All Episodes
Previous Next
May 11, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
May 11, 2010, Tuesday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
You know, folks, speaking of Greece, there's another good comparison to what we're doing in Greece.
Greece is like the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler, in effect.
In fact, it's probably more like GM and Chrysler than it is the bank bailouts.
The banks didn't want the money.
Greek does.
Greece does.
The banks paid the money back.
Some of them didn't want the money.
But what was the General Motors and Chrysler bailout?
What it really was, was a bailout of the socialist unions and their health care plans and their pension plans, which is exactly what this money is going to do in Greece.
There will be no austerity.
We're going to bail them out.
We!
The borrowing window at the Fed is open.
You could retire at General Motors at 53, just like in Greece.
That was threatened until we bailed out General Motors and Chrysler.
Yeah, right.
Austerity just around the corner.
53, yeah, you could retire 53 at General Motors just like you can in Greece with your pension and your health care and everything else.
I'm 59.
I could have retired six years ago.
And we're now paying for it.
That's what the bailout was all about.
All of this is about bailing out government workers, government unions, and private sector unions that exclusively support and contribute to liberalism, socialism, communism.
Now, what I want to know is how can Los Angeles be in such, by the way, hi folks, you know who I am, Rush Limbaugh.
You know what this is, the best show on the radio, so get that out of the way.
800-282-2882, if you'll be on the phones, we'll get to you in a minute.
The question, how can Los Angeles be in such terrible shape?
They're doing everything Obama suggested.
Are they not?
The way Obama said he is going to lift the entire country out of our recession.
They have raised taxes.
They have hired a tremendous number of unionized government workers.
And you know, there's a story in the stack.
Obama wants to speed up federal hiring.
We're not hiring federal workers fast enough.
He wants to speed up the process.
Well, Los Angeles has done that.
They're the country's foremost leaders on taxing companies in the name of climate change.
They are a barometer of cap and trade.
They are exactly where we're headed.
They support green energy left and right, up and down.
They are a sanctuary city, L.A. is, wonderfully overrun with hardworking, economy-expanding, illegal aliens.
100 languages are spoken there.
Where did they go wrong?
I want Obama to tell us where Greece went wrong.
Spain's unemployment, 20%.
I want Obama to tell us where Spain went wrong.
And I would like Villaragosa to tell us where he went wrong.
Because the Obama prescriptions are on display throughout Los Angeles.
And here's more about L.A.
This is from the Heritage Foundation of Morning Bill today.
On March 15th, appearing with labor and environmental leaders, a Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaragosa unveiled a new alternative energy plan that he said would ensure the L.A. Department of Water and Power would meet his goal of securing 20% of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar by December 31st.
At the time, he claimed that this initiative, this alternative energy plan, would create 16,000 jobs and only raise consumer electric bills between 8.8 and 28.4% only.
That was the good news.
Going alternative energy, green energy, clean up everything, 16,000 new workers, and it's only going to cost your electric rates to go up maybe 28%.
That was the good news.
Less than two weeks later, this is on March 15th when he made this announcement.
Less than two weeks later, those energy rate increase estimates had skyrocketed with the LA Department of Water and Power saying it needed to raise rates by 37% in order to meet the renewable energy standards that Villa Ragosa had established.
Now, Los Angeles' already shrinking business community revolted, and by April, Mayor Villaragosa's plan had been soundly defeated.
But what played out in Los Angeles is now about to play out in Washington.
Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat, New Mexico, has been marshaling his American Clean Energy and Security Act through committee.
It's set to move to the floor soon.
The heart of Bingaman's plan is essentially the same as Mayor Villaragos's, a renewable electricity standard, RES, that mandates sellers of electricity to produce a growing percentage of their power from renewable energy sources every two years.
And like Mayor Villaragosa's plan, Senator Bingaman's renewable energy standards would also mean higher electricity prices for all Americans.
Now, the inconvenient truth of all this is that nearly half of America's electricity is generated from coal, natural gas and nuclear energy at about 20% each.
Most of the rest, and that's 70 or 30% here, most of the rest, provided by renewable sources, primarily hydroelectric energy at 6%.
Non-hydro renewables like wind, solar, and biomass total only 3%.
And this is after decades of existing generous renewable subsidies.
We have been subsidizing renewable energy for decades, and still it accounts for less than 10% of the production of our electricity nationwide.
Now, if electricity created by wind and other renewables were cost-competitive, consumers would use more of it without a federal law to force them to.
But renewable energy is not cost-competitive, hence the need for government coercion to force the American people to buy it.
Liberalism.
Now, just how much more will we have to pay for energy under renewable electricity standard?
Keep in mind now, we're trying to revive an economy, ostensibly.
The cost of basic necessity set to skyrocket here.
Well, there are federal studies of the costs of the renewable energy sources that conclude it would add no more than a few percent to electric rates, but these studies do not take the full cost of wind and other renewables into account, including the additional resources needed to overcome the intermittent and unreliable nature of wind energy or the construction of new transmission lines connecting rural windmills to urban power needs.
If you take all of these factors into account, the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis crunched the numbers and found that The Bingaman bill basically would raise electricity prices by 36% for households, 60% for industry.
It would cut national GDP by 5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035.
It would cut national income by $2,400 per family for Family Four, reduce employment by more than a million jobs, and add more than $10,000 to a Family of Four share of the national debt by 2035.
The report concludes that electric power is one of the most critical inputs to a modern economy.
That is, no surprise, forcing the cost of electricity to rise dampens economic activity.
The bottom line is, it didn't work in L.A.
It had no chance of working.
We're about to do it here with the Bingaman bill, and it's not going to work.
It's cap and trade.
All of this new spending, this delusional spending on top of delusional spending, the delusion being that this is fixing anything, has just got to stop.
Liberalism, folks, this is not somebody's wrong ideas of finance.
It's not somebody's incorrect assumptions about business.
All of these decisions are being made by political ideologues who haven't the slightest idea what they're talking about.
They haven't the slightest idea how to do anything in the private sector and make it work because they never have, because they resent the private sector.
And they have the gall and the arrogance to act smarter than everybody else when they are blazing a trail of destruction wherever they go.
And they wake up every day and they keep expanding the trail and digging it even deeper.
Back after this.
Okay, we're going to go to the phones here, folks.
People, as always, lined up since before the program began.
Did you get rid of that idiot that wanted to tell me snurdily that Elena Kagan is more open-minded than Bork?
All right, good.
John in Los Angeles.
Well, it makes sense to start with somebody from L.A. Welcome to the program, sir.
Oh, thank you very much.
Glad to get through finally.
I don't know if you know this, but the things that you're talking about are absolutely true about Los Angeles.
I'm born and raised here, lived here all my life since 66.
And the programs, the things that they've implemented, not only in Los Angeles, but at the legislature in Sacramento, we now have 12.5 million people in Los Angeles.
Only 35% pay taxes.
I mean, I'm sorry, 12.5 million people, LA and L.A. County.
Only 35% pay taxes.
And you wonder why we're in a fiscal mess.
You know, they have these welfare programs for every social service you can think of.
And all the jobs are moving to the city sector.
And the private companies have gone.
I mean, I've seen the Toyota plants close.
I've seen Lieber Brothers close.
I've seen so many industrial plants close.
The Chevy plants have closed that the only thing left is the service sector and the city jobs.
And that's predominantly why I think that we're in the financial mess that we're in.
I've been out to LA a lot.
The country clubs are still open.
Yeah, I mean, for the Hollywood types, but for everybody else, I mean, you know, you look at the mortgage meltdown and everything that's going here, and we try to sell you on the dream that you can still acquire what the Paris Hiltons have.
But guess what?
You've seen what's happening now.
We have probably the second or the first largest foreclosure rate in the country.
The taxes are horrendous.
They can't touch property taxes, but they're going after that.
Sales tax is at 10%.
I mean, my parents didn't even used to pay any state tax back in the 60s and the 50s and all that good stuff.
And here we are paying the highest taxes in the nation, and now we've just become the largest welfare state in the nation.
Yeah, you know, what you're describing here is just like in socialist countries everywhere, there's no middle class anymore.
You have the very poor and the very rich.
The bourgeoisie have been cut off.
They don't exist.
Rush, and you're going to laugh at this.
Do you want to know what California considers a rich person as far as when it comes to taxing?
If you make income of over $47,000 a year in California, which is the highest, probably the second or the first highest place to live when it comes to the cost of living, that if you make $48,000 a year or more, you're considered an upper echelon person.
Me and my wife make over $100,000 together, and we barely scrape by just on the cost of food, the cost of gas, the cost of insurance, the cost of everything.
And I think the states like Texas and Florida and other states that don't have state income tax are seeing the mass exodus of people who've been born and raised or who have equity in their homes that are selling them because they're bubbling this market up right now.
Right.
Well, now here's the point of all this.
The point of all this is people say, well, why isn't there a mass exodus in California?
Why don't people leave?
People are.
Taxpayers are leaving.
You heard it.
35% of the people who live in L.A. pay taxes.
So you get the very rich and you have the very poor.
The middle class is gone.
And people don't want to leave.
It's a beautiful place.
People born there love it.
It doesn't matter what part of the state they were born in.
Northern California, Central Valley, Monterey Bay, all of that, down to San Diego and L.A., they love it.
And it's a beautiful place.
The state debt is just out of control.
And I have people say to me, but Rush, I've been hearing my whole life about the national debt, and I've been hearing about all of these things that are going to supposedly result in giant catastrophe, and it never happens.
Well, the reason that it never happened is because we were always attempting to do something about it.
You remember serious efforts at deficit reduction.
In the mid-90s, when the Republicans ran the House of Representatives, we actually did balance the federal budget a couple years.
And we actually did enact welfare reform, which at the time succeeded in getting a lot of people off welfare and back to work.
And it was a good thing.
But still, the left, that's stigmatizing, making people work.
Well, that's easy for you to say.
This country doesn't provide decent paying jobs except in union.
What do you mean make them go to work?
The bottom line is now there's no effort here, no effort at all to stench the believing here.
It's purposely being made worse.
Now, you see what's going on in the European Union.
I don't mean to really harp on this, but whatever you think of Wall Street, whatever you think, would you rather have Barack Obama and anybody in his administration managing your financial portfolio, your retirement, or would you rather have the guys at Goldman Sachs doing it?
Now, you may have been told that you should hate the people at Goldman Sachs, but who would you rather have in charge of growing your money pile?
I damn well would prefer anybody at Goldman Sachs to anybody in this administration.
Now, the problem here with Greece is, if they don't even go through the motions of pretending to deal with this, nobody is going to invest in anything that is.
I don't care what people think of government spending and how important it is, if you don't have people investing in things they think are going to show a great profit or return, then you're not going to have any growth of any kind to speak of.
And if people don't have the confidence to invest in something, who wants to buy an LA municipal bond right now?
You might have been talked into hating investors, and you might have been talked into hating speculators.
But the sad reality is that these people are great indicators of where strength and weakness is.
And right now, nobody wants to invest in the Euro.
And all of these efforts here, these are window-dressing type efforts to make it look like we're doing something about it, just like the TARP bailout was and stimulus.
It was an attempt to make the world, the Chikams are going to go, okay, we're taking it seriously now.
We're really doing something about it.
But we keep contradicting ourselves because while we present this picture of doing something about it, we pile on another deficit exploding piece of legislation called Obamacare.
And now we're ready to put cap and trade on top of it.
And now we're talking about amnesty for illegals and flooding the country legally now, which is going to depress real job creation for the middle class.
At some point, none of this stuff is sustainable.
It's not that the irresponsibility of past years didn't matter.
It's that we've got a bunch of people running the country and running the world who are doing all of this on purpose because they are delusional and think this is what's good.
They think that this is the best way to provide for a population of people.
And they bring with them their biases and their bigotry and their incorrect assumptions and their prejudice.
Their bias and prejudice and bigotry is against achievement.
It's against traditional achievement, traditional institutions that have defined greatness in a free country, ours.
They hate it.
They think it's the root of unfairness.
They think it's the root of injustice.
They think that it is the root cause of racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, all of the isms.
And they are hell-bent in a moral superiority way that they're going to fix this.
Something has been wrong for over 200 years.
They're finally going to fix it.
Except we see what their repairs lead to.
The only bright spot in any of this, and it's not very bright, but the only bright spot in any of this is that for once and all, who these people are is wide open.
It's right in front of our eyes, plain as day.
The path of destruction that they cause is happening to real people more and more each and every day, and we cannot miss it.
Yeah, it's a snurdly asked me at the top of the hour, well, how come people aren't leaving Los Angeles?
How come they're not leaving California?
I have a lot of people I complain about it every day.
They never leave.
The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number of people moving in from another state during the year ending July 1st, 2008.
California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period, more than any other state.
And this is Census Bureau data.
And from a July 2009 NBC affiliate Los Angeles TV report, cost of living sucks, everyone leaving California.
So people are vominosing.
They are getting out of there.
All those things that I just cited about how you try to fix the economy, balance the budget, welfare reform, all of the traditions that have defined greatness and prosperity, those are the things that Barack Hussein Obama, mm, mm, mmm, is dedicating his life to rolling back.
Make no mistake about it.
There's a great piece today by a professor of history at Hillsdale College, Bert Folsom.
And this is a question that people ask me often.
When did all this entitlement stuff start?
Why do people put such faith in government, even though government fails?
Why do they do it?
Well, Bert Folsom has a theorem.
As we look around us, we are awash in failed government programs.
State level, California and other states are broke and desperate for cash at the federal level.
We see minimum wage laws stifling the hiring of young men and women.
A social security system is on the verge of paying out more than it takes in.
And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receiving $145 billion in tax dollars now and more later.
Another $8.5 billion bailout's been asked for by Fannie Mae.
And the guy running us, you know what?
We're not even going to make any pretense we're going to pay it back and we're going to show a profit here.
We need to service the mortgage industry.
We need to continue to provide people homes.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, Mr. Folsom says we got into this mess because people looked to government to solve problems, not themselves.
The founders of our nation saw government as a potential source of problems.
They wrote a constitution to tie the hands of politicians, slow down their mischief.
The founders assumed if government expanded in power, tyranny was around the corner.
And of course, we all remember the quote, once people find out they can vote themselves money from the federal treasury, democracy is over.
We've all heard that one.
Why then do Americans today encounter problems and look to government to solve them instead of recognizing that more government is likely to make their problems worse?
The transition decade in the growth of government was the 1930s.
FDR.
In that decade, FDR, in the midst of the Great Depression, persuaded Americans to expand government in all areas of the American economy.
His speeches, especially his fireside chats, stressed the good intentions of his programs.
There was also a secondary reason for doing all this, and that was to create perpetual power for his party, the Socialist Democrat Workers' Party.
FDR said we could pay farmers not to produce, and these farmers then wouldn't lose their land.
We could use government to pay silver miners 64.5 cents per ounce for their silver, and that would help them maintain jobs in the mines because the world market price was only 40 cents an ounce.
The reasoning for the minimum wage, Social Security, and Fannie Mae, all programs of the 30s, was similar.
Let's use government to help get people higher wages, have money for retirement, and buy houses.
The intentions were good.
Americans bought the good intentions, ended up with broken programs and high taxes.
After that, some Americans wanted more programs to save us from the previous programs, and so on.
75 years later, most of those original programs are still around sucking the wealth of the nation.
They have been duplicated.
They are redundant many times over.
Americans are less, are left with less liberty and higher taxes and still demanding government to fix the problems.
And we elected somebody whose fix is to expand the problems and compound them.
The answer, of course, is limited government.
Conservatism, folks, liberalism is the reason we and the rest of the world are in the mess that we are in.
Jim in San Bernardino, great to have you on the EIB network, sir.
Hello.
Hey, Rush, longtime listener.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you very much, sir.
Hey, I work for a company that builds wind towers in San Bernardino County.
And I've only been with the company for a short time, and it's a union company.
And in December, we had like a layoff of 50 people.
And now, probably in June or July, we're completely out of wind tower work.
We had a meeting with our general manager a couple of weeks ago, and he said that after these few towers we finished are completed, these few towers we're working on are completed, there's really nothing forecasted for the future.
So we're saying that we're going to have a layoff there at the plant where we make wind towers, and that's about 200 people.
Well, and we know this because the mayor of Los Angeles had to cancel his green energy program two weeks after he announced it because everybody figured out that the utility prices were going to go up 38% for it.
So here you've built a bunch of useless wind towers.
It's whose ideas are these?
Whose ideas?
The whole notion of green energy, what's the foundation?
Clean energy.
What is this?
What's it based on?
It's based on primarily a belief that everything about America is wrong, dirty, unjust, and unfair.
Here's Sue in Spokane, Washington.
Sue, welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
Thank you, Rush.
Nice to speak with you.
You bet.
I was calling regarding the people leaving California, and I can speak from experience that over the last few years, we have felt the rush of California folks moving up here.
It's changed the dynamic of the landscape here in this area as far as they're buying up what used to be farmland and building their beautiful homes here because they made so much money flipping their house down there.
And now they're changing, they're bringing their philosophies up here with them also.
One of the things I wanted to mention is we can't use cascade dish detergent up here in Spokane anymore because the environmental movement feels that it's too much phosphorus.
I remember this.
We've reported on this, and now you don't have clean dishes.
You've got to use worthless dishwater detergent in your dishwasher.
I remember this story.
Yeah, but they're moving here.
They're changing the dynamic of this land.
You know, Spokane, that side of Washington is pretty right-leaning, but the left's moving in there.
They've been moving in for a while.
I feel that they were, you know, they slipped their houses, made a lot of money, moved up here, and brought all their ways with them because they rapped it down there.
See, isn't that in and of itself, isn't that fascinating?
These are the people that helped lead the destruction of L.A.
And then they complain and whine and moan about it and blame other people in their delusion.
And they move somewhere else and they're going to go pollute that area with the same kind of belief system that destroyed their original habitat.
If you will, slash and burn.
It's like the drive-by media.
You know, drive-by media shows up to a story.
They destroy everybody involved in it, create havoc and a mess.
Responsible adults have to clean it up.
Meanwhile, the drive-bys are heading down the road to the next story.
Anyway, I got to take a brief time out here, folks.
We'll be back and continue.
El Rushbo, serving humanity on the EIB network.
Now, we just described FDR when all of this, the transition to government programs to make everybody rich and to provide security and make everything hunky-dory started with FDR.
And at its peak, during FDR, according to our own Office of Management and Budget, federal spending averaged 19.35% of GDP during FDR.
And that was bad.
Obama's four fiscal years, estimated by the Office of Management and Budget, spending will average 24.13%, 5% greater than even FDR as a percentage of GDP, meaning a full 25% of the United States economy will be government.
And when the full health care thing kicks in by 2014, which is beyond Obama's first four years, it's going to skyrocket to even more than that.
So we've got, I mean, it's an incredible uptick in the size of GDP, and Obama's not finished.
Now, during all that, Obama was fighting FDR fighting a depression, actually making it worse, and a world war.
What's Obama fighting?
Obama's fighting the past.
And get this.
I read stuff like this, and I just, I just, I break out laughing.
It's from the Detroit News, Jacqueline Trump.
In a state with the nation's highest jobless rate, landscaping companies, you know, it's spring getting into summertime up there, and the trees and grass are starting to grow, so people are going to need this stuff cut, trimmed, and all that.
Landscaping companies are finding some job applicants are rejecting offers of work so they can continue collecting unemployment benefits.
And now, it's unclear whether this trend is affecting other seasonal industries, but the fact that some seasonal landscaping workers choose to stay home and collect a check from the state rather than work outside for a full week and spend money for gas taxes and other expenses raises questions about whether extended unemployment benefits give the jobless an incentive to avoid work.
There's no question about it.
There's absolutely no question about it.
And let me tell you something.
The people in charge of extending unemployment benefits know that as well as we do.
They prefer this.
They want more and more people depending on the state rather than the private sector.
This is precisely what's going on here.
There's no question about this.
Members of the Michigan Nursery and Landscape Association have told me that they have a lot of people applying, but when they actually talk to them, it turns out they're on unemployment.
They're not looking for work, but they have to make it look like they are.
So they show up and do interviews and go home and get the extended unemployment benefit check.
It's like, you got to be kidding me, Pompeo said.
It's frustrating.
Honestly, something I've never seen before.
They say, oh, okay.
Like I surprised him by offering them a job.
Chris Pompeo, Vice President of Operations, Landscape America in Warren, Michigan, said he's had about a dozen offers declined.
applicant who had eight weeks to go until his state unemployment benefits ran out asked for a deferred start date and if they extend his unemployment benefits he's never going to go to work there's no question about this well he raises questions about whether extended unemployment no the question is why the hell are people running government doing this on purpose that's where you people in the media ought to be looking
You really wouldn't even have to look.
All you need to do is listen to me.
Well, a lot of them are on the unemployment line too in the media.
Anyway, now yesterday on this program, I gave you a precious quote from Obama delivered in a commencement speech over the weekend.
Information is a distraction.
Information is a distraction.
That's what our fearless leader said to a bunch of college graduates at Hampton University in Virginia.
Now, information is a distraction.
Apply that quote to yourself.
You're out there trying to make sense of all of this that's going on.
Understand the complex world you live in today.
You want to know how did Greece slip into this abyss?
Why are we having to bail it out?
How is it our security is so porous that a guy who wants to blow up Times Square can come and go to Pakistan a dozen times, some of it for al-Qaeda training, and never be put on the watch list.
You want to find out how that can happen.
Obama doesn't want you to be able to know.
Information is a distraction.
Seeking information to address and not preempt those disasters is just a distraction, if you're like the president.
But since you think information is power and information is helpful, information improves you in your life, then you got to go where there is great information.
That's why you're here.
We're a clearinghouse for information.
So is the Heritage Foundation.
If we're going to get to a place where we elect individuals with conservative values to implement a sound policy, we've got to be informed enough to enhance our opinions with facts that motivate others to arrive at the right conclusions by their own reasoning.
That's how you persuade people.
You don't get in their face and wag a finger at them and demand they believe something.
You set up a series of circumstances to which the conclusion is obvious and they're going to think they're smart that they figured it out.
And bingo, you have a convert.
I've always said become the smartest person in your group, the go-to person, whenever somebody has a political question.
Being a member of the Heritage Foundation can help you do that.
AskHeritage.org.
They've had explosive growth in membership because I, El Rushbo, have highlighted their incredible diligence with both information and how they share it with all of you.
The Obama administration doesn't like you being able to listen to this program.
He actually mentioned talk radio in that speech.
He doesn't like you having access to information.
He doesn't like you being able to go to the Heritage Foundation.
He doesn't like you having an iPod.
He doesn't like you having an iPhone, an iPad.
He doesn't like you having all those things.
He lied about saying he didn't even know how to work them.
But he does know how to work them.
He just doesn't want you to be able to.
So Obama's put another enemy on his list, and it happens to be Apple Incorporated.
And Microsoft, they make the Xbox.
And Sony, they make the PlayStation.
Askheritage.org, including with a new feature there, folks.
You can actually ask them something.
I suggested they do that.
AskHeritage.org, ask them a question.
You can have direct access to scholars at Heritage as little as $25 per year and confound all of these liberals who don't want you to have access to information.
Access to information, the right information is the way eventually we're going to roll all of this back.
Askheritage.org.
You know, I just realized I haven't played a single soundbite today.
And as usual, some of them are about me.
Did you realize that Media Matters for America actually came out?
They put a post on their website yesterday, which means that the state control media, now picked it up and run with it, that I actually supported slavery yesterday when I was analyzing Kagan's idolizing of Thurgood Marshall.
Yes, they did.
Limbaugh supports slavery.
And that led to David Axelrod talking about that without mentioning my name, but we all know who he was talking.
I'll play the soundbite and all that when we get back after this.
Look at this headline here, folks.
Arizona organizers drop immigration referendum drive.
How can that be?
State control media been saying all day, every day, this is the most unpopular thing on earth, racial profiling.
Obama's been warning everybody against.
And yet the organizers have dropped it because they don't have any supporters for it.
▲
Export Selection