All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 9, 2010 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:32
August 9, 2010, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 s 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, Hey guy Rove, I thought we sent him to the pen.
I thought he weak 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.
Uh 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 ninety-some odd days of the election in order to maximize our uh 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 so 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 Russ fed it to Ezra Klein in an using uh, you know, sort of the mind techniques that are now being revealed in the movie Inception, and he caused them to uh begin this list and um embarrass themselves.
So Rush has come up with a couple of new angles like that.
So he's 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 Dedeem the least essential person for the meeting.
So I'm here instead of Rush.
Rush will return, however, shortly.
You can be uh rest assured of that.
What are we gonna do today?
Well, darned if I know, I'm here.
I'm still trying to figure out.
So hour one, we're gonna talk about a little bit of substance.
We're gonna talk about issues and uh some of the current events going on.
Hour number two, we're gonna get into my sweet spot, politics.
We're gonna be talking about the 2010 election, what we're gonna 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 gonna be sheer unbridled anarchy.
And all during the thing, we'll be taking your phone calls.
Uh, and uh look, give me some slack.
This is the first time I've ever done this.
Do you look, I have sweat through about three shirts.
I've got I've I've been, you know, 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, aka 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 it?
Didn't you, Snarly?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was fabulous.
It was fabulous.
Yeah, what's the phone number?
What is the phone number?
800-28282.
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, that even I can remember that.
282-2882 with the f 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 school of 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 uh, you know, if you work in the White House uh as I did for nearly seven years, uh you it's like drinking from a fire host 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 uh making a decision they need to go home.
But Christine Roomer, I'm gonna miss her.
I'm gonna miss her because this woman was fabulous at economic forecasts.
Uh in fact, I've got to tell you, I carry around in my briefcase a document that she wrote uh as this is before she even took office.
She was, in fact, it says Chairman nominee designate Council of Economic Advisors, Christina Roemer, 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 eleven 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 I'm I'm Carl Rove.
I'm a recovering government bureaucrat.
I was on the federal payroll.
There is no recover 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 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 eight and a half percent or seven and a half percent, and by the third quarter of two thousand nine, that would be last the end of last summer, it'll top out at eight percent and begin a decline so that by the time that it gets into sort of like the end of the summer of two thousand and ten, it's gonna be approaching seven percent.
And if we do nothing, if we do nothing, ladies and gentlemen, and do not pass the seven hundred and sixty-five billion dollar stimulus plan, unemployment will rise to nine percent, and it will re it will actually hit nine percent for the first, second, and third quarters of two thousand and ten.
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 Roer, the esteemed Dr. Christina Roomer, 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 than if we did nothing.
She said unemployment would top out at nine percent.
It's at 9.5%.
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 gonna 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.
They they first of all, they outsourced it to the Congress.
They simply said, you know, we we you know, we need a package of between six hundred and seventy and seven hundred and seventy billion dollars, but we'll take eight hundred and fifty billion dollars, and of course, Congress immediately started aiming towards $850 billion.
In fact, the Senate got it up to $880 billion before it got trimmed back.
And uh the second thing they did is they they did they went up to Capitol Hill and they said, okay, um, we're only gonna meet with Democrats.
This was right after the election.
You know, when that election which the one, Senator Obama, candidate Obama said we're going to um 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?
Uh 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 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 we're we're going to come back to that in just a minute.
We got a little break here from our advertisers, and when we come back, we'll be talking about the most important part of Christina Roomer's document, and I'm talking about Appendix One.
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 One 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.
Uh well, what do I mean again today?
This is my first time.
It's rush 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 Roamer.
She's departing.
The President's Council of Economic Uh Advisors Chair is returning to Berkeley, sort of Moscow on the Pacific Coast.
And uh, you know, we were talking about how it is that she got it so wrong on the stimulus package.
She proposed uh she backed the president's effort with a very thoughtful document that said if we don't do the stimulus, we're gonna have unemployment go through the roof, it is going to actually hit nine percent, and if uh and it's gonna stay up there for a long while.
And if we do something pass this bill, it's gonna cut top out at eight percent by the end of the summer of two thousand and nine and and or drop dramatically after that back to the way it was under that bad guy Bush, down in there in the five and six 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 she promised we would get if we did nothing.
And how did we end up there?
Well, as I told you earlier, being a free covering government bureaucrat, I actually read the stuff they put out, and uh not just to the chart that said here's how the performance is going to be, but you always go and I I say read the appendices.
And in this one they have one, appendix one.
And uh 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 one percent 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 a dollar sixty in economic growth permanently added to the American economy.
Think about that for a minute.
Government spends a dollar and magically a dollar fifty of economic growth is somehow created.
I mean, if that's the case, why do we stop at $765 billion and seven hundred and seventy-two, whatever it was, in stimulus bill.
We we we sh we should have had like the five trillion dollar stimulus bill, and there would have been seven and a half trillion dollars plus worth of economic growth.
We could have done the ten trillion dollar stimulus bill, and there would have been fifteen trillion dollars of economic growth, and we could have thrown one heck of a party on the five trillion dollars that we magically created.
I mean, the whole thrust of the stimulus bill was it doesn't matter what we're 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 fifteenth 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 s in a well-designed stimulus package, one that emphasizes tax cuts and tremporary incentives that cause people to create jobs.
You only get 80 cents of economic growth.
And at some point you got it, you got to pay the piper.
You've got to pick up the tab for that twenty 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 that the so-called multiplier is a buck fifty-five 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 uh uh freshman college students, economic economic second edition.
I mean, let alone the conservative economist.
In fact, there's a wonderful paper.
You can get it just by uh Googling John Cogan and Tobias Swick, CWIK.
Now, that's that'll absolutely guarantee that the that this pops up this these guys' paper, but they wrote a paper called No New Keynesian Keynesian versus old Keynesian government spending multipliers.
This is the last February where they warned, hey, this is a nutty proposition.
You think you're gonna 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 uh believe as they do that this didn't create economic growth.
It hasn't.
And uh we're seeing jobs uh today at uh uh 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 we're and 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 a hundred and eighty-one thousand people stopped looking for work altogether.
They said, toss it in, forget it.
There's no there's not going to be a job for me.
And uh 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 on in uh when they passed the bill last February, and then later on the CBO said, uh-oh, tiny little mistake, just ooh, it'sy bitsy tiny little itsy bitsy government mistake.
We were only off by about a factor of oh nine percent.
We're only seventy-five billion dollars off in our estimate.
So it's eight hundred and sixty-two billion dollars that they spent on that stimulus bill rather than what they seven hundred and eighty-seven 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's Nerly.
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 thank God, thank God Al Gore invented the Internet.
You know, it's 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 eight hundred and sixty-two billion dollars 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 gonna 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 spent they're spending, you know, uh this money so slowly, we're we're stimulating the economy last year.
You know, we're the 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're 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.
You know?
Instead, you know, 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 web page, get a hold of the webmaster.
The American people deserve accountability and transparency.
You know, Vice President Joe Biden, he's a 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 issues since he came to the Congress in 1972.
Back after this break.
Yes, we've received a report from the secret conclave that uh Russia is hosting that uh 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 is attending the secret international vast right-wing conspiracy that he's chairing the special meeting.
Uh look, we're going to take some calls.
Remember, the number to call is 1-800-282-2882.
And uh why don't we start with uh Brett in Lynchburg, Virginia, one of one of the nicer towns in uh in the in the United States of America, been there a number of times.
Brett, uh, good morning.
You 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 like talking to you.
Uh you're the guy that uh 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 are 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 I think that's a good point, but I think there are two sets of arguments that our candidates ought to make.
And uh 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, or people who own small businesses who file on the individual tax uh line.
In fact, 50 percent of small business income will be will be taxed at a higher rate if the if President Obama gets his way and the tax hikes go into effect next year.
And I mean, that's the you know, for economy that's struggling, we don't want to have that happen.
We don't want to have the job creators and small business suddenly face big tax bills, and the and they will be big.
I mean, we're taking the top rate from 35 percent to forty percent, 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.
Fifty-four percent of all uh businesses that are subchapter S are going to pay higher taxes, and 33 percent of sole proprietorships are.
But you know what?
That is not the only set of arguments that we ought to make.
There is a 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 percent of these people's money, it can say we want to take 40 percent 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 of what people think about how much government should take from any one individual, you'll find out that they that about 80 percent 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 twenty percent.
So, you know, with uh with the top rate of thirty-five percent, about ready to go to forty.
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 and you know about the rich.
Well, the really what they're talking about, high income, the reason one guy gets a more of a tax break is because he paid more in taxes.
Well, if you and I go into a store and and uh the store is given a discount that day, and if you spend more money than I do, you get more of a discount.
Didn't mean we both got 10 percent, but you got a more 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 paying if you're in the lowest tax bracket before 2001, you're paying fifteen percent tax rate.
After the two thousand one tax cut, you're paying ten percent tax rate, which means your tax rate was cut by a third.
Well, actually it was cut by you know, uh cut by uh cut from fifteen to thirteen five out of fifteen is a third.
But I mean you had the biggest uh percentage reduction.
That was higher than being cut from you know thirty-nine to thirty-five.
So look, it's i th this is this is an issue where spine matters, where courage matters, where the willy willingness to stand up and say, I I'm willing to take this what you think is a tough opinion and stand by it can pay off politically, because it it resonates with what Americans think.
There's incidentally a great new book at our strongly recommend by Arthur Brooks called The Battle, where he talks about this, and uh it's uh 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 that defending free enterprise and defending our American capitalistic system is a cultural and moral battle as well as an economic one.
Thanks for thanks for calling in.
Uh yeah, let's let's uh let's take uh 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 on in the Adirondack Mountains, and uh on the advice of my accountant, I'm participating in the hire act, the hiring incentives to restore employment.
Uh I give my employees a W11 form.
They're seasonal employees.
Um 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 was asked.
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 W11 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, uh look, um first of all, thanks for for sharing with us this practical uh description of what this bill actually does.
You you've got absolutely right.
The higher act is not going to generate significantly larger employment than we would otherwise have, but it will generate significantly higher cost to the taxpayer.
Uh those those eighty-nine dollars 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, on again, repr back on uh uh Al Gore's marvelous invention, recovery dot, you know, the web, the internet, uh recovery.gov, they have a little box there, recovery funded jobs reported by recipients.
Remember they said we're gonna pass this bill and we're gonna save or create three and a half million new jobs by the end of two thousand and ten.
Now we've lost two million jobs from the day that the President said that, but they they they can't they can't claim what a job is is saved.
They can't quantify that.
Economists say that's you know, 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're 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 got a they're back doing the same job they would have been doing regardless of whether or not the higher act was there.
It's just that somebody with a smart accountant was able to get some some money back on their employment.
But I gotta tell you, this is not gonna solve the problem.
What it solves the problem is not a temporary boost from the government.
What solves the problem is men and women who are who are entrepreneurs and risk takers like you saying, you know what, I feel confident enough about what the future is gonna look like that I'll take my money and I'll invest it in expanding s expanding plant equipment and services.
And that's not gonna happen as long as we got all these kind of overhang of government spending and so forth.
Anyway, thanks so much for calling in.
And uh 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.
Uh Carl Rove sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Uh you know, uh Christine Roomer, we've been talking about stimulus, the stimulus bill from last year, and Christine Roomer's departure, and uh she uh she you know, 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 uh this uh 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 eight percent.
Boy, I it's nice to know she's regretful about making that forecast.
I I think we all regret having spent eight hundred and sixty-two billion dollars to no good use.
Anyway, um, you know, we're gonna talk about stimulus two.
If stimulus one didn't work, uh stimulus two they think will work, and we're gonna talk about how bad an idea it is.
But you know, we're coming up against the top of the hour, so I think I'm gonna wait until the top of the hour.
Let's take another phone call if we can uh from Gary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Hey, Mr. Rowe, how are you doing?
Hey, Gary, fine.
How about you, man, and the uh twin cities?
Oh, been a fan for us since eighty six, and when I heard you're like, who's that voice?
I know that voice.
There we go.
Well, 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, you know, the two options where if we do something, this is where it's gonna be, and if we do nothing, this is where it's going to be.
Well, we did if we would have done not if we did something, and plus not only did it not do anything, but it gave us two trillion dollars more in debt.
I mean, didn't one Bush leave we were at sixty six hundred and forty billion in our deficit?
And where we're at today, and what are we gonna start paying this stuff back?
And then the kind of guys that we got running, like in my state, uh 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 uh 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, and that easy for him to say because he's got a lot of money that was made for him by his uh predecessors and his family who built up a great company and now he's just cashes the checks and clips the coupons.
Easy for him to say.
You're right, though, it's interesting.
The national debt, uh, this is the debt uh held by the public was six point three trillion dollars on January twentieth, two thousand nine.
That is what has been was built up uh over the course of America's history.
Uh by the end of two thousand ten, it will be two thousand it will be nine point three trillion dollars.
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 it's a bundle.
And so the question is gonna be whether or not if Republicans make gains this fall, they're gonna 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 it when he came into office, uh the federal government was just over 20 percent of the GDP.
That's sort of the historic norm since World War II.
At uh at in 2009, he drove it up to 24.7 percent of GDP.
Part of that was to be found in the Stimulus One bill, which turns out to be, you know, not $787 billion that we thought at the time, but $862 billion.
And then he added another 13 percent 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 percent this year and an estimated 25.1 percent next year.
And uh think about that.
The size of the Federal Government is now a quarter larger than it was the day before Barack Obama came into office.
That is just astonishing.
And you're right, we're not gonna get it down unless we not only say we're willing to freeze, but we start saying we're willing to cut.
Certainly we if we grew a twenty-five percent in one year, we can work our way back down.
Well, I'll I'll tell you, I sit there and you listen to these guys on Mr. Shiver Up My Leg 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.
You mean this is why we're in the shape that we're in and what triggered everything.
That's right.
And look, uh, you know, I love this.
Fanny and Freddie, uh two of my favorite institutions.
We're gonna actually talk about this in in hour three.
There was just a little bit of a news item that Freddie Mack has asked for one point eight billion dollars in additional federal aid after posting a larger than expected loss in the second quarter, and that's Freddie, and Fanny asked for a billion five uh before that.
So I mean, with $3.3 billion asked for last week for the for the coming quarter from just these two institutions.
And I remember when when we came into office in 2001, we received a report from Elmond Falcone, who was the head of O'Feo, the government office that's in charge of regulating Fanny and Freddie.
And he was very blunt.
He said, Look, I'm supposed 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 gonna end up being on the hook.
And we are on the we these guys are getting leverage.
He at the time thought that they were leveraged eight to one to ten to one, which means that a ten to twelve percent decline in the value of their underlying assets, these mortgages, would would uh would cause them to go bankrupt.
And and and we set out on a new course, and I'm gonna come when we come back after this message, I want to talk with you more, Scott, about this.
Uh uh excuse me, Gary about this, and uh I'm sorry, Scott, and we'll we'll talk more about Fanny and Freddie when we come back.
Thank you.
Well, thanks.
We're back.
Uh we've got just a few seconds before we uh break at the end of the hour, so let me let you know what's coming up next.
We're gonna be talking about stimulus two, and then we're gonna be getting into my sweet spot, the zone of comfort.
We're gonna 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 uh 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 uh thanks for listening.
And uh and they 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 it 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 an international vast right-wing conspiracy, and we are concocting things there.
▲
Export Selection