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Aug. 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
August 9, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Oh my God, I can feel it all across the country.
In every conservative household from East Coast to West Coast, there is a terrible noise.
It's, oh my God, what happened to Rush?
What happened to Rush?
We've got Rove in today for him.
And yet, and yet that's offset by the gnashing of teeth to be found in every liberal household across America who said, that guy, Rove, I thought we sent him to the pen.
I thought he was crucified.
I thought we killed him.
Why is he on the radio?
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Carl Rove standing in today for Rush Limbaugh.
I know you're disappointed because you'd like to hear Rush, but you're stuck with me.
Where is Rush?
Where is Rush?
Look, I'll let you in on a secret.
First of all, the cover story.
This is what we need to tell everybody who's not part of the conspiracy.
What we say is Rush and Catherine are taking a day off somewhere in the western United States, and they couldn't get back to New York or to Florida in time to do the broadcast.
That's our cover story.
That is what we're telling the American people.
In reality, Rush has convened an emergency meeting of the international vast right-wing conspiracy to look over our battle plans for the remaining 90-some odd days of the election in order to maximize our victories this fall.
And in addition, Rush is engaged.
He's got a couple of very interesting ideas.
You may not know this, but one of the things that Rush Limbaugh has done is he has figured out how to infiltrate the liberal network and to convince them to do things that make them look stupid.
And this is one of the most amazing things that he does.
For example, you may have thought, you may have heard this thing about the journal list.
This is the network of email buddies put together ostensibly by Ezra Klein, in which liberals got together in the 2008 election in order to proclaim to each other their fidelity to the one, the one, the magic one, the solemn one at the top of the Democratic ticket, and how they could advance his cause in the election.
Well, it wasn't this guy, Ezra Klein, who's credited with doing this.
He's for the Washington Post.
In reality, this whole idea was Rush's.
And Rush fed that to Ezra Klein using sort of the mind techniques that are now being revealed in the movie Inception.
And he caused them to begin this list and embarrass themselves.
So Rush has come up with a couple of new angles like that.
So he's convened a special meeting at an undisclosed location, the world headquarters of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
And so I'm sitting in for him today because as a member of that conspiracy, I was deemed the least essential person for the meeting.
So I'm here instead of Rush.
Rush will return, however, shortly.
You can be rest assured of that.
What are we going to do today?
Well, darned if I know.
I'm here.
I'm still trying to figure out.
So hour one, we're going to talk about a little bit of substance.
We're going to talk about issues and some of the current events going on.
Hour number two, we're going to get into my sweet spot, politics.
We're going to be talking about the 2010 election, what we're going to be doing, what's going on behind the scenes, the things you need to know, the things you need to hear about, the things you need to act upon, and we'll be doing that.
And then hour number three, it's going to be sheer unbridled anarchy.
And all during the thing, we'll be taking your phone calls.
And look, give me some slack.
This is the first time I've ever done this.
Look, I have sweat through about three shirts.
I've been hydrating all day.
I've been nervous.
I didn't sleep at all last night.
I'm sitting in for the man behind the golden microphone.
And more important than that is, I'm sharing the studio with Snerdley, a.k.a. James Golden.
I mean, this man is a legend.
I bought this man lunch in the White House mess once.
It was one of the highlight of my White House years was buying lunch for Golden.
Actually, it was breakfast, as I recall.
And he had a very robust breakfast, Golden, didn't you, Snerdley?
Yeah.
Yeah, it was fabulous.
It was fabulous.
Yeah, with the phone number.
What is the phone number?
800-282-2882.
You've got it now.
You heard it from the man himself.
Call into that number.
Say that number again there, Snerdley.
It is 800-282-28.
Yeah, even I can remember that.
282-2882 with the, yeah, where?
I don't see it.
Nowhere.
Oh, there it is.
Above it.
I see it.
See, they've got all these very complicated, sophisticated devices here.
I'm used to people putting pieces of paper in front of me, and I'm supposed to look at the message box screen.
Anyway, what's going on in the world that we need to talk about?
Well, last week, last week, President Obama was dealt a serious blow when the best member of his economic team, I'm speaking, of course, of the esteemed Dr. Christine Romer, announced her resignation.
After 19 months in the White House, she said she was chucking it in and heading back to Berkeley in time to get her girl back into public schools in Berkeley before the fall season began, the fall semester.
You know, actually, having been in the White House, I don't blame people for leaving the White House.
The average tenure, this may surprise you, but the average tenure of a senior White House aide is 18 months.
So Christine Romer broke the average by a month.
And if you work in the White House, as I did for nearly seven years, it's like drinking from a fire hose 24 hours a day.
So I don't begrudge somebody who's made the sacrifice for our country to come into anybody's White House and serve our country, making a decision they need to go home.
But Christine Romer, I'm going to miss her.
I'm going to miss her because this woman was fabulous at economic forecasts.
In fact, I've got to tell you, I carry around in my briefcase a document that she wrote.
This is before she even took office.
She was, in fact, it says chairman, nominee, designate Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Romer.
And it's signed also by the esteemed Jared Bernstein, Office of the Vice President-elect.
And they issued it on January 9th, 2009.
It's a smashing document.
I do carry a copy around with me because whenever I'm down and feeling low and I need a laugh, I read this document.
This is the jobs impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.
This is what, 11 days before President Obama came into office, he had his chief economic wizards and wizardesses put out to say, this is what this great stimulus plan will do.
Look, I'm Carl Rove.
I'm a recovering government bureaucrat.
I was on the federal payroll.
There's no Betty Ford clinic for us.
So I actually read this stuff.
And rule number one is: always read the appendices.
Rule number two, always read the footnotes.
And rule number three, pay careful attention to the diagrams.
And the diagram is on page four, figure one.
It's a lovely thing.
You can't see it, but let me describe it to you.
It's titled Unemployment Rate With and Without the Recovery Plan.
And it shows there's a big, thick blue line that says if we pass the recovery plan, as the president-elect has proposed, unemployment by the first quarter of 2009 will be at roughly 8.5% or 7.5%.
And by the third quarter of 2009, that would be last, the end of last summer, it'll top out at 8% and begin a decline so that by the time that it gets into sort of like the end of the summer of 2010, it's going to be approaching 7%.
And if we do nothing, if we do nothing, ladies and gentlemen, and do not pass the $765 billion stimulus plan, unemployment will rise to 9%, and it will actually hit 9% for the first, second, and third quarters of 2010.
It's unbelievable how bad it will be if we don't pass this gigantic spending bill, so pass it right away.
And of course we did, and what happened?
We are getting the economic forecast that Christine Romer, the esteemed Dr. Christina Romer, then the chair nominee designate and now the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, said we would get if we did nothing.
Think about that.
We got worse, in fact, than if we did nothing.
She said unemployment would top out at 9 percent.
It's at 9.5 percent.
And this is the woman who was in charge of the economic forecast for the president and selling us this gigantic spending package.
And now she's departing.
So we're going to miss that mirth, that delightful laughter, those humorous moments that she's provided us during the last 19 months with economic forecasts like this.
Now, why was she so off?
Why was she so off?
Well, first of all, They made a bunch of mistakes in writing this bill, as you know.
First of all, they outsourced it to the Congress.
They simply said, you know, we need a package of between $670 and $770 billion, but we'll take $850 billion.
And, of course, Congress immediately started aiming towards $850 billion.
In fact, the Senate got it to $880 billion before it got trimmed back.
And the second thing they did is they went up to Capitol Hill and they said, okay, we're only going to meet with Democrats.
This was right after the election.
You know, that election in which the one Senator Obama, candidate Obama, said, we're going to not be red states, not blue states, but United States.
I want to be the president of the United States, not blue states or red states.
Well, once he got into office, he lost that and sort of basically said, go up to the kill, talk about what we want on the stimulus, but be sure only to meet with Democrats because we can't trust to meet with those Republicans.
They don't obviously want what we want, so don't meet with them.
And the third mistake they made was they said, you know what, in that big spending package, we'll describe what we want you to put into it, but we'll only describe less than half of the money.
You go figure out what it is.
Because we don't really care what goes in there, just as long as you've got a big number.
And why did they not care what went in the package?
Why do they care just about a big number?
Well, we're going to come back to that in just a minute.
We've got a little break here from our advertisers.
And when we come back, we'll be talking about the most important part of Christina Romer's document.
And I'm talking about Appendix 1.
Remember the rules?
Always read the appendix.
Always look at the charts and always read the footnotes.
And when we come back, we're going to read Appendix 1 and understand how just absolutely whacked out the economic theories of this administration are based on Christina Romer's beautiful, charming, delightful, well-written, very expressive appendix number one.
Back in a minute.
Hello, this is Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh again today.
Well, what do I mean again today?
This is my first time.
It's Russia's out.
I'm doing it for the first time, so it's not again.
But you're back with me again if you were with me before the break.
How confused is that?
Anyway, glad to have you back.
We were talking about Christina Romer.
She's departing.
The President's Council of Economic Advisors chair is returning to Berkeley, sort of Moscow on the Pacific coast.
And, you know, we were talking about how it is that she got it so wrong on the stimulus package.
She proposed, she backed the president's effort with a very thoughtful document that said if we don't do the stimulus, we're going to have unemployment go through the roof.
It is going to actually hit 9%.
And it's going to stay up there for a long while.
And if we do Something, pass this bill, it's going to top out at 8% by the end of the summer of 2009 and drop dramatically after that back to the way it was under that bad guy Bush, down in there, the 5 and 6 percent range, down getting close to where it was under Bush at least.
But it didn't happen that way.
In fact, we're getting the economic performance that she promised we would get if we did nothing.
And how did we end up there?
Well, as I told you earlier, being a recovering government bureaucrat, I actually read the stuff they put out.
And not just the chart that said here's how the performance are going to be, but you always go, and I say read the appendices.
And in this one, they have one, Appendix 1.
And this is a report put out on January 9th, 2009, a selling document for the stimulus bill called the Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.
Incidentally, I'm putting this up on my website, rove.com.
It's in the worth noting section, and I'll put it up there so anybody can go and download it yourself if you like.
Check it out if you like, rove.com.
But multipliers for different types of spending.
It's got a lovely two paragraphs of text, and then a lovely chart follows it.
And the thrust of which is this: they think that for every 1% of GDP that the government spends in a stimulus bill, that is to say, for every dollar of spending in the stimulus, there will be a dollar, nearly $1.60 in economic growth permanently added to the American economy.
Think about that for a minute.
Government spends a dollar, and magically $1.50 of economic growth is somehow created.
I mean, if that's the case, why do we stop at $765 billion and $772, whatever it was, in stimulus bill?
We should have had like the $5 trillion stimulus bill, and there would have been $7.5 trillion plus worth of economic growth.
We could have done the $10 trillion stimulus bill, and there would have been $15 trillion of economic growth, and we could have thrown one heck of a party on the $5 trillion that we magically created.
I mean, the whole thrust of the stimulus bill was it doesn't matter what we do to stimulate the economy as long as we spend a lot of money.
And guess what?
No country has ever spent its way to prosperity.
In fact, you know, this theory that you spend a dollar and you create a dollar fifty-five or a dollar fifty-six or in the 15th quarter a dollar fifty-seven of economic growth is nutty.
In fact, you know, it gets criticism from all kinds of economists.
You know, there's a wonderful economist named Robert J. Barrow who did a study on this that said for every dollar of government spending in a well-designed stimulus package, one that emphasizes tax cuts and temporary incentives that cause people to create jobs, you only get 80 cents of economic growth.
And at some point, you got to pay the piper.
You got to pick up the tab for that 20 cents that you spent that you didn't recover.
And you pay it either through higher taxes, less spending, or higher interest in the future.
In fact, what's really interesting is that there are a bunch of other economists, liberal and conservative, who think it's just nutty to assume that the so-called multiplier is a $1.55 for every dollar in spending.
Among them, the esteemed Nobel Prize winning Paul Krugman, I hate to say that name on this show, but even he poo-poos the administration's number.
In the textbook, he writes for freshman college students, macroeconomics, second edition.
I mean, let alone the conservative economists.
In fact, there's a wonderful paper.
You can get it just by Googling John Cogan and Tobias Swick, C-W-I-K.
Now, that'll absolutely guarantee that this pops up these guys' paper.
But they wrote a paper called New Keynesian versus Old Keynesian Government Spending Multipliers.
This was last February where they warned, hey, this is a nutty proposition.
You think you're going to get this kind of economic growth by spending this kind of money?
You're nuts.
And yet that's exactly what the administration did.
That's exactly what Congress did.
And the American people have every reason to believe, as they do, that this didn't create economic growth.
It hasn't.
And we're seeing jobs today at job growth is slowing.
We're getting jobs in the last three months at half the rate that we got them in the first six months of the year.
We're seeing the economy slowing this quarter, less than last quarter, which was less than the quarter before.
And while the economy is trying to get started and we're doing something when it comes to jobs, we're growing jobs at less than half the rate we need in order to keep the economy at the current level.
In fact, the only reason the unemployment rate didn't go up last Friday was 181,000 people stopped looking for work altogether.
They said, toss it in.
Forget it.
There's not going to be a job for me.
And yet, that's after they spent all this money on the stimulus program.
And incidentally, you know what?
They spent more than they told us.
They said it would be $765 billion or thereabouts, but it turns out to be $852 billion.
They made a mistake of $75 billion in it.
They told us it'd be a certain amount when they passed the bill last February.
And then later on, the CBO said, ooh-ooh, tiny little mistake, just itsy-bitsy tiny little itsy-bitsy government mistake.
We were only off by about a factor of 9%.
We're only $75 billion off in our estimate.
So it's $862 billion that they spent on that stimulus bill rather than what the $787 billion they told us when they passed it.
And guess what?
Remember who's in charge of the recovery of monitoring it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe Biden, that's it, Snurly.
Very good.
Yeah, very good.
You know what?
The guy, I went to his website, recovery.org.
You know, isn't the internet a great thing?
Thank God Al Gore invented the Internet.
Well, what I found was that the guy in charge of monitoring it keeps track of the spending on it.
And he doesn't keep track of the $862 billion in spending.
He keeps track of the $787.
It has been months and months and months and months since the Congressional Budget Office said, you know what, this bill is going to cost $75 billion more because of the way the formulas were written.
And the guy in charge of it is so clueless that he can't even update his website.
Now, it makes it look like they've spent more of what they were supposed to spend, but they've actually, you know, they're spent, they're spending this money so slowly.
We're stimulating the economy last year.
You know, we were supposed to stimulate it in 2009.
We'll spend more money under the stimulus bill that Vice President Biden is in charge of monitoring.
We'll spend more of it between 2011, next year, and 2019 than we spent last year when we were supposedly stimulating the economy.
How stupid is that?
Some guy's got a heart attack and the EMS shows up and the guy pulls out the paddles and yells, Claire, this will only take a week or two.
Instead, we're supposed to be stimulating the economy last year and we're spending the money into the future.
And the guy in charge of it, he doesn't even know what the amount is that he's supposed to be monitoring.
Biden!
Hey, hey, we just did.
We just did.
Where is Biden?
Biden, are you listening?
Get your numbers right.
There we go, buddy.
Get the number right.
787?
No, 862.
Update your website.
Update the webpage.
Get a hold of the webmaster.
The American people deserve accountability and transparency.
You know, Vice President Joe Biden, he is a yuck-a-minute.
What a guy.
Let's keep the guy around to monitor the recovery and maybe hope that he does better than he has done in Foreign Affairs, where he's been wrong on every single major foreign policy issue since he came to the Congress in 1972.
Back after this break.
Yes, we've received a report from the secret conclave that Rush is hosting that the agenda is being moved on quickly.
Some really important decisions have been made.
And remember, he's there secretly.
And our cover story that we have to tell the rest of America is that Rush and Catherine are taking a brief break somewhere in the western side of the United States when in reality he's attending the secret international vast right-wing conspiracy that he's chairing the special meeting.
Look, we're going to take some calls.
Remember, the number to call is 1-800-282-2882.
And why don't we start with Brett in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of the nicer towns in the United States of America?
I've been there a number of times.
Brett, good morning.
You're talking to me.
I'm talking to you, man.
If you're talking to me, I'm talking to you.
I thought you said, Brett.
Yeah, this is Fred in Lynchburg.
Yeah, I'd like to talk to you.
You're the guy that can help us out here getting the message out to these people when they're talking on these talk shows.
And they're always, the opposition throws out this tax cuts for the rich.
And I think our guys just seem to fumble around with not a good answer.
And these really aren't tax cuts for the rich.
They've got to distinguish between the rich and high-income people.
There's a difference.
I mean, people have wealth, but there's a difference between having wealth and earning income.
Yeah, well, I think that's a good point.
But I think there are two sets of arguments that our candidates ought to make.
And one set of arguments have to do with the effect of big tax increases on the economy.
I mean, these tax increases on the so-called wealthy, most of those people are small businesses, are people who own small businesses who file on the individual tax line.
In fact, 50% of small business income will be taxed at a higher rate if President Obama gets his way and the tax hikes go into effect next year.
And I mean, that's the, you know, for an economy that's struggling, we don't want to have that happen.
We don't want to have the job creators in small business suddenly face big tax bills.
And they will be big.
I mean, we're taking the top rate from 35% to 40%, and then we're putting a bunch of other costs on them with the health care bill and regulations and banks and so forth.
And so these small business guys are going to get hit and hit hard, these small business guys and gals.
54% of all businesses that are subchapter S are going to pay higher taxes, and 33% of sole proprietorships are.
But you know what?
That is not the only set of arguments that we ought to make.
There's another point we ought to make that is strong and powerful, and our guys sometimes don't have the spine to make it, and that is that there is a moral dimension to taxes.
There ought to be a limit to what government can take from any one individual.
If the government can say we want to take 40% of these people's money, it can say we want to take 40% of everybody's money.
And that's exactly what happens with tax rates.
We ought to say there ought to be a limit.
We live in a country that values individual enterprise and personal responsibility and individual freedom.
And the more the government takes out of your pocket, the less we have of all three of those things.
So there ought to be a moral argument.
And guess what?
From a practical political standpoint, this is a fantastic winner.
If you take a look at the Tax Foundation, which does this annual study, or almost annually, of what people think about how much government should take from any one individual, you'll find out that about 80% of the American people think that it ought to be taken less than a quarter, and three-quarters of the American people think it ought to be taken less than 20%.
So, you know, with the top rate of 35%, about ready to go to 40%, this is an argument that makes sense to a lot of people.
We are not a country full of people who believe in class warfare.
We may have a president who believes in that.
We certainly have demagogues up on Capitol Hill believe in that.
But the vast majority of Americans do not believe that the government ought to have an unbridled license to take whatever it wants from any one individual.
They keep demagoguing the thing about the rich.
Well, really, what they're talking about, high income, the reason one guy gets more of a tax break is because he paid more in taxes.
Well, if you and I go into a store and the store is given a discount that day, and if you spend more money than I do, you get more of a discount.
It didn't mean we both got 10%, but you got a higher dollar value.
Yeah, well, and look, and look, let's be honest about it.
The effect of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was to shift the tax burden even more heavily to the people at the top because it lowered.
Look, if you're in the lowest tax bracket before 2001, you're paying 15% tax rate.
After the 2001 tax cut, you're paying 10% tax rate, which means your tax rate was cut by a third.
Well, actually, it was cut from 15 to 13.5 out of 15 is a third.
But you had the biggest percentage reduction.
That was higher than being cut from 39 to 35.
So look, this is an issue where spine matters, where courage matters, where the willingness to stand up and say, I'm willing to take this what you think is a tough opinion and stand by it can pay off politically because it resonates with what Americans think.
There's incidentally a great new book out I would strongly recommend by Arthur Brooks called The Battle, where he talks about this.
And this is a remarkable young academic from New York who's now taken over as the head of the American Enterprise Institute.
And he makes the argument that defending free enterprise and defending our American capitalistic system is a cultural and moral battle as well as an economic one.
Thanks for calling in.
Yeah, let's take John from Indian Lake, New York.
Hello, Mr. Rove.
Hey, John, how are you?
I'm well, thank you.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
Thanks for calling in.
Listen, I own a resort here in the Adirondack Mountains.
And on the advice of my accountant, I'm participating in the HIRE Act, the hiring incentives to restore employment.
I give my employees a W-11 form.
They're seasonal employees.
I asked the accountant the following questions.
Does it matter if they're only part-time employees?
The answer was no, it does not matter.
Does it matter if they're only working seasonally?
Answer was the same.
It does not matter.
I asked, does it matter if they're only 14 years old?
I was told no, it does not matter.
I asked him, does it matter if they're claimed as a dependent on another taxpayer's return?
Nope, that didn't matter either.
What about if they're a retiree, as one of them is, just filling in with some extra hours?
That did not matter.
What about if they worked here last year and I'm just returning them to their same job?
Nope, doesn't matter.
What if they worked here the last four years in a row and they're just coming back to their same seasonal job?
That didn't matter.
Finally, I asked, what if they only work five or six hours a week cleaning on Saturdays?
That did not matter either.
Each one of these employees is, I assume, going to be listed as a new job that's been created through the stimulus and through the benevolent actions of our government.
So I've been telling my employees that they're doing their patriotic duty by filling in their W-11 form.
They're helping their president to bring up the employment numbers so that we can restore confidence in our economy.
And for each one of these W-11 forms that I turn in, I get on the average $89 in tax credit from my government.
Yeah, look, first of all, thanks for sharing with us this practical description of what this bill actually does.
You've got absolutely right.
The HIRE Act is not going to generate significantly larger employment than we would otherwise have, but it will generate significantly higher costs to the taxpayer.
Those $89 mount up over time.
But this goes to show the scam that is involved in a lot of what is being done to so-called stimulate the economy.
In fact, if you look at it, again, back on Al Gore's marvelous invention, Recovery.
You know, the web, the internet, recovery.gov, they have a little box there, recovery-funded jobs reported by recipients.
Remember, they said, we're going to pass this bill and we're going to save or create 3.5 million new jobs by the end of 2010.
Now, we've lost 2 million jobs from the day that the president said that, but they can't claim what a job is saved.
They can't quantify that.
Economists say that's just not quantifiable in the way that you can say here's what employment is.
So what they do is they count the number of people who are funded by some kind of mechanism under the Recovery Act.
And through June of this year, it's 755,454.
But as you say, many of them are people just like the people that you've dealt with.
They're part-time, they're seasonal.
They may be young.
They may be dependents.
They may be retirees.
They may work a few hours a week.
But most important of all, they are people returning to the same job, the same seasonal job that they did last year, they're doing now.
Or they're back doing the same job they would have been doing regardless of whether or not the hire act was there.
It's just that somebody with a smart accountant was able to get some money back on their employment.
But I've got to tell you, this is not going to solve the problem.
What solves the problem is not a temporary boost from the government.
What solves the problem is men and women who are entrepreneurs and risk takers like you saying, you know what, I feel confident enough about what the future is going to look like that I'll take my money and I'll invest it in expanding plant equipment and services.
And that's not going to happen as long as we've got all these kind of overhang of government spending and so forth.
Anyway, thanks so much for calling in.
And let's take a break here.
Time for us to do another break and then we'll be back to talk about stimulus two.
Two, two, two, two, two.
Well, we're back.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
You know, Christine Romer, we've been talking about stimulus, the stimulus bill from last year and Christine Romer's departure.
And she said this over this weekend that she, quote, wishes she could redo one of her first official acts for President Obama, and that is this document we've been talking about, the January 9th, 2009 document, in which she, quote, forecasts that a big shot of federal spending would save millions of jobs and keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent.
Boy, it's nice to know she's regretful about making that forecast.
I think we all regret having spent $862 billion to no good use.
Anyway, you know, we're going to talk about stimulus two.
If stimulus one didn't work, stimulus two, they think, will work, and we're going to talk about how bad an idea it is.
But, you know, we're coming up against the top of the air, so I think I'm going to wait until the top of the air.
Let's take another phone call if we can from Gary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Hey, Mr. Rove, how are you doing?
Hey, Gary, fine.
How about you, man, in the Twin Cities?
Oh, been a fan for us since 86.
And when I heard you, I'm like, who's that voice?
I know that voice.
That's the architect.
There we go.
So I had to call in, but, you know, you're talking about the stimulus, which is right.
It hasn't done a thing.
But, you know, when you look at the two options where if we do something, this is where it's going to be.
And if we do nothing, this is where it's going to be.
Well, if we would have done nothing if we did something.
And plus, not only did it not do anything, but it gave us $2 trillion more in debt.
I mean, didn't when Bush leave, we were at $640 billion in our deficit and where we're at today.
And what are we going to start paying this stuff back?
And then the kind of guys that we got running, like in my state, Mark Dayton, who was a senator during your time in the White House, wasn't he the first guy that hightailed it during the anthrax threat that happened?
And now they want to vote him in as governor.
And the only thing this guy can say is higher taxes, tax the rich, make them pay their fair share.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, look, easy for him to say because he's got a lot of money that was made for him by his predecessors and his family who built up a great company, and now he just cashes the checks and clips the coupons.
Easy for him to say.
You're right, though.
It's interesting.
The national debt, this is the debt held by the public, was $6.3 trillion on January 20th, 2009.
That is what was built up over the course of America's history.
By the end of 2010, it will be $9.3 trillion.
More debt will be piled up by President Obama in less than two years than Bush did in eight.
And President Obama supported, proposed, advocated, approved, and authorized every dollar of spending that's occurred since he was sworn in.
And it's a bundle.
And so the question is going to be whether or not if Republicans make gains this fall, they're going to be tough and hard on spending.
I mean, think about this.
The size of the federal government is a quarter larger than it was when President Obama came into office.
When he came into office, the federal government was just over 20% of the GDP.
That's sort of the historic norm since World War II.
In 2009, he drove it up to 24.7% of GDP.
Part of that was to be found in the Stimulus One bill, which turns out to be not $787 billion that we thought at the time, but $862 billion.
And then he added another 13% increase in discretionary non-security spending for fiscal year 2010 that began to appear in 2009.
So the GDP was 24.7 in 2009.
It'll be 25.1% this year and an estimated 25.1% next year.
And think about that.
The size of the federal government is now a quarter larger than it was the day before Barack Obama came in office.
That is just astonishing.
And you're right.
We're not going to get it down unless we not only say we're willing to freeze, but we start saying we're willing to cut.
Certainly, if we grew at 25% in one year, we can work our way back down.
Well, I'll tell you, I sit there and you listen to these guys on Mr. Shiver Up My Legs Matthews and the way they talk and why we as the right aren't pounding in.
The reason why we're in this position was the 1997 policies of Clinton that started this whole thing that got us into this trouble where, you know, giving away these mortgages, because I'm in the real estate business for free and no down payment, no skin in the game.
These people were, you know, not paying their bills.
I mean, this is why we're in the shape that we're in and what triggered everything.
That's right.
And look, you know, I love this.
Fannie and Freddie, two of my favorite institutions.
We're going to actually talk about this in hour three.
There was just a little bit of a news item that Freddie Mac has asked for $1.8 billion in additional federal aid after posting a larger than expected loss in the second quarter.
And that's Freddie.
And Fannie asked for $1 billion before that.
So, I mean, $3.3 billion asked for last week for the coming quarter from just these two institutions.
I remember when we came into office in 2001, we received a report from Almondo Falcone, who was the head of Ofeo, the government office that's in charge of regulating Fannie and Freddie.
And he was very blunt.
He said, Look, I'm the Clinton-appointed regulator of these agencies.
I don't have any authority.
I don't have any power.
He said, I think they're cooking the books, but I don't have the power to go in and tell you that they're cooking the books.
But I can smell it and they're cooking their books.
They're highly leveraged, he said.
These are government-sponsored enterprises, and the taxpayer is going to end up being on the hook.
And we are on these guys are getting leveraged.
He at the time thought that they were leveraged 8 to 1 to 10 to 1, which means that a 10 to 12 percent decline in the value of their underlying assets, these mortgages, would cause them to go bankrupt.
And we set out on a new course.
And I'm going to come when we come back after this message, I want to talk with you more, Scott, about this.
Excuse me, Gary, about this.
I'm sorry, Scott.
And we'll talk more about Fannie and Freddie when we come back.
Thank you.
Well, thanks.
We're back.
We've got just a few seconds before we break at the end of the hour.
So let me let you know what's coming up next.
We're going to be talking about stimulus two, and then we're going to be getting into my sweet spot, the zone of comfort.
We're going to be talking politics, P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S, politics.
So hope you've enjoyed the first hour here of Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh and come back for another little bit of time, hopefully two hours.
But we'll be here whether you are or not.
But I'd probably feel better if you were here.
Anyway, thanks for having me, and thanks for listening.
And remember, and remember, right now, Rush Limbaugh is not, I mean, he's look, the cover story is that they're relaxing.
He and Catherine are out with friends somewhere in the western United States, watching a Placid Mountain Stream, something like that.
But embellish it whatever way you like.
But the reality is, Rush is presiding over the secret conclave of the international vast right-wing conspiracy, and we are concocting things there.
He's laying out the agenda.
People are standing up, voting, making amendments.
And we are going to win in November because of the work that he has done at the secret conclave at the undisclosed location.
Dick Cheney is attending.
In fact, he's going to host lunch for everybody today at the Secret Conclave.
Don't close.
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