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April 13, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:16
April 13, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Mr. Broadcast Engineer, I might jip this.
He's still going.
I get the feeling, snurdily, this could be a Qaddafi type speech lengthwise, maybe even Castro, the way this is going.
And typically, he's chosen an audience of students, once again, rather than adults to speak to.
He's at George Washington University.
Speaking of President Obama, greetings.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh and the EIB network.
We are at 800-282-2882.
Email address, lrushbo at EIBnet.com.
Are you sitting down?
If you're just joining us, everything, everything I thought this was going to be, it turned out to make it the first five minutes.
This is a sales pitch, excuse me, a sales pitch for growing, expanding, ever larger government.
The definition of America's greatness, in his view, began with the expansion of government, social security, Medicare and Medicaid, transfer payments, the redistribution of wealth.
In other words, is when this country began its first steps of greatness.
That's what he's saying.
And I can tell you by the tone of this speech, he does not think he got snookered on this budget deal.
He is confident as he can be.
He is almost arrogantly, condescendingly confident here.
He knows he got the Republicans wrapped around his little fingers.
He knows that they are not on the same page as their voters.
And frankly, that has always been one of my fears, that the Republican leadership is stuck back in the year 2000 while our voters, you, me, the Tea Party, the rest of the public, is in the now.
The leadership isn't.
So this big election last November resulted in empowering Republicans who just, I don't think, have the stomach for this.
Not bad people.
They're not sellouts or any of that.
If you'd meet them, I know many of them, you'd like them.
They're not bad people.
They're just they don't have the stomach for what this is going to take.
Some of them do, some of them do.
I mean, this is not a blanket statement that I'm making.
But ladies and gentlemen, he just said this deficit, our economic circumstance is all because of George W. Bush.
George Bush started two wars and cut taxes, and that's why we are where we are today.
And that's why we're paying the price.
He referred to the Bush tax cuts as trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts.
Now that only a Stalinist-type central planner could look at tax revenue that way.
Imagine the kind of mindset you must have that sees tax cuts, i.e., people keeping more of their own money as a net cost to government.
I always think of a cost as something that is an outflow.
And they really look at it this way.
They think all money is Washington's.
It is originated there.
It prints there, or is printed there.
And in their convoluted view, all money is Washington's.
That's where it's printed.
That's where it started.
And what you end up with is because of their good graces.
And so high-income earners via tax rates ends up being unpaid for tax cuts.
Simply, it's delusional and convoluted.
He said, we don't begrudge those who've done well.
We don't begrudge those who've done well.
But he does begrudge those who've done well, and they're going to pay the price for doing well because he doesn't think they're paying a high enough price.
Now, you people who have achieved, you who are in the upper income brackets, all of this is your fault because you accepted George W. Bush's tax cuts.
Here's a story from CNNmoney.com.
Headline, tax the rich, exclamation point, okay, but then what, Mr. President?
Because even this story says there aren't enough rich people to come anywhere near close to paying for the mess that we're in.
There just aren't enough rich people to generate the kind of revenue needed to substantially reduce deficits.
That's right here from Gene Zahadi, senior writer, CNN Money.
There never has been, sorry, there never have been enough rich people.
30 years ago, 25 years, there was a saying that had developed by us, by our guys, to counter the notion that the rich weren't paying their fair share in taxes.
And if you could raise their taxes, their tax rates, you'd wipe out deficits.
And it went like this.
And this is as recent as it was accurate numerically, mathematically, as recently as the mid-70s, maybe even early 80s, you could confiscate all the wealth.
You could confiscate every dollar over, I think it was $200,000.
You confiscate it all and you could run the federal government for a week.
That was true at the, we'd run the numbers.
It was true at the time.
I don't know what you could do now.
It would be far less now.
But if you confiscated, I mean, you took it all, then where would you be?
It wouldn't be there anymore.
You've taken it all.
So it's clearly raising taxes is not the answer.
Raising taxes is going to kill further job creation.
Just that simple.
He also said it's important for us to be honest about what's driving up the deficit.
And I heard him say that.
It was during commercial break, and I'm shouting at the TV.
You, you are driving up the deficit.
He said, we don't begrudge those doing well.
He said, if our creditors start worrying that we can't pay our debts, that will drive up interest rates even more.
So that's the debt ceiling.
Don't mess with that.
He said, we've got to raise the debt ceiling.
He said, politicians think that we can close our deficit by eliminating fraud and abuse.
He used to say that too.
In fact, he used to say that that's how we could fund Obamacare, is just by eliminating fraud and abuse.
After Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, everything else is only 12% of our budget, leaving out the Department of Defense.
And he said cuts to that 12% won't solve the problem.
Everything has to be on the table.
Economists think we don't need to balance our economy overnight.
And he did give a I don't know what you would call that.
This is so condescending.
He was talking about Paul Ryan.
He said, to their credit, one vision has been presented by the Republicans.
He said the Ryan plan would lead to a fundamentally different America than what we have known throughout our history.
He said the Ryan plan paints a kind of America that he doesn't believe in.
Obama doesn't believe in.
The rest of America doesn't believe in.
He's talking about how brutal the Medicare cost increases will be under Ryan's plan.
So basically, what we're getting from the regime is a sales pitch and history revision.
We are hearing that America's greatness only began with the redistribution of wealth, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
That's true American greatness where we were all interconnected and a sales pitch to have this government get even bigger because he's now defining economic prosperity as more and more government involvement in everybody's lives.
Folks, if we don't succeed in stopping this and the next real opportunity to stop it, obviously, is the 2012 election.
If we don't succeed, the country's going to unravel anyway.
I don't see the need to play along with these people.
I don't look at this as the politics of same-old, same-old.
Back in the days when the Democrats ran the House for 40 years, the Republicans had 135 to 160 members.
Bob Michael was the Speaker of the House, and they were non-factors.
The Republicans were non-factors.
They didn't even bother going to committee meetings.
It didn't matter.
And everybody was happy.
Just the way it was.
We just accepted that that was the way that it was going to be.
And then every now and then in the White House level, the presidency would be won by the Republicans.
We'd shift power.
We'd trade.
We'd share.
We'd go back and forth.
But it's different now.
The contrast between what we believe and what Obama and his people believe is so stark that if they ultimately prevail, America as founded and as we know it won't exist anymore.
It is unravel.
It will unravel.
There's no need to play along with these people and trickle around the margins on these policies.
There's no reason.
There's no reason to pretend it's like it was 30, 50 years ago where the old bromide about tippo Nealon Reagan going out and having a beer after work.
That was largely exaggerated anyway.
But the meaning of that was, hey, we're all the same people here.
We just differ marginally, just a little bit.
Some days you guys are going to have power.
Some days we will.
And at night, we're all trying to find Fannie Fox at the fountain.
Well, no, it's not that way anymore.
The future is too crucial.
Got to take a break.
We'll do it.
And your phone calls and other things remain in the stacks of stuff that I have not yet gotten to.
We will, right after this.
Top 2%.
Top 2% of income earners in America, if Obama gets his way.
No more itemized deductions, including The home mortgage interest deduction.
You might be surprised at the income level, that is the floor at the top 2%.
You might be surprised.
He's talking about $250,000 to $300,000 a year.
He's not talking about millionaires here, folks.
So that's, lookit, we knew he was going to say this.
There was a Reuters story out today.
Obama to lay out deficit plan would focus on tax and spending.
We knew he was going to take the mortgage interest deduction away from certain people and all itemized deductions.
He was going to make a play for it.
And basically, he wants to jack up taxes.
He wants to cut military spending and continue to impose Obamacare.
Now, we're supposed to think this is something new.
We're supposed to think that this is something revolutionary.
The president has been working hard and has really thought about this.
There's nothing new here.
These are the same old destructive policies that he has already been implementing and fighting for.
Taking away the mortgage deduction for the top 2%.
Well, yeah, but the fact that he's proposed it is new.
The fact that he has been thinking about it isn't.
Putting the final nail in the housing market's already nail-studded coffin.
Take away the home mortgage interest deduction for the top 2% of wage earners.
Let's go to Sierra Vista, Arizona.
We go back to the phones.
Hello, Rich.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, Rush Dittos from the desert.
Thank you.
This is just talking, you know, listening to Boehner and McConnell today with all this stuff going on.
And you may have already answered my question by saying Congress can't tie future hands of future Congresses.
You know, they are talking about there's no way that they have the votes to raise the debt ceiling.
So, okay, if they don't have the votes to raise the debt ceiling, unless there's something substantive that we do, and I can't think of anything more substantive to say, okay, we'll raise your debt ceiling to cover our debts for this fiscal year.
But starting October 1st, tie it in, and at the same time that they do the budget that they're supposed to start doing the budget, the first thing they have to do on October 1st is lower the debt ceiling by law.
Wait a minute.
I'm a little confused.
Where have you heard there aren't the votes yet to raise the debt ceiling?
Boehner and McConnell were on the television just a little while ago talking about it after a meeting they had with Obama.
I missed that.
Yeah, it was on Fox News.
They were actually doing a live thing, and they sat there and said, we don't have the votes to give it to you unless you give us something else.
So now that's actually encouraging.
They had been talking earlier and were sounding quite different.
I know that I heard McConnell say that in effect, raising the debt level, this is not to go to war on.
It's too important.
We have to raise the debt ceiling.
Now you're confusing me.
Well, it's not confusing.
I mean, Boehner, McConnell, Cantor, and Kyle were all in the same video, and it was live, and they said, no, we don't have the votes to do it.
So, you know, unless you give us something else.
And I think that they should tie it to every certain amount of time.
And I don't even know if they, you know, what the time would be.
This time we lower it.
And say you can't raise it anymore legally by law.
And I think that has a snowball effect on everything because now you're telling the rest of the world.
Well, that is what we're all after.
What we are all after is reducing debt, is reducing the size of government.
Now, One of the disadvantages here is all this stuff happening while I happen to be serving humanity.
It's very rare that somebody calls here and tells me something I don't know.
It's doubly rare that somebody calls here and tells me something that's quite the opposite of what I thought I heard.
So now I'm going to really dig into this because believe me, some of the conservative media people from last night into this morning were saying, you know what, we thought the debt limit would be the place to fight this, but we're not.
We're going to focus on the Ryan budget.
And then there was a story in the Politico, and it's the Politico.
I grant you that.
That's why we hold it in reserve.
That Wall Street people threatening Boehner on the debt ceiling.
And Boehner and McConnell are both out there talking about, you know, we can't afford to play around with America in default, meaning not raise the debt ceiling.
But we'll get to the bottom of it, folks.
You know, at the end of the day, we here at the EIB network will get to the bottom of it.
I just have not heard what this caller said.
I have not heard it.
And we're going to find out what the bottom line is.
By the way, charitable giving also included in no deductions for the upper 2% of wage interventions, but it's nothing new.
This was, remember now, this was ending the charitable deduction.
That goes back to the first days of the regime.
I think maybe even in the campaign.
Remember, they want to be the source of all charity.
They want the government to be the source of charity.
They'd be perfectly fine if charitable giving dries up because there's no longer the deduction for it now is whatever your tax bracket is.
So 35, 36% of the top.
I don't know what the top bracket is.
But whatever it is, that's what your deduction is.
But he's going to eliminate it.
All kinds of deductions, sternly, not just the whole mortgage interest deduction.
Charitable donations, no more tax deductibility.
Look at it.
He's going to strip them all.
There is no more deductibility.
It's not fair that they can deduct and the middle class can't.
So if he thought he lost the budget debate, he wouldn't be making this speech, much less saying this stuff.
See, everybody's got this wrong.
Everybody thinks he's out there making this speech because he lost the budget debate.
Everybody's out there thinking he made the speech today because he took it on the chin.
Because all his spin on the media all the weekend was that, wow, man, the Republicans really cleaned Obama's clock.
So he's got to go out there and he's got to put his hand in the deal now.
He's got to make sure he keeps his hand in there.
And you can tell his attitude, the contents, the subject matter, he doesn't think he lost the budget deal.
In my humble opinion, listening to Obama today thinks that he will be able to get whatever he wants.
I don't think that he's acting chastened or beaten or defensive.
In fact, he's back to looking like God, looking up above everybody.
One of the tricks is they raise those teleprompter screens higher than his eyelashes has to look up so that he appears to be looking down on everybody's nose is in the air.
Got the godlike reverb in there now and then.
He's back to the only thing missing here is the fake paper-mâché Greek columns that they had in Denver.
Now, the Washington Times is quoting Boehner, quoting McConnell as saying no debt ceiling increase without cutting the debt.
That is in the Washington Times.
We'll get more detail on this.
I hope that's true.
I hope the interpretation I had earlier, what I heard, is not true, was incorrect.
In the meantime, a brief obscene profit center break, and we'll be back before you know it.
Okay, there are not enough votes in the House to raise the debt ceiling without language attached requiring more spending cuts.
The Republican leaders did say that today.
We have checked.
We are working hard here.
Show prep goes on while the show is being done.
There are not enough votes in the House to raise the debt limit right now, and there aren't enough Republican votes to pass a $38.5 billion budget deal right now.
You might have to go get some Democrat votes to pass the budget deal negotiated with Obama on Friday.
Here's Brian at Corpus Christi, Texas.
Welcome to the EIB Network.
Great to have you here.
How you doing, Russ?
Very good, sir.
Thanks very, very much.
All right, man.
I just called in because I wondered how you get to the conclusion that by cutting taxes, that it isn't like a loss to our government because that X amount of tax would bring in that much income.
Whenever you cut the tax, you cut the income, don't you?
Well, only if you presume that the money belongs to Washington first.
I don't presume that.
I presume that the money I make belongs to me first.
I don't think I understand how it belongs to you first.
Yeah, but we do owe X amount according to the Constitution of how much we got to pay in taxes.
If you cut that rate, the government loses out of money, doesn't it?
The Constitution's got nothing to do with how much we pay in taxes.
Nothing to do with it?
No.
All right.
Well, okay, another question.
Sorry about that.
I got a question.
I guess right now in corpus Christi is about $375 a gallon.
And I remember back when they were Bush was president and gas was this high, a barrel of oil was selling for like $140.
I don't understand why a barrel of oil is going for like $105 today, and our gas is still $375.
Why is that?
Speculators.
Speculators?
I mean, it's like $30 a difference on the barrel of the speculation price versus the raw goods price differential is much different this time around.
It could also be, you know, well, but, you know, the guy that sets the gasoline price could just be taking advantage now because everybody has been told gasoline prices are going to be going up.
And so the guy that controls gas prices might have just, okay, well, let's raise them because people are expecting that to happen.
I want to go back to this notion, sir, we may have already lost you, but I hope not.
I don't mean on the phone.
I mean the way you think.
This notion, you have given me a challenge here.
You've given me a real challenge, like one I gave my dad when he told me when I was seven or eight years old.
You've given me a real challenge here to try to explain to people the fallacy in the claim that unpaid for tax cuts is a legitimate economic entry item or premise.
Unpaid for tax cuts.
See, to me, instinctively, that is communist talk.
But if it's not instinctively communist or socialist or collectivist talk to you, I have to find a way to explain it to you so you'll understand it.
And that's going to be a bit of a challenge.
But not going to be hard.
It's going to be a challenge to do it convincingly, persuasively, because you already, you're just, you're looking at it from the standpoint of government needs X amount of dollars to run, and you're not making any judgment on it.
I do.
I think half the money it takes is unnecessary and invalid and fallaciously spent.
It's unnecessary.
I don't think it takes $3.7 trillion to run this government.
Okay, but that's making it even more intricate, which I shouldn't be doing at this stage of the explanation.
But I'm just trying to describe for you my position on this.
See, I believe that all wealth is created by individuals working.
You and I, in what's called the private sector.
Without us, the government would have nothing.
And yet, the presumption is that we have what we have because government allows us to keep a certain percentage of what we make.
If we've gotten to the point where a majority of people in this country think that it's more important for government to have what it wants with no concern for the consequences it has.
In other words, try it this way.
They raise your taxes and you say, I can't afford anymore.
I mean, you're taking disposable income away from me.
You're taking money that I need to buy food.
We're talking wants here, not needs.
Well, how come the same doesn't apply for government?
How come every tax cut, the government has to pay for it?
Why can't they do with less now and then?
Why does a tax cut have to be paid for?
It's that kind of thinking that gets us $14 trillion as a national debt.
Unpaid for tax cuts?
The old notion that we should not cut taxes unless somehow we can replace that revenue.
Why can't government do with less?
We know how many programs are redundant on child health, school nutrition, all of this.
I mean, it's just, it would boggle your mind, the amount of money that's triple and quadruple spent on the same projects.
And the purpose here is to de-emphasize the relevance and importance of you as an individual.
You are to be subordinate to the government.
The government's needs are to take total precedence over yours.
That's not America.
And the notion that they can never do with less, but that we have to on every whim they describe.
Why, it offends my sensibilities.
So when I hear some Marxist president start talking about the reason we have a $14 trillion debt or the reason we have a $1.9 trillion deficit is because of unpaid for tax cuts to millionaires.
No, that's not why we have a deficit.
We have a deficit because of irresponsible spending on the part of people who work in Washington.
And they spend that money for a host of reasons, the least of which is your prosperity.
They're spending money to buy votes.
They're spending money to make people dependent.
They are enforcing poverty on people.
They are breaking up families Under the pretense of compassion and concern and hoping to help people.
They are destroying people's dignity by taking away the option of dreams and work and achievement and success.
They are exploiting a natural tendency of some people to be lazy and siftless and sit out there and do nothing but collect a check.
Quite simply, sir, the Democrat Party is using people, exploiting people for one reason, and it has nothing to do with having a desire that those people have a happy life.
It's all about making sure those people have barely enough to get by and that all they've got comes from government.
And that they know that the government providing it to them is the Democrat Party.
Ergo votes year in, year out.
I say, after 50 years of this ultimate failure, which destroys elements of the country and our people, it's time to try it a different way and to de-emphasize the role of government in everybody's life.
And if why should your government stand in the way of your becoming prosperous?
Why should the government be an obstacle to your prosperity?
Why should we have a government that looks at your achievement as something to be punished by you having to pay higher taxes than other people?
It's not fair that you're not paying more.
Why?
Where did it get written in the great annals of humanity that the greatness of a country is defined by how many people it has barely getting by being provided for by government because that equals compassion?
Where did that get started?
But your president today basically defined the greatness of America as that.
We didn't become a great country until we started redistributing wealth.
Whatever you want to call the program, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, AFTC, WIC, Pell Grants, I don't care what.
It's all redistributed.
It's all it is.
Well, I'm sorry, but that's not defined our greatness.
And it never will define greatness.
That's been tried around the world, sir.
It's been tried in Cuba.
Is there anything great down there?
Tried in the Soviet Union, Russia.
Is there anything great over there?
THICOMS.
The greatness that's occurring in the THICOM circumstance happens to be to the extent that they are going capitalist in order to have any kind of a growing economy.
The Obama way has been tried.
For as long as there have been human beings who used to be monkeys walking the earth, it's been tried.
And it has never worked.
Well, that was my concession to the Darwinists in the audience.
But it doesn't work.
And this theory that government's in trouble because of unpaid-for tax cuts is part of the recipe of that failure.
And that is that the number one thing in a nation's existence is its government.
It's not.
Certainly not the way this nation was founded.
You know what you need to do?
You need to go to the online Constitution Forum.
It's El Fribo that the Hillsdale people are putting on on April 16th because the Constitution doesn't think about taxes.
Well, there's an amendment in there that deals with some, but tax rates, tax, that's all the U.S. House of Representatives tax bills originate there.
In fact, there wasn't an income tax until the 13th Amendment.
That's where it is.
And the original income tax, sir, was, what was it?
I mean, ballpark at this, 1% on the top, 1%.
I mean, it was tiny.
It was minuscule.
Anyway, I'm glad you called.
I relish these opportunities.
The question I asked my dad, if he was a religious question, I asked him how he was so certain that there was a heaven.
And I'm seven or eight years old.
Now, he had satisfied it himself.
My father was a lawyer, but he was also, well, for all intents and purposes, a scholar of the Bible.
And he was a deep thinker about it.
The concept of eternal life was something that captivated him.
And he was always searching for ways to convince people with humanly logic above and beyond just having faith in the Bible.
He was always searching for something that would convince him, sort of like Pascal's wager.
Oh, this was not his, but Blaise Pascal, the brilliant 18th century philosopher.
Pascal's wager basically was: hey, if the Bible says there is an eternal life if you're a believer, it makes sense to believe.
If there is no afterlife and you die, you're not going to know the difference.
But if there is an afterlife and you don't believe, you'll find out because you're going to be in hell.
So, safe bet is to believe.
He was looking at things like this because he taught Sunday school.
He occasionally did sermons and so forth.
So I asked him how he knew, how he was so confident.
And he told me this story, not when I was seven or eight.
He told me later on when I was older enough to be able to understand it.
And his answer was: well, son, you know, I believe creation, God created, I believe in a loving God.
He went through all that.
I've got to make a short version of this because of time.
He said, I just don't believe a loving God would create such, create beings who could conceive of, plan for, and imagine and have faith in such places if it weren't true.
It'd be the ultimate cruelty of a loving God.
At any rate, I got to take a break.
We'll be it, do it, and be back right after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, so Obama basically spends 45 minutes vilifying the Ryan plan, and then the last five minutes telling us how eager he is for us all to work together.
He's a guy who doesn't even present his own budget.
Here's really all you need to know about the Obama speech, folks.
If you are productive, if you work, if you are successful, if you create wealth, if you earn wealth, if you create jobs, then you are Obama's target because he cannot pay for what he's done.
He can't pay for what he's doing unless he steals more from you.
What you heard today, if you haven't heard it, you will.
It's like a Labor Party leader in Europe.
That's what we've got.
And we'll be back tomorrow for a secret dinner in Washington.
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