Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
All of this is an attempt to get you to not turn off the radio.
Yes, here's the bad news.
Not only is Rush not here, he's gone all week.
Let's just get that out of the way right now.
He's gone all week.
But I want to hear, I know, I can't do anything about it.
I can only fill in for him.
He's gone all week.
It's that week.
I think he's gone this week all the time because I think I was here last year on this week, wasn't I?
I believe I was.
It's great to be back.
I'm the guy who actually comes into New York to do the program rather than sit at my home radio station and do it because I'm apparently enough of a prima donna that I'm able to get away with that.
I'm glad to be here.
I do have a few, I have done the show enough now that there are a handful of ditto heads who are now my fans, four, five, and they always ask me, when's the next time you're going to do the program?
Which is really presumptuous.
What do you want me to do?
Call up Rush and say, ah, Rush, when are you going to be leaving?
And could I fill in for you?
But they do seem to appreciate my doing the program.
So for those of you not aware, I have been doing my own program on MSNBC for the last six or seven months, and that's been occupying a lot of my time right now.
You don't know if I'm telling the truth about that, do you?
No one knows if that's true or not.
Does anyone watch MSNBC?
Do you know anyone in your life, you have met someone who's watched MSNBC?
I don't know anyone who watches it ever.
I could pull this off.
I could go two days claiming that I've got my show on MSNBC, and there wouldn't be anyone in Russia's audience who would know the wiser because no one listens to MSNBC or watches it.
I made that up.
I am not on MSNBC.
I do have a plan for today's program.
Later on today, we're going to be talking about the whole Sarah Palin story and getting into what's happening there and why she made the decision that she did.
I also want to try to put the situation in Honduras into context.
It's a big deal, and it's something that is relevant to all of us.
We'll deal with all of that a little bit later on.
I am going to get into the call by, I think, Joe Biden for another stimulus package.
We'll do that shortly.
But here's what I want to open with.
For those of you who did not hear the news, Robert McNamara died today, 93 years old.
I mean, this, perhaps more than anybody else, he may have defined what it was like to be an Eastern liberal Democrat in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
I mean, he was the guy that really was the personification of the best and brightest Halberstam's book.
The brilliant Ivy League educated guy came out of the automobile industry, tabbed by Kennedy to be the architect of American foreign policy, and completely screwed everything up.
I wasn't even aware if Robert McNamara was still alive.
He hasn't been talked about in a long time, ever since he apologized for the Vietnam War.
But there's something really appropriate about his passing being announced today, the same day that Barack Obama is in Russia talking about arms control, holding his news conference there.
It's the same thing.
It's like we're back in the 60s again.
Here we are with the Democrats trying to talk arms control with the Russians.
It's back to the future, only back to the past.
It's the same thing again.
The whole problem with the McNamara-Kennedy-Johnson approach was they thought they could work with the Soviet Union, but they had to deal with all these tiny little tin pot problems that we had around the world, like Vietnam.
They didn't know how to fight the Vietnam War.
They put all of our resources into Vietnam to fight the war badly.
And in the meantime, the real threat, Soviet expansionism, continued.
We lost the war in Vietnam, and we lost years in the Cold War, but this was the plan that we were given by the brilliant Ivy League-educated Eastern elitists by Robert McNamara and Dean Ross and all of these people.
They know what they were doing.
We were told this for 10 years in the 60s.
There's a plan.
They know what they're doing.
They're brilliant.
Over and over and over, we were hammered that.
And here I look at Barack Obama.
And for those of you who are catching the live broadcast, he just concluded a news conference in Russia with President Medvedev.
He's the Kendall that Putin trots out now to be the public face of Russia.
Putin still runs the show, but Medvedev's the president.
Obama was holding a news conference with him as they announced some deal to reduce the number of warheads and delivery systems that we have and they have and whatever.
You should see the hall they were in.
I put the chief of staff of the program in charge of something.
I asked him to find out where it was, and he thinks it was Catherine Hall or it might be the Hall of Arms.
Without regard to that, it's one of those halls that exists only in Russia.
The building goes probably 15 stories high.
It goes up and up and up and up.
There's statues everywhere.
Everything is gilded and it's gold and it's got all this absolute majesty of tyrants.
I'm telling you, Obama never looked more at home.
We're used to the Obama that can't speak without looking at the teleprompter.
We're used to the Obama who, in his news conferences in the United States, does all the uhs and errors and looks away and the begging for time.
The Obama that starts holding his hands together and getting nervous and wringing his hands.
I didn't see any of that.
He's here in this Russian hall standing next to the leader of Russia, a fellow tyrant, and he was completely at home.
He was comfortable there.
And what's he doing?
He's announcing a reduction in nuclear delivery systems with the Russians.
It's like a time warp.
Why are we worried about the Russians and their nukes?
Iran?
North Korea?
This guy, starting with Russia, he thinks he can go to Iran and do the same thing.
He thinks all he has to do is walk over there, meet the tyrant of the day in Iran, and say, hey, can't we reduce our nuclear warheads?
Why don't you get rid of your nukes?
I'll cut back on a few of mine.
Then he's going to go to North Korea, he thinks, and do the exact same thing.
It's this complete naivete that comes every time that we put these Eastern elitists in charge of anything in this country.
And it's the way that Obama wants to run our foreign policy.
It's the reason why he was so uncomfortable with the demonstrations in the streets of Iran.
He wants to deal with the Iranian tyrants.
He's not comfortable dealing with anyone who comes into power in a messy way.
Look at the Honduran situation and how he's cozied up to Hugo Chavez.
For Obama, this is another kindred spirit, a person who is establishing power and control.
I'm telling you, you watch this news conference between him and Medvedev, and you see a different Barack Obama.
A guy who's in a palace, a palace built on oppression of people for decades and decades and decades.
And this is where he felt comfortable.
I've got a few quotes here.
Our relations have drifted apart, shot clearly at W.
And then we are committed to leaving behind the rivalries of the past.
Such comfort.
We're going to work together.
We're going to work with the Russians.
And here's my favorite.
I trust President Medvedev.
Isn't that beautiful?
Our president trusts President Medvedev.
He trusts him.
So there's Medvedev nodding as he stands next to Obama.
What do you think Putin was doing as he's watching this?
Putin, who's back in the back room, the guy who holds the strings for Medvedev, I trust President Medvedev.
Putin had to be busting a gut.
We've got a president here that we can deal with.
This is our kind of president.
And I don't think President Bush's greatest hour was dealing with the Russians.
I think Bush made mistakes in thinking that he could deal with Putin and that he didn't understand that the Russians still are at their heart oppressors.
But Putin has to be looking at Obama as a guy that he can walk all over.
Let's give him a bone here.
Yeah, you can fly over Russia on the way to Afghanistan.
Let's give him another meaningless arms control deal.
Let's allow Obama to have his photo op here in Catherine Hall or whatever it is.
Is it Catherine Hall?
We think it might be Catherine Hall.
Named after Catherine the Great.
Hall of Arms, whichever one it was.
So the Russians figure that we'll give him this and he'll be happy.
He'll go back to the United States with his photo op feeling as though he's accomplished something.
We didn't accomplish anything today.
And thinking that the way of dealing with an ever-dangerous world is going over and being reasonable and having meetings and looking in the eye of some of the most savage people in the world is a prescription for failure.
This is the same Russian government that wants to slaughter and overrun Georgia.
It's the same Russian government that looks at the Baltic states and wants to reannex them.
It's the same Russian government that uses South Otethia as Ossetia as a pretext to expanding their empire.
That's what that government is all about.
And it's looking at the United States as the old useful idiot, the term that the communists have always applied to fellow travelers in the United States.
The way to deal with the world that we live in is to have its respect and the fear of it.
President Bush managed to keep a lid on a terribly difficult world.
The world of 9-11, the world of al-Qaeda, the world of Muslim extremism, the world of nuclear expansion in Iran, the world of North Korea.
And he did so primarily by letting the rest of the world know that you can't mess with the United States.
The approach that I saw today, President so proud to be in this majestic hall in Russia, standing next to a puppet leader,
that President Obama reminded me so much of the naivete of the Eastern elitists in the 60s who made the exact same mistakes and dug us into an absolute disaster that led to the foreign policy crises of the 70s that weren't solved until President Reagan came around in the 80s.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh on EIB.
This is a beautiful story.
Today's Wall Street Journal.
Vice President Joe Biden said the Obama administration, quote, misread how bad the economy was and didn't foresee unemployment levels nearing double digits.
In comments likely to intensify calls for the administration to do more to counter job losses, get the impression that this is going to be the first of many misread how bad the blank is statements.
Okay.
First of all, let us all once again thank President Obama for choosing Joe Biden to be Vice President of the United States.
Joe Biden is going to give us endless material.
Joe Biden is unwittingly going to speak the truth even when he's trying not to speak the truth.
This beautiful stuff.
So we're now getting an acknowledgement that they trod Biden out to say, and notice that this statement comes from Biden when Obama is literally half a world away.
He's on the other side of the world.
That they misread how bad the economy was and they didn't foresee unemployment levels nearing double digits.
Comments likely to intensify calls for the administration to do more to counter job losses.
Here's what that is.
Here comes the next stimulus.
Well, we didn't think it was this bad.
It would be even worse had we not passed stimulus.
But it's worse than we thought.
And we need more stimulus.
No, we don't.
We can't have another stimulus.
The money's all gone.
They blew it.
It was Rahm Emanuel who said a crisis is too good to waste or whatever it was, he said.
And they wasted the stimulus.
Some conservatives thought stimulus was a good idea.
Some didn't.
I don't much like the idea of it.
It was debated.
Do we need to throw federal money into the American economy in order to turn things around, to put people back to work?
The problem with this is, is this wasn't really stimulus.
This was simply more democratic social spending on all the glop that they care about.
And they used the economic downturn as the pretext to do it.
Doing it again won't do any good.
The reason stimulus didn't work is we didn't spend any of the money on anything that would put anyone to work.
All of this stuff was thrown into the existing social service infrastructure.
Expand the grant for this.
Provide funding for that.
One more liberal social program after another, after another, after another.
We put a lot of it into existing public schools.
All of it was aimed at keeping rolling an already existing liberal government gravy train.
None of it put anybody to work.
If you wanted stimulus to actually create jobs, what you needed to do is go out and find all sorts of things that needed to be done today.
Not social programs, not let's hold someone's hand so they become a better person, not more family planning, not any of that.
Sewers, bridges, roads, stuff like that.
Now, again, I'm not an advocate of that.
I don't believe in make-work projects, just spending money for the sake of spending money.
But if you were going to do it, you needed to find projects that would put people who aren't working now to work.
I'll use the example of a major bridge project.
You do a major bridge project, you're going to put to work all the people who are going to work on the bridge.
You're going to put to work all the people who are involved in supplying all the ironwork.
You're going to put to work all of the truckers that are going to be bringing the materials in.
You're going to be putting to work the engineers that are going to design the project.
And it will all happen now.
While that might simply be another budget-busting program that expands the deficit, you at least get the upside that there would be people who would be working on it now.
Instead, we wasted all of this.
And what we've done is we've taken the federal debt and the annual deficit to levels that this country has never seen.
You can't do another one.
The money's all gone.
Especially when they're talking about nationalizing health care and creating massive taxes to cap and trade.
You can't just keep snapping your fingers and say, okay, we'll spend our way out of this.
Had they the first time around done stimulus correctly, we might not have the economic situation that we're in right now.
But instead, we have the worst of both worlds.
We've blown the deficit up without doing anything to stimulate anything, and now they want to turn around and get another one.
Well, they don't get a do-over.
There is no mulligan here.
They blew it by putting all the money into the same garbage that they've been shilling for all along.
And it didn't do anything to create jobs.
There are no new jobs from stimulus.
We're in the same rut that we're in when President Obama took office.
1-800-282-2882 is the telephone number at EIB.
To Albany and Mike, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
I'm great.
Thank you.
Good.
While you're on the subject of the administration misreading, I don't know if you saw the same story.
One was AP and one was Washington Post.
They also, in the exact same words, administration misread situation in Honduras.
We're going to get nothing but misreadings for the next four years.
Well, we didn't see this.
We didn't see that coming.
We didn't see the next thing coming.
That's going to be the excuse then to get them to be able to change policy and do whatever it was that they intended to do in the first place.
When you take a look at the situation that we have with the economy right now, everybody knew what was happening.
The financial markets melted down late last year.
The housing market melted down.
The economy therefore went into a downturn and unemployment started.
But the fact of the matter is we have higher unemployment now than we did when the stimulus package was passed.
Can you come up with anything that's a bigger failure than that?
The very thing that the stimulus was supposed to do, stop the rise in unemployment and get people back to work.
And they were pretty clear about what the consequences were.
Yes, we're going to expand the deficit in the short term in an attempt to get the economy to recover by putting people back to work.
Well, what happened was we expanded the deficit, but we haven't put anybody back to work because all of this money was put into existing programs for people who already have jobs, much of it three, five, seven, nine, eleven-year programs.
It will take forever to spend all of that money.
We've committed it now.
We've expanded the deficit, but we put no one back to work.
And now they want to do it again?
No way is what I say.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
A lot of this stimulus stuff is pretty easy to understand.
Let's imagine I was a really rich guy and I decided I wanted to do something about the economy.
What would have a greater effect?
Me walking around to a bunch of beggars on the street and giving them each $5,000 or me going around, opening up a business, putting up a Help Wanted sign and hiring 50 people.
Everybody knows the answer to that.
The people who were hired would be paying taxes.
They would now have money that they could spend.
My business would be presumably making or creating something.
If I just give the money to the beggars on the street, they're going to keep begging and nothing really is going to change.
It's possible that they might spend the money and get it into the economy, but there's nothing permanent that changes here.
I'm going to quote from the same Wall Street Journal article that I was quoting before.
This is Lawrence Mischel.
He's a lefty, president of the Economic Policy Institute, left-leaning Washington think tank.
They're in a buying because the recovery package is just starting to generate positive benefits, where, but to the extent we know something about the future, unemployment is too high and is going to stay high for a long period.
When we hit 10% unemployment, which we will within months, even those who don't lose a job will be affected by the squeeze on wage growth furloughs and the cutbacks in retirement plans.
All of that is true, but it's not an excuse to go out and simply start throwing more money around from the government.
What we need is more money to be generated from the private sector rather than be thrown top-down from Washington because the money being thrown top-down from Washington is just our own.
They can only produce money by raising taxes or by doing even more of the borrowing that they're already doing.
What we have got to do is something that gets the private sector to start investing and hiring people again.
And that means no capping and trading.
It means not socializing health care.
And it certainly means not spending all sorts of money on government employees doing more government work, which was all the first stimulus ever really was.
Let's go to the phones in St. George, Utah.
Jeremy, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hello, Mark.
Thanks for taking my calling.
You're doing a great job filling in for Rush.
Thanks.
I, you know, you basically said what I had in mind.
These bailouts that started, what, last spring with the Bush administration and continuing up until now, it's like, just like you said, government doesn't create any wealth.
We're just taking water out of a tub from one end of the tub, and geez, we're putting it into the other thinking, hey, this is going to solve our problems.
And at the same time, with inflation and with the interest we're going to be paying on this debt, it's like we also have a tub that leaks.
Well, and it's worse so than what you say because we're not just taking it from one tub to the other.
So much of the stimulus was money that was back-ended.
Create a three-year program, a five-year program, a seven-year program, and provide the funding for it that you have a lot of this money wouldn't even be getting into the economy for years.
You're not hiring any new people when you're simply expanding work for an agency that's already out there.
And when you provide this long-term funding for the program, it means that you're not going to get any kind of an impact now, which is why I, while I do not support all this brick-and-mortar pork barrel stuff that you could do, at least if you did that, there'd be a reaction immediately.
You build a sports stadium, and again, I'm not advocating that.
You would at least have people buying materials and going to work and doing something.
But they didn't even do that right.
They didn't even waste money correctly.
They managed to waste the money without any benefit at all because so much of it went into satisfying their special interest.
Back in the community that I'm in from Milwaukee, we've got a suburb that was given a grant under the stimulus program for energy conservation.
They could not figure out how to spend the money.
So they talked about putting solar panels on top of one of the public works buildings because hopefully that would reduce their carbon footprint.
They ended up not doing it.
But the very fact that they had to think about what to do with that money proves that the stimulus isn't stimulating anything.
Let's suppose they had done it.
Okay, they buy the solar panels.
Somebody takes two days to put them in there.
We're done.
What got stimulated?
What job was created?
What changed in our economy?
Nothing.
But that's what they did with this stimulus plan.
You had all these Democrats in Congress and the president deciding which one of their special interests they could make happy.
We've got to make the Greens happy.
We've got to make the teachers' unions happy.
We've got to make AFSME happy.
They were busy making all of those people who still have jobs because they're in the government, not the private sector, happy.
And we did nothing to encourage the only known and proven job maker we have, which is corporate America, small business, medium business, and large business.
We did nothing to improve the economy or give them rewards for investing in themselves.
And if they want to do this the second time around, all they're going to end up doing is more of the same.
And we can't let them do it because there's no money left.
If the first stimulus had been small and they had wasted it, you could make the argument that, well, we can still blow up the budget deficit for this year.
We've still got a year left.
And now let's do it the right way.
The problem was the first porkulus was so enormous that the only way you can do another one would be to simply make a mockery of the value of the dollar, print so much money, expand our debt to the point that we're just a third world nation.
They don't get a second chance here.
The fact that they're talking about a second stimulus is an acknowledgement that the first one didn't work.
Thank you, Jeremy.
To Rick in Fulda, Minnesota, you're on the Russian Limbaugh Program.
Hey, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Thank you.
Yeah, I was just going to say about stimulus and kind of the cap and trade thing.
I work for a utility in the Midwest here.
If you're from Wisconsin, you probably know what it is.
But we were going to build a coal-fired power plant, and it took us probably two, three years to get all the permits and stuff to do it.
And it was going to be about $1.5 billion to build this thing.
And you think of all the jobs that would have been created just to build it, let alone to run it after it was built.
And we got the approvals, I think it was right around the election time, but then we elected not to build it.
Not to build it, because cap and trade and the implication of it, if it's a coal plant, would be that you'd be taxed to death and you would kill the business climate in your area if you did it.
This is the point that I'm making here.
If you want to put people to work, you've got to encourage businesses to invest and spend.
And that means you've got to let those businesses know, if you invest and spend, we're going to let you make profits.
Because no business is going to do this out of being a good citizen.
Businesses spend money when they think they can make more.
But we've had nothing but an attack for the last, really, since July of last year when Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
We've had nothing but an attack on every private sector industry that's out there.
They went after the drug companies.
They've gone after the defense contractors.
They went after to some extent good the financial sector.
They've gone after everybody.
And they've tried to say that corporate profits are a terrible and evil thing.
Well, the only way you're going to turn the economy around is with corporate profits because government can't do it.
Government can hire all the people it wants to sit around and fill in circles and fill in squares and pretend to be doing work, but it doesn't create anything.
It doesn't make anything.
You've got to allow the private sector to go out and do things.
And with cap and trade looming over their heads, they're not going to do it.
They've got to give up on this notion of stimulus and do something to start getting out of the way of the economy.
Thank you for the call, Rick.
Let's go to Lansing, Michigan, another government town.
Joe, it's your turn on the Russian Limbaugh program.
Hey, good afternoon, Mark.
Great job, everybody.
Thank you.
Just a couple of comments.
To all the people that, and I know everybody's heart goes out to them that have lost their jobs over the past six months or so, and probably those that will lose them.
I would just like them to ask themselves if they were in that position when Bush was president.
I mean, you know, the Obama campaign promise originally was his economic policies were going to create 4 million jobs.
And then he changed it to SABER, create 4 million.
It's basically done neither.
It hasn't done anything.
In fact, the economy is getting worse, at least in terms of employment.
There are some things that have started to recover a little bit.
The companies that do business internationally are doing a little bit better because the rest of the world is starting to recover.
I mean, China's booming again, partly because they're propping up a lot of their own industries, but China's roaring ahead.
The price of oil has gone up, meaning that there's some economic activity somewhere.
But in the United States, there's been almost nothing.
I'm not going to be an apologist for President Bush and say that Obama didn't inherit economic problems.
He did.
What happened in housing and what happened in finance, largely because of Democratic meddling in those markets, that did create an economy that was on the downturn.
But Obama came in with a blank check.
He had all sorts of public goodwill.
He had overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Senate and the House.
He had the ability to pass anything he want, and he went big.
This stimulus package was enormous.
It was the biggest single spending bill in American history.
And it didn't do anything.
It hasn't changed anything because almost none of the money has gone into the private sector.
You track these dollars in whatever community you're in, you're not going to find them.
Lansing, Michigan, wherever.
Go to Atlanta, Georgia.
Try to find the stimulus dollars.
Try to find where that money is.
Just walk around and say, did you get anything?
Did you get anything?
Find a business that got money from this.
Find a business that got a contract.
Find anything that changed anywhere.
And all you're going to find is that the existing social service agencies that are out there putting together make-work programs, doing good things in their communities, they got another grand for this and somebody else got another study for that.
And we took a train line and added a couple of miles to it.
That's all this thing was.
It didn't change anything.
So what we've done is we've blown this huge pot of money, which is our future.
We've blown it without creating any jobs.
And now they're turning around and saying they want more stimulus with what?
Are they going to raise taxes for stimulus too?
If so, what are you stimulating?
Let's just take even more money from people who already have jobs and put it back into this thing to stimulate to create new jobs.
You're just circling money around.
They are lost here.
They were the ones who said stimulus would work.
It's not working.
So they're doing what liberals always do.
Whenever a liberal program fails, what they want to do is do more of the thing that has failed.
Any of you who have a light rail system in your community can vouch for this.
You build the light rail system, nobody rides the train.
Well, it's because it doesn't go anywhere.
So we add another route onto the land.
Well, it's still not going enough places.
The next thing you know, the train is going around all over the place.
It costs a fortune, but nobody's ever riding the train.
Look at the amount of money we've spent to fight poverty.
For 50 years, we have been throwing a fortune to fight poverty in the cities, and it hasn't done any good.
And the argument that we keep coming back with, we've got to spend more.
Look at urban public schools.
We've spent a fortune on urban education.
No results.
Thing gets worse.
Urban schools worse than ever right now.
We've got to spend more.
On and on it goes, and they're going to use stimulus in the same way.
If they could prove that they were creating jobs, they'd have an argument to make here.
They aren't creating any jobs, and this time around, we've got to say no rather than allow them to take the national future and spend it away.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush.
One of the beautiful things about being a conservative is watching what happens when liberals start to realize that their stuff isn't working.
That's when they start to regroup and change things.
Today's New York Times headline: Job retraining may fall short of high hopes.
For the second time in three years, Mike Hutchins, a laid-off automotive engineer, is preparing to enroll in job retraining at a local community college, this time to become a civil engineering technician, but he has no idea if he has chosen the right path.
I'm fumbling around in the dark, said Mr. Hutchins, 58.
The industry of Mr. Hutchins worked for 25 years has shriveled.
Tens of thousands of laid-off workers like Mr. Hutchins have turned to retraining as a lifeline.
Yet, for all the popularity of these government-finance programs, there are questions about whether they actually work.
Even as President Obama's stimulus plan directs $1.4 billion more to retraining and other services for people who have lost their jobs.
But let's think about that for a minute.
Let's take a look at the portion of stimulus that was put into retraining, and retraining sounds so good.
We'll take displaced workers and give them the training necessary to get into a line of work that has more of a future.
The problem is, is that that money is being spent on simply hiring more teachers or expanding a program at a community college that was already there.
In the interim, nothing happens.
Furthermore, the government officials that are running these retraining programs have no idea what's going on in the private sector.
They're retraining people for jobs that existed in the 1970s.
What this fella needs to do is somehow get out there in the workforce and find something on his own, find a startup company, find a business that has a chance of making money, the very kinds of businesses that Barack Obama wants to cap and trade to death and tax to death.
Continuing in this story, in a little notice study, the Labor Department released several months ago found that the benefits of the biggest federal job training program were small or non-existent for laid-off workers.
It showed little difference in earnings and the chances of being rehired between laid-off people who had been retrained and those who had not.
Okay, so we just find it in today's New York Times: retraining doesn't work.
So let's expand it and let's do more of it.
Let's do another stimulus.
Let's have more retraining because the newer and bigger and better retraining will work even though the older retraining didn't work.
My name is Mark Belling and I'm sitting in for rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
Want to stimulate the economy?
I can do it right now.
Let's give grants to oil companies that drill here in the United States.
They'll go crazy.
They'll put up oil rigs all over the place.
Instead of throwing up all these roadblocks for them, they'll move forward.
They'll have an incentive to do it.
Let's encourage companies to build more coal plants so we can become energy independent.
They'll be putting people to work instantly.
The problem is, is that the liberals don't want people doing the very jobs that we need in order to turn the economy around.
John in Chicago, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark.
You're doing a great job.
Thank you.
I'm not a Republican or a Democrat.
I'm a conservative.
And I feel that Barack Obama has done more damage than Pearl Harbor and 9-11 put together.
He is taxing all the corporations out of this country.
is putting millions and millions of people out of work.
Wouldn't it be better to put more people to work with lower taxes, paying taxes, than putting all these people out of work paying higher taxes?
This doesn't make any sense.
If we hadn't done any stimulus at all, even if we hadn't bailed out the financial institutions that were in trouble, if we hadn't taken over General Motors and Chrysler, if we had done none of those things, if we simply said for two years, we're going to lower the corporate income tax to almost nothing and we're going to lower the capital gains tax,
you would have seen entrepreneurs take advantage of the fact that there are all sorts of opportunities out there in the economy and take risks and put people to work.
But that's anathema to this administration and to its supporters.
They don't like businesses.
They don't like the oil companies.
They don't like the drug companies.
They don't really like the car companies because they build those big gas guzzlers.
What they like are people who work for social service agencies, for nonprofits, and work for the government.
So we threw all the money into that, created nothing, did nothing but backload a lot of spending that isn't going to occur for a few years and put no one back to work.
And now that it hasn't worked, they want to do more of it.