All Episodes
Previous Next
March 23, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:26
March 23, 2009, Monday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, great to be with you.
Yes, America's Anchor Man is away, and this is your undocumented anchor man, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
Sitting in for Rush today.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
1-800-282-2882.
You know, we've been talking about Barack Obama, the terrific job he's doing, creating a more equal society.
If in the sense of an equal society, you mean a society that's getting more equal to like a third world banana republic economic basket case.
We've had the latest of these toxic asset bailouts today, a trillion dollar bailout for tax.
Nobody even cares now.
12 zeros on the does anybody, I can't even, people don't even remember the number less than a trillion now.
It's like if you're proposing government expenditure and it's not a trillion dollars, you just sound like some cheapskate.
No one takes you seriously.
It's got to be a trillion.
Trillion is now the new minimum, the new baseline for government, trillion dollars.
And as we heard, the CBO estimated that his calculations of deficits are off by over $2 trillion.
We're going to be paying the bill for these last couple of months for a long, long time.
How bad is it going to get?
The Associated Press has a story out just now.
More women going from jobless to topless.
This is what it's come to.
There's so few, they've got a picture here of an attractive lady, Eva Stone.
She's got a bachelor's degree in graphic design and she's now working as a stripper at Chicago's Pink Monkey Gentleman's Club.
By the way, I don't want to sound like one of these elitist conservatives like Christopher Buckley or David Brooks at the New York Times.
I'm not sure myself, speaking as a gentleman, whether I'd be inclined to belong to a gentleman's club with a name like the Pink Monkey.
It doesn't sound quite like a gentleman's club, does it?
It's not like, what is it, what is it here?
The Princeton Club, the Knickerbocker Club.
Pink Monkey doesn't have quite the gentlemanly ring to it.
But maybe that's just, maybe I'm just being an East Coast elitist about this stuff.
Anyway, women are going from jobless to topless.
They're now being driven into taking their clothes off for money and revealing their non-toxic assets.
It's the only way they can make a living in this economy.
What is the best way to deal with what is happening around the world?
I mean, I mentioned last hour for the so-called United States Treasury Department right now is one guy, Tim Geiden.
He's not the most impressive guy.
He was the one, if you recall, he tried to claim his kids' summer camp as legitimate business expense.
So is he the kind of guy you would want to put trillions of dollars in charge of?
His excuse for this, by the way, he couldn't figure out turbo tax, couldn't figure out turbo tax.
Turbo tax is one of these things, you stick the CD in your computer and it says, if yes, click here, if no, click there.
Anyone can do turbo tax, except the Treasury Secretary of the United States.
But not to worry, we're giving him trillions of dollars.
And he's got a full staff there.
All the offices are empty, but he's got like 40 low-level civil service interns who were going to parcel it out.
They'll each spend about half a trillion dollars apiece, and at the end of that, we'll have spent all the money wisely.
This is lunacy.
This is lunacy.
Do you have any idea of how many billions of dollars are just going to disappear?
No one will ever know what happened to them.
No one will, you might as well.
They'd be better to open up the windows of the Treasury Department and hurl $3.7 trillion out the window in dollar bills, because there's at least a chance that the wind might change direction and blow some of them back into circulation, even though $2.3 trillion of them would land in the Potomac and get soaked and wafted out into the Atlantic Ocean, never to be seen again.
This is simply not possible.
It's not possible for civil servants to calibrate and align the global economy and make it all start functioning again.
Now, I had a caller, he didn't stick with us, but he's typical of a lot of people who say, well, you know, you're going on about Obama and you're going on about Barney Frank and you're going on about Tim Geidner, but the Republicans were all for this too.
Yeah, I've got no objection to that.
I objected and Rush objected back in September when Henry Paulson started doing all this stuff.
The point is you cannot reinflate a global credit bubble, which is what we're trying to do.
When overvalued assets are declining to their real value, the best thing you can do is get the hell out of the way and let them settle where their real value is.
But there's no point, just no point trying to pump trillions of dollars in, just in effect, to try and reinflate a global credit bubble that's subject to all kinds of factors.
You have nothing to say in.
Now, AIG is a great example of a distraction.
There's a lot of Republicans demagoguing on this too.
John McCain, one of the reasons John McCain was such a ridiculous presidential candidate for the Republican Party is because he essentially signed on to Obama's view of this in the fall.
You know, McCain talked more about greedy Wall Street flat cats than Obama did.
Obama just stood there looking cool like a male mannequin in those debates because he didn't have his teleprompter, so he was being kind of cautious about what words he said.
But McCain was demonizing Wall Street fat cats at every opportunity.
You know, in the last two years, the United States banking sector has declined to 25%, below 25% of what its value was two years ago.
They're not fat cats.
They're emaciated, cadaverous cats.
They've got that, what's that thing, that cat version of AIDS that the cats get, the feline immunodeficiency virus?
These are emaciated skeletal cats.
They're the only ones left.
They're scavenging for fish bones in the garbage cans of Wall Street.
And we're still going, oh, Wall Street flat cats with their bonuses.
There's no, these AIG units, these AIG units, are nothing to do with anything that went wrong.
Now, look, I don't support the AIG bailout.
I'd be happy to let AIG fail.
I think trying to save AIG is ridiculous.
And I don't think it's an appropriate use of taxpayers' money to fund the Manchester United soccer team in England, for example.
They're England's biggest soccer team.
Their shirts are sponsored by AIG, which means they're sponsored by you.
So if you're a United States taxpayer, you might want to, next time you fly over, take a trip to England if you can afford it.
Make sure you go and see Manchester United play because when they come out on the pitch with those red shirts and kick the ball around in that sort of cutesy sort of semi-effeminate way that these British types play soccer, that is your money that is paying for that red soccer shirt.
That's what it's come to.
That's what it's come to.
The United States government is now sponsoring England's number one soccer team.
I wasn't in favor of any of this, but the reality is that one unit of AIG went down.
And as HR reminded me, it was one unit in London.
So in fact, it was one bunch of sinister foreigners that caused this meltdown.
If you want to demagogue people, why can't we just be straightforwardly xenophobic and demagogue these sinister foreigners?
But instead, what we're doing is we're identifying people who work for units that had nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do with anything that went wrong at AIG and saying, no, no, no, you're going to have your bonus.
You're part of the company that's working well, that's doing good, that's generating profits.
And we're going to, not only are we going to deny you your bonus and tax it at 90%, but we're going to get ACORN to hire a big bus and drive around to your house with 20 camera crews in tow to put you up on national TV as a disgrace.
This is Acorn, by the way, who were behind this protest over the weekend where they organized a bus.
Only 30 people turned up.
It's not like the tea parties.
They've got tea parties, these so-called tea parties around the nation now.
They're getting 3,000, 5,000 people at some of these tea parties.
But even the smallest tea party doesn't get 30 people turning up for it, which is what happened on this stupid bus trip.
Yet all the newspapers, all the news shows cover the stupid bus trip of the 30 Acorn workers who are being paid to be outraged.
And incidentally, look at these Acorn bus crew when they're on TV.
They're the guys who are going to be running the census, if Obama has his way.
This has got nothing to do with what is wrong with the U.S. economy.
You deserve, if you think there's anything serious at stake in $165 million worth of bonuses, when the United States government is wasting trillions and doesn't even know where they're going, then you frankly deserve to have your wealth vaporized.
And that's the way it's going to be.
You can own a very modest home.
You can have a very modest saving account.
You can have a very modest pension provision for your retirement.
And you're going to be poorer in a couple of years because you're not staying focused.
You're getting hung up on all this drivel about some blameless, no-name vice president in an irrelevant operating unit of AIG and not staying focused on the massive expansion of government and massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector of the economy to the non-productive, sclerotic government sector that is going to ensure that you end your days in a poorer America.
This is a choice.
This is a choice that freeborn Americans can face.
Do you want to go down the route of Barney Frank-mandated poverty, or do you want him to get the hell out of the way, let these toxic assets settle at whatever price they settle at, and then get back in the game and start America growing again?
That's the choice.
1-800-282-2882 in Markstein sitting in for a rush on the Rush Limbaugh show.
El Rushbo is just off for the day.
He is going to be back tomorrow and take you through the end of the week and a cracking lineup because this is like, there's been no start to a presidency like this.
This is, well, I don't know.
I wasn't around for, I don't remember how Chester Arthur started.
He had a valet.
I think he was the first president with a valet in the White House.
But other than that, I'm not up on the Chester Arthur presidency.
But certainly there's been no start to any presidency like this in modern times.
We'll talk about that and take your calls and lots more straight ahead on the EIB network.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show from the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Here's a story out of Randolph, Utah that gets to the heart of what is so ridiculous about this.
Quote, Dale Lambourne, the superintendent of a somewhat threadbare rural school district, feels the pain of Utah's economic crisis every day as he tinkers with his shrinking budget, struggling to afford laying off teachers or cutting classes like welding or calculus.
Just across the border in Wyoming, a state awash in oil and gas money, James Bailey runs a wealthier district, which has a new elementary school and gives every child an Apple laptop.
But under the Obama administration's stimulus package, Mr. Lamborn, who needs every penny he can get, will receive hundreds of dollars less per student than will Dr. Bailey, who says he doesn't need the extra money.
For us, this is just a windfall, Dr. Bailey said.
All right, you got this?
This was the core of the president's big speech, his pseudo-State of the Union thing.
If you recall, he talked about that 14-year-old schoolgirl from Dillon, South Carolina, who wrote to him saying the ceilings leak and the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train comes barreling by their classroom.
This is what the president said.
And he's basically saying, not to worry, school districts, I'll send you the money.
The federal government is not in a position to do that.
He's sending the money to school districts that don't need it and not to those that do.
And incidentally, by the way, you know, what is wrong with the idea of a school district in South Carolina that's got peeling paint on its walls looking to Washington to fix it?
That is something that Tocqueville, when he was traveling around America in 1830, would have thought was completely nuts.
Tocqueville, when he was here 200 years ago, said the difference between an American and a European is that when something goes wrong, a European waits for his masters, his lord and masters, the king, the lord of the manor, whoever to come and fix it for him.
The American just gets on and does it himself.
The point about a school district that's got peeling paint on its walls in a town of 6,000 is that they should be able to correct the peeling paint situation themselves.
They should be able to correct the dripping ceiling situation themselves.
Even if the federal government were capable of fixing their peeling paint and dripping ceilings, the level of bureaucracy you would require to facilitate that in an effective way, as opposed to the way it is now, where they're sending money to the wealthy school district in Wyoming that doesn't need it, but not to the impoverished school district in Utah that does.
The level of government, the scale of government that would be required to fix peeling paint in grade schools across this country would be so huge that this would no longer be a free society.
Tocqueville thought the township was the heart of American democracy, and it used to be.
Why can't a schoolhouse in South Carolina correct the problem of peeling paint in a town of 6,000?
Why does everyone think it normal to ask the great King Barack the Mighty way up in Washington to solve that problem?
You know, this idea called 1-800-Obama, I'll solve all your needs.
He can't do it, folks.
He can't do it.
And if he could do it, you would no longer be living in a free society.
Let's go to Elmer in Birch Run, Michigan.
Elmer.
You're on the EIB network.
Good to talk with you.
Good talking to you too.
First of all, you're a conservative, and I believe in about 95% of what you say.
Oh, that's good.
You were just talking about the AIG and they shouldn't give back their bonuses and like that kind of stuff.
But earlier on, not on yours when you were there, but rushing them, they said that the unions should renegotiate contracts and we should, as a union worker, which I am, I should give back some money to help GM out.
Well, you don't have to.
Nobody's saying you have to give back that money, but GM is not going to be around if you don't.
Basically, GM has a model where in good times when it essentially was part of an all-American cartel 35, 40 years ago, negotiated contracts that it cannot afford to honor and stay in business.
You work for GM, do you, Elmer?
I'm retired now, yeah.
Right.
Well, you know, the basic reality of GM is that it employs 96,000 people, but it provides health and retirement benefits to over a million people.
So it's basically a retirement home that has this extremely small loss-making auto subsidiary.
That's the reality of GM.
It loses money on every car it makes.
How do you expect that situation to continue, Elmer?
Well, I would say something right now.
We have, just recently, on our health insurance, you call our health insurance, we have to pay out of our check every month towards our health insurance as a retiree.
Yeah.
As a retiree.
I don't get it for free.
No, that may be the case, but the point is that GM loses money.
It doesn't make any difference whether GM sells five cars or five million cars, because they lose money on every one.
They lose something like between $1,000 and $8,000 in every model.
Let's call it $5,000, whatever.
Let's call it $3,000 model.
So if they sell 10 cars, they lose $30,000.
If they sell a million cars, they lose $3 billion.
So selling cars is no longer the answer for General Motors, because that's not the business they're in, Elmer.
And the reality is that I don't blame the unions.
The unions are there to represent the workers.
But the stupid management at GM, which is there to represent the owners of the company and the investors in the company, negotiated deals that presuppose that cloud cuckoo land would continue forever.
And that's the tragedy of General Motors, Elmer.
It was a negotiated thing that they didn't have to negotiate, but they negotiated.
And like I said, every three years, our contract's up for renegotiation.
They can renegotiate it different anytime they want to.
Well, I wish you well with that, Elmer.
But I've seen what it's like.
I was in Michigan a couple of weeks ago.
I think they've stopped the third shift now at Chrysler.
These are tough times if you're in the auto industry.
But the thing is, Detroit and the big three did this to themselves.
Nobody else was involved.
Nobody else was involved.
Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of the world 50 years ago.
Now it's a basket case from which people have fled.
And in fact, as I understand it, there are more American automobiles made in the province of Ontario now than made in the state of Michigan.
Detroit and the big three did this to themselves.
More straight ahead on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Great to be with you.
Rush will be in to take care of business for the rest of the week.
Fox News is just reporting that President Obama is now calling for more oversight of executive pay.
That's great, isn't it?
That's great.
It's not just on the AIG vice presidents now, not just tormenting them.
That's what he meant when he said he didn't think it was right to use the tax code to target a small number of individuals.
It makes much sense to use the tax code to target everybody.
So we're going to have more oversight of executive pay.
That is, I think at one point in Britain, by the way, the top marginal tax rates were 98%.
So in other words, for every pound you earned, you kept tuppence.
You kept tuppence, and the government got 98%.
The government got the rest of it.
You got feed the birds, tuppence a bag, as Mary Poppins saying.
That's all anyone could afford to do.
98% marginal tax rate.
One of these celebrities will figure it out and re-record, record a cover version of The Beatles Taxman.
You know, let me tell you how it's going to be 19, what is it, one for you, 19 for me.
That is the way we're headed, because no matter how much you tax people, you cannot tax them enough to generate enough revenue to pay for the level of spending here.
So it's great news.
Now he's saying we're not going to target these small group of individuals.
We're going to target you all.
That's terrific.
Wonderful.
Let's go to Fred in Houston.
Fred, you are on the EIB network calling us from the great state of Texas.
I want to spend some stimulus.
Are you kidding?
That's excellent.
You sounded like you were in need of some stimulus there.
That was terrific.
I definitely do.
I'm a small businessman, and I tell you, I'm scared to death.
Well, you should be, because you're going to be getting smaller.
That's his plan for small business.
That seems to be the plan.
Mark, I assume you're a foreign-born because you have a funny action.
No, no, no, I was...
Just like I do.
No, I was born in the general vicinity of Hawaii.
I'm planning to run for president on the basis of my Hawaiian birth certificate, circa 2012.
And I don't see you.
Why don't you join me?
You could be vice president, Fred.
You sound like you were born in Hawaii, too.
Maybe I could, too, when they annex Cuba.
Right.
I'm a Cuban descent.
I was 13 when I came to this country on December 31st, 1960, to live a new life in a new country.
And I became a citizen as quickly as I could.
Any regrets about that, by the way?
Because by coming to the hellhole of America, you lost out on all that great Cuban healthcare.
Well, next to my family, the greatest reward that I've ever had was that American citizenship.
That's the thing that I value the most, and I'm beginning to question its value.
Well, that's a tragedy.
I mean, Cecil Rhodes, a century ago, said that if you were born an Englishman, you had won first prize in the lottery of life.
It used to be at the end of the 20th century, if you were born an American, you would won first prize in the lottery of life.
And it's very sad to hear you saying that that may not be the case anymore.
You know, I spent 33 years in international telecom traveling the entire world.
Every time I would come back to this country, I felt like kissing the ground that I lived on because there's no country like this country anywhere on the face of the terrorist.
That's true.
And it's pathetic that this man, this rock star who got elected, and I don't call him president because he's not presidential.
He thinks he's the press, you know, a rock star.
He nominates a tax-evading man to run the treasury and then we go and accuse 13 other companies who are behind the taxes and he is the man who's supposed to enforce it.
That's kind of a joke, isn't it?
Yeah, there is.
There ought to be a Geithner box.
You know, we're coming up to, we're in what they call tax season.
That's incidentally one of the problems of America, that you've now got spring, summer, autumn, winter, and tax season.
Tax shouldn't require an entire season.
And you're right, there should be a Geithner box on the form that says, hey, yep, you're right.
There's 25 grand, 70 grand that I'm not paying on this.
I'm not sending you the check for, but I'd like to check the Tim Geithner.
There are a Geithner exception, which is put in every box, right?
Yeah, I'd like the deal he's got.
What's the line from when Harry met Sally?
I'll have what he's having.
That's when it, well, on April the 15th, I'll have what he's having.
And that's the way Americans should be.
What is it?
No, no taxation without, what was it, no taxation without representation?
There should be no confiscation from people who don't pay their taxation.
The Geithner issue is serious, and we should all be on the Geithner, on the Geithner plan.
Thank you very much, Fred, for your call.
And, you know, I'm not as I have faith in the American people, but this is a serious business.
Americans need to get serious about this unless they want to end up in the same sinkhole as Europe did.
You will live worse lives.
You will live lives that will simply not generate the wealth that makes this the land of the American dream.
there's something else too it's very nice when you go um sarkozy was at some i think it was a nato summit in eastern europe and he and he posed the question does europe want peace or does europe just want to be left in peace And in a way, to ask the question is to answer it.
You know, Europeans don't want to have to think about, they don't want to be in there in difficult wars.
They don't mind sending in a couple of peacekeepers.
You know, in Afghanistan, half these so-called NATO armies that are supporting us aren't actually doing anything.
They don't have any combat troops.
The Norwegians are there, and God bless them.
They're basically manning the photocopier back at barracks.
And they're, you know, and it's nice.
So like the Americans go out and kill all the bad guys.
By the way, it's not just the Americans.
The Americans, the British, Canadians, a couple of serious allies, but most of these other people.
The Germans have a thing.
They won't fly in certain provinces.
Some countries won't go out in snow, won't go out in snow.
I mean, that's what kind of army is that?
Was it Joe Biden?
Joe Biden.
He's boasting about how, I'm one tough hombre.
You know, I flew.
I know where Osama bin Laden lives.
I was flying to get him when my plane came down in snow.
His plane wouldn't have been up there if he'd been flying with whatever it was, the Luftwaffe, whichever Air Force it was.
These things, they won't go out in snow.
They won't go out combat missions.
They won't go out after anybody except like one of 173 people who are on a UN-approved list.
These people don't want to shoulder the burdens of the world.
And the lesson of this is a simple one.
Norway can be Norway, and Sweden can be Sweden, and Belgium can be Belgium, and Germany can be Germany, but only because America's America.
So if America decides, hey, we'd like to be Belgium too, the whole system will fall apart, and we will end our days in darkness, plunged into a new dark ages in which our children will live in bondage on a primitive planet where we'll all be living in caves, and it'll be great for Al Gore and his polar bears and hell for everybody else.
So if you want to go down that route, that is a good way to go.
The whole thing, Belgium can be Belgium, Germany can be Germany, only because America's America.
There has to be some adult oversight, even in the decline of Western civilization.
1-800-282-2882.
That wasn't exactly Little Mary Sunshine, was it?
What was it?
What was it, Bob was calling President Obama the Polyad adult?
I can use a bit more of the old polyad adult routine.
Yeah, okay.
By the way, last time I was doing my whole apocalyptic end of the world shtick sell-up now, head for the hills.
People wanted to name the date.
I think actually it's May the 23rd.
I think we figured that.
May the 23rd.
Anyway, we'll see how that works out.
Mark Snyder, sitting in for Rush of the EIB network.
We look more straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
Happy to start the week with you.
A one-man toxic asset that'll bring down the whole system.
That's me.
My own senator, Judd Gregg, has just said that he doesn't think these spending plans will leave America with a debt ratio equivalent to 80% of GDP.
And there are countries in the world that have that, and they're banana republics.
So we will have, the United States of America will have the same 80% of GDP debt ratio our children will have.
The same, they'll be in banana republic territory.
This is a terrible, terrible thing that we are doing to the economic engine of the world.
It's a tragedy to see it.
Let's go to Josh in Scottsborough, Alabama.
And you're on the rush limbo, show, Josh.
Hey, sir.
It's a pleasure talking with you.
I appreciate you taking my call.
I was going to call with a comment, maybe a question rather, about Mr. Geithner.
It seems to me like now it looks like Geithner was more or less appointed by Obama to be a scapegoat as this economic crisis continues to go for a downward spiral.
It looks to me like Obama has got a scapegoat now in Geithner to more or less point his finger at and say, hey, it's his fault.
Even though I appointed him, it's his fault now.
Yeah.
And he's just enough of a bipartisan figure that he can, when he scapegoats him, he can sort of stick it in a semi-way to Bush and the Republicans because he's got some connection with them.
You know, Tim Geithner has the air of the schnook mob accountant when you see him on TV.
The schnook mob accountant who winds up doing 30 years when the big Mafioso skates.
And I don't know whether that's something that Barack Obama learned from Chicago politics, just cook county business as usual.
But he does give off that air that he's being lined up.
And I think certainly he's the one nearest the exit door.
But I mean, at some point, Obama will earn this crisis.
I mean, if you look at his numbers, people are saying, well, look, Bush's history.
Bush is gone.
Dick Cheney's history.
Rumsfeld's history.
You can't just go on about all this stuff anymore.
It's your presidency.
Right.
It was easy for him the other day when I was listening to him on TV saying that, and it's been played on this broadcast several times, that Obama was going to take the blame.
You know, hey, you take the blame.
And then it immediately went from take the blame to come talk to me.
It seems like with each scenario, he kind of changes.
It's a different face from when he was in his campaign, throwing out those promises that he's yet to deliver on and that I think that he's not ever going to be able to deliver on.
It just seems like, you know, with Geithner, he's got an easy scapegoat now.
He can point his finger at him and walk away, and it'd be the same as what it's been since he's been in the presidency.
Yeah, Hillary Clinton, God bless her, actually got it right when she was asked about Obama's accomplishments.
And she said, well, he gave a good speech.
And that's right.
He gave a good speech.
But he isn't actually someone who's used to executive authority making decisions.
And this whole coldness that Rush was talking about, which I think is true and is fascinating, really, it's like he doesn't seem engaged by the issues in any way.
You would think Clinton, Clinton said something wacky and classically egocentric after September 11th.
He expressed a sort of wistful yearning that something like this had happened on his watch so that he could be a consequential president instead of being the sort of Janet Jackson Super Bowl entertainment between the Cold War and the new conflict.
He was the sort of novelty act with wardrobe malfunctions.
It was a trivial eight years.
And he expressed this sort of pining for the fact that he never got the opportunity to deal with a 9-11.
Well, you know, Obama has come into office at the time of the first shrinking of the global economy since 1945.
This is unprecedented, what he's dealing with.
It's the first crisis of globalization.
And yet he doesn't seem engaged by it.
It doesn't seem like boring to him.
You know, oh man, I got to, who can think about that stuff?
I got to get my makeup on for the Jay Leno show.
I mean, this is weird.
He just doesn't seem engaged by it.
And I think this is what is beginning to kind of slightly freak people out, that he is so, his cool, his cool is, which people thought meant rock star cool, is now like going into something like Frosty the Snowman cool.
I mean, this guy is like in the icebox.
He seems untouched by this stuff.
As I said at the beginning of the show, it's the big difference with Clinton.
You know, basically the message you get from Obama is, I don't feel your pain, and I don't care if you know it.
And there is nothing like the start of this presidency.
It's weird and unsettling, and it has elements of tragedy about it.
But now I'm being married.
It's like my little Berry Sunshine routine again.
I don't know.
Mark Stein sitting in for Rush on the, I gotta stop.
I gotta stop working up to these big apocalyptic doom-mongering things.
It's not tragedy.
We'll recover from it.
We'll crawl out from the rubble.
Some things will survive.
Cockroaches and Celine Deion albums.
There'll be something there underneath the rubble.
Don't worry about it.
More in a moment on the EIB network.
Mark Stein on the EIB network.
A rollicking start to the week.
Another trillion dollars down the hole.
That's grand news.
What's the thing after a trillion?
We've got to get used to the 12 zeros on the air now.
We've got to find the number that comes.
Is it a bazillion?
Is it a gazillion?
Didn't we have this before Caroline Kennedy's thing?
It's a cotillion, isn't it?
I think that's something.
Isn't that what isn't?
Whatever it is.
Anyway, it's a huge number, and we need to spend more.
You can never have enough zeros on the end.
Look, I've been reasonably semi-apocalyptic and actually often full-blown apocalyptic this last half hour.
And I don't want to leave on a kind of down note.
So I think it's important.
Let's get back to first principles.
This is what every citizen should remember.
You know, as President Reagan said, we are a nation that has a government, not the other way round.
Bahani Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Co. behave as if it's the other way round.
And so does President Obama.
It's not.
It's not the other way around.
We are a nation that has a government, not the other way round.
The nation pays for the government, not the other way round.
When I pay for Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd, not the other way around.
So I would appreciate it if these people would take a less destructive attitude to the wealth-creating class of this country.
And I would also say that the best way to get value for money is not to circulate these programs through Washington.
That South Carolina grade school actually teaches an important lesson.
There's no point if you've got peeling paint in your classrooms, don't turn to Washington.
You can imagine the cost of that paint job by the time it's been cycled through six government agencies and they've all taken the various markup for the bureaucrats involved.
The best way is to do it yourself.
That's the American way.
That's what Tocqueville saw when he came here 200 years ago.
Rush will be back tomorrow.
▲
Export Selection