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Jan. 3, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:37
January 3, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in Rush Returns Live to kick off a brand new year of excellence in broadcasting tomorrow, 12 midday Eastern.
Rush back live for another full year of excellence in broadcasting.
Great to be with you.
1-800-282-2882.
Breaking news, breaking news.
There is no truth to the rumor.
That Justin Bieber has come out in support of the Ground Zero Mosque.
Justin Bieber, Canada's Teen Sensation.
Hey, wait a minute.
I thought I was Canada's Teen Sensation.
The public is so fickle.
Justin Bieber, Canada's Teen Sensation, was rumored to have given an interview to Tiger Beat saying that he was in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque.
And as a result of this, the New York City Hard Hats, who are protesting the Ground Zero Mosque, had launched a boycott of Justin Bieber.
Andy Sullivan, the construction worker who's the head of the 9-11 Hard Hat pledge, had demanded that his eight-year-old daughter take down a Justin Bieber poster.
So anyway, Justin Bieber's spokespersons now have denied that he gave an interview to Tiger Beat coming out in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque.
The Tiger Beat story in the current issue, did Justin Bieber grow a mustache?
That is a legitimate story.
Again, I hate to, my, I don't know, what's happened to the research team on this program?
Did he grow a mustache or didn't he?
I haven't got the answer here.
Now I look like a fool.
Has Justin Bieber grown a mustache?
Anyway, the Justin Bieber grow a mustache story is apparently genuine, but the Justin Bieber coming out in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque story never appeared in Tiger Beat.
Tiger Beat is carrying Tiger Beat.
Tiger Beat is entirely unaware of Justin Bieber's position on the Ground Zero Mosque.
So you do not need to boycott Justin Bieber.
Well, actually, you do, you do, but on aesthetic grounds, not on grounds of his support for the Ground Zero Mosque.
But just the fact that a rumor that Justin Bieber is in support of the Ground Zero Mosque leads people to tear the posters of him off the bedroom walls of their eight-year-old daughter, I think is a sign that Katie Coic may be onto something with the rampant Islamophobia across the United States.
If people are just prepared to turn on Justin Bieber on mere rumors of a Tiger Beat story, that means there's no end.
There's no end to the depths of Islamophobia in America.
There is an interesting story in the Christian Science Monitor today.
People sometimes say, well, why do you talk about something going on in Canada or something going on in Europe?
Because in case you haven't noticed, every single bad Euro-Canadian idea sooner or later comes to the United States of America, whereas a very little, very little actually travels in the other direction.
So whatever it is, government healthcare, confiscatory taxation, eventually that shows up here.
Whereas you can go and talk about the Second Amendment all you want in most other countries of the Western world and you're not going to get anywhere.
The traffic is all one way.
So what's going to be the next great European idea to make it to the United States of America?
European nations begin seizing private pensions.
Five nations in Europe are taking over their citizens' private pension money to make up government budget shortfalls.
They give a couple of examples.
In Hungary, last month, the government made the citizens an offer they could not refuse.
They could either remit their individual retirement savings to the state or lose the right to the basic state pension but still have an obligation to pay for it.
The government, in effect, nationalized $14 billion of individual retirement savings.
The Bulgars are now trying something similar.
What do they do with this money, by the way?
The idea that somehow when they take money for the so-called government pension fund, they're going to actually use it on government pensions is completely false.
In Ireland, for example, the National Pension Reserve Fund was brought into existence explicitly to support pensions for the Irish people in the years 2025 to 2050.
However, in March, the Irish government took $4 billion out of this fund to rescue banks in the wake of the big downturn in 2008.
And just six weeks ago, they took the remaining savings of 2.5 billion euros out of it to support the bailout for the rest of the flailing Irish economy.
So all this money that was earmarked for pensions for the Irish people in the years 2025 to 2050, they just basically spent the whole lot of it.
There ain't going to be anything.
If you're expecting to return in Ireland in the year 2025, they've already spent it.
And that gets to go back to what we were talking about earlier: that the pansy left solving problems that don't exist.
But the cost of solving them is huge, is absolutely huge.
It's actually more expensive.
Solving fictitious problems turns out to be far more expensive than solving real problems, because in effect they're a fantasy.
So you're not limited by the constraints of reality in determining what it is you do to solve the problem.
The light bulb is a good example.
There's no real problem with Edison's light bulb.
But if you suddenly decide, if Congress gets together, the pansy left and the pansy right get together and decide, ooh, Edison's light bulb is America's silent killer.
We've got to do something about it.
The fact that this is a fevered fantasy that you have concocted out of your own head means that there are no limits to what you are prepared to spend to solve this problem.
It's not like a real problem.
If you've got a washed-out bridge and you need to replace the washed-out bridge, you know what it costs to bridge from A to B.
That is a fairly containable real-world problem.
When you're solving fantasy problems, there's no end to it.
And that's why in Europe, at least five nations now have begun to seize private pensions.
That's to say, you may have a private pension arrangement, you may have a 401k, you may have a SEP or whatever.
And one day the government spokesman just turns up on TV and announces he's nationalizing it.
Just as the government took over General Motors, just as the government took over college loans, just as the government took over healthcare, the government is now taking over your 401k.
And it's worth thinking about that because it sounds crazy, but just think how crazy the government taking over General Motors would have sounded, you know, even as late as, say, 1980.
Just think how crazy Obamacare would have sounded to any American of the mid-20th century.
Sooner or later, all the crazy ideas that seem totally antithetical to the American idea eventually implant themselves here.
And that's why the important thing is to nip them in the bud, to nip them in the bud.
And I would say that the idea, what sounds insane, that the idea that the government might nationalize your 401k, I would bet when you're spending $4 trillion but only raising $2 trillion in revenue, eventually you run out of all legitimate sources of income.
And so the only question then becomes is how extravagant you have to be in seizing illegitimate sources of income.
And the idea that this government will not start thinking about ways to nationalize retirement savings when that's the only kind of money that it can't easily access, you don't want to bet against the government trying something like that.
There was a very interesting example of why the left ties itself into knots on this kind of stuff, by the way, when Ezra Klein, who's an economist with the Washington Post, and he got into trouble when he was on MSNBC and he said that one reason people find the Constitution so confusing, as he put it, is because it's over 100 years old.
And so it's written in this kind of old-timey language that people don't understand.
You've got to love this guy, he's like, Ezra Klein is basically the Justin Bieber of the Washington Post.
And, you know, he can't believe that this Constitution thing that America's saddled with dates like from the Cindy Lauper era.
I mean, who needs it, man?
It's over 100 years old.
Nobody understands.
Who knows even what kind of language that people were speaking back then?
And of course, a lot of people rushed in to mock him, to point out that, in fact, the Constitution is over 200 years old.
But, you know, let's face it, if you but and that this demonstrated lack of a certain grasp of history.
But in fact, I think it gets to a more basic point: that the left lives in the present tense.
It doesn't matter whether it's 100 years old, 200 years old.
The King James Bible is 400 years old.
It's celebrating its 400th anniversary.
Who can relate to it?
It's like totally ancient, outmoded stuff.
Because it gets to the big distinction, this, between, I think, a so-called progressive temperament and a conservative temperament.
The idea that every idea comes with built-in obsolescence.
So the fact that the Constitution is this moldy old thing written with quill pen means it can't possibly be relevant in the age of Twitter.
The idea that there might be timeless principles which endure beyond the span of a mere human lifetime is literally incredible to the left because it's a present tense moment.
It lives in a kind of fevered present tense sphere.
And just as it has no interest in the past, it has no real interest in the future.
That's why it spent our future.
That's why if you were one of the Irish taxpayers who was shaken down to put money into the Irish pension fund for the years 2025 to 2050, get used to it.
They've spent 2025 to 2050, just as we've spent our future.
Just as the Congressional Budget Office does all these ludicrous predictions for the year 2050 and the year 2080 and the year 2090, and none of it matters a damn because we have outspent everything from those years.
And what matters is not the mid-20th century, but really from kind of 2014, 2015 on, we are going to be hanging off the cliff by our fingernails.
But that is how the left thinks.
Oh, the Constitution, it's written in all this old-timey language.
It's over 100 years old.
Who can possibly relate to it?
Just as the functioning society is a kind of contract between the present, the past, and the future.
And the left breaks that contract.
It despises the past because it thinks there are no enduring principles and thinks there is nothing you cannot reinvent.
It doesn't matter whether it's basic societal building blocks like the family or religious institutions or anything, or constitutions, doesn't matter.
Who needs it?
But at the same time, as it breaks its faith with the past, it also breaks its faith with the future, which is why if you're one of those teenagers who was standing behind Obama in the campaign rallies, singing, chanting all the Hopey Changey stuff, they've done for you too.
And it's not just the old-time constitution that they've tossed in the garbage can of history, they've tossed your future in the garbage can of history too, because in the end, the whole leftist big government program is completely unsustainable.
We'll talk about that and lots more in this first live rush show of the new year, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Steinen for us, just want to make sure I've got that Ezra Klein quote right.
Quote, this is a Washington post columnist, by the way.
Quote, the issue of the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago.
Who knew what even what language was spoken then?
It's like stuff from 100 years ago.
Was it Take Me Out to the Ball Game?
I think that was written in 1908, if memory serves.
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.
I don't care if I ever get back.
Who the hell knows what it means?
We should have nine Supreme Court justices weighing in on interpretation of anything over 100 years old.
But this gets to the core of the leftist delusion that the permanence is the vanity of every age.
They assume that the present tense is forever.
And because the present tense is forever, we have driven off, we have driven America off a fiscal cliff because the progressive state breaks faith with both the past and the future.
Let's go to Patrick in Bangor, Maine.
Patrick, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Great to be with you.
I enjoy listening to you when you fill in for Rush.
You do a great job.
I love being here.
I love being here.
In your neighboring state, by the way, I'm live here in New Hampshire.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right close by.
Well, I wouldn't say that.
It's like a three-day drive zigzagging up and down because from me to you is one of those you can't get there from here type of stuff.
Don't get me going on the east-to-west highway that the state shut down for several decades, but that's us for another call.
No, no, that's right.
I love the way in your great state, whatever I do, whatever that, what is it, Route 2, that's the big East or 302, whichever, where it doesn't make any difference, whichever one you take across Maine.
I love the way in summer, the minute the summer tourists arrive, they just have the one-lane highway and they're doing all the paving on it.
So that helps even more.
Yeah, that's great.
Let's not complain about the Maine highway system because that'll take us from here till next Christmas.
What's on your mind next?
We do have LePage in there, not to forget.
He may make some changes.
But in any case, my comment was about public sector unions.
And I told your screener how that even in FDR's era, not that he wasn't calmy enough to get on with that program, but they understood it was such an obvious, you know, nepotistic grab for power that it just wasn't palatable.
You know, it was so overt.
Now we find it to be, you know, the state of the nation.
And it goes back to what you were saying about how their politics work.
Eventually, there's no long sight.
It's the politics of adolescence.
And, you know, their great three tenets, you know, Marxist tenets is repetition, repetition, repetition.
And here we are.
No matter what subject you want to look at it, they've just inundated us and desensitized, and here we stand.
No, and as you point out, what everyone felt about FDR, he understood the basic, the contradiction in public sector unions.
There was a fantastic moment.
John Corzine, the floppo governor of New Jersey before Chris Christie.
Now, he stood by, he addressed a public sector union rally, and he said at one point, we're going to be in there working for you, pitching for you.
This was over some negotiation for whatever this union, rapacious terms, this union wanted.
And what was fascinating was the use of the word we there.
He saw himself, John Corzine saw himself as one of them.
He's supposed to be their employer.
He's supposed to be representing the interests of the people of New Jersey.
And instead, he was representing the interests of the rapacious public sector shakedown kleptocrats of New Jersey.
And that's why you shouldn't have public sector unions because he doesn't understand that he's the boss negotiating with the workers.
That relationship has no meaning in government, especially not when you have unions just basically sluicing whatever percentage it is from their members' salaries straight to the Democratic Party to grow government and thereby grow the public sector union even bigger.
You simply can't have that.
And Patrick, I don't know what is Maine a big union state for public sector unions?
Well, they've killed off the economy over a quarter century or so through policies here.
But so, yeah, there's a lot of government jobs.
That's really kind of what's left, unless you're down in the southern part of the state, and that's basically a burb of Boston, which was getting all of the welfare money through the big dig and all.
So, yeah, it's getting that way.
There's not a whole lot to be done.
There's so many restrictions.
Unless we FL trees.
Yeah, that's right.
You should use that northern forest to see if you can't grow environmentally friendly light bulbs, Patrick.
That would be a great use for the Great North Woods.
Thanks.
Thanks for your call.
You know, Patrick gets right to the essence here.
Whatever the necessity of unions or the justification for unions in the private sector, there's no need for them in government because government is a monopoly.
It's not as if you can have a cartel of rapacious private sector bosses ganging up on the poor working man.
There's none of that in government.
It's a cozy relationship.
That demonstration where people were saying in Springfield, Illinois, there was a demonstration a few months ago, people standing up and down the street saying, raise my taxes.
And if you'd listen to the way it was presented on Pansy Public Radio, the Pansies and Public Radio were presenting it as a kind of communitarian thing.
All these public-spirited citizens were saying that we need to pay more in taxes so that we can have better public services.
No, this was a demonstration of public sector union workers who live off taxes.
So them standing up and down, prancing up and down in the street saying, raise my taxes, is about as selfless as me prancing up and down in the street saying, buy my book.
It was entirely driven by self-interest.
Unless we roll back public sector unions, there is no future.
Mark Stein in for Rush, more straight ahead on the EIB network.
And we'll take lots more of your calls.
1-800-282-2882.
Yes, Rush will be back live tomorrow.
But if you go to rushlinbore.com, it's like he never went away because there's tons of content over there, particularly if you're a Rush 24-7 subscriber.
And in particular, you'll be able to find out how to get the new Rush app, which was launched just before Christmas and on its very first day became the number one app over at Apple.
If you go to Apple's store and just enter Rush, you'll come straight to the Rush app and be told how to download.
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Go to RushLimbaugh.com for more information on the new Rush app.
The very first day it hit number one, the next day, the FCC announced that we needed to federally regulate apps so that the Janine Garofilo app has a sporting chance of overtaking the Rush app in the best-selling app categories.
But for the moment, you can still get your Rush app in a free market manner by going straight to the Apple store and entering the word Rush, and you'll come straight to it.
Just wanted to say one other thought, by the way, on this idea of the left thinking that you can live in an eternal present tense.
This was prompted by Ezra Klein saying that the Constitution is confusing because it's over 100 years old.
And there's an old Taliban saying.
Well, I don't think it's that old because the Taliban aren't that old.
But apparently the Taliban have a saying in Afghanistan called, Americans have all the watches, but we've got all the time.
I don't know.
I read this somewhere or other a couple of months back.
I don't know whether it's a real Taliban saying.
If it isn't, it would make an excellent country song.
But it absolutely distills the essence of the clash of civilizations.
Islam is playing for tomorrow, whereas a whole lot of the Western world has, by any traditional measure, given up on the future completely.
We do not save, we do not produce, we do not reproduce, not in most European countries, not in Canada, not in Vermont or San Francisco.
But instead, like Ezra Klein, we want to live in an eternal present tense of which a contempt, even the idea of using the expression over 100 years old as a term of obsolescence, if not of outright contempt, is a big sign of what's wrong with the left and what is wrong with the policies that it's imposing on this country.
Let us go to Tim in Milwaukee.
Tim, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Hey, ghostly, ghostly sounds.
Are you there, Tim?
I'm here.
Thank you.
Oh, great to have you with us.
You're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
All right.
Thank you.
Great show.
I was just calling to my New Year's wish is that the 112th Congress lives up to the wishes of the voters.
Yes, I think you're right there that that is actually an open question right now because the sad fact is that November the 2nd feels rather far away.
It seems to be receding into the rear window rather faster than it should.
Henry Waxman, a close ally of soon-to-be former Speaker Pelosi, says we can expect one of the most rancorous Congresses in history in the next two years because of all the very extreme people, as he puts it, who have pulled the Republican Party, quote, even further to the right, unquote.
Now, I hope he's right about that, because I think we should have a rancorous two years in the United States Congress, because we've got to have a fight about some of this stuff.
We can't have the usual reach across the aisle accommodationism.
We can't have Fred Upton bipartisan when he drew up the Curly Fry light bulb legislation.
It was between him, he's supposed to be a Republican of some kind or other, and Jane Harmon, Democrat of California.
We want to actually put some clear blue water between conservative ideas and the last two years.
Waxman says that the last two years have been two of the most productive in modern American history.
Well, the electorate delivered a verdict on that on November the 2nd, and it looks like the political class would like to forget that verdict.
So I hope he's right about this.
Because unless we draw the line, and we already saw that in the lame duck session, people say, well, you know, it's only 100 and this program that the Republicans have agreed to, it's only $160 billion.
What's the point of making a stand on that?
What's the point of taking a firm stand on that?
Or one of the Obama bills that was such a nickel and dime operation, nobody didn't even make the papers.
And a half trillion dollar acquisition of new federal land.
Why is the United States government taking another half trillion dollars worth of land out of productive use?
But by the time it happened, well, it was only $400 and something billion dollars.
Who cares about it?
It's just rinky-dinky little stuff.
No point even making the papers.
What's your priority, Tim?
What do you want to see him do?
Well, like you said, it's got to stop.
It's the spending.
You just want a stop to the spending.
Yeah, you're right.
That's the bottom line.
But you know, I think it's worth understanding this: that the idea, there's two kinds of Republicans who are in Congress at the moment, because everyone's pretending to be concerned about the deficit and the debt.
And there's two kinds of legislators there at the moment.
There are those who want to figure out a way to make all this huge spending affordable, and there are those who want to roll back the spending.
And we need to support the guys who want to roll back the spending.
It's not about figuring out a formula that will make this huge, wasteful government temporarily solvent for another year or two.
It's actually about cancelling some of these programs, abolishing some of these agencies, and firing huge numbers of these bureaucrats.
That's the kind of policies that we have to get behind.
Otherwise, there is actually no way to salvage the situation.
So, Tim, every time your congressman, I don't know who your guy is in Milwaukee, but every time your guy starts talking about the problem of the deficit and the debt, you have to correct him and say the problem is not the deficit and the debt, it's the bloated, wasteful government spending that causes the deficit and the debt.
The idea is not to bring in a balanced budget by increasing taxes or introducing a VAT as they have over in Europe, a value-added tax.
The idea is to actually roll back the spending and make the government smaller.
And if your guy isn't talking about that, he's not serious.
And he didn't get the message of November the 2nd, because the message of November 2nd wasn't just about the debt and deficit.
It was also about big spending.
It was about big government.
Thanks for your call, Tim, and happy new year to you.
And Tim is right, by the way, that it's an open question as to whether we're going to get these guys following through on what happened on November the 2nd.
What Henry Waxman calls the most productive lame-duck session, the most productive two years that the Congress has had in generations, he's right about that.
The Democrats get into power and they don't waste any time.
They ram this stuff down your throat.
They don't care.
They don't care what the polls say.
They didn't care about losing Scott Brown's Senate seat.
The minute they lost so-called Ted Kennedy seat in Massachusetts and Scott Brown was elected, did they listen to the message of that?
They just got a bigger hammer to make it all the more easier to hammer the health care bill down America's throat.
And whatever you think of the Democrats, they use their moment, their tiny little window of opportunity.
They use their moment to enact hugely expensive, transformative legislation that serves their political ends.
And you get the impression on November the 2nd that the Republicans think, okay, we're back now.
We've got the committee chairmanships.
We've got the car.
We've got the driver.
We've got the corner office.
We can just sit here and tread water for a couple of years.
And America doesn't have that option right now because America is a big country and it's an important country.
America can't be like Iceland or Greece.
When Iceland slides off the fiscal cliff, it's tough if you're Icelandic, but everyone else is a spectator.
When Greece slides off the fiscal cliff, it's tough if you're a Greek and it's tough if you're a German who has to pick up the tab for bailing them out.
But otherwise, most of the world is a spectator.
Greece doesn't matter in the scheme of things.
But when America slides off a cliff, it's going to drag most of the planet with it.
And that is why this stuff has to be, we have to have a Republican Party in the House of Representatives that understands this is no time to tread water, but it's time to roll back, roll back what the Pelosi-Reed Congress did in the previous two years.
And even if it's only symbolic, even if they pass a bill repealing Obamacare, knowing full well that the reach across the aisle types at the Senate aren't going to go along with it and the president isn't going to go sign it, pass it, pass it.
Tell America the two-party system still functions and that while there's a pansy left dealing with fictional problems, there is at least one party in the two-party system that understands that America's rendezvous with destiny is looming and we have to act on this stuff, not in 2020, 2040, 2070, but we have to act on it right now.
And that moment began on November the 2nd.
Mark Stein, in for rush, more to come.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network.
I mentioned those guys demonstrating outside the Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, saying, raise my taxes, raise my taxes.
We need to demonstrate our communitarian selflessness by signing on for bigger taxes.
Do you ever wonder if you're an Illinois resident what your taxes go to?
An investigation of an Illinois prison by the Belleville News Democrat has found that the state has paid out $10 million for worker injuries in the past three years, with more than 230 guards claiming repetitive stress from manually operating the cell locks.
Oh, poor wee prison guards.
They have to manually operate the cell locks.
Oh, and they've got repetitive stress now.
So 230 of them have received a total of $10 million in payouts, including the warden.
He got $75,678.
Why?
Does the warden at what jail is this?
Oh, yes, the Menard Correctional Center.
Does the warden at the Menard Correctional Center also manually operate the cell locks?
It sounds unlikely to me, but he's also apparently got the old repetitive stress.
Maybe it's in the air now.
Maybe the prisoners are coming down with it.
And if they can get some of those Gitmo lawyers on their team, maybe they could sue for catching the repetitive stress from the guards.
More than half the prison staff, 389 guards, have filed.
Wow, it's rampant there.
If it breaks out of the prison, repetitive stress, to stalk the state of Illinois, then it could be, it could be, yeah.
Well, I think I think HR points out, by the way, that the prisoners are at risk from second-hand repetitive stress, which I think is terrible because if you're like on death row there, so you've got like you're sitting on death row in the Menard Correctional Center and you've got like 20 years of appeals ahead of you, you're going to be dead from the secondhand repetitive stress long before they ever stick you in the chair and fry you.
I mean, this is outrageous.
This is outrageous.
We need to spend more money on this.
We need to tax the people of Illinois more so we can give more payouts to more guards suffering repetitive stress at the Menard Correctional Center and more prisoners being stricken, lifetime prisoners, prisoners, career rapists, career murderers, serial killers, guys on death row coming down with secondhand repetitive stress system.
This is the priority for the United States of America in the year 2011.
Let us go to John in Pinehurst, North Carolina.
John, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Well, we'll just try to be a star today, Mr. Stein.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
I want to get right to my point.
Great.
You seem to do your homework very well.
And I spent many years with military intelligence, almost 12 years.
And one thing I learned in the military and within the intelligence community is that the military had a contingency plan, a what-if plan for everything, for virtually every country on this planet after the invasion of Grenada, because previous to that they didn't.
I find it hard to believe, and I just cannot believe that Democrats and Republicans, common citizens, have never been told by the government that this government under Obama or under Bush, and let's say Obama, because he's our current president, hasn't spoken with financial wizards, people that simply know what's going on in the financial world, to say that once the deficit hits $14 trillion, any day now, or $15 or $16 trillion,
that if this occurs and there is a demand on the part of China, Japan, or anybody else that we owe money to them, this is what is going to happen in this country.
This deficit, this $14 trillion deficit, which is about $45,000 per person, man, woman, and child, in this country to pay it off, is so out of control.
This could destroy, virtually destroy this country's entire financial system.
But nobody ever breaches that subject.
Through the people and connections that you have within high-level financial areas, have you ever been told of a contingency plan or a what-if plan if this goes on with this unbridled spending in this country?
Well, this is a fascinating point you raised, John, because Austin Goolsby, who's an Obama economic advisor, in fact, I believe he's the only Obama economic advisor from 2009 who's still in the job today.
All the others have parlayed their roller dock decks into lucrative private sector gigs now.
But he was on TV talking about playing politics with the debt ceiling and the impact on the economy that would occur if we even raise the question of U.S. government default.
But the fact is, we've only been able to get to this stage because the U.S. is the de facto global reserve currency.
In other words, it borrows money and it pays it back in the global currency.
So from the Chinese point of view, it's less risky lending to buying American debt than, say, buying Zimbabwean debt or even Icelandic debt.
Now then, that raises the question, at what point does America spend so much that it jeopardizes its position as the global currency and in effect ends its status as the global currency?
You may have noticed the U.S. dollar heading into the toilet in recent months.
And at that point, we're just another, not Zimbabwe, but we're just another Iceland.
And at that point, we run out of people to buy our debt.
As you say, where is the contingency for the CBO?
That's an interesting question, and we will explore it.
I got to take an EIB profit center break here because we're one of the last solvent operations in the United States.
But I will return to that because it's the biggest question mark over the future of the United States right at the moment.
We'll take John's question and explore it in more depth still to come on the Rush Limbaugh Show, 1-800-282-2882.
John wants to talk about the contingency plans for America's looming date with fiscal destiny.
Here's how the Congressional Budget Office puts it: musing on the likelihood of an impending fiscal crisis.
The CBO says, quote, the exact point at which such a crisis might occur for the United States is unknown, in part because the ratio of federal debt to GDP is climbing into unfamiliar territory, unquote.
You know something?
It's going to get real familiar real soon.
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