All Episodes
Previous Next
March 30, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:42
March 30, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yes, America's anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Great to be with you.
Mark Davis here tomorrow and then Rush returns on Thursday from his undisclosed location.
He's been checking out still functioning health systems around the world and a lot of listeners went in with suggestions upon about where he might be.
South Africa and Singapore.
Yesterday it was New Zealand that was in the lead.
But I would say that actually today more votes have been cast for Singapore and South Africa.
So Rush will explain where he's been on Thursday.
In fact, where he is now, as we heard from that caller from Melbourne, Victoria in Australia, where Rush is now, it's already the day he's supposed to be back on the air.
So he should, with the time difference, he should just be wrapping up his first show since he got back.
But because of the time delay, you won't hear that show until he returns on Thursday Eastern time, if you follow that.
Mark Stein in for Russia.
You know, we were talking about Germany and German overall economic indicators.
There is a real problem with the rest of the Western world.
And that is why you don't look at healthcare as a healthcare issue.
You look at it as a government issue.
You look at what it does to the overall indicators of the state.
There's a piece in the Asia Times today, Japan, land of the setting sun.
You know, this has just kind of disappeared down the memory hole.
But if you went back to the late 1980s, everybody was terrified.
Japan was buying up everything inside.
Sony bought Columbia.
The Japanese bought Rockefeller Center.
They were going to take over everything.
And yes, we are in Japan.
Is it still Japanese zone?
We're broadcasting from what was supposed to be the flagship of the Nipponese invasion.
And it was basically their base camp for the takeover of the United States.
And it's now owned by somebody else, isn't it?
Is it owned by an American?
Nobody knows who owned it now, but they bought it cheap.
The Japanese paid for Rockefeller Center at the top of the market, and they sold it.
They were very glad to unload it and get rid of it.
But remember, that's just the day before yesterday.
People were terrified.
The Japanese, people were making these commercials that you'd be going to the shopping mall and everything would be Japanese and they'd be speaking Japanese and they were going to buy up the whole of America.
What happened to Japan?
What happened to Japan?
Japan has a deficit now in the latest budget of 10% of GDP at a time when Japanese public debt exceeds 200% of GDP.
So, and there, for the first time ever, the tax receipts in Japan are projected to cover less than 50% of public spending.
So in other words, they're doing like Obama on steroids.
We're just a little below that now, but they're pumped up ahead of us.
By the way, that 200% of GDP, if it sounds horrible to think that your public debt is 200% of GDP, we are going to be second in the world among the OECD countries.
I mean, I have no idea what it's like in, and I don't think even they do, in North Korea or whatever.
It doesn't really count.
But among the developed countries, we are going to be second only to Japan in terms of debt as a percentage of GDP in a couple of years.
They're up to 200% now.
Their tax receipts cover less than 50% of spending.
So in other words, this isn't very difficult because we're heading up towards that kind of territory now.
You spend $4 trillion, but you take in $2 trillion in tax receipts.
And you do that, you know, I mean, it doesn't sound a lot at first, $2 trillion shortfall, does it?
But you do it every year.
You do it every year, and it starts to add up.
$2 trillion, $4 trillion, $6 trillion every year.
So for the first time ever, the Japanese are taking in less than in tax receipts, less than 50% of what they're spending this year.
The most notorious example of a government, this is the Asia Times, the most notorious example of a government whose tax receipts covered less than 50% of public spending in peacetime was the German Weimar government of 1919 to 1923.
Well, there's a heartening precedent for you.
But that's what we're talking about.
You know, if you look at the later Weimar years, people had these, the Deutschmark was worthless.
It was just like being devalued every day of the week.
So people were taking wheelbarrows to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread.
No good, no good comes of spending at this level.
And this is the point to bear in mind, that everywhere that the big-sized Euro-Japanese social welfare state has been tried, it leads to a demographic death spiral, an economic death spiral that it's extremely hard to pull out of.
Germany is in net population decline.
Japan is in net population decline.
The toy manufacturers, who wants to be a toy manufacturer in Japan because there are no children?
They're closing maternity wards.
Nobody wants to have kids.
The women are all single and don't want to have kids.
So the toy manufacturers, because there's no point making teddy bears and cute little dollies when there's no little girls to play with the dollies.
So the Japanese are now, toy manufacturers are now making robot companions for the elderly, in effect, to be the grandchildren they'll never have.
So they know just enough phrases to be able to have the kind of conversation that a slightly backward three-year-old would be able to have with you.
And so they'll keep you company in your lonely old age.
The Japanese are manufacturing, because the other thing, of course, if you're very old and you've got government health care, who's going to be your nurses?
Who's going to be your nurses?
You need to have a certain amount.
If you look at, just wander around.
I know young people who are pain in the neck and, you know, they make this awful ghastly catawalling pop music like Ricky Martin and then come out and announce they're gay and they're generally irritating.
I can understand that about young people.
But just walk out in the streets.
Who digs the roads?
Young people.
Who are the policemen?
Young people.
Who are the nurses?
Young people.
If you don't have a certain amount of young people, it's very difficult to have a, and you have a bunch of old people.
You've got to figure out who's going to look after the old people.
So in Japan, they're trying to develop robot nurses, robot nurses, so that when you are lying in hospital, in a Japanese hospital, spending 20 years dying, and they need someone to turn you over for your bed bath, and they can't get a real nurse, they've invented a robot to do it.
And they're primitive robots at the moment with cold metallic hands.
So it doesn't really, it's not too pleasant.
But they're going to invest a bit more in it, and they will develop these robots, like more like the Austin Powers Fembot, so that when it turns you over, it's actually quite pleasant, and the skin still feels slightly creepy.
But it's no more creepy than embracing your average Hollywood actress and finding yourself bruised from her implants.
I mean, they're at least as human as your average Hollywood celebrity.
So this is where, this is where the social welfare state leads.
It leads to a deformed demographic profile and an economic tail spiral that you can never pull out of.
And every time, yeah, pop culture calls it.
There are no Ricky Martin living La Vida Loca.
Because like Ricky Martin, when he was all boyish and charming 10 years ago, prancing around, wiggling his butt, singing, that was great.
But it's embarrassing when you've only got like 78-year-old pop stars wiggling their butts and talking about doing the living La Vida Loca.
It's ridiculous.
So this is every time Obama and the Democrats tell you, well, what's so wrong with being a European social democracy?
What's so wrong with being a Japanese social democracy?
Look at them.
Look at their demographic profile.
Look at their aging populations.
Look at their unsustainable entitlements.
Look at their tax rates.
Look at their GDP, their invisible GDP growth.
Look at their permanent unemployment rates by all important indicators.
And then even if you don't want to do that, if you don't want to get hung up on details, ask yourself this.
What happened to all those big scare stories you used to hear about the rising sun?
Japan, the Japanese are coming.
They're buying up everything.
It was the day before yesterday.
It's gone.
It's over and it will never come again.
So you don't have to worry.
Whatever you have to worry about in the future, you don't have to worry about the Japanese.
So we'll talk.
So I don't think we have much to emulate in the German healthcare system or the Japanese healthcare system because they're generally part of a dysfunctional view of the sustainable size of government in an advanced society.
So we'll talk about that.
Also get into the new militias are back.
Have you ever noticed this?
The scary right-wing militia.
You used to hear about them all the time in the Clinton era.
And then mysteriously, you never heard anything about them during the Bush years.
And now they're back.
They've just arrested all these guys in Michigan.
I think nine guys from one of these, what Dan Rather, in the days before he started doing watermelon jokes about Obama, Dan Rather used to call the shadowy right-wing militia.
This was his phrase.
He'd be running these stories every couple of weeks.
The shadowy right-wing militia.
They're back now in Michigan.
And we'll get into what that says for all the hate out there.
So if you're a big-time hatemonger, if you're a racist, misogynist, I'd love to hear from you.
1-800-282-282.
I love this.
You know, I was trying to find that Frank Rich story in the New York Times about how we right-wing hatemongers only hate a healthcare bill because we're racists and homophobes and misogynists.
And instead, I came across the obituary of the prominent American poet I, AI, that's her name, I, whose work, known for its raw power, jagged edges, and unflinching examination of violence and despair, stood as a damning indictment of American society.
She died.
Sadly, she died a couple of days ago.
But her damning indictment of American society, they quote from her poem here, her poem Salome, I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would if I cut it off.
This is Frank Rich's very own newspaper.
Frank Rich writes the things, oh, those hate mongers, those hate mongers on the right, they're using loaded language like battleground states because they're so full of rage and violence.
And you turn the page, and on the Vedex page, there's this forwarding obituary of the poet I and her savage indictment of American society.
I scissor the stem of the red carnation and set it in a bowl of water.
It floats the way your head would if I cut it off.
That's the New York Times approved poem of the day from the EIB network.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Turning Japanese.
I think I'm turning.
We're turning Japanese.
We're turning Greek.
It's a tragedy for the United States of America.
We're embracing, we're embracing the strategies that have proved so disastrous for the rest of the Western world, just as they're beginning to wake up to the impact.
Let us go to Jim in Portland, May.
Jim, you are live on the Rush Limbusho.
Great to have you with us.
Hello, Mark.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I hope you're doing great in Portland, too, my northern New England neighbor just across the border from me in New Hampshire.
It's always good to have you representing the hate mongers of America while Russia's away.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Rush is the president of the hate mongers of America.
I'm only an assistant deputy vice president of the hate mongers of northern New England, Jim.
So don't go over-inflating my status, please.
Okay.
Well, look, I love it when you talk unfunded mandates.
One of my favorites of all time is the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Years ago, when I was employed by one of our 57 states, we had a person who was a professor in a state-owned college who had been abusing female students for many years.
We finally managed to fire him, and lo and behold, the first time I ever heard the term sex addict was in a lawsuit which he filed against us.
Right.
That lawsuit ended up being appealed all the way to the state high court.
That's right.
I remember this case because it's one of those ones where you think, wow, they cannot be serious.
Sex addiction.
So he was basically saying he was just hitting on all these chicks because it was a medical condition.
Couldn't help himself.
And he was in a protected class under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And, of course, the part of that unfunded mandate that people don't realize is that although we prevailed, it took two years and an untold amount of expense in terms of court filings and legal time and so forth to try to win against it.
Yeah, and that's the other thing that people forget about this expansion of government: that the sheer time and money that the ever more complicated regime the government imposes on you costs you in real time and in real economic activity.
Whatever you spent taking that to the Maine Supreme Court, you could have spent on far more genuine wealth-generating activities in Portland and in the Maine area, couldn't you?
Exactly.
And then you look at, and the one that just makes me quake in my boots is the idea of 16,000 more IRS agents because it'll be the same kind of thing.
And you can be right, but it can cost you dearly to prove that you're right.
Yeah, that's right.
When you say the 16, I think it's actually 16,500 extra IRS agents that will be taken on to comply with all the different tax implications of Obamacare.
This is the biggest expansion of the single expansion of the IRS since the Second World War, which gives you an indication of what Obamacare is going to do to the tax code, because this country already has an overcomplicated tax code that is an abomination to a free society.
And we're expanding the reach of the IRS in the biggest single growth of the agency since the Second World War.
So at some point, you know, and just to bring up another point, Jim, this insulation thing, this green insulation thing that was in the stimulus package over a year ago now, and where apparently only a small number of homes have been done, this is because, this is because the federal requirements in who you can hire to do the work in insulating your home according to the federal green stimulus thing are so complicated, so complicated,
that even the federal government, which designed the thing, has taken over a year to try and figure out the precise rate they're allowed to charge in all the different 3,000 counties of the United States.
So at a certain point, I think government, particularly with unfunded mandates, but government can transfer so much to the private sector, so much of the effort involved in policing and enforcing these various codes and regulations.
But at some point, the private sector just throws its hand up and gives up, surely.
Yeah, exactly.
And any bill with over 2,000 pages in it is only going to benefit the trial lawyers and probably work to the detriment of most everybody else.
Yeah, and there used to be, under common law, there used to be a very basic, a very basic principle that ignorance of the law is no dispute, is no excuse.
And that was a very reasonable position to take when laws were three or four pages long.
When you have laws that are 2,000 pages long and the guys who vote on it don't read them and the people who pass the bill don't read them, and the people who pass the bill go on, meet the press and claim there are things in that bill that aren't actually in that bill.
At that stage, at that stage ignorance of the law when even the legislators are ignorant of the law, nobody can know this law and you're no longer living under a regime of laws.
Because if it's impossible to know the law unless you hire high-priced legal advice, as you had to pay and spend to get off this sex addiction thing not your sex addiction, I take it, but the sex addiction of your former employee then there is no equality before the law, because then it just becomes a matter of whether you can afford to fight the thing or whether you just have to give up and settle it.
But for the moment, sex addiction is not a recognized disability in the state of Maine.
I'm not sure.
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know.
But the point is, if someone files a claim and if they get the thing moving, you have to defend again.
Yeah, that's true.
And really, once sex addiction becomes a recognized disease, and particularly if it's one of these pre-existing conditions that you can't turn people away for, then basically everything, everything is an illness, isn't it?
Because there's entire vacation resorts set up in Florida.
Like spring break is just like sex addiction break, isn't it?
So that would be like an American with Disabilities Act convention under this interpretation of the law.
I mean, at a certain point, you cannot go anywhere with this.
Eventually, the Leviathan will bring it all crashing down.
And there will be no point even to being a sex addict because you'll be too depressed even to hit on any checks because you're just paying so much to support the government.
So even if you are a sex addict, even if you are, thank you for your call, Jim, by the way.
I'd forgotten that.
It went all the way to the Supreme Court.
So even if you are a sex addict and you think this is, wow, this is great.
Americans with Disabilities Act, now I can be a sex addict on the government's dime.
No, it's not going to work like that because eventually, even in a massive dependency culture, it just leads to the grey, drab, empty shelves of your average Soviet emporium.
There is no future in going down this road.
More straight ahead.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away.
Your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Mark Davis will be here tomorrow and Rush returns Thursday.
You know, we were talking earlier about the size of this legislation, these 2,000-page bills.
The Homestead Act, the Homestead Act of 1862, that basically opened up land for granting land to heads of family, 106, I think up to 160 acres for a minimum filing fee and five years of continued residence on that land, opening up the expansion of the United States Beyond the Eastern Coast,
critical act in the growth and development of this nation.
It's two pages long.
It's two pages long.
And the guy who, by the way, the guy who wrote that legislation knew what was in it because he wrote it in his own hand.
It wasn't one of these things where they farmed it out to a zillion different committees and legal aides to this or that senator.
It's two handwritten pages, a vast transformative act.
This health care bill is 2,000 pages.
Nobody knows what's in it.
That represents the corruption of Republican government.
You can't have informed citizens when you have 2,000-page bills.
You can't even have informed legislators.
Nobody knows what's in these bills.
Do you remember when people were saying they were talking about passing a law requiring congressmen to have read the bill before they voted on it?
And John Conyers said, there is no point making me read the bill because I wouldn't understand what's in it anyway.
So there's no point.
There's no point even asking these guys to read the bill because they can't understand it.
They can't understand it.
You don't know what's in it.
There's no Republican government in any meaningful sense when that happens.
All you have is rule by technocrats.
All you have is some guy, you don't know who he is, you don't know his name.
He's sitting in some building in Washington and he will make the determination on the particular interpretation of whatever happens to be the lingo in this bill.
But if you don't like him, you don't know who he is.
You don't know which department he works for.
You don't know how his particular provision got in the bill.
Where do you go to to vote him out?
This whole thing is an abomination and an affront to genuine Republican government.
Let's go to Maggie in Miami.
Maggie, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show.
It is great to have you with us.
Hi, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
And can I just say I love your accent?
Really?
Yes, I do.
It required years of vocal coaching by one of Broadway's best vocal teachers, by the way, to get me.
You don't want to hear what I sound like normally.
But anyway, that's very nice of you.
That's very nice of you, Maggie.
I'll try and keep it up for another 20 minutes or so.
But great to have, yeah, it's like a sort of Meryl Streep thing, you know.
I can just, I can just, like, if I'm at the airline counter buying a ticket or whatever, I've got a complete, I sound more like Gary Cooper.
You know, I can do all kinds of things.
Great to have you with us anyway.
What's your point?
Well, according to the Liberals, I am a triple minority radical.
I am a woman of Hispanic descent.
I am gay, and I go to tea parties.
However, I do.
You're a gay, Hispanic woman tea partier.
That's right.
I consider myself an American.
Right, right.
But as far as the liberal, as far as Frank Rich is concerned, you are, in fact, a racist, homophobe misogynist, because the category that counts is that you go to tea parties.
If you go to tea parties, you must hate black people and you must hate women and you must hate gay people.
So congratulations, Maggie.
You've hit the trifecta there.
That's great.
I know.
But my question is this.
I mean, I have health insurance, and my health insurance provider, you can get your, you could provide insurance to your 23-year-old, providing that they go to school full-time.
Right.
And you have to provide proof.
So I'd like to know what is like the, if the government's going to have a prerequisite to have your 26-year-old on your health insurance.
Because the way I look at it, then I guess they're defining you're a child up until the age you're 26.
Right.
So if that's the case, if you're a child up until the age of year 26, then they need to raise the drinking and voting age to 27.
Right, right.
I wholly agree with you.
I think the age of consent should be raised to 27 too, because I don't think these kids, I think the letting these kids get any kind of action, get any heavy petting or all the rest of it until they're fully mature on their 27th birthday would be a disaster.
We shouldn't let them vote until they're 27, and we certainly shouldn't let them have a glass of alcohol until they're 27.
So you want a kind of harmonized age of majority in the United States.
Well, if they're defining a child to the age of 26, then I guess they're not an adult until they're like 27.
I mean, that's the way I'm that's the way I view it.
I mean, if they're viewing that you're rich because you make $250,000, then I guess I would view that you're an adult when you're 27.
Well, it's true.
If you're a child for the purposes of health insurance until you're 27, then on what basis, basically the state is saying you're so vulnerable, you still require the protection of your parents until the age of 27.
At what state, why then should someone be going out, you know, when they're just a kid, when they're just 24 or 25, why should they be going out down to a bar and having a couple of beers?
You're right, that should be put up till the age of 27.
And they shouldn't vote because they're not mature enough to vote.
And when they do, they just vote for Obama, who increases their health care premiums 17%.
So you're right, I think, that this makes sense.
We should have a revision of the law of the age of majority and that these little children, these vulnerable little children of 26 and a half, whom people have exploited by luring them into bars and luring them into meaningless sexual activity, this is a disaster.
We should prohibit all that until their 27th birthday.
Good thinking, Maggie.
That's terrific.
I hope the Democrats will take you up on that.
Yeah, right.
I'm an oddball as it is.
And just as a matter of interest, you enjoy going to those tea parties?
I love it.
I love it.
I meet the nicest people.
I mean, at least I meet people that have an idea.
They know what's going on.
I mean, I've actually, I remember going to a gathering where they were all like gay people at the gathering, and they were talking about Obama, and I said I didn't vote for him.
I thought everybody was going to have whiplash because their head just snapped.
And I'm like, no.
You can't really be gay if you didn't vote for Obama, can you?
I mean, it's not.
Absolutely.
Why not?
I have a common sense approach to life and I have a common sense approach to politics.
But I mean, I thought you got drummed out of the movement if you like wander off the reservation.
They like tribal solidarity in identity group politics.
You've all got to vote one way.
And you've got to stick within you got to stick within the tribe.
You've got to stick within the identity group and you can't wander too far.
But you feel you're actually getting a fairer shake with the Tea Party crowd than you do when you go to the gay group get-togethers.
Well, and I really don't even go to gay group get-togethers anymore, but it's just that I just I think they're just so clueless.
Most people, and it just doesn't have to mean the the gender.
It's just in general, a lot of people are just clueless to what's going on.
They're not getting their information straight.
They're not researching the information.
And when I do go to these tea parties, I I mean I'm involved with a group and everything.
You at least you could sit and speak politics and the issues, what's going on with people that just ha can think for themselves, 'cause it's all about thinking for yourself and making the best decisions for your family because the government does not have to get involved in every single decision that you make.
That's the way I feel.
I don't feel government has to get involved in whatever decisions I make.
And I believe in small government.
I believe in low taxes.
I don't think just because you're rich, you need to pay more taxes.
No, because it's those rich people that are the ones that own the businesses that provide the jobs for the majority of people.
It's like I have a common sense approach to looking at how government should run.
Thanks for your call, Maggie.
And you're absolutely right, because what would you rather do?
Would you rather the rich guy takes his money and he spends it on the local businesses and he spends it in his local community?
Or would you rather he writes a check and mails it to Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to spend as they think right.
And that's really the choice here.
I mean, it's not a terribly difficult one to make.
It's basically that who knows who even if you accept that the rich guy is selfish and overpaid and has all these decadent and unhealthy tastes, he's not like Scrooge McDuck.
Scrooge McDuck is the only rich guy who takes his money in dollar bills and keeps it in a warehouse and drives it back and forth in his tractor every day.
Other than Scrooge McDuck, rich guys take their money and they spend it in their neighborhood and they spend it in their community and they spend it buying stuff and they spend it investing stuff and they spend it hiring people.
So would you rather they did that or would you rather that he just wrote a big check and mailed it to Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and they decided how the rich guy's money should be spent?
Because that's basically the choice here.
The choice is whether you think Barney Frank knows how to spend the money or whether Nancy Pelosi knows how to spend the money or whether the rich guy just spending it on stuff he'd like to do, on projects he'd like to invest in, on people he'd like to hire, will actually do a better job of that.
Very good example.
This is from The Guardian, left-wing newspaper in London today.
The loss of up to 3,000 jobs in City of London hedge funds and private equity firms is a price worth paying for tougher rules on the sector.
An influential European member of parliament said today.
Jean-Paul Goz, the European Parliament rapporteur on a proposed directive on alternative investment.
Now, proposed directive on alternative investment, this is what I was talking about.
This is where Barney Frank decides what he'd like to put the rich guy's money into.
Jean-Paul Goes said, if the directive wipes out 2,000 or 3,000 speculators, I am not going to be sad.
In his first trip to London in more than 30 years, Goes said that Europe should become a fortress of non-European hedge funds.
In other words, this guy is saying, we're not going to let the market determine where people invest their money.
We're going to insist that people give their money to the political establishment, and the political establishment will create a rigged market.
And that is basically the express elevator to the septic tanker history.
And this is always the way it works.
The rich guy, the rich guy, just spending his money on what happens to interest him and where he happens to think it should go will always do a better job than Barney Frank spending the rich guy's money for him.
Lots more straight ahead.
1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein in Farush.
We were talking to Maggie, who was a gay Hispanic female.
And yesterday we were talking to Cynthia, who was another gay lady.
So I don't know whether This is a higher than normal quotient HR for in terms of the number of gay female callers on the show.
But I think that just as we're messing with Frank Rich's head, I think we should try.
I think we should try and do an all-gay show at some point in which we will get all lesbian callers and just make Frank Rich's head explode.
Because make the Rush Limbaugh show the number one show for right-wing lesbian hate mongers and just make Frank Rich's head explode.
Let us go to Doug in Great Falls, Montana.
Doug, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hi, Mark.
I can't help you with that lineup.
Straight white married male here.
A straight white married male?
You're just pandering to Frank Rich's stereotype, you hate monger.
Well, we'll make an exception and let have Doug.
You can be the angry white male of the day.
So give it your best shot.
All right, Mark.
Hey, you know, I'm 47.
My dad was born in 1934.
When he was 26 years old, he had two kids, owned a business, and had been supporting his mother and his little brothers for 12 years.
Now, that's a grown-up man in my book.
Right.
And now we're going to tell kids, you're 26, but gee, live with mom and dad.
We'll pay for everything and we'll pay for your health coverage, too.
It's another question I had.
Are they going to cover the kids of kids?
Does the 26-year-old with three kids, are the three kids covered under Obama's plan?
So wait a minute.
So wait a minute.
The 26-year-old's kids, they would be covered by his health insurance, which would be covered by his parents' health insurance.
So at that point, the 48-year-old parents of the 26-year-old kid would have every incentive to move in with their 73-year-old parents and put it all on the 73-year-old parents' health insurance.
You're absolutely right, though, when you say this.
Any society in human history would have regarded a 26-year-old as an adult who, in normal circumstances, would already have formed his own family, started a job, be growing a business, be living in his own home.
And there's a serious point to what you say, Doug, because one of the reasons why other Western nations are in the hellhole they're in is because of delayed family formation.
In Japan, where none of the women want to have kids, they're 30-year-olds, they're living at home, they're single, and they're childless.
Same thing in Germany.
They've got words for these things now.
They call them in Italy the Bambocione, I think it is.
And in Japan, they're called the Parasitu Shinguru, which is parasite singles, they call them.
And they named it after a horror film called Parasite A Eve, in which alien spawn grow in human bellies and feed off the host until they're ready to burst through, like an alien.
And in Germany, they're called nest hawkers.
And in Britain, they're called kippers.
Kippers, which stands for kids in, let me get this right.
Kippers, kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings.
And so this is a phenomenon now across the Western world.
Seven out of ten adults aged 18 to 39 in Italy live with their parents.
There is no future going down the Italian path.
More to come.
Mark Stein on the E of EIB Network.
The time has flown by quicker than sitting in a National Health Service waiting room waiting for your hip replacement for three years.
We've covered it all today from Larry King to man boobs.
And it's been great.
It's been great to be with you.
I love being a Rush Limborg guest host.
It's a pre-existing condition.
Although, oddly enough, I don't believe, I believe it's the last pre-existing condition that isn't covered by Obamacare.
Mark Davis is going to be in with you tomorrow.
▲
Export Selection