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June 6, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:51
June 6, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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You know, for the longest time nobody even knew where Wisconsin was.
It's somewhere out there by Minnesota and North Dakota, right?
Well, now Wisconsin's becoming a verb and an adjective.
In Massachusetts, when they talked about uh pulling back some public employee benefits, Governor there, well, we're not doing a Wisconsin.
All those protests, well, it's not protests like what's going on in Wisconsin.
Everybody in America knows what's going on in Wisconsin, sort of.
Well, I'm in Wisconsin.
I'm at ground zero.
Now, if you're around for the first hour of the program today, I talked about the American economy and how all of the numbers right now seem to be moving in the wrong direction.
The leading indicators like factory orders slowing down.
Still moving up, but not the kind of growth we were hoping for.
GDP not moving up much, moving up, but only a little, and unemployment barely improving, to the point that some worry if next month's job creation numbers will actually show a job loss.
This story is occurring at the same time that the United States government's budget is a total disaster.
They're linked because the president gambled our nation's budget on a bet that he could fix the economy by spending nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus and just throwing it around all over America.
He thought it would work because that's what liberals have been taught their entire lives.
Well, government can stimulate an economy through government spending.
It's like the gospel to them.
The old Keynesian belief system.
Furthermore, the president's experience in the economy, his people who work for social service agencies and who work for government.
That's all he knows about the economy, and it's all he knows about work because it's all he himself has ever done.
And the same with so many of those surrounded surrounding him.
Even his economic advisors who come from Wall Street, Wall Street's just another pass through.
It's not really part of corporate America.
They don't make anything on Wall Street.
They merely make bets on the ups or downs of the people who are doing things in our economy.
Now, what does this have to do with Wisconsin?
I said at the beginning of the program that I ran the risk of being the guest host who's going to be all gloomy and doomy, and having everybody depressed that things were never going to get any better.
The good news is there's a way out of this.
We can fix our economy.
We can even fix the federal budget.
We can create job growth and we can pursue policies that will help the private sector.
It's not a guaranteed losing game here.
I've got an economic plan.
The president doesn't.
I have an economic plan.
Oh, my economic plan is throw him out of office.
Until you change him, nothing's going to get better, and I'm going to try to prove that point.
If you've got a corporation that isn't doing what it's supposed to, what do the board of directors do?
They bounce the CEO and bring in somebody else with a different vision.
In my state right now, there's all sorts of wild and craziness going on because they've got a governor in there who has a different vision.
And I want to spend about two or three minutes here telling you why there's been the kind of reaction to what Governor Scott Walker is doing in Wisconsin.
Because it directly mirrors what's happening at the federal level, particularly with the deficit talks that we have going on right now.
Wisconsin had a major budget deficit.
His predecessor governor, a Democrat, Walker's predecessor, guy named Doyle, not only was part of the national recession, he borrowed a lot of money and raided a lot of funds so that he could keep the big spending government gravy train going.
We spend a lot of money on government in Wisconsin.
Our public employees are not only highly paid, they have benefits that you're not going to believe if I tell you about them.
They have enormous pensions.
The public workers in Wisconsin can retire with full benefits After about 35 years of service.
That means most of them quit in their mid-50s.
Their pension payouts are based on their highest earning years, whatever they were.
They pay almost nothing into that pension system.
Taxpayers pay almost all of it.
In addition to that, they have Cadillac level health plans that they pay very little for.
With those those employees able to retire at such a young age, Wisconsin taxpayers, after time, ended up paying two groups of people, the people that are currently working for government and paying the costs of all of these retirees in the form of the pensions.
The pensions have a survivor benefit, meaning if the public employee dies, the spouse gets the benefit.
It's one of those so-called unsustainable programs.
It can't go on forever.
The cost of government in Wisconsin was getting higher and higher and higher, and they were doing things like raiding funds and raising every tax that they could, and the new governor who came in and said, We're not going to do this anymore.
First of all, I'm not going to raise your taxes.
Secondly, I'm going to improve the deficit, and thirdly, I'm going to create new jobs in my state.
I'm going to create an environment where private sector jobs are created.
He's doing the exact opposite of what the Democrats in Washington have been doing.
First said the first thing we're going to do is we're going to control our spending.
We're going to stop spending so much money.
Public sector employees, you get to keep your pensions, but you're finally going to have to kick in for them.
You can keep your health care, but you're finally going to have to pay at least a small amount for the cost of the premium.
And in addition to that, the system that has allowed you, that has created a setup where you've been able to get all of these benefits, collective bargaining on everything, including your pension, your health care and all of that, we're only going to let you bargain on wages.
That's my plan.
Put that in and all hell has broken loose.
If you're sitting there listening to me from somewhere other than Wisconsin, you must think that my state's having a civil war.
You turn on the television set, the Capitol in Madison is tenth city, by the way, they're back this week because they're close to passing a new two-year budget in Wisconsin.
And people ranting and screaming and carrying on, they're raising money nationally to stop this nut out in Wisconsin who's going after the middle class.
He's going after public workers.
He's an assault, it's an assault on human rights, all of this stuff.
It isn't any of that.
The only thing going on in Wisconsin is the people who've been on the receiving end of government spending and now aren't going to get quite as much are going nuts.
That's all it is.
There's going to be a little bit less gravy on the train, and the people who feed in the gravy train are screaming and carrying on and acting like children about it.
That's all this is.
This is a metaphor for what we have going on in the United States.
Congressman Paul Ryan has proposed a plan to reform and save Medicare.
Democrats are telling senior citizens that this will cost them dearly.
They're counting on the people who are receiving the government money to go crazy.
If we've learned anything about government funding of anything, it's that when government spends money on something, the people who get the money presume that they're going to be getting it forever and ever and ever.
That's not sustainable.
All over America, state governments, local governments, and soon the federal government are coming to the conclusion that they are broke, and something has to be done about it.
I was talking, I've got to be vague here.
Talking about a week and a half ago with someone who is an aid to a mayor of a major American city, and it's not Milwaukee.
Was in Chicago at the time.
City's not Chicago Either.
She didn't know that she didn't even know any, you know, as a talk show host or anything.
She's an aide to a Democratic mayor in a major city.
He's saying, you know, and she found out I was from Wisconsin, oh, Wisconsin, you know, we're facing the same thing in blank my city.
Said, but your guy's a liberal.
It doesn't matter.
There isn't any liberal or conservative in local government anymore.
We're all facing the same problems.
We're spending more than we're taking in, and we have to cut, and the unions just aren't willing to accept anything.
This was coming from an aid to a democratic big city mayor.
California under Governor Brown is going to have to confront it.
Every state's going to have to confront it.
You can't spend money that you don't have, and there's a limit to which you can raise taxes and still get the same tax revenue to support those programs.
When someone steps in and tries to show restraint, when someone steps in and actually acts, not speaks the rhetoric of, well, we've got to cut government out of size we've got to spend less money, when they actually start spending less money.
There is an enormous and profound backlash.
The reason the backlash is so loud in Wisconsin, we've been spending more money than most other states.
Our public sector benefits were more lavish than existed in most places.
And the people who've been on the receiving end of those are just yelling and screaming the loudest.
That's what's going on there.
The same thing's going to happen in the United States.
This battle that we have now are we're going to keep raising the debt ceiling, are we going to have spending cuts?
It's all part of the same problem.
Government is spending too much money, and when you try to restrain the growth in spending or actually cut spending, the people getting the money tend to go nuts.
It's real easy to take the position.
Let's just keep spending.
Let's keep giving it to government workers.
Let's just keep the gravy train going.
Let's throw out all of this money to all the acorns of the world.
Real easy to do that.
The problem is that in the end, there isn't enough money.
And responsible people step in and say it's time for us to bring our spending under control.
The Republicans have never been much better than the Democrats on this.
The Democrats spend a lot of money.
The Republicans spend less money, but still a lot.
Only once in a blue moon do some people come around who actually say we need to cut spending.
There is a generation now, I think, in the Republican Party that is willing to do that.
Whether they exist in Congress or not, we don't yet know.
The debate over raising the debt ceiling is a way of calling their bluff.
I want to get into that and also expand on my thoughts on what's wrong with the American economy and the hostility of President Obama to it as we move on here.
1 800 282882 is the phone number on the Russian Limbaugh program.
My name is Mark Belling.
I'm Mark Felling sitting in for Rush.
August 4th.
That's the latest date in which we're told the world is going to come to an end unless we raise the debt ceiling.
This thing's apparently going to play out every two or three months.
Congress has to vote to raise the debt ceiling or the government is going to shut down.
It's just going to be like Newt Gingrich.
It'll be the end of the world for the Republicans.
They're going to be blamed for that.
So forth and so on.
You know, Sarah was on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace yesterday, did a great job.
She said that she doesn't think that that's such an important date.
Chris Wallace was a little incredulous.
Well, I got Crowdhammer in front.
Crowdhammer doesn't much like Sarah, but they're on the same page.
He writes, as the sun rises in the east, the debt ceiling will be raised.
Getting there, however, will be harrowing, which is a good thing.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner warns that failure to raise the limit would be disastrous.
In that he is correct, but he is disingenuous when he suggests that we must raise the ceiling by August 2nd or the sky falls.
There is no drop dead date.
There is no overnight default.
Debt service amounts to about six percent of the federal budget and only about 10% of federal revenue.
That means for every one dollar of interest payments, there is roughly nine dollars of revenue the government spends elsewhere.
Move money around, and you've covered the debt service.
Cover the debt service, and there is no default.
What scares Geitner, this is Crowdhammer's words, but I you can substitute Obama's name in here.
What scares Geitner is not that we won't be able to pay our creditors, but that his treasury won't be able to continue spending the obscene amounts of money it doesn't have and will be unable to borrow.
Good.
The government will temporarily be forced to establish priorities, a salutary exercise.
Equally salutary is the era of crisis that will be generated by the fear of default.
We shall have a preview of what happens when we hit the real debt ceiling several years from now and face real default.
That's our current fiscal trajectory.
Under President Obama's budgets, debt service, now 214 billion a year, climbs to 931 billion in a decade.
I know that numbers are hard to translate on the radio.
Currently, the federal government is spending 214 billion, an incredible number, on debt service in its budget.
The projections on Obama's budget show that number growing to 931 billion by the beginning of the next decade.
So the witching hours finally about to come.
And we're going to be facing this decision that we people in Wisconsin are facing right now.
The federal government's going to face it as well.
Are we going to cut spending or not?
This is where the Republicans can't be left off the hook.
In order to raise the debt ceiling, you need the House of Representatives to vote to do so.
The House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans.
I admit you probably at some point have to raise the debt ceiling.
Well then get something for it.
Get not these pretend spending cuts, get real dollar for dollar reductions in federal spending, or say we're not going to extend the debt ceiling until we get it.
You can win that argument with the American public.
Don't reduce the growth in spending.
Cut spending by whatever amount you need to raise the debt ceiling.
Put something else on the table.
Sarah on Fox News Sunday yesterday said, How about drilling an Anwar?
Play a little bit of hard ball here.
Me, I'd start the bidding at Obama cameras.
President, you want the debt ceiling?
Raised, okay, we'll give it to you.
We got to kill off Obamacare.
Get something for this, including real reductions in spending.
Let's go to the phones and uh who do you want me to go to first?
Line one, line two, line twenty-six, let's go to line one.
Don in Archdale, North Carolina, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Uh I would suggest that President Obama is not trying to fix the economy in terms of making it more prosperous.
He's trying to fix it in terms of making it more compatible with his socialist idea of fairness.
And if that means we all have to be more equally poor, that's fine with him.
That's exactly what we're doing.
Well, that's right.
That's his ideology.
I agree with you on that.
He's uh he's essentially a redistributionist.
He doesn't believe in wealth.
He's when he gets his opportunities to talk about wealth and profits for corporate oh, those who have done well done well are the ones that ought to be paying all the time.
Times are tough.
That's the kind of rhetoric he believes in.
He has one problem, though, Don.
If he doesn't create jobs in the private sector, he's not going to be re-elected.
You can take a look at all the other issues that have been out there, but over the last hundred and fifty years in the United States of America, presidents of the United States lose reelection only when they're presiding over bad economies.
He knows he's got to do something to improve the economy, but he's got this ideology that gets in the way of it.
I agree with you.
I know what it is that he believes in and what it is that he cares about, but he's got to fix the economy or he's not going to be re-elected, and he knows that.
This is why they're planning all of these sessions in which he's going to be holding listening sessions and focusing on the economy and talking about this, that, or the other thing, because he knows that his reelection is dependent upon it.
You know, two months ago the conventional wisdom was that Obama was going to win.
The Republican control of the House was going to restrain his ability to do to move much farther to the left, that the economy was naturally going to begin recovering because stimulus would be taking hold.
The Republican field of candidates, so called conventional wisdom said it's terrible.
There's no big first stringers out there.
The president's going to win.
It's going to be a repeat of the mid-90s.
Clinton took a shellacking in 1994 in the midterm congressional elections, but came back and he won re-election.
That's what everybody was saying two months ago.
But there's been a change in the script.
The economy is not getting better.
It appears to be getting worse.
That's the thing that was not anticipated by the mainstream media, by the president himself, by any of the people who are controlling the dialogue out there.
They all thought things would be getting better.
It's not.
That's creating an opening for the Republicans.
But that opening is only going to exist if they offer a real alternative, which starts with cutting spending.
Let's write another one of the Marks.
Almost all of Russia's guest hosts are named Mark.
I'm one of them.
Fortunately, Stein has an accent.
That way people don't confuse him with me because I can say no, Stein's the one who thinks that the world's going to come to an end because of all of these demographic trends.
I'm the one who's all doomy and gloomy on the economy because we've got a president and like the private sector.
And then there's Mark Davis, who everybody mixes up for me, but he's from California.
I'm not.
I'm the guy that's in Wisconsin, which is where we have Scott Walker, the governor that the Democrats hate.
If you want an indication that a Republican politician is on the right track economically in terms of this two-pronged challenge of embracing private sector growth and restraining spending in the government.
Look for those Republicans that are encountering massive backlash.
If the backlash doesn't exist, it's because they're not on the right track.
Look at the ones that have the backlash.
Sarah, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan.
They are the ones that are willing to address this stuff.
You can't have growth in an economy like ours unless we are willing not only to accept but encourage people to make money.
What success has stimulus shown anywhere?
I want the president to walk into America and say, here's this great thing where people are prospering and thriving because of my stimulus.
The only private sector projects he can find are when they're putting up a government building, that job goes away as soon as it's done, or when they're doing a new government road project.
But even in this quiet economy, there are amazing things that happen that have had nothing to do with stimulus.
The group on story is mind-boggling.
I talked about it when I uh sat in for Rush six months ago.
Groupon is this company started by a guy in Chicago.
Chicago of all places.
Obama's kind of hometown.
He comes up with this idea to put on the internet 50% off coupons to places like nail salons and restaurants.
Groupon is going to have an IPO that values the company around what?
30 billion dollars.
It didn't exist three years ago.
It's an incredible story.
There are lots of people that are trying to do internet coupons for whatever reason Groupon landed on something that worked.
The revenue growth in that company is off the charts.
They're talking about making this year two and a half billion dollars in revenue.
This wasn't created by stimulus.
This wasn't the result of some sort of government economic program.
This was an entrepreneur who came up with an idea for a product that people are buying into.
Big news over the weekend.
Major progress in the development of two new cancer drugs.
Both deal with melanoma.
Melanoma is apparently the deadliest form of cancer.
It's the bad of the two types of skin cancer.
Both drugs deal with going after the problems in genetic mutations that caused the expansion of some cancers.
There is belief that both of these drugs can have significant impact in extending the lives of people who suffer from melanova.
I pick up the newspaper here.
I'm reading about the story and reading and reading and reading the first drug.
It was developed by Roach and Plexicon, a biotechnology company in Berkeley, California, that was recently acquired by Daiichi Sankyo of Japan.
The second drug, the trial of the other drug paid for by Bristol Myers involved 502 patients with late stage melanova.
Those two drugs are coming out of the pipeline of private sector drug companies in the United States.
Why are they working so hard on these cancer drugs?
Because they're noble corporations, because they care?
No.
Because they want to make money.
Drugs that are effective in the treatment of cancers are very, very profitable for drug companies.
That's why they're doing it.
The only good we have in this country comes out of the private sector.
Government does what the private sector pays for.
We have a private sector that's hurting, a private sector of individual Americans who are underwater with met with mortgages, a private sector of Americans, many of whom don't have jobs right now.
And a private sector of employers and job creators that are scared to death to expand in our economy because they think that there's a president that is not on their side.
In the meantime, we have government that is bloated beyond control, spending money like crazy on public sector workers and public sector jobs that end up leading to nothing, to no growth at all, that only produce all of these bills.
You've got to decide which economy you're on the side of.
The government economy, that's the Obama side, that's the Democratic politician side, that's the big city side, or the private sector economy that pays these bills and produces all of the benefits and advantages that we have in the United States.
As I said, if you're picking and choosing between Republicans, trying to figure out which are on your side and which are not.
Look for the ones that are getting a backlash at what they're doing.
Let's go to Port Port Huron, Michigan, and John.
John, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Thanks, Mark.
By the way, as far as substitute hosts go, you're our favorite one.
You're the uh Tony Snow, God rest the soul of guest host.
So I'm glad you compare I'm glad you compared me to Tony, because whenever we do this, you're the best one of this, that, or the other, it just hacks off the other guest hosts.
You're not one of those guys that calls up when Stein and the rest of them are guest hosting and say, oh, Walter's guest hosting, you're the best of all, are you?
No, that's not me.
But only put through callers who think that I'm the guest co guest host between now and the anyway, John, what's on your mind?
Well, I can't believe all the points you're hitting actually apply to my partner and I in our business.
Every single one of them.
Listen, before this guy was in office, we would do anything we could to avoid um the the reach of the federal government.
Uh whether it was hitting 50 employees or the Family Medical Leave Act and a plethora of other regs would kick into effect, it would be cost prohibitive to go from 35, 38 employees to 50.
And we were always aware of that.
So even back the Family Medical Leave Act is the one that required you to give medical leave to men and women for these personal reasons that were that were out there, which is a tremendous hardship on small employers because when somebody takes leave, you've got a higher attemp to do that person's job.
So you're saying that you stayed under the threshold, so you wouldn't be covered by the regulation.
Absolutely.
There's a lot of other things that people aren't aware that kicks in, but that's that was the major one when that change kicked into place.
And my partner, who was my plant manager when that went into effect, trains these uh operators on how to work a computer to America controlled machine to make our product.
We're not gonna invest all that time so that that person can be gone for three months.
We can't afford to replace him because we got to bring him back, and by the time we get the new guy trained, he's coming back.
So that's one example, even before this guy was in place, what the federal government does.
Now, with this guy, we would love to go out and spend 170 to 200,000 on a CNC lathe or mill, but why are we going to show out our money to do that to advance our business when we don't know what's coming down the pike tax-wise?
Why am I going to spend that capital and pay interest on a loan to get that money when I don't even know what thank God you called.
That is that is the problem.
And I hear it in my own local show in Milwaukee again and again and again.
When you talk to people that are out there, it's that.
It's the uncertainty of what's next.
You've got two things can happen to you if you make that investment.
One, it doesn't work out.
You're stuck with debt.
You've got to pay that down.
The economy's g the economy's tanking.
You have few you have less business but more debt.
In other words, the risk you took it didn't pay off.
That's the bad thing.
The good thing is it does work.
You get extra business, you make more in revenue than the one hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand dollars that you laid out for it, and your profits therefore go up, but your fear is that if they do go up, he's going to take them from you in the form of his higher taxes, and it's that uncertainty that has businesses paralyzed.
Get this, Mark.
I'm an example of all things of a perfect storm because on top of that, our materials are titanium, cobalt chrome, and plastic, an oil derivative.
So you were talking about material costs going up.
We're living that to make it to quadruple it.
We're in the medical device business.
We're producing orthopedic implants that the disciples of our designer who uh who who practiced until he was ninety years old and designed for all the major corporations and started this twenty years ago.
There's certain doctors who want this design, this product.
People think that under Obamacare, we're going to establish a bureaucracy that's going to determine how much providers can charge for equipment.
So you're going to be limited as to how much you can charge.
You're going to be taxed when you make a profit off of the product, but your costs are going up because we've weakened the dollar to the point that all raw materials are escalating in price.
So you are trapped.
You're trapped by this president.
And he is listening to you thinking, well, but you have a duty to create that job.
After all, you have enough evidence right now.
Go out and create that job.
Plus you're creating this medical device.
You should be doing this out of the goodness of your heart.
Aren't you a noble person?
Don't you want people to have all of this stuff?
Instead, you're going to be driven by survival and the desire to make money.
And whether people like that or not, it's how our economy works.
If the president does isn't willing to embrace you, John, if he's not willing to embrace you making a lot of money and getting to keep it, he's never going to preside over a successful economy.
He'll need to go to an action to a nation whose economy is entirely socialist, where it's centrally planned from the beginning.
Because that's the only kind he's able to run because he doesn't believe in what you do and he doesn't believe in the motivations that you have, but they're there.
You're gonna look out for yourself first.
That's what people do with their money.
Mark, if I wake up tomorrow after hiring five new employees, buying two new machines, and the little minions who are writing all the little regs for Obamacare say, you know what?
Jonathan and Johnson is now the national supplier of orthopedic implants in this company because they've given us such a good deal that a five million dollar company in Port Hearing can't give us.
So you don't have a business anymore.
And if people out there think that's theoretic, I can tell them my partner and I wake up every day wondering if that's going to happen.
Because it very damn well could.
I mean, if you're gonna tell a patient what they can get and not get, how why couldn't they tell a surgeon what type of product they're gonna use?
And that's the same thing.
That is their plan.
They state it's their plan.
When they're asked on how do you control costs under Obamacare, where is the savings going to come from?
It's going to be because we're going to establish these rules and they're going to be limits on what any individual can charge.
We're going to put in place what what is going what kind of product you can and can't use.
We're going to put efficiencies into the system.
We're going to do all of those things.
So here you are, somebody who realizes you'd be victimized by this.
The point that I made a few minutes ago, in which I can tell you how we can get out from underneath this.
Throw Obama out of office, get somebody in who repeals Obamacare, somebody who isn't going to raise taxes in two years so you can make money, and somebody who starts cutting down the size of government so we don't have this massive debt.
If all of that happened, my guess is that you and your partner would go out and buy that product and be even gutzier and have more confidence because none of these things that you're worried about would be threats for you anymore, would they?
That's exactly right.
And it's just so interesting I got through today that every element of what you're talking about from material cost to Obamacare, how it impacts people like me.
Um federal regulations, why we don't hire as many employees.
Order that machine.
And when I don't know that machine, by the way, there's companies in this country that aren't employing people to uh machine their own property.
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point with our economy.
When one business expands, it's Because they're buying something from another business.
And when that business has somebody something bought from it, it needs to hire more workers.
And those workers then have jobs and then go and participate in the economy.
Our American economy is a giant snowball.
When it starts rolling down the hill, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
Here you've got a president of the United States.
All he's concerned about is government workers, which has been a which has kept our snowball melting.
Thank you for the call.
John was very, very good.
Started out on a really, really good note when he praised me, but his story about his personal experience, one guy out there, a job creator, if he chooses to be, and why he has it been, why he is not making those financial risks right now, they're not making that up.
The president of the United States is listening to him that would go in one ear and out the other.
He can't relate to that.
The American economy is filled with guys like that.
When you talk about the private sector, everybody thinks you're talking about Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs, talking about him.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
My vain egotistical attempt to discredit my fellow Mark Mark Davis, another one of Rush's villains, his covers and blown on this.
I I said he was from California.
He's not.
He's from Texas.
I was just trying to discredit Mark a little bit, so I could move up the ladder on his expense here on the pecking order, but offended all the people who listen to Mark in Texas.
If they were from anyone, don't say we're from California.
I'm from Wisconsin.
We don't know where anything else is because you all don't know where we're from.
Let's go to uh Monroe, Wisconsin, my own state.
Tony, you're on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, how are things in Milwaukee?
Um lot of fun right now.
Well, yeah.
Uh very turbulent state.
Uh I can tell you uh just a little background.
Monroe is an hour south of Madison, and I can tell you firsthand what I have seen and read in the papers uh how this collective bargaining issue has uh divided communities, uh divided friends, and probably divided families as well, because um the local the the private sector feeding the pensions of the uh public employees is is a huge, huge issue, and I'm tired of it.
Uh I don't want to be paying anybody else's pension.
Nobody else is paying mine.
Um, the divisiveness that you mentioned i i is real, and for people who've been wondering about what we're facing in Wisconsin, it's just been so passion filled.
You've had the people who are on the receiving end of it, and nobody's taking their pension away.
They're merely told they have to kick in a little bit for it.
They're going nuts over this.
Well, no wonder we have the same problems at the federal level with concern over entitlements and how we're going to pay for them.
No wonder so many politicians have been afraid of confronting Social Security and Medicare and all of the other things that are out there.
Because they know the reaction when you dare to go after any type of federal spending at all.
People go nuts.
They think it's a betrayal.
You've got public employees in Wisconsin who are going to retire at 65, 70, 75% of their pay in the mid-50s, go out and get another job for another ten years, double dip, have great health care, which they're able to still get from government.
We're trying to scale that back a little bit, and they're going nuts.
They're going ballistic.
But in the end, it will work.
The reforms that the governor of Wisconsin are pushing are going to be passed, they're going to be upheld as legal by the state Supreme Court.
That budget is going to get balanced.
New jobs are going to be created, and it is going to work.
But the process that you have to go through when you dare to go after the things that some people believe that they're entitled to from their fellow citizen, it's an ugly process.
And the ones that are showing their ugliness are those that can't imagine not continuing to live off the rest of us.
Thanks for the call, Tony.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm in for rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I've been combining in my first two hours.
Two stories.
The problem of excessive government spending and how it's strangling budgets right now, up to and including the federal government budget, and the American economy, which is being presided over by a president of the United States that doesn't believe in it.
All of this stuff eventually comes to a head.
I always used to think that this statement came from Milton Freeman, but actually came from Herbstein, who was head of Council of Economic Advisors under Nixon and Ben Stein's father.
He said that things that can't go on forever don't.
In the end, it does come to an head.
It's coming to a head in the states right now, and we're about to see it in the federal government.
Portugal.
Yesterday, elections, headline, Wall Street Journal.
Portugal decisively ends leftist rule.
Portugal has sought a bailout because of its budget problems.
Mr. Pasas Coelho, that's the winner, has never held a government post, but he says his experience as an entrepreneur makes him a good fit as prime minister at a time when Portugal's movement government faces budget cuts and limited alternatives to foster growth.
He has vowed to downsize ministries and state agencies and create a government that is able to implement an ambitious privatization program and revise current infrastructure projects such as the high speed trains.
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