All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 3, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
September 3, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yes, America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in an overseas contingency operation that snuck across the border despite Janet Napolitano.
Walder E. Williams will be here tomorrow and Rush returns next week.
At the end of the first hour, Kevin was talking about, Kevin from Columbus, Ohio said that this is the greatest country in the world so that if we do a government healthcare system, it'll be the greatest government healthcare system ever known to man.
I think he's missing the point there.
I believe this is the greatest country in the world and I believe in American exceptionalism.
But why is America exceptional?
It's exceptional because as Tocqueville says somewhere 200 years ago, the difference between the people he observed back in Europe and an American is that when an American has a problem, he doesn't wait for the state to do something about it.
He solves it for himself.
He fixes it himself.
This is a great country, the greatest country, because the government doesn't do it, because you do it.
And because you do it, we have a self-reliant citizenry that is more commercially dynamic, more culturally dynamic, that has become the sole superpower on the face of the earth, simply because it's not a statist morass in the way so many other countries are.
When the government does do it, it's just as lousy as when any government does it.
In fact, it's even worse because it's so un-American.
I mean, if I want to ride on a government railway system, I'd rather ride French railways than Amtrak, because at least in France, when the government does it, that's like the core activity, so they're better at it.
When the government does it here, it's worse than other government systems.
When the government does it here, you get Amtrak, or you get those lousy VA hospitals that are such a disgrace to America's veterans and which are apparently going to be the model now for all hospitals under this new system.
This is not a society where the government intrudes into spheres of activities that are best left to the individual.
And so if Kevin really does believe this is the greatest country in the world, then he should understand exactly why it's the greatest country in the world.
I mentioned earlier this Whole Foods boycott.
I don't know whether you've been following this, but the CEO of Whole Foods, I'm not up to speed on Whole Foods because they don't have any in the entire state of New Hampshire.
And I'm not sure they have any in any of the in Maine or Vermont either, which are the two states that border me.
So it's like it's a Whole Foods-free zone there.
So I'm not, that's why I always like coming down to New York to do the Rush show because I can tank up on arugula and these other exotic things that I can't get.
But if you drive, I don't know if you've ever driven north out of Boston on I 93, but they got a big sign just before you get to New Hampshire saying last arugula before the border.
So it's not something I'm familiar with.
So I've never been in a Whole Foods, but apparently HR just flaunting his credentials.
I believe he actually, I think he said he bought a kumquat or something in a Whole Foods.
So he knows he knows he's familiar with the whole Whole Foods, the whole Whole Foods ambience.
Anyway, the CEO of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal opposing President Obama's healthcare reform ideas, not in any crazy, insane right-wing way, but actually in a sort of rather practical sense, talking about his own experience with his employees.
And immediately the left went bananas, organic bananas, and decided they were going to boycott Whole Foods.
So, like the whole the LA Times has got a piece today by Megan Dawn going on about the Prius driving gay marriage supporting organic crazed liberals boycotting Whole Foods.
I mentioned it at the beginning of the show: that the Whole Foods crowd, your whole moveon.org, your daily cost, have said, We're out of here, we're going to Lardbutt, Burger, we're going to chow down there, and to hell with Whole Foods.
And the conservatives, the nationwide Tea Party Coalition, has now kicked off what they call a bycot in Dallas and St. Louis, where they're asking consumers, they're asking all us knuckle-dragging conservatives who've never been in a whole, we wouldn't know a kumquat if it fell on our head.
And what is a kumquat, actually?
Animal, mineral, or vegetable HR.
You were pretending to be Mr. Sophisticate.
Right, right.
A small fruit.
Yeah, there's lots of those in Whole Foods.
Anyway, so we've established what a kumquat is now.
Anyway, the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition is organizing what they call a bycott, a bycott for kumquats, where you in Dallas and St. Louis to show your support for this guy.
He's in big trouble, his lefty pals.
He's done, it's the same thing as happened to Hillary when she stuck in the game against Obama.
It's the same thing that happened to Geraldine Ferraro when she questioned Obama's credentials.
The left turns on its own with a terrific ferocity.
And so they're now saying, I don't care, I like the Chilean sea bass on Papillot, but I'm not getting it at Whole Foods.
I'm out of there.
And they don't want to know.
And as somebody wrote on a conservative blog, if the brainwashed hemp-smoking zombies of the left stop shopping there, we conservatives can fill that market hole.
And a left-wing blogger responded, Once you conservatives walk into the place and don't see Twinkies, you'll waddle on out.
So we £300 conservatives, sated on Twinkies, are now clogging up the aisles at Whole Foods, looking for where the Twinkie section is, and just finding these little small fruits everywhere you look.
Small fruits.
So it's like 300-pound conservatives chowing down on Twinkies and small fruits clogging up the aisle at Whole Foods.
But the lesson here, the lesson here is very interesting because what they object to about the CEO of Whole Foods is that he's found a free market solution to healthcare.
In other words, he doesn't need, he doesn't really need Obama to impose a healthcare plan for 300 million people from Maine to Hawaii because just leaving it to him and he's worked out what's good for him and good for his employees.
And the left loathes that.
The left likes the one-size-fits-all solution that applies across the fruited plane.
The kumquatted plane?
Would that be is that what?
They like the one-size-fits-all solution across the kumquatted plane.
And that is why they cannot tolerate dissent like this from the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey.
And I think that's actually what we need here.
We don't need a centralized system.
We need a thousand flowers to bloom.
We need a healthcare system that is restored as close as possible to market conditions.
For that, you don't, the key thing to doing that would be ending, would be enabling portability across state lines.
It's ridiculous that there should be more restrictions on taking your health care from one place to another than there is in importing some other, some entirely peripheral product in your life from Bangladesh or from China.
So I think that simply because he proposed, he's not a right-wing guy, he's not a conservative guy, I doubt he's ever voted Republican in his life, but he has come up with a situation that works for him and his company without any government interference, and the left can't stand it.
The left can't stand it.
And when I say, by the way, a one-size-fits-all solution, that doesn't mean that our rulers are going to be enjoying the same kind of health care that you get once the government health care system's in place.
It'll be like it is in Cuba or in Canada or anywhere else, where if you're like a big shot cabinet minister, you'll be able to access a higher level of health care faster than just Joe Schmo in the street.
And if you want to get a good idea of how that's going to work, then you should look at this situation with Charlie Wrangell.
He's the guy who basically presides over the tax code in Congress.
And as you know, he's run into certain difficulties with his own personal tax situation.
He had a vacation home in the Dominican Republic that he was renting out, and he accidentally forgot to declare tons of income on it.
But apparently, his forgetfulness is contagious, the New York Post reports, because two of his top aides are among a dozen highly paid staffers on the powerful Tax Writing Ways and Means Committee who have filed a flurry of amendments correcting their financial disclosure statements since 2002.
Since 2002, that's seven years ago.
Jim Cappell, the chief of staff for Charlie Wrangell's personal office, failed to file any such statements for six years.
On the afternoon of July 14th, he filed five years' worth of delinquent reports.
Now, these are the fellows who write tax policy in the United States.
The people who write a tax policy preside over the tax code.
They don't observe it.
They do not observe it.
Charlie Wrangell announced, whatever it was, the other day, that he wants to crack down on tax cheats.
Why doesn't he start with himself?
Essentially, the IRS is giving him a pass on failure to report something like $150,000 in rental income on, this isn't on his Dominican Republic rental property, but on a couple of other properties he's got in the District of Columbia that he somehow, a lifetime in public service, has somehow enabled this guy to own properties in multiple jurisdictions across the Western Hemisphere.
And I guess when you own that many properties and you're doing the turbo tax thing where it says, do you own any other properties, check yes or no, I guess it's easy to forget if you own, you know, three, five, seven, nine different properties here, there, you know, in Washington, D.C., the Dominican Republic.
Who knows whether you own, is it seven, eight, nine?
What's it up to now?
Isn't it easier just to check, no, I don't own any vacation properties, no rental properties, and just get that whole thing out of the way.
So essentially, Charlie Wrangell reserves the right to crack down on you if you were to answer that question uncorrectly when you're doing the turbo tax thing in April.
But he doesn't feel any obligation, and nor does the IRS, in fact, feel any obligation to punish him for failing to answer that question himself.
And this is what we would be heading for towards in healthcare too.
We would be having a two-tier system in which our rulers impose regulations and rules on us that they themselves do not follow.
This Charlie Wrangell thing is significant in the way that the Timothy Geithner thing was significant.
The Timothy Geithner thing, his excuse was basically, look, it's all too complicated.
Well, who can follow this?
And so they said, yeah, that sounds plausible.
We'll make you Treasury Secretary.
Now, if it is all too complicated, which I happen to think it is, the answer to that is to say, no, don't just give a pass to the Treasury Secretary.
Give a pass to all of us by simplifying the tax code.
If Charlie Wrangell is as virtuous and his chief of staff and his other aides, none of whom can apparently fill in a tax return as reliably as a waitress who has a part-time cleaning job on the side, the answer there is to say the Charlie Wrangell approach to taxation should apply to all of us.
If Charlie Wrangell doesn't think any of his multiple rental properties are any business of the federal government, we should all get that.
We should all be given that privilege.
But we're embarking on a very dangerous, taking very dangerous steps here towards a world in which a privileged lifetime ruling class, and it is worth asking, by the way, how a guy like Charlie Wrangell on a congressman's salary manages to accumulate quite so many, quite as many properties as it slipped his mind how he acquired most profits.
And it's amazing what a lifetime, you know, at the time of his overthrow, Saddam Hussein was, I think, the fourth wealthiest man on the planet.
This is a guy who's been in public service in Iraq since 1962 or whatever it was.
And it's impressive to me that evidently being Charlie Wrangell at a congressman in New York is almost as lucrative.
A lifetime in public service in New York is almost as lucrative as a lifetime of public service in Iraq.
I think that's very impressive.
But the point is, we should all get the Timothy Geithner, Charlie Wrangell thing.
If we take their stories at face value, as the IRS apparently is doing, that these are all innocent mistakes, then the lesson from that is that we should all be entitled to the Geithner-Wrangel pass.
The alternative is a world in which there is one set of rules for the rulers, and the rest of the time they impose ever greater restrictions, ever greater penalties, ever greater regulations on us, their subjects.
And at that point, the whole 1776 thing is a waste of time because you might as well go back to King George III and the window tax and all the rest of it.
It wasn't as onerous as what Charlie Wrangell's got in mind for you.
Lots more straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Walter Williams here tomorrow from the Miami Herald, from the Miami Herald.
A slice of $7.5 million in federal stimulus money is being offered to help homeless sex offenders and predators living under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami to cover rent, housing, and utilities.
I didn't know they were living there.
Apparently, it's like Sex Offender Central.
If you're looking, if you're in the Greater Miami area and you're looking for a sex offender, they're all under the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
I mean, it's great, isn't it?
If you're Julia Tuttle, they name this causeway after you, and it becomes a home for sex offenders.
As I understand the story, one reason why we need to spend stimulus dollars on housing sex offenders is because everybody's passed these laws now saying you can't have sex offenders within so many yards of a school.
So the pool of available housing for sex offenders is very limited unless they all move in to John Edwards' big fancy pad with its like fantastic long driveway.
You need a driveway John Edwards length to be basically to be that far from a school house anywhere in America.
So we're spending, we're going to spend all the federal dollars now to rehouse the sex offenders under the Julia Tuttle Causeway.
Going back to this Charlie Wrangell story, all the stuff he hasn't paid taxes, he neglected to disclose a checking account with the Congressional Federal Credit Unit, one with Merrill Lynch, each valued between a quarter and half a million dollars, tens of thousands of dollars he's earning from dividends, and the money made from the sale of a Harlem townhouse.
Also, the below-market rents on four Harlem apartments, four Harlem apartments.
He's got two properties in D.C., failing to report income from a Florida condominium sale and failing to pay taxes on a home in the Dominican Republic.
He basically, as far as I can tell from his turbo-tax income tax return, he basically filled out the name and address and then cut to the do you have any more to disclose question and was then out of here.
We'd all love a tax return like that.
That's like the one-page tax return that all civilized societies should have.
But the point I was making is that amazingly, this congressman of modest means has not only got four apartments in Harlem, he's got a Florida condominium, he's got a home in the Dominican Republic, he's got two properties in Washington, D.C.
Why couldn't, as he has somehow become one of the biggest property owners in the land, why couldn't we house all the sex offenders under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami in Charlie Wrangell's rental properties and solve two birds with one stone?
Basically, it doesn't make any difference to the IRS because whatever they'd be paying him in rent, he wouldn't declare anyhow.
So there would be, it'd be a net wash in terms of the federal treasury.
But it gets absolutely to the heart of what it means to be a free citizen in a democratic republic.
The minimum thing you demand of such a republic is that the rulers live by the same laws they impose on the rest of us.
And right now, Charlie Wrangell is the poster child for a man who looks at office basically as a giant cash cow and as someone who imposes laws on you and me, the little people, but that he does not himself have to live by.
And that is fundamentally un-American.
Needless to say, he said that criticism of Obama's health care policy is racist and no doubt complaining that he didn't declare pay taxes on his vacation home in the Dominican Republic and his two properties in Washington, D.C. and his four Harlem apartments and all the rest of it.
No doubt that's also racist too.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein in for Rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, great to be with you.
The terrific Dr. Walter E. Williams returns to the EIB microphone tomorrow, and Rush will be back all next week.
Let's go to Stephen in Boulder, Colorado.
Stephen, thanks for waiting.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, Mark, how are you doing today?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Good.
I had two high school students, so I was sort of interested in the president's back-to-school message.
I went to the local Boulder Valley superintendent's office to find out about it, and they steered me to the whitehouse.gov website.
Right.
Okay, on the whitehouse.gov website, there's a section called Classroom Engagement Resources, and it says menu of classroom activities for students to stimulate discussion on the importance of education in students' lives.
There's two versions, one from K to sixth grade, one from seven to twelve.
Now, what bothered me is the seven to twelve.
These high school students are going to be voters in three years.
In the document, which is four pages, there's a section called After the Seech, and it has nine bullet points for a guided discussion.
Not one of the bullet points asks how you're going to improve your grades or how you're going to do better in school, but they do ask silly things like, what are the three most important words in the speech?
Rank them.
What are the three most important words in Obama's speech?
And you have to put them in order.
Is our children learning, as the former president would have said.
So the test here, the test is you name the three most important words in Obama's speech, but it's not that simple.
You've got to break them up.
So like if you think the three most important words in his speech are, that's all folks, you have to say whether folks is more important than that or whether all, which you did have in number three position, has come through in the swimsuit round and actually should be number one.
That's the exercise, is it?
Absolutely.
I mean, this is polling the students.
There's another one.
Suppose President Obama were to give another speech.
To whom would he speak?
Why?
And what would the president say?
Aren't these polls?
That's advice.
That's right.
That's a Frank Luntz focus group.
People would pay good money for that.
So what they're basically doing, by the way, is this for the K6 or the 712?
These are 7-12.
Right.
This is the 7-12, and it's interesting.
The 7-12 is a four-page document where the K6 is only two.
Right.
So he's now said, as you say, these people are going to be in the voting booths either in the 2010 election or 2012.
So he's prepping them now.
He's saying, what are the three most important words in the speech?
Which is a toughie because it's like easy.
Number one, hope, number two, change.
What's Obama's third word?
Who knows?
Yeah, more, no, a government option.
That doesn't play so well.
But the idea is that you have to rank these words and then recommend what Obama should say in his next speech, and then he'll swing by your classroom and say it to you, basically.
That is the most preposterous thing I've ever heard.
I mean, you know, I was mentioning, I mentioned back at the top of the show that I'd been in these schoolhouses in Iraq where they'd just taken down all the big portraits of Saddam that had been in every classroom.
And I remember this was in Ramadi, At a schoolhouse in Ramadi, going in there, and a little kid showing me his book.
And the school book was like full of the personality cult of Saddam Hussein.
It was interesting.
He'd done what all like seven-year-old, nine-year-olds, whatever he was, done, what I did at that age.
He'd done little doodles and scribbles in the margin and defaced, he'd done moustaches on people's faces and everything.
The one thing that was undefaced in that book were all the pictures of Saddam, of Saddam Hussein.
A school principal had on his desk a big stack of frames where he'd had to take, he'd take, he'd done what the debathification thing, he'd taken down all the portraits of Saddam, and he had this big pile of empty frames on the desk stacked up on his desk and nothing to put in them.
And I was shown a first-grade reader in Iraq.
They have these fellows who are like, I guess, I don't know, what were they called here?
Dick and Jane in America, fun with Dick and Jane or whatever it was.
They were called Hassan and Amal in the Iraqi ones.
And they explained the benefits of an Iraqi education and why Iraqi education was important.
And I wrote down this one section from it.
It's like, oh, come, Hassan, says Amal.
Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, O beloved Saddam.
And Hassan replies, I come, Amal.
I come in a hurry to chant, O Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.
Now, I'm sure there were a few misgivings when they said Saddam Hussein originally proposed: well, look, it's not going to be a partisan thing.
I'm just going to generally encourage the kids to get fired up about education.
But where it ends in the conflation of the state and the leader, I think is just entirely improper in a civilized, advanced society.
There have been 44 presidents of the United States.
This is the first one who feels the need to insert himself into grade school classrooms and then invite children to pick the three most important words from his words from his speeches.
There is simply no need for this.
The idea that this is educative value, that somehow the deadbeat at the back, the leader of the pack who's lying there at the back of the class sprawled there in his Marlon Brando leather jacket, singing how he's proud to be a juvenile delinquent, is suddenly going to be inspired by being invited to pick his three favorite words in the president's speech is completely preposterous.
We should be teaching our children history, we should be teaching them languages, we should be teaching them science, we should not be teaching them to deconstruct President Obama's speech.
What's the point?
He'll be giving another one 20 minutes later.
That's all he does.
That's all he does.
He doesn't need, why doesn't he ask the kids if he's going to insert himself into every grade school classroom?
Why doesn't he ask the kids, hey, hey, kids, what would you like me to do apart from give speeches?
Why doesn't he try that?
What could I do?
What speech would you like me not to give?
What speech have you heard all before?
What words have you heard in every single Obama speech since I first appeared on the national scene?
How many times do you think I should use the word hope in my next speech?
These would all be lessons of enormous educative value.
This is what we should be teaching our school children.
What we have here is something that is not, obviously, I'm not saying, I'm not comparing President Obama to Saddam Hussein, but I am saying that the cult of personality at grade school level is a phenomenon of non-functioning, non-democratic, non-free societies, and it should have no place here.
Look, I've got nothing against the I don't mind if you go when I cross the when I sneak in to the country illegally to do the Rush Limbaugh show, I come across the border post at Derby Line, Vermont.
They got a big picture in there of President Obama and a big picture of Vice President Biden.
And every time I see that picture of Vice President Biden on the wall, I can't, oftentimes I'm laughing so much.
I'm basically at risk of being carted off to Gitmo for disrespect to the Vice President.
But I don't really mind.
If you've got to have the cult of personality, stick the picture of the president and the vice president of the border posts as you come into the country, and that's it.
That's it.
It shouldn't be like Jordan.
It shouldn't be like Iraq.
It shouldn't be like third world basket cases where the president inserts himself into grade school education.
And the idea that somehow it has educational value asking children to pick their favorite words, the three most important words, and rank them in order in an Obama speech is preposterous.
As I said, the only words that matter are that's all folks.
One, that's two, all three folks.
And I would encourage every grade school child in America to enter that as the answer for question.
It'll destroy your life.
They'll fail you.
You'll be expelled.
You'll wind up sleeping under a bridge with those sex offenders in Miami.
It'll ruin your life.
But you will have stood up for yourself and say, I will not be propagandized by this thin, boring celebrity president who isn't interesting enough to give 111 speeches on healthcare every 20 minutes.
Do it, do it for America.
Do it for yourself.
And even if you end up under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami, you'll feel better about yourself.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Mark Stein, infra rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show live, live from under the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami.
Let us go to Chad in Franklin, Tennessee.
Chad has been hanging on a long time.
He's a hanging Chad.
He's a hanging Chad.
Thanks for waiting, Chad, and great to have you with us on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
No problem.
Got enough time to find Dun slightly here here while I was on the phone.
So anyway, here we go.
I have been in the healthcare industry for a couple of years.
I'm not intimately involved and not an expert at everything, but did work closely with patient accounting and whatnot.
And one of the things that I've got an issue with the Republican leadership at this point is they have an opportunity to drive a nail in the coffin of all health care debate from here on until way into the future.
And they're not doing a whole lot other than just nodding their head to the folks that really don't want government health care.
So that's doing nothing but kind of reinstilling the base that does not want health care, but it's not saying a whole lot to the people who are on the right.
Well, well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute, Chad.
I think that is one reason why Obama is in such trouble.
Because I think Laura Ingram said this on Fox News last night, that she said, look, the Republican Party doesn't have a leader at the moment, and it's doing better than it's done in years.
What has been successful on the healthcare front is that the usual trimmers and accommodationists, Your John McCain's and all the rest of them, and your Lindsey Grahams and all the rest of them, they have not driven this debate.
The debate has been driven by differences on the Democratic side on the one hand and by the Tea Party movement and the grassroots and the town halls and all the rest of it on the other.
Now, are you suggesting that at some point the mainstream Republican accommodationists will get into this thing and then suddenly we'll have one of those reach across the aisle moments where they decide to basically give President Obama two-thirds of what he wants?
Potentially.
I mean, basically, you already have the makings of the Democrats rolling back some of the more some of the larger pieces of the puzzle that a lot of people don't like.
And the portion, the problem is no matter what will happen, if their version, any version of their health care reform is passed, it's simply a foot in the door.
So what has to happen, in my opinion, is once the Democrats come up with a, you know, okay, here's a less harmful bill that we might be able to shove through a little more easily, what the Republicans need to do at this point is identify what the issues are with healthcare that's driving the costs up.
Again, with my experience in the patient accounting business, and I'll relate it to the cash for clunkers piece, you know, you've got a program that people, you know, bought into and people wanted to take part of, but now what you've left with is thousands of dealers stuck with huge bills of these credits.
Well, just go back to healthcare for a minute then.
When you say what is driving costs, I mean, to my mind, what is driving costs?
There's certain issues here.
You have certain parties involved in healthcare that by their nature add to their costs.
So, for example, you have government, you have insurers, and you have lawyers in terms of medical malpractice suits.
Now, if it was otherwise a straight commercial transaction, like going and buying half a pound of tomatoes at the grocery store, where those factors do not come into play, that would make it significantly cheaper.
But in other words, the cost element in this is not driven by the cost of mending your broken leg or sewing on this guy's finger over in Los Angeles.
The cost is driven by these additional players who insert themselves into healthcare.
To some extent, but again, the point is that you've got, there's two big issues that need to be addressed, in my opinion.
You've got, well, when somebody does go and get their finger sewn on, you know, maybe that costs $5,000.
I don't know.
I don't think it costs $5,000 to sew a finger on, by the way.
But we don't know because there's no market.
You can't put a market price on finger sewing in the United States.
Let's say that it did cost $5,000 because you're over in one of the northeastern states that can't control anything.
So you've got an issue that.
You could get a finger sewed on in New Hampshire for less than $5,000.
I'm not going to demonstrate it now, but maybe 10 minutes before the end of the show.
But you can get a finger sewn on for less than $5,000.
But let's leave that aside because, as you say, there's basically no market price on what it costs to get a finger done.
So carry on.
Whatever it does cost, effectively, whoever the patient is is more than likely not going to have the cash, which is on them, which is one of the major issues.
Not going to have the cash on hand to pay for that.
Yes, but when you go to buy a car, when you go to buy a car for $20,000, most people don't walk into the showroom with $20,000.
We find a way to, when you buy a home for $250,000, most people, they don't walk in to the real estate office and write out a check for $250,000.
Throughout life, there are big ticket purchases.
And by the way, I'm not even talking about homes and cars now, but if you stand behind someone at Radio Shack and watch them buy some fancy little radio or whatever, they will be doing that on an installment plan.
The idea that simply because these are large sums of money to produce in $10 bills out of your pocket at the point of sale is a reason to get the government involved in them, I don't think is correct.
But let's take Chad's broader point, by the way.
Why is it a good idea that the Republican Party hasn't shown leadership on this?
It's precisely because there are differences of opinion.
There are all these wealthy people earning over $75,000 who don't want to be insured.
There are all these young people who don't want to be insured.
So the Republican Party does, it would not benefit the Republican Party to become the party of the insurance system because there are all kinds of people out of this country, over this country, who, as a matter of free choice, opt out of the insurance system.
And we should say, as I said earlier, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Let people devise the healthcare system and the healthcare provision that's right for them.
And there will be multiple types and they will vary greatly between Florida and Alaska.
But that's what's great about America.
It's a federal nation with different jurisdictions that do things differently.
One size fits all will not work.
Mark Stein in for Rush, more straight ahead.
By the way, I mentioned that $150,000 in undeclared rental income.
That actually wasn't Charlie Wrangell himself.
That was George Daly, who is Charlie Wrangell's legal counsel.
So obviously, legal counsel for the Ways and Means Committee wouldn't know anything about paying taxes.
You can't tell the non-taxpayers without a scorecard, folks.
Mark Stein, InforRush, on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Walter Williams will be here tomorrow, and Rush returns next week.
▲
Export Selection