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Oct. 29, 2009 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
October 29, 2009, Thursday, Hour #2
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Greetings, my good friends.
Great to have you here, as it always is.
I am your host, Rush Limboy, and this is the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
You're listening to the most listened to radio talk show in the country.
And for that, I thank you.
So does the staff.
They wouldn't be here otherwise.
Telephone number 800-282-2882 at the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
I have a couple of um interesting stories here from State Controlled Associated Press, an early progress report on Obama's economic recovery plan overstates by thousands.
The number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.
My God.
A mistake that was Biden said, if we get this wrong, I'm dead.
You remember him saying that?
Joe, you haven't gotten anything right since you went the plug route.
A government's first accounting of jobs tied to the stimulus program claim more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money, but that figure is overstated by at least 5,000 jobs, according to an associated press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.
A company working with the FCC reported stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs when about 1,000 were produced.
A Georgia Community College reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.
A Florida Child Care Center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs, but they used the money on raises for existing employees.
Now you do that on Wall Street and you get a Pazar firing bullets at you and taking away 90% of your income.
There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate jobs.
Oh, really?
Well, let me tell you something, AP.
We don't need no stinking evidence.
We know they're a pack of thieves and liars in the first place.
It's gonna happen with health care too.
This is just a microcosm of what's coming.
Oh, you did and by the way, what was the big deal about 30,000 jobs saved or created in the first place?
When we have 9 million unemployment, and we're gonna tout that we saved or created 30,000 jobs.
What was the big hooray in the first place for?
This is i if there's an error that was made, uh let's get it fixed, said Ed Deceive, um, an Obama advisor helping to oversee the stimulus program.
If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed.
It's it is fraud.
It is lying.
It is not an error.
Here's another AP story on the same uh thing.
Stimulus jobs.
Overstated by thousands by Brett Blackledge and Matt Apuzo.
A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of Obama's recovery plan, the real number fewer than 1,000.
Childcare center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money.
Instead it gave pay raises to existing employees.
Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four, even more times.
That's an error.
That's an error, and these are the people.
It's a nightmare.
This is a freaking nightmare.
I can't wait till I wake up and find out it's all been a nightmare.
The government's overstated by thousands the number of jobs it's created to save with federal contracts under this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
It's not clear just how far off the 30,000 claim was the AP's state controlled review, which was not an exhausting account of uh accounting of 9,000 contracts, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, homed in on the most obvious Cases of jobs wrongly tied to the stimulus because of duplications or misinterpretations of how the job should be counted.
You know, you can't even count a job saved anyway.
There's no earthly intelligent way to count a job saved.
And if we start, I'm gonna, how many jobs am I saving simply by working every day?
I haven't fired anybody, that's true.
And uh hardly anybody ever leaves.
Um, here's the here's the question.
If the Obama administration will lie with such impunity about all this, what else will they lie about?
Mind you.
Let me read this again.
It's not clear just how far off the 30,000 claim was.
The AP's review, which was not an exhaustive accounting of all 9,000 contracts reported by the government so far, homed in on the most obvious cases of jobs wrongly tied to the stimulus because of duplications or misinterpretations of how the jobs should be counted.
If you don't understand that and you're in real linda, don't worry about it.
I'm not even gonna try.
By the way, look at the kind of jobs the stimulus money went to.
1,000 jobs in call centers fielding questions about television converter boxes.
Twenty-five jobs helping people to make the conversion to digital TV.
Money for raises for 129 people at a child care center.
Indeed, there was only one job mentioned that sounded anything at all like the promised infrastructure improvements, and that's the 125 jobs created to lay railroad tracks that is mentioned in this story.
But it does seem appropriate that uh the Obama official overseeing all of this is named Deceive.
It's spelled D E, capital S E V, E E V uh D E Capital S E V E, which to me sounds a lot like DC, as in fool you.
Or you could also say it sounds like you could pronounce de CV.
It's just uh if I had a trillion bucks, how many jobs do you think I could create?
Um the real number is 787 billion.
Let's let's I know it really was a trillion because they needed 250 billion pork and earmarks to get the 780.
If I if I had a trillion dollars, how many jobs could I create?
Two.
I'd pay myself all but a hundred thousand of it and hire an assistant.
I the uh the staff is shocked.
Um it's a good question.
How many jobs could I create or could you if you had a trillion dollars, how many jobs could you?
And they're out there touting 30,000.
And now we learn that that's fraudulent.
It was overstated.
Folks.
I rarely am rendered speechless.
And at those moments when I am rendered speechless, it is only because I am on the verge of profanity.
So let's take a little break earlier here by a minute or so than we normally do, shall we?
And we're back.
L Rush Ballby Hein that golden EIV microphone here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna.
You know, it's there are days here where I've been doing this 21 years.
I've had just we just went through a commercial break.
Staff could have asked me anything.
They didn't.
When they come back from the break, here I am welcoming you back to the program.
And Snurdley says, are you gonna talk about Steve King and Roger Goodell?
Yes.
I'm gonna do it in the next hour.
Right now, I'm gonna talk about me.
We're gonna go back to Tuesday on this program where I said this to a lot of people, public option means free.
Public options associated with government.
And people think what they get from the government is free, the kind of people we're talking about.
Oh, yeah, your uh food stamps come in and you didn't pay for them.
Yeah, government gave them to me.
Obama stash.
The poor people in Detroit.
Oh, Obama giving me the money.
Obama from reserve funds from his stash.
So you can find them people like that.
You support the public option.
Is it free?
Yeah, fine.
Count me in.
And then some reputable polling organization puts the news out there.
Now, as you know, the uh state control media has been gunning for Joe Lieberman ever since he said he'd join the filibuster against Dingy Harry's public option state opt-out.
He's on Fox News Channel's newsroom yesterday, Jane Skinner, Mrs. Roger Goodell, by the way, talked to Senator Joe Lieberman.
And she said to him, Senator, supporters of this government-run health insurance say that your economic argument really makes no sense because the public option, they say, would actually lower costs because it would exert pressure on private insurance out there.
I I I don't agree.
Premiums will go up.
When people hear public option, I think they think it's for free.
It's not for free.
Somebody's gonna have to pay for it, and you can bet it's gonna be the taxpayers and the people who pay health insurance premiums now.
Bingo.
Bingo.
I finally figured out this public option, all that they there are enough people in this country who think it means free, and then they hear people come along, yeah, we're gonna raise taxes on the on the rich uh millionaires out there, we're gonna raise their taxes, they're gonna be the ones paying for it.
Um so but you know, the the the question here, you know, some people say that the uh public option would lower cost because it would exert pressure on private insurance.
This is the myth that there's no competition in the private insurance market.
There's 1,700 companies in this country selling health insurance.
But there are so many regulations from state to state that they a lot of companies cannot put together policy options that they would like to sell because their state regulations against it.
In addition, if you live in Alabama, you cannot buy a policy from anywhere but Alabama.
And ditto if you live in Missouri, you have to buy insurance from a company in Missouri.
So the theory is that here comes the government, here comes Obama, and Obama will be the 1,71st or one company.
So we're gonna add to 1,700 insurance companies why one.
And that's gonna be the government, and that is going to be all kinds of competitive pressure.
The competitive pressure has already been monkeyed with because of all the state regulations governing the insurance agency, what they can and can't sell, to whom they can and cannot sell it, for how much they can and cannot charge.
I mean, it's already so overregulated to call it a free market's a little bit of an exaggeration as it is.
But the idea that the government's gonna come in and be a competitor and lower costs in private insurance, folks, when you have a company offering health insurance that does not have to make a profit, competing against companies that do have to make a profit, stay in business.
What's the result?
The companies that have to make a profit go out of business.
You know why?
Because the company doesn't have to make a profit, can charge as little as it wants at first.
If your company provides health coverage for you, and you'll say it, let's say that that uh plan that the company provides for you covers your family for a bunch of services, and let's say it costs the company, I'll just pick a $7,500 a year to give you your health benefits package.
Okay, here comes Obamacare.
Public option.
Available $500 a person.
Same plan, same coverage.
Now, in the private sector, there are regulations to prevent private companies for uh uh from competing that way.
Companies cannot give away the product, they cannot charge below uh uh cost and so forth for very long before people come in and say, wait a minute, it's unfair business practice.
But the government's under no such regulation.
So if if the Obama public option, let's say it's two thousand dollars versus the private coverage you already have at 7500, what's gonna happen?
Your company's gonna offload you to the public option.
It's gonna be much cheaper to buy insurance for employees at $2,000 from the government than $7,500 from a company who even charging $7,500 is only making a profit of two to three percent every year.
So there is no the whole the whole idea that there is competition, the government's gonna spark competition.
That's another one of those assertions that gets me very close to the string of profanity.
The government can run deficits.
You can't.
The government can run deficits all day.
Credit card companies do not punish the government for borrowing too much or not paying back the minimum balance.
Credit card companies do not penalize the government for paying off the balance on time.
The government can run debit, they can print money.
There is no way that a company that can print money and doesn't have to work worry about making a profit will it will do anything but destroy its so-called competitors.
And this is the plan.
This is the objective.
And that's how small business people and others are going to end up putting you on the public option.
Obama's out there saying, if you like your plan, if you like what you're paying for it, nobody's gonna make you change it.
Technically, nobody may make you change it.
But if something that you cost that that costs you $7,500, same thing you can get for $2,000, what are you gonna do?
Now, by the way, that $2,000, that's gonna the because that's gonna be priced way below what the actual uh service you get for it is, it's gonna be it's gonna be priced i i in extraordinarily low.
It's not realistic.
At some point that $2,000 is going to rise to even higher than what it was at $7,500 when your employer was getting your insurance.
It has to.
It's the government involved here.
Quick.
Uh oh, what one more, James Quyburn, last night, MSNBC, question, what is the tax side of this bill gonna look like when Pelosi unveils it tomorrow?
We will be looking at couples who make more than a million dollars a year and individuals that make more than five hundred thousand dollars a year.
About uh one and a half percent.
I forgot exactly what the percentage is.
There will be a small increase uh in their income taxes, which will then uh take them back a ways, but not far as far back as they were before uh Bush gave their the tax cut.
They'll still be uh benefiting uh from part of the Bush tax cuts, but not as much.
So there you have it.
There's a new tax uh increase on the rich, one and a half percent surcharge on individuals at 500 grand a year or couples at one million dollars a year.
Arlington, Texas, Kim, thank you for waiving your next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hi, Russ, how are you today?
Fine, thanks very much.
Well, I think you got it totally right.
I think that what they're doing is they're just gonna price everybody out of it by c by calling it by a new name in this new bill from the Congress.
They're making it sound so good by calling it something sunshine of price gorging, you know, with the health industry.
And, you know, just like they're changing the name from the public option to the consumer option, they're making it sound so good by putting a pretty label on it, and they're making it sound so good that they're basically going to price out all of the private insurers by making it sound so good.
And uh the health industry, you know, Secretary Sebilius, she's basically gonna be that, you know, that gatekeeper that basically is gonna be the regulator for all the private insurers and make sure that all the um private insurers end up going out of business.
Eventually, eventually.
I mean, this this is the not going to happen overnight.
Uh in the first place, none of this is going to except the tax increases, none of this is gonna get implemented for four years.
Tax increases will happen immediately.
The increased costs, like on medical devices, which include tampons, by the way.
Yes, it does.
You don't remember me announcing this.
You must have been on your honeymoon or something.
Tampons are considered a medical device, condoms are considered a medical device, and there's gonna be taxes on these things.
Uh, anyway, uh the the the then that they'll go into effect as soon as this uh this this this debacle is passed, but the actual health care practice, the spending will not happen for three or four years.
Now, the thing about forcing people to buy insurance, and that's another thing here that we need to talk about because that's in the bill too, forcing you to buy insurance, and if you don't, you pay a fine.
Now, again, public option.
Cheaper than private insurance.
Where are you going to go to buy it?
In fact, what if they price the fine so low that it makes more sense to pay the fine and not get insurance than to go out and buy a policy even from the public option?
That's such a nightmare.
It is such a nightmare.
Back in a sec.
Let me ask you a question, folks.
Do you like monopolies?
You know what a monopoly is.
Do you like them?
We normally don't.
We don't like monopolies.
The government is going to be a health care monopoly.
You're going to have nowhere else to go.
I've been trying to get to a brilliant column today by Daniel Hanner in the Wall Street Journal for the last 45 minutes.
And my brain keeps exploding here with all this health care stuff, and I keep learning things about this health care bill.
But do you remember mere moments ago, I was telling you about uh, I think it was CBS radio at the top of the hour earlier today said, Oh no, oh no.
Kids without health insurance are 60% more likely to die than kids with, and I said, What about what about SCHIP?
SCHIP is the state children's health insurance program, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, 6.6 million children and 670,000 adults received coverage at some point from the state children's health insurance program.
Obama has expanded the program tremendously, did so in February by four million.
So now it covers 10 million children, and who knows how many adults because it covers people up to age 25.
And yet, state controlled media trying to create panic.
Oh no, oh that's reminds me of another thing.
I'm watching Fox today, and they're doing a story on H1N1, and they have a little graphic there.
It says H1N1 causing a panic.
No, you are.
The media is causing the panic.
Aided and abetted by the Obama administration.
The media is causing the panic on H1N1.
No question about it.
Now, uh I've I've got some from the new House bill.
I've got a couple of uh passages from it here.
This the thing Pelosi announced today, and it's uh I'm gonna read it to you.
Just to show you what we're going to be dealing with.
Now, as I go through this, it this section I'm gonna read part of.
It looks like small businesses are gonna lose their tax breaks for health coverage.
Right now, small business gets a tax break for providing health coverage.
It's gonna be it looks like it's gonna be phased out in two years.
But it's hard to tell from the from the damn convoluted language.
For purposes of section 38 and uh by the section 45, our small business employee health coverage credit.
Uh for uh purposes of section 38 in the case of a qualified small employer, the small business employee health coverage credit determined under this section for the taxable year is an amount equal to the applicable percentage of the qualified employee health coverage uh expenses of such employer for such taxable year.
For purposes of this section, the applicable percentage is 50%.
In the case of an employer whose average annual employee compensation for the taxable year exceeds $20,000, the percentage specified in paragraph one shall be reduced by a number of percentage points which bears the same ratio to 50 as such excess bears to 20,000.
Are you with me?
Phased, a phase out based on employer size.
In the case of an employer who employs more than 10 qualified employees.
What the f what is a qualified lord.
In the in the case of an employer who employs more than 10 qualified employees during the taxable year, the credit determined under subsection A shall be reduced by an amount which bears the same ratio to the amount of such credit determined without regard to this paragraph and after the applic application of the other provisions of this section as a the excess of six, the number of qualified employees employed by the employer during the taxable year over 10 years to 15.
Credit not allowed with respect to certain highly compensated employees.
No credit shall be determined under subsection A with respect to qualified employee health coverage, expenses paid or incurred with respect to any employee for any taxable year if the aggregate compensation paid by the employer to such employee during such taxable year exceeds $80,000.
How's that hope and change working out for you?
Now there's another passage.
I'm not going to read nearly as much of it.
This there is a tax on those without insurance.
Section 59B, page 297, out of all 1,990 pages, by the way.
Tax on individuals without acceptable health coverage.
A tax imposed.
In the case of any individual who does not meet the requirements of subsection D at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5% of the excess of one the taxpayers modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year over the amount of gross income specified in Section 6012A, parentheses one, with respect to the taxpayer.
B limitations, tax limited to average premium.
In general, the tax imposed under subsection A with respect to any taxpayer for any taxable year shall not exceed the applicable national average premium for such taxable year.
What all adds up to here is there's gonna be a tax if you don't if you don't go out and get insurance.
Uh 2.5%.
You want to hear some of the other taxes in this?
The uh tax.
Uh what is it?
Uh blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Tax Foundation, what is it?
The uh Americans for tax reform.
Yeah, Americans for tax reform has has gone through the bill, and they got a little comprehensive list of taxes in Pelosi's debacle.
Employer mandate excise tax, page 275.
If an employer does not pay 72 and a half percent of a single employee's health premium, 65% of a family employee, the employer must pay an excise tax equal to 8% of average wages.
Individual mandate surtax.
If an individual fails to obtain qualifying coverage, he must pay an income surtax equal to the lesser of 2.5% of modified adjusted gross income or the average premium.
Medicine cabinet tax, non-prescription medications, would no longer be able to be purchased from health savings accounts, flexible spending accounts, or health reimbursement arrangements.
Insulin accepted.
Increased additional tax on non-qualified HSA distributions, page 326, non-qualified distributions from HSA's, health savings accounts, would face an additional tax of 20%, current laws 10%.
The disadvantages of HSA's relative to other tax-free accounts, blah, blah, blah, or this disadvantages.
A denial of tax deduction for employer health plans coordinating with Medicare Part D. We just covered that one.
Surtax on individuals and small businesses imposes an income surtax of 5.4% on manageable adjusted gross income over $500,000, 1 million married filing joint.
5.
He just said it was 1.5%.
Clymer did.
He just said it was but they the Americans for tax reform is 5.4%.
An income surtax of 5.4% on individuals over 500 grand and couples over a million.
That would raise the top marginal tax rate in 2011 from 39.6% under current law to 45%, a new effective top rate.
45%, that's before you start paying state taxes, Social Security, and Medicare.
5.4%, not 1.5.
Hmm.
Coordinator codification of the economic substance doctrine, page thir 349.
This empowers the IRS to disallow a perfectly legal tax deduction or other tax relief merely because the IRS deems that the motive of the taxpayer was not primarily business related.
Page 349, economic substance doctrine empowers the IRS to disallow a perfectly legal tax deduction or other tax relief merely because the IRS deems the motive of the taxpayer was not primarily business related.
Welcome to the Soviet Union.
I mean, this is just the thing is this is going to get out, people are going to hear about this, and there's going to be the same reaction to this that there was to HR 3200, only it's going to be worse.
What, Sterley?
What?
No, you don't.
No, no, you're miss you do not have.
You do not have to provide motive.
All they have to do is say your motive wasn't any good.
You're not going to get a chance to argue with them here.
Empowers the IRS to disallow a perfectly legal tax deduction because the IRS deems the motive of the taxpayer was not primarily business related.
Uh what'd you say, H.R.?
Um I guess you could call it that a health care hate crime.
Because they're taxing you the way uh denying a deduction because of the way you think is what motive is.
We have to take a break.
Now, it's a good question.
Snurdily says, Well, how can they impugn your motive?
They're liberals.
They're dictators.
They're not small D Democrats.
How can they dictate their how can they dictate what little kids are forced to sing in school?
Because they can.
How can they dictate what you think?
They're in the process of doing it now.
They are statists.
They are central planners.
They are deniers of freedom and liberty.
It's all through this.
This is the little bit I've read.
Okay, we're back.
Rush Limboy and uh the EIP network, your guiding light.
The times of trouble, confusion, tumult, chaos.
Uh, and even the good times.
Right now, I'm gonna get to this Daniel Henniger piece here because this, you know, Hanneger is always brilliant.
Wall Street Journal.
He's always brilliant, but this column is two notches above the norm.
Obama and the old hat people.
People thought something small, agile, and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big box politics.
If you are an elected Democrat anywhere to the right of Barney Frank and trying to defend a competitive seat next November, you gotta be starting to sweat.
You wake up in the morning, and just like every other morning, as far as the eye can see, the only thing in the news is the president's health care reform.
It's starting to look like Harry Reed and Nancy Pelosi are leading the Donner Party, the snow-browned emigrants who bogged down the Sierra Nevada winter in the 1840s and resorted to cannibalism to survive.
The betting is that with raw political muscle and procedural magic, the Congressional Democrats will pass something, call it reform, and hand Obama a victory.
Meanwhile, or maybe, but I think what we are seeing with this massive legislation is that the Democrats in Washington have a bigger problem.
Their party is looking so yesterday.
Get this next paragraph in a world defined by nearly 100,000 iPhone apps, a world of seemingly limitless, self-defined choice.
The Democrats are pushing the biggest, fattest, one-size-fits-all legislation since 1965.
And they brag this will complete the dream Franklin Delano Roosevelt had in 1939.
The cultures still believe the U.S. has a hipster for president.
But the Obama health care bill, and maybe this whole administration is starting to look totally out of sync with the new Zeitgeist, which is the spirit of the times.
Everything about the health care exercise is looking very old hat, starting with the old guys working on it.
Max Baucus, Patrick Leahy, Pete Stark all were elected to Congress in the 70s.
They live on as the immortals in Washington's forever land.
But it's more than the fact that Congress looks old.
The health care bill is big, it's complex, incomprehensible, and coercive.
All the things people hate nowadays.
It's easy to make jokes about how insubstantial the millions of people seem to be, who are constantly using technologies like Twitter.
But these new digital and web-based technologies, which have decentralized virtually everything, now occupy most of the average person's waking hours at work or at home.
Mass media is struggling to stay massive in a world whose people want to break up into many discrete markets.
The one lump that won't change is government.
Government in our time is looking out of it.
It'd be one thing if government were almost cool in an old-fashioned way, but it's not.
When everybody else's job gets measured by performance, its hallmark is malperformance, whether in Congress, California, or New York.
We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley, who took a small idea and ran with it.
Congress does the opposite.
It takes something already big and makes it bigger.
We got Medicare for the elderly with spending claims out to Mars.
So let's create Medicare for everybody.
One of the least noticed parts of the health care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger when Medicaid's cost is arguably the main thing destroying California.
There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America.
Now it means being willing to fall in line behind some huge piece of legislation.
Read Mr. Obama's speech last week at MIT on climate change.
Quote.
The folks who pretend that this is not an issue, they're being marginalized, unquote.
This ironically sounds a lot like the 2007 anti-Hillary Big Brother TV commercial.
Its message was that Hillary represented something uh old and ominously coercive.
Boot up that ad now and put Obama's face where Hillary's is.
The larger point here isn't necessarily partisan.
It's a description of why the people live their lives.
It's a description of the way people live their lives in a 21st century world and how disconnected politics has become from that world.
If we were really living in the world of leading edge politics that many people thought they were getting with Barack Hussein Obama, mmm.
He would have proposed an iPhone for health care, a flexible system for which all sorts of users could create or choose health care apps that suited their needs.
Over time with trial and error, a better system would emerge.
No chance of that.
Our outdated political software can't recognize trial and error.
What Obamacare is doing with health care, the public option, may be fine with the activist left, but I suspect it's starting to strike many younger Americans as at odds with their lives, as not somewhere they want to go.
Wait until EPA's ghostbusters start enforcing cap and trade on them.
People thought something small, agile, and smart was coming to government, but so far it's turning out to be just big box politics.
None of this is to suggest the Republicans are any better to do, however, have a better chance of breaking out of the ancient political castle.
So long as the Democrat Party is the party of the old hat people, dependent on public sector unions with Orwellian names like the Service Employees International Union.
It'll remain yoked to a pre-iPhone political model that will increasingly strike average everyday American voters as weird and alien to their world.
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, this is a brilliantly crafted piece.
The only thing missing here is that all this is happening is by design.
This is not a bunch of old fuddy dutties that can't figure it out.
This is a bunch of control freaks who don't care what anybody else thinks.
We're going to do it their way, and they're going to have total control over us no matter what.
Okay, folks, uh we gotta we gotta close out this hour here.
But uh we are going to get Steve King, uh Republican congressman from Iowa, questioned the commissioner of the National Football League yesterday, Roger Goodell.
Uh hearing ostensibly was about uh what can Congress do to cut down on concussions and brain injuries in the National Football League.
But uh Steve King asked him a couple of other things, and uh we'll play that for you when we come back.
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