The president of the NEA said, you can't do it this way, quote, if you pay one teacher more, you have to pay somebody else less, close quote.
Uh duh.
You see, the goal of the union is to increase membership.
It's not to increase test scores, it's to increase membership.
And the goal of the union is to reward mediocrity, to protect their members.
The idea of merit pay, the way this administration is proposing it, simply means no teacher will get laid off or fired when they should.
Now, there are some layoffs due to the due to the economy in LA right now, but they were protesting there at the at a local meeting, the teachers were.
How dare you lay us off?
We have jobs for life.
But there won't be anybody really fired out of incompetence or malfeasance or anything like that.
What will happen is some teachers will get more money.
Now, I don't know what teachers should make.
Some of them should get fired.
They should make less.
Some of them should probably make more.
But we don't have a market system for education.
So how could we possibly know what they're worth?
Consumers have no power.
We have a government, can you imagine if uh Apple or Microsoft or McDonald's for that matter got the government to pass a bill that said you're gonna get taxed every year for our products?
Now, if you don't want to use them, you don't have to, but you're still gonna pay the tax.
I love it when the apologists for government education, they always say, Well, you got choice, Jason.
You can send your kid to a private school.
Yeah, but I'm still gonna pay for yours.
Still gonna pay the public system.
That's not choice.
The antitrust busters would be out there in a flash busting up that cartel.
Sooner or later, as I've said, we're going to have to talk about real education reform.
And I think the best way to do it is a universal tuition tax credit that says if I pay for my child's home schooling, if I pay for a parochial school, a private school, or for that matter, in a philanthropic effort, if my neighbor pays for my kids' education, if my business pays for my kids, whoever's doing the paying for the private education or the homeschooling gets a tax credit.
I'm not real keen on vouchers because vouchers are government money, and what vou what what a voucher will bring will be more government regulation.
But a tax credit is not government money.
That's getting your own money back.
And if I choose, I should not have to pay twice for my child's education.
Now, if you want to provide a safety net and means test education for those who absolutely can't afford it, fine.
But the rest of us should get our money back and go out and buy education and do what's best for our kids, not unlike not unlike higher education to a degree.
Now they're they get a lot of government money too, but the fact is there's tuition, and you can choose.
Speaking of unions, have you heard of this card check legislation?
This is unbelievable.
People wonder why some of us on the right are so apoplectic about this administration.
The tax increases, the nationalizing of health care, of the economy, uh the debt, you name it, and now taking away of the secret ballot.
Uh the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that this change to win big labor consortium is now threatening banks who receive TARP bailout money from exercising their First Amendment rights on the employee free choice act, the card check.
What the unions are demanding is that if your place of work is not unionized, all you have to do is sign a card with, you know, Vinny looking over your shoulder.
But you sign the cart and that's going to suffice for a vote.
Right now you sign a card to authorize an election, and then you have a secret ballot after management gets its say and the union gets its say.
They want to take away the secret ballot.
Folks, the secret ballot is fundamental to a fair election.
It is what prevents voter fraud.
It what it is what prevents people getting their votes bought.
Because if somebody wants to buy my vote, they don't know how I'm going to vote in a secret booth.
But if they're standing over me and they paid me a hundred bucks to vote this way, they're gonna know because they can watch me right out in the open sign this card.
Now, far be it for me to suggest corruption in unions, Jimmy Hoffa.
But this is pretty scary stuff.
This is pretty scary stuff.
And now some centrist Democrats are starting to get squeamish about this, the employee free choice act, and starting to back off.
They don't want to tie themselves to the legislation that's been billed uh is bad for business.
Business is really gearing up on this.
Who was it?
Senator Mark Udall, according to Politico, co-sponsored it last time in the House, his true intention, now isn't talking about it because Colorado businessmen and women are saying, You want to destroy us?
You want to send the economy in a spiral even further?
Nice going, Mark.
Hopefully they can fight back on this.
But you know, taking away the secret ballot, raising taxes, uh, using the tax code to redistribute income, massive amounts of debt, nationalizing health care.
I don't know why we're so concerned.
Huh.
Got me.
1800-282-2882.
I'm Jason Lewis, LJSBO, In for Rush, back with your calls when we return.
1-800-282-2882, the contact line for the Rush Limbaugh program.
Greetings once again, conversationalists across the fruited plain.
I am Jason Lewis, In for Rush.
We'll be back tomorrow for an hour open line Friday, and then the replay of the Rush CPAC speech for the last couple of hours of the show.
So tune in tomorrow.
Should be lots of fun.
And meanwhile, Ballakinwood, Pennsylvania, Steve, you are on the EIB.
Hi, Jason.
I just want to make a comment about the school choice.
I'm from Canada.
That's where I grew up.
I went to school.
I live in the U.S. now.
But when I was growing up in Canada, and it's still the case today, You had a choice between the public school and the Catholic school system.
And both were funded by the government.
So you could send your kids to either one.
And how did that work?
How did how did that work?
I mean, did the government send dollars to directly to the s the respective schools or do they send them to the consumer, the parents?
Based on their enrollment numbers, send it directly to the schools.
So what happened is I went to public I'm not Catholic, my family's not Catholic.
I went to public school.
My sister was in public school, and she had a lot of problems with the teachers there.
They weren't really doing their job.
My mother pulled her out and put her in the Catholic school.
At least on a little point.
But how much leeway are the Catholic schools given there?
Uh they have to accept any student that's not Catholic.
It just calls the case.
Well, can they have it can they start the day with a prayer?
Uh no, they can't.
Can I mean they're just run by the Catholic uh because in Canada it's a huge French population, which is traditionally Catholic.
So they had the whole system.
And a lot of kids that weren't Catholic would go there just because they figured the uh the education was better.
It's a little bit stricter there at those schools, more a little bit more discipline than the public schools.
A lot of times would be the thing.
There is something in the American Constitution that's called the congressional spending power, and members of Congress were given carte blanche going back in the New Deal.
I think the case was the the butler versus U.S., I think.
But basically what the Supreme Court said in trying to shred the Constitution and enumerated powers is anything the Congress wants to spend on, they can for the general welfare.
Even though that concept was not specific welfare, it was general welfare, and Madison and Jefferson said that had very specific meaning.
Regardless, that's what the court ruled in the 30s, as uh FDR was tearing up the Constitution.
So what that means is anything the government spends money on, Steve, they are now allowed to regulate.
It's called the congressional spending power.
So if they if they've given you highway money, they can tell you to lower or raise the drinking age in your state.
Otherwise you don't get the highway money.
And the danger here in America is if you start to have government money funding parochial schools, Catholic schools, Lutheran schools, nondenominational, what have you.
Uh you are going to get the Title I regulations, you're going to get the environmental dogma, you're going to get the the airtight ban on church and state, which is a little bit overdone.
So you're going to get all of those bad things.
I mean, I'm glad you liked it, and I think it's probably a step in the right direction, but there will be limits.
I much prefer a private system as an alternative that is free of the government bureaucrats.
That is free of the chains of government funding.
Because then you just, for lack of a better term, nationalize the private schools.
But it is fascinating that even Canada recognizes uh however limited there's got to be a safety valve.
Steve, thanks for the call.
Atlanta, Georgia.
Tim, you're next up on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hi, Jason.
This is Tim in Atlanta.
Um former Michigan resident down here in Atlanta now.
Um my comment was about um how the book publishers too out of New York that are kind of in cahoots with the Democratic Party, had to urge our parents to cross the country.
Yeah.
I'm shocked.
Read their kids' textbooks.
Um it's a breath of fresh air, actually, here in Atlanta compared to uh Michigan and uh how that state is controlled by the uh MEA and the teachers' unions.
And there's a lot of good teachers, but it's also a very obviously unionized state, and we're seeing uh, you know, Michigan's leading the country right now, and uh where the country a good example of where the country could be going.
But uh if you read, like for example, even down here, I have a third grader uh that they have American Heroes uh uh eight biographies to read, and I think they're even being tested on this on an annual basis.
They're called the CRC uh CRCTs down here.
And the American heroes are a third grade level, our American heroes were Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson and his assistant, uh Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, and Chavez, a migrant farm worker rights uh guy from the Cesar Chavez, yeah.
Yes, here you're I'm surprised if I'm surprised it wasn't uh I'm surprised it wasn't Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and of course Susan Sarandon.
It makes there's no rhyme or reason to this stuff.
Uh and this is now resembling much more of an indoctrination than an education.
Uh the people who who teach our kids, whether quite frankly in high school, college, or soon to be daycare Preschool, uh, lean predominantly to the left.
They use their position to abuse their power, quite frankly, on a routine basis, especially in universities, and yet we sit here and say, well, you but you gotta fund public education.
I go through this, you know, in the internecine battles within the GOP.
You can't have those conservatives or the libertarians like Lewis, they're bringing the party down.
Look at education.
He's against public education.
I'm not against public education.
I'm against government education.
And we end up funding the enemies of capitalism.
And when you bring that up and say, we got to do something about it, what happens?
They say, oh, no, no, no, we can't go that far.
That's a that's a bridge too far.
You gotta be reasonable here.
And so it becomes just very, very frustrating.
Sooner or later we're going to have to break with the past.
Yes, you are.
I am Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh today and tomorrow we'll have an abbreviated, dare we say an aborted open line Friday, first hour of the show, and then Russia's CPAC speech tomorrow in the last couple of hours.
So we uh Big Friday coming your way on the excellence in broadcasting network, one, eight hundred, two eight two, two eight eight two.
Markets up about a buck eighty, hundred and eighty points today, after that three hundred rise, everybody's saying, oh, it's it's happening, it's happening.
Oh, contraire.
I think the uptick rule or the possible suspension of it was uh driving the market earlier in the week, and then Warren Buffett's comments, along with guys like Steve Forbes and others uh demanding a suspension of the mark to market accounting for regulatory capital purposes is what's driving this.
And I think they're on to something.
The other day I mistakenly attributed mark to market to uh Sarbanes Oxley.
It was a mistake.
So must be leapier.
I make one every four years or so.
But the the point uh the the uptick rule is the short sell.
The mark to market is is different.
I think the mark to market is what's going to drive this market if it comes back.
And I do think it's time to revisit that.
Because right now, and what's fascinating about this and what Buffett said on a CNBC on Monday, calling for a suspension of mark to market accounting, essentially, if you've got a bond and you have no intention of selling it, unlike a stock that could be sold tomorrow or a liquid investment, if you've got a bond that say it's a four-year bond, and you're gonna hold it.
So you you loan somebody a thousand bucks, they're gonna pay you the thousand back in four years, and in the meantime, you're gonna get semi-annual interest or whatever, and you have no intention of selling it.
Uh in their they're up to date on principal payment or on uh interest payments.
They're not in default, but for one day the market says we don't like bonds, and the and the thing drops precipitously.
Under mark to market, you're supposed to count that down.
You're supposed to redo your balance sheet and take a loss.
But why?
It's it's performing.
You've got a bond that's paying interest, you're gonna hold it till maturity, so it doesn't matter what the market price will be today, because with maturity comes, you're gonna get your thousand dollars back.
So we we installed this mark-to-market accounting.
It was the uh it was a uh FASB rule, what, 157, I believe.
It was 19 uh 2007.
I believe FDR suspended it because he was concerned about it.
Forbes had a good article in the journal on this not long ago.
Point is what happened is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So somebody's holding bonds, and in this case they were the mortgage bonds, mortgage backed securities, CDOs and the like, the derivatives, and the market takes a tank.
So now the bank says, or the the investment house says, gosh, I had um two million dollars worth of bonds or two billion, whatever the case might be.
Now the market for those bonds goes from a thousand dollar face value to 900 bucks, eight hundred bucks.
They take a huge hit.
They got to mark their their asset side of their balance sheet down, you know, a couple of million bucks, two hundred million dollars, whatever the case might be, and that of course means their equity side has fallen.
They've taken a huge loss, and what happens?
The rating agencies look at their balance sheet and say, oh gosh, they just lost a ton of money.
The value of their assets went down because they had to mark to market, and so we're gonna lower their rating, which further drives down the assets in the market.
And so it becomes this vicious cycle.
And that's why people from Buffett to Forbes want to suspend mark to market accounting, and I think it's something we ought to we ought to look at here.
And what's ironic about this, and I want everybody to listen closely.
Because if you've got a regulatory capital requirement of a bank that says um your liabilities can't be more than X amount of your assets, that's a government rule.
And so what happens is when they're when they have to go from mark to market accounting and they mark down assets, they end up having to sell their bad ass or good assets in order to pay down liabilities to get back within the federal capital requirements.
And so you get this this vicious cycles, I say, self-fulfilling prophecy.
They mark down their portfolio because of, you know, the market adjusts or whatever, the market goes down.
The rating agencies give them a kick kick right in the gut because they mark them down.
That further drives down that.
Then the regulatory capital requirements say, oh, you got to sell some assets, so they put them all on the market.
That further drives down the prices of the portfolio.
And pretty soon you've got a financial crisis.
But here's the kicker.
Whether it is the regulatory capital requirements or whether it is mark to market accounting, those are government inventions.
Government rules.
Dare we say they're government regulations.
Heck, I thought deregulation caused the market to fall, Mr. Buffett.
Didn't, you know, didn't you and and Barack during the campaign run around deregulation, irresponsibility on Wall Street?
No, turns out, and this is what uh Buffett is at least tacitly admitting, that government rules may have caused this precipitous decline on Wall Street and in the banking sector.
And repealing the government rule, they're now admitting, might actually provide a boost to the market, and now there's talk about repealing that mark to market and the and the market's going up.
So don't let anybody buffalo you about, oh, it's deregulation.
Here's a perfect example of regulation that was driving things down.
Valparaiso, Indiana, Stephen, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
I'm calling exactly about that.
And uh earlier you had said, oh, you know, you're not sure what kind of you know regulation would have helped, and and you're not sure, you know, what was deregulated in the first place.
Well, um my question is what about the credit default swaps where you know a company would would make credit default swap.
It wasn't just that they were making these things, but when it looked like the the bonds that they had the credit default swaps on were about to go sour, they started selling those, reselling and rebundling those credit default swaps to other people.
It would have been like if, you know, your grandfather had a life insurance policy and you know, 30 more people came in and said, Oh, you know, when your grandpa dies, I want a piece of that, you know, life insurance policy too.
Um what about you?
Well, here's look, look on the on the credit default swaps, you've got to remember one thing, though.
The the criticism is they weren't covered or they weren't leveraged.
So they were just buying on one side.
So somebody would issue a credit default swap, which for uh radio talk show purposes is essentially an insurance product, and they'd say, I'm gonna insure that mortgage backed security you have, Stephen, and I'm gonna issue a credit default swap effectively insuring it for you.
Now I'm I'm kind of naked.
I'm not covered if that thing should default.
Except, guess what?
Your mortgage backed security was was implicitly guaranteed by Freddie and Fanny.
I wouldn't cover myself either.
Well, it's not just it's not just Freddie and Fanny, and and Freddie and Fanny uh failing is also a uh a measure of government de uh not enough government regulation because what was happening with the Republicans were trying to do back, you know, when b you know before all this started was they were trying to get the government to restrict Freddie and Fanny's portfolio.
Well, they weren't trying very hard.
Uh the Republicans, here's the bottom line.
You're you you know, Bush made a a faint attempt at this, but let's be clear.
The Republicans had majorities in both houses up until 2006.
They had a Republican president.
What on earth is Freddie and Fanny even doing in existence?
I mean, this this one really gets me going.
If we were serious about preventing another bubble and another collapse when the asset bubble bursts, we would have dismantled Freddie and Fanny after this nonsense.
Instead, we're growing it once again.
And I do blame the Republicans.
Oh, okay.
Well, you you you can blame it on the Republicans and the Democrats because the Republicans have a majority in the uh the Senate Financial Committee.
But also, Freddie and Fanny weren't the only problem.
The reason Fetty and Franny were trying to increase their portfolios is because I think the figures on something on eighty percent of uh uh the subprime mortgages were not through Feddy and Freddie, they were through uh free market private companies.
And they were getting in on the Housing bubble.
Right.
R exactly.
But what was driving the housing bubble?
It was easy credit, frankly, from the Fed on one side, and the fact that that there was a secondary insurance market.
And remember, Freddie and Fanny ended up with about 1.6 trillion in subprime alt-A-type loans.
They had five trillion.
They were by far the largest secondary insurer or secondary mortgage market uh entity out there, not even close to anybody else.
That was driving the housing bubble is my point.
Okay.
That's that's fair.
But the then you have, you know, you know, credit default swaps and you have uh the you know the the improperly packaged CDOs that are that are that were that were chopped up into a thousand pieces and raised triple A when they when they weren't supposed to be.
Exactly.
No, I you're right about that, and that's why we had the contagion, and that's why Hank Paulson said if we don't do something, everybody's gonna go down because everybody had a piece of this, and there's no limit on how many derivatives you can you can write off one mortgage backed security.
But I'm gonna go back to my earlier point, Stephen.
If if uh you know Freddie and Fannie's got the you know, they they get investors to give them money, then they go out and buy these mortgages, many of which turned out to be bad.
The investors then hold either Freddie and Fanny stock or they hold mortgage backed securities.
And then Wall Street, you know, wrote credit default swaps on those derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, all of those.
But you gotta remember one fundamental thing, and this is where the government screwed it up.
There was an implicit guarantee that the underlying product, the mortgage, the mortgage itself would be guaranteed by the taxpayer, and it turned out it was.
We bailed out Freddie and Fanny.
So if I'm writing all of these instruments off that underlying product, I've got this false sense of security that, well, the my my instrument can't go bad because the underlying product, the mortgage itself, is guaranteed by the government.
And that's why the moral hazard was induced and why, in my view, and many other economists, we had the asset bubble, gotta go, more coming right up back after this.
All right, let's squeeze in a couple of calls before we say goodbye for a Thursday back for open line Friday tomorrow when Russia's big uh replay of the C SPAC's uh CPAC speech, I should say.
One eight hundred two eight two two eight A two out to uh the Los Angeles area, Los Angeles and John.
Welcome to the program.
I spent one balushe-filled year in uh the basin there.
Good time.
Of course I was young, I could take it then.
Uh John, go ahead, my friend.
Hey, uh uh Bernie Madoff uh went to prison today.
I'd like to know why Alan Greenspan has not been prosecuted, investigated or driving under the influence.
He drove the economy uh into the ground like a madman with these interest rates that should have been raised a long time ago.
He his invention.
And kill off a recovery.
Now wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
First, let's start one at a time here.
Are you telling me Bernie Madoff's going to prison?
Holy mackerel, no wonder he's now returning my calls.
And Al should be right behind him, okay?
Dodd Frank and Maxine Waters ought to be right there too.
Why aren't there being investigated the same way for fraud, uh criminal negligence, etc.?
But here's my question, okay?
Here's my question.
We've heard you.
Every branch of government is unconstitutional.
America has been in an unconstitutional mode for fifty years.
What is the Constitution provide for enforcement?
We have jettisoned the enumerated powers doctrine.
People people from you know, and Rush was talking about this in the monologue, how we set up this republic.
Uh a young woman asked Ben Franklin, so the story goes, at the time of the Constitutional Convention, what kind of government have you left us?
And Franklin was reported to have said a republic if you can keep it.
And we haven't kept it since, quite frankly, the New Deal.
Uh or I would go back even further than that, and I would blame people like Teddy Roosevelt, too.
He's a lot of liberal Republicans love Teddy Roosevelt because he was a progressive and believed in government power big time.
I'm not one of those.
And so if you go back to the progressive era culminating in the New Deal, and we have turned a republic into uh an unlimited central power.
We've gone from a federal government to a national government.
We have eviscerated, emasculated, dare we say, the concept of federalism.
We have a judicial oligarchy, we have a Congress and an executive branch, but more so the Congress that absolutely has no chains around them.
There is no enumerated powers doctrine.
You know, when Al Alexander Hamilton was arguing against the Bill of Rights.
And remember that, against the Bill of Rights.
His argument in Federalist 84, I believe.
You people say we've got to have a bill of rights to make certain the government doesn't do this or that.
Well, how could we possibly, or how could the new government possibly do something of which it has no power to do in the body of the Constitution?
You know, Hamilton, Madison and Jay were were a little concerned about the Bill of Rights because then people would look to the Bill of Rights for their rights.
No, folks, we have all the rights.
We specify a limited set of powers under the Constitution as to what the government may do.
If it's not in the Constitution, they can't do it.
Because we have totally destroyed the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Equal Protection Clause has been abused, not to mention the due process clause.
There are loopholes that the apologists for big government and Washington fine to regulate and tax everything under the sun in this country.
It is a country right now the framers would not recognize St. Louis, Missouri.
Rick, you are next.
Hi.
Hey, I just have a real quick point I want to make about all of these bailouts that the government keeps doing and all this money that they're printing.
And what it is is they're actually taxing us by the inflation that they're going to cause with all this money being printed out because they're reappropriating the value of all of our savings to the worthless paper that they're printing out that allows them to buy the goods and services that they want.
So the inflation rate, the inflation rate right now, actually we're suffering from disinflation right now.
Yeah, but I think in about a year or so when they're putting these trillions of dollars into circulation with all of these TARP bailouts and the stimulus package and the deficits, that's gonna devalue the currency.
And so you're gonna be able to do that.
What?
Right.
There are two aspects to what you're saying that that are worthy, and that is one, all of this debt that they're building up, um, you know, in twenty months more than Bush build up the entire eight years.
Uh if it's not able to be repaid, and in order to repay it, you would have to massively raise taxes.
And in order to fund the debt, you're going to have to let interest rates skyrocket, which will kill off the recovery anyway.
If they just can't pay it back, they'll just start printing.
They'll repudiate the debt.
The other aspect to what you speak, Rick, is the Federal Reserve.
Uh the Fed is buying up all of these debt obligations, consumer loans now, treasury bills, mortgages, you name it, on the the assumption that the debtor will pay them back.
Now, if the debtor does pay the back, if every single bailout the Fed has made uh and they get paid back the entire amount, then has the money gets paid back, the Fed holds it, reigns in the money supply, and you might get out from under this.
Um problem with that political will.
I know of no central banking authority that has the temerity to raise interest rates and kill off an economic recovery, which is what has to happen sometimes if you've got this inflation uh rearing its ugly head.
So it's a fair point.
I'm glad you brought it up.
We'll come back wrap things up right after this on the Russian ball program.
Hey, excuse me, gang, but didn't George Bush take a ration for his signing statements when he would sign a bill and then say, well, look, look, I don't have to spend everything in this bill.
I don't uh I have my constitutional prerogative.
If I think it's unconstitutional, I won't enforce the bill.
It's called a signing statement.
I seem to recall Bush getting a lot of flack for that.
Odd, yesterday, President Obama issued his first signing statement saying that, look, I can bypass parts of this bill if I think it's not constitutional on my interpretations of the Constitution.
Gee, hey, Chris Matthews, you know, still got still got that thrill up your leg?
I didn't heard you.
Hey, Keith Oberman, you gonna talk about this at all?
Well, don't worry, nobody will notice, but the point is the hypocrisy goes on.
Going to close, gonna c get out of the war immediately.
No, it won't be till the end of 2011.
Uh, well, wiretaps, they're bad.
No, he supports that too.
A D.C. gun ban.
I was for D.C. gun control.
Now the Supreme Court rules I'm against it.
This guy, I don't know if it's just socialism or incompetence.
Either one, there may be a turning tide pretty soon here, folks.
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