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Jan. 26, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
January 26, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away today.
This is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein.
Honored to be here.
I ought to, before we do anything else, I ought to clear up that business where we had that dramatic sound effect just before the top of the last hour, because I didn't want to give you the impression that it was a national emergency.
I didn't want to pull like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds thing in 1939 or whatever it was and have everybody stampedeing for the border to get the hell out.
It was an actual emergency, but it was a flood warning for Sullivan County, New Hampshire.
So unless you're in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, you have nothing to worry about.
Everything is fine.
Nothing to see here.
Move on, folks.
No rubber decking.
If you are in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, though, you're screwed.
Flee.
Head for the hills.
Run for your lives.
Get to higher ground now.
You've got about a minute and a half.
But other than that, if you're anywhere else in the United States of America or outlying territories, I don't want to upset anyone in Guam who thought it's not a flood warning for Guam.
It was just for Sullivan County, New Hampshire.
That's the difference, by the way, when you get a professional radio announcer, like obviously like Russia, but also like Mark Davis or Mark Belling or any of the other marks we've had sitting in here, they know that you're not meant to make jokes about the emergency warning system.
But I didn't know that.
And to be honest, you know, when you live in a country that's on, what are we on?
We're permanent orange alert now or something like that?
When you live in a nation that is on permanent orange alert, you do get to play a little faster and loose with the whole emergency concept, don't you?
Because like you're living on a knife's edge the whole time.
What's the big deal about it?
Eventually you get too mellow about these emergencies.
But it was a flood warning.
Sullivan County, New Hampshire.
If you're in outlying parts of Guam, you can relax.
1-800-282-2882.
By the way, while we're dealing with unfinished business, I mentioned roundabouts yesterday, and I'm still getting mail about roundabouts.
And I'm heard from now, I would say, a couple of dozen highway engineers explaining roundabouts in great detail.
And I'm grateful for it.
But look, it was just a cheap, irrational prejudice that erupted in mid-flow.
So I'd ask you please to hold off on the roundabout correspondence.
I'm still getting people, by the way, who say, oh, they're not called roundabouts, they're called rotaries.
And then when I said they were called rotaries, I got people saying, they're not called rotaries, they're called traffic circles.
Why do you think they've given a different name in every state?
That's so they slip under your radar.
It makes it sound like it fits in.
You don't know that it's some sinister foreign concept imported from a neighboring state.
It's like soda pop.
Some people say soda, some people say pop.
It varies from region to region.
Why do you think this thing is given a different name in every state?
By the way, my local paper this morning has a picture on the front page.
A shimmering white cloud hovering over the mountains of Kinsman North and Kinsman South as seen in this photo taken in Benton, New Hampshire.
It's a beautiful thing.
It's this beautiful, perfect white spherical disc surrounded by flaming clouds of many colors.
For more than a half hour, the disc-shaped cloud appeared to remain suspended in one spot.
This is over the mountains of Kinsman North and Kinsman South, a little ways north west of here in New Hampshire.
You know what that strange disc-like disc-shaped cloud in the sky was?
That was a new roundabout coming into land, folks.
That'll be somewhere on, that'll be at the junction of Route 10 and Route 302 by tomorrow morning.
So anyway, please no more roundabout correspondence because the roundabout in New London that came, have to come by to get to the studio here at WNTK after dark tonight.
By the way, I got enraged email correspondence about this from New London taxpayers who said that roundabout costs $750,000, which is amazing.
But you don't need to worry about it anymore.
After the show today, after dark, we're going to go out there and we're going to dig it up.
So by tomorrow morning, it'll be gone and you can relax.
Populism.
Populism.
This is the new tactic of Obama.
He realizes now he's too cerebral, he's too aloof.
It's the administration of the elite.
He has this elite image.
He has this Ivy League image with all these Harvard and Princeton and Yale guys all making plans for the rest of us.
The elite making their decisions and imposing them on the rest of us.
So he's decided that as an antidote to that now, he's going to be Mr. Populist.
And he's attacking the banks and the bank president.
The bank presidents, bank taxes.
The bank tax is the centerpiece of the party's new populism.
It's the first test, according to the Wall Street Journal, of a populist pitch the party strategists hope to take to other campaigns this year.
Here's the good news.
They figured out that you're angry.
The bad news is they reckon you're not angry at government and big government and at government expenditure, but you're angry at the banks and at other private institutions in society.
With the bank tax, we can take populism back to our side, a Democratic Party strategist said.
On Friday, Martha Coakley and others invoked the bank tax in speeches and fundraising emails.
A missive from Joe Biden said that even though the banks receive billions of dollars from American taxpayers, Scott Brown doesn't think it's fair for us to get it back when they're paying out billions in bonuses with our money.
Now, they've figured out, this didn't work for them in Massachusetts, but they figured out that this polls well in a general sense, and that at a time when in certain key demographic constituencies, for example, you have a 50% unemployment rate among young blacks, for example, in part because of actions that this administration has taken.
But with that degree of dissatisfaction out there, you can channel it and harness it and redirect it away from the government and turn it onto their various bogeymen, like bank vice presidents.
And what's depressing to me is that when you look at some of the polls, there are far too many people willing to string along with this.
You know, for a start, it's stupid to pick on banks.
I mean, if you're going to do this, if you're going to go down this half-witted populism route, why don't you impose a special tax on people who build yachts, people who build luxury yachts?
Or why don't you impose a special 40% punitive tax on material restaurants that won't give you a table?
You'd be better off doing it for an area like that that doesn't touch your life, doesn't impact on your life at any point.
But what's the point of a bank?
What's the point of a bank?
A bank is where rich people deposit their money so that people who don't have large amounts of money can access the cash required to advance and grow their businesses and buy homes and buy cars and improve their station on life.
If there wasn't a bank, you would have to go to the rich guy directly.
So if you didn't have the first national bank of Dead Skunk Creek to go to, you would have to go and see the big plutocrat who lives in the swanky house on the outskirts of town and ring on the gate and petition for the Lord of the Manor to graciously shower you with some small pittance that would enable you to add a rec room to your hovel if there were no banks.
So the bank exists.
The bank developed in Western society as a conduit to get money from people who had surplus amounts of cash, generally speaking richer, older people, and facilitate its flow to younger, poorer people who had lots of energy and lots of ideas but couldn't access ready cash.
So if you wanted to name the single most stupid and fraudulent type of populism one could ever devise, it would be to say, hey, let's demonize bank presidents.
We were talking to a lady in Defiance, Ohio yesterday, and this came up, and she gets it.
She understands it.
When she sees the bank president being dropped off by his chauffeur in his fantastic limousine outside the pillared doors of the bank every morning, she doesn't think, oh, I hate that guy.
Why don't they impose a 90% marginal tax rate on him and teach him a lesson?
She says she would like her son to grow up to be that guy.
That's the American dream.
And that's what banks, when they're operating properly, that's what banks do.
Banks enable, banks take people who have got large sums of money and lend it to people who don't have sums of money.
So why, why does anyone, no matter how idiotic you are, no matter how brainwashed you've been from Obamaomics, would you think it was in your interest to make the bank have less money so the next time you want to go and buy a car,
the next time you want to go and buy some rusting double wide on a 16th acre lot round the back of the stockyards, the next time you want to go and get a new credit card, why would you think it was in your interest for that bank to have less money in its vaults?
Now there are problems with banks.
We're not talking here about perfect institutions.
Perfectability is not something that banks can achieve.
But what is wrong with banks in the United States?
The problem with banks in the United States is that government regulation diverted them from what they would otherwise do.
For example, you will notice that there are no problems.
No banks north of the border had to be bailed out.
No Canadian bank had to be bailed out by the government of Canada.
You know why?
They don't have subprime mortgages in Canada.
They didn't get into that racket.
The government left the banks.
And by the way, this is the pitiful state this country's been reduced to.
I'm citing to you a Canadian example as an example of how capitalism should function.
You should be embarrassed as an American by that, but it's true.
It's true.
The Canadian banks are fine.
They don't need to be bailed out.
They're doing great.
And the only thing that's a problem, by the way, is that some of these banks, like the Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, they made the mistake of buying small U.S. subsidiaries.
So they bought the first national bank of Dead Stunk Creek and then discovered that their small US subsidiary was their only underperforming asset at the end of the year.
So they've all sold off their pathetic American subsidiaries now because they understand that the government has distorted the banking sector in the United States, distorted the banking sector.
So the idea of scapegoating the banks as Obama is doing, the only people that is going to hurt are you.
We've been hearing all this talk for the last year.
We need to free up the credit markets.
We need to free up the credit markets.
What is the credit market?
The credit market is the guy sitting across from you at the bank.
And when you go in and say, well, I need a loan of $15,000.
Okay?
So how is Obama proposing to free up the credit market by taking that $15,000 that the vice president of the bank was going to lend to you and saying, no, we're going to toss it down the great sucking moor of the federal treasury to disappear in the bottomless pit of $9 trillion or whatever the hole is now and just throw it down there like sacrificing virgins into the volcano.
If you can think of a trillion-dollar bill as just a random virgin that you're tossing down the great sucking moor of the federal treasury.
This is phony baloney populism.
This is a magician's sleight of hand where the government that takes ever more of your wealth and your liberty is saying, oh, don't blame me.
It's all that guy's fault.
The guy in the top hat and the striped pants and the tailcoat waiting for his chauffeur to pull up the car before you lynch him on the sidewalk.
A bank, if you want to have genuine populism, involves leaving the people free to exploit their economic potential to the fullest.
And all scapegoating banks does is get in the way of that.
It's the crudest kind of class warfare and it's fundamentally un-American.
1-800-282-2882-Mark Stein in for rush.
Mark Stein in for rush.
Let's go to Sherry in Quad Cities from Barack Obama's great state of Illinois.
Sherry, you're live on the Rush Limbush.
Are you anywhere near Obama community organizing territory?
Well, I'm afraid it's everywhere, even though we don't see it, but please don't rub it in.
I won't send him around to organize your community.
By the way, nobody who has a choice about it wants to live in the kind of community that requires a community organizer.
I mean, it's generally a good sign that your community is not functioning properly.
But so I hope you don't have them in your neighborhood, Sherry.
But it's great to have you on the show.
Thank you.
Well said.
And you know, when we are looking at our primaries and our votes coming up, my mother and I both are saying, you know, if they're from Chicago, I'm not voting for them.
I'm looking for someone from mid to southern Illinois.
And that's just a fact.
There's just not much trust there.
Right.
So you don't want someone who's part of the machine.
Absolutely.
They cannot be trusted.
And I hate to make generalizations like that.
It makes me sick to my stomach to say that about people, but it's what we've seen.
How do you think all this class warfare stuff is going to is going to play?
Because the Democrats think they've found a winner here, demonizing the private sector.
77% of the public think that Obama is unfriendly to business.
And the Democrats say, hey, that's great.
Let's demonize them even more.
You know, if I were going to write a book or an article or something, I would write about the ironies.
I think there are so many ironies about the Democrats and the liberal platform and what the outcome is of what they do.
And I live in John Geere's World Headquarters, which is huge union territory.
And again, it pains me to say this about unions, but I think they're wagging the dogs.
I think the days of the union are past, and they've got such a stronghold on their members that they won't let go.
And I think it's ridiculous that the union members, I don't know.
I guess my question is, are they really as brainwashed and gullible as it seems?
Well, I would say, just to take that point, Sherry, that there's two kinds of unions.
And the real immediate, I mean, you have unions as you do in, say, Detroit, who are president, who negotiated deals that their companies could not support.
Now, at one level, it's the fault of the stupid boards of those companies for agreeing to sign those agreements in good times and then frantically trying to figure a way out when they can't afford all those overgenerous payments.
That's the problem of Detroit.
But, you know, Detroit killed itself because of unions in many ways.
But the real threat now, I would say, Sherry, is public sector unions.
I don't even understand why we have public sector unions.
President Kennedy allowed the federal government to unionize in, I think, it was 1962.
And why?
Why?
Because if you work for the government, you don't need a union.
Normally, if you work for a union, it's because the rich, selfish plutocrat you work for is going to is going to fire you and kick you out without any notice, and you and your little wife and kids are all going to be starving in your hovel because the big, bad capitalist has kicked you out because the market's turned down.
But you don't have to worry about that with government.
The government is a monopoly.
You don't have a situation where the government A says, well, I can't compete with government B across the streets.
I'm going to have to cut your wages.
The one people who shouldn't be in unions are the public sector, our government workers.
And since President Kennedy sent this thing in 1962, essentially the Democratic Party has unionized the federal government, the government workforce of the United States, and thereby starts with a huge advantage in every single election.
Because effectively, when you allow people to be public sector workers, public sector unionized workers, those union workforces become fully paid up members of the Democratic Party.
You look at what any candidate in New York state has to do.
New York is an over-unionized state, and that means that the Democratic Party starts with a huge advantage in almost any election.
And that's why it's bad for the country, Sherry.
And so I hope people in the private sector do not buy this demonization.
They're not buying it in your part of town, are they?
Well, I don't think so.
You know, that's my hope.
It's in humankind and human sensibility, because I think the union and the liberals are banking on people being, responding to the mantra.
And this villainizing of wealthy people, rich people.
I've seen it in my family who are union members.
They just think, they believe it.
Hookline and thinker, that's the mantra.
And when they, and I've seen and heard the Obama administration starting to play that up to get people ready and rally their side in this coming election.
And I'm really hoping that they're going to be smarter than that when they come to vote.
They will be.
It didn't work.
It didn't work in Massachusetts, and it isn't going to work in the rest of the country because people get it.
This crude class warfare is absolutely the opposite of what used to be the great strength about the United States.
We'll talk about that and lots more straight ahead.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Don't go away.
Great to be with you.
Your undocumented anchor man.
America's Anchorman returns live from Las Vegas tomorrow, where he's been busy judging the Miss America contest.
I'm still getting mail about roundabouts.
I've had an email from Catherine who goes, I've Googled maps of New London, New Hampshire, and cannot find any roundabout.
Where is it?
Catherine, you don't get it, do you?
They're like vampires.
They don't show up on maps.
Vampires in the mirror.
They don't show up on maps.
You're not going to find it there.
You can do the GPS.
It's not going to work.
We're talking about this new populism, Obama the Populist.
The president is making noises about helping the middle class, says the Los Angeles Times.
Is it a real economic plan or pandering?
Well, what do you think?
What do you think the answer?
That's the A or B question, the multiple choice question.
Is it a real economic plan?
A, is it a real economic plan?
B, or pandering.
Don't all press B all at once.
What is crippling the middle class in this country?
What is crippling the middle class is governmentalization of your life.
The cap and trade bill, what does that do for the middle class?
It impose new regulatory costs on small businesses.
It imposes new costs on just the simple act like selling your home or bringing your home up to environmental standards.
What does healthcare do?
That's a job killer.
What does Card Check do?
That's a job killer.
It diverts.
Card check benefits big, unproductive, unionized industries over small, dynamic industries.
What does the energy tax do?
What does stimulus spending do?
That's what's killing it for the middle class.
That's what's killing it for the middle class.
Now, people turn to this.
Once productive states turn to this as a last refuge, for example, in the state of Oregon, where is it?
I've got a pile of curl and fax paper here and I can't find the relevant one.
In the state of Oregon, they have decided that the solution to their problems is to increase corporate taxes.
Do you know what increasing corporate taxes does?
This country already has some of the highest corporate taxes, the highest corporate taxes in the world.
You go, here it's about 35%, depending which state or city or whatever you're in.
In Ireland, you know, it's a flat rate of 12%.
And that's it, 12%.
America's corporate tax rate is lower than is higher than Sweden's.
What do you think Americans work for?
A business doesn't pay taxes.
In the end, whatever tax rate you impose on a corporation has to be paid by human beings.
And those human beings are your voters and they're your citizens.
So this idea that you can somehow demonize corporations and no human beings need be involved is completely preposterous.
And only, only a left-wing economic illiterate would look at it that way.
Let's go to, I'm not even sure how to pronounce this name.
Ferrin.
Ferrin in Atlanta.
That's a fantastic name, Theron.
Theron, you're live on the Rushlinbaugh show.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, you pronounced it correctly.
It's Theron.
Oh, that's great.
Theron, just before we go any further, what kind of name is that?
It's actually of Acadian origin, I think.
Oh, right.
So that would be, that's what was confusing me.
I was thinking of it from up in Canada.
It would be Tehran, Tehran.
But you just say Theron.
You've Americanized it.
Well, I don't know.
It's a very unusual name.
There's only about three people I know have it.
I consider it a misspelled French name the way I kind of describe it.
Well, that's good.
Don't go sissying it up by sticking an accent on the E or anything.
It's just good law, the all-American way like Theron.
Okay, Ferrin, you're calling from Atlanta.
And what's your point?
Well, I was listening to the earlier, and I wanted to maybe respectfully correct you on something.
You mentioned about maybe instead of taxing bankers, they should go after luxury yacht makers.
But populism can have unintended consequences at any level.
And about 15 years ago, that was done.
I don't know if it was done for populist reasons or not, but they basically decided to tax yacht builders, and it put an awful lot of blue-collar workers out of work.
And basically, they had to backtrack on it.
So I'd like you to maybe wax on about the unintended consequences of popular.
Just to clarify here, Theron, I wasn't recommending that we impose punitive taxes on yacht makers.
But I was just making the point that if you want to, if you are mired in this populist outlook, the one thing you shouldn't be going after is banks, because banks are really in the business of taking rich people's money and lending it to poor people who don't have money.
Whereas it's easier to target a big yacht maker who's making yachts for John Kerry to float off sea in.
But you're right.
And the Democrats tried this.
Do you remember, you don't have to go back 15 years to the yacht bill.
About a year ago, they were going to impose penalties when they first came into office.
Do you remember when the big three automakers all flew in to beg Washington for money and they all flew in by private corporate jet?
And the Democrats, because they think this way, they think Nancy Pelosi needs a big private jet, but they don't think a guy who runs a big multinational company does.
They were going to impose punitive taxes on corporate executives who used corporate jets.
And then some Democrat congressman, bless them, showed that all these blue-collar workers who were their constituents worked for private jet manufacturers in this blue state and that blue state, and the Democrats decided to leave corporate jets alone.
But that actually makes the point.
Even when you're trying this populist stuff, you can take a yacht as a symbol of consumer excess, or you can take a private jet as a symbol of corporate greed.
But who makes the jet?
Who makes the yacht?
Regular people do.
The guy who lives down your street makes that yacht, makes that corporate jet.
And this is where populism is simply the worst kind of class prejudice and ultimately self-destructive because the big rich guy will still find a yacht.
You can buy a yacht from some guy in the United Arab Emirates and sail around in that.
All you'll be doing is putting American yacht workers out of work.
So that's a very good point, Theron.
You said it perfectly.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
That's Farin in Atlanta.
That's kind of yacht country down there in an odd kind of way.
Let's go to Bill in Southampton.
That's also yacht country too.
Bill in Southampton, New York.
You're live on the Russian Bush.
Great to have you with us.
Yeah.
Hi, Mark.
How are you today?
I'm doing good.
Excellent.
Kudos and amen to all the points that you're making about banks and going after corporations in America.
But here's my little bit of hope that Americans are not going to buy this populism against the banks.
And it has to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
And I believe a lot of Americans were tuned in to watch that old hearing in the Congress with Barney Frank and Maxine Waters extolling how well Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac are doing for America while they were forcing the banks to make all of these subprime loans and really destroy the system that we have today.
And I really laid at their doorstep why the market crashed as much as it did.
And I think a lot of people saw it when the Republicans tried to show that Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac are in trouble by bringing in the auditors.
All they did was just trash the auditors and constantly say what a wonderful job they're doing for America.
That's right.
And what happens is the people think it's Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
I think you had it the other way around.
Freddie Mac and Fannie and Fannie Mae.
But it doesn't matter because they're cross-dressers.
Who can remember which is which anyway?
But the point is this, that people think, oh, this is just some quasi-governmental entity that helps poor people.
They don't realize that it is in fact a massive distortion of the natural market and that it prevents the natural corrections of the market.
And what it did here in the United States, and this is why people should be going after Barney Frank long before they go after any vice president of this or that private bank, because Barney Frank is completely unaccountable.
And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unaccountable in that sense because they're a government license monopoly.
They've been given a blank check now.
They passed this thing in the dead of night just before I think it was Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve or whatever holiday it was, Groundhog Day, who remembers.
But they passed this thing essentially removing all fiscal control at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac completely so that the government can just write them a blank check now.
And that has been a far more destructive blow at property, which is after all the heart, the bedrock of a free society.
Property is indispensable to liberty.
So when you make an assault on the integrity of property and you destroy the value of property and you destroy the property market, you're actually making an assault on freedom.
There's a reason why hardcore Marxists say property is theft, because they understand that when people get a taste for property, when people own property, they start thinking like free individuals.
And that's why the distortion of property of the property market that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did was absolutely disgraceful and did huge damage to this country and in fact to the economy.
And people would be far better off blaming Barney Frank, whose significant other or whatever you call it, whose partner, whose long-term boyfriend was running one of them.
I can't remember whether he was running Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but he was running one of them during all this time.
That's the sort of thing, by the way, that if it was some Republican guy and his wife was running Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, there'd be all kinds of investigations into.
But oddly enough, whatever Barney Frank does, like this thing up in Maine the other day, where it turns out his current boyfriend has been growing marijuana in their vacation home, and he says, oh, well, I had no idea what a marijuana plant looks like.
So how was I to know what it was?
This is one reason why one-party states are unhealthy.
Barney Frank is not subject until this Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts to the normal political accountability.
He's essentially the emir of incumbestan in his little congressional district in Massachusetts.
And we need that we would be far better off demanding that the Congress and some of these regulatory agencies be held to account than going after bank presidents.
And you talk about auditors.
Nobody audits anything at government.
Government is immune to auditing.
Government, can you look at any government program?
You look at Medicare.
You look at the money that just disappears in Medicare because it either goes out in fraudulent payments or it just disappears somewhere en route to making a payment.
No small business could present paperwork like that to the IRS and get away with it.
Only a government department can, Bill.
And I think that's the message that people need to hear.
So you keep telling it to folks, Bill.
Have you gone?
Is Bill still there?
Bill, Bill, Bill's gone.
He bailed out on me.
We'll have lots of your calls straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Rush back tomorrow.
I found that story from Oregon I was looking for.
I got usually when I'm sitting down with HR and the gang down in New York, I've got everything on like this nice, super thick paper.
It's almost like a card you'd use for a wedding invitation.
It's money, no object.
But I've had it all up here on like curly fax papers.
Time to try to find anything.
It sort of curls off and blows out into the breeze into the flood-stricken Sullivan County and gets washed out to Long Island Sound before I get a chance to grab it.
But I found this thing, Portland, Oregon.
Oregon is considering measures to raise taxes on households earning $250,000 or more and on individuals earning $125,000 as well as hike corporate taxes.
About 39,000 of the state's 1.5 million taxpayers would be subject to the higher tax, and some big companies could see their annual bills go from $10 to $100,000.
Hey, what's the big deal?
I wonder how many of those companies in this recession, let's say your 2009 tax bill was $10, and your 2010 tax bill is $100,000.
So that's like $99,990 more you're giving to the government than you would have had to invest in your company or to hire somebody else.
This is what's wrong with the thinking behind what the government's doing.
All this stuff is job killing, job-killing, job-killing.
For a start, when you have uncertainty, in other words, when you have things like healthcare stuff that, oh, it's past the Senate, oh, it's wiggled through the next hole, it's wiggled through the next hoop, it just has to jump through one more hoop, and then we will have fantastic government health care.
But we haven't quite got there yet.
We might get there by reconciliation.
You've got cap and trade.
It passes in one house, it hasn't passed in the other house, but it's coming down the pike.
It's coming at you.
Everything that the administration and the Democrat Congress talks about and makes clear it wants to pass is a job killer.
So even before passing it, people, if you've got a small business and you're thinking, well, do I want to hire somebody?
Okay, last quarter I kind of recovered.
I got back on my feet again.
It'd be nice to maybe take somebody else on.
Oh, but what's this?
Oh, now they're saying my annual tax bill could go from $10 to $100,000.
So that $99,999, $990 that I would have used to hire a new person, maybe a couple of new people, whatever, now will be going to the government.
Whenever you have populism that identifies itself as an assault on the dynamic and the successful and the innovative, you're punishing yourself.
It's great to stick it to the rich guy, but in the end, you're only sticking it to yourself.
You'd be much better sticking it to the big job-killing government bureaucracy that is at the heart of the problems here.
Mark Stein in for rush and lots more still to come on the EIB network.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
Let's go to Richie in Cincinnati.
Richie, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Yeah, Mark, thanks for taking my call.
I wanted to, I'll get right to the point.
Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are creating trickle-down taxation and poverty on the poor.
And here's the reason why.
Every time you directly or indirectly increase prices for corporations through taxation or any other cost, what you do is force them to raise their prices.
Okay?
Now, if you raise the price $100, if everybody's going to, every person in the country has to spend $100 more, think of it this way.
A $25,000 income that has disposable income left of about $10,000, divide $100 by $10,000.
That's their effective tax rate.
Take that person you were mentioning before, $250,000.
They have $100,000 of taxation.
That's an increase in taxation.
That is only going to increase divide 100 by 100,000.
The effective tax rate on the poor goes up.
Taxation never trickles up to the rich, it trickles down to the poor.
That's an excellent point, Richie.
And you know why this president doesn't understand it?
There's fewer people, by the way, involved who have private sector experience in this administration.
They did some survey, fewer people in the cabinet with private sector administration than in any U.S. cabinet the last century.
And that's why the president stood up here and he said that the government health care plan would be helpful because unlike it would be cheaper, because unlike private health care insurers, they didn't have to factor profits into overhead.
That's how economically illiterate the president of the United States is, folks.
He thinks that profit is part of your overhead.
So he's now, for the last 12 months, punished profits.
People who make profits spend those profits by investing in their companies, by spending money in other local businesses, by dispersing those profits around their communities.
There's nothing in it for you if he takes those profits and sticks it in the great big bottomless pit of the federal treasury.
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