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July 15, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
July 15, 2011, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
I really don't know if this is good or bad, but President Obama spoke exactly one hour ago.
Came on at about 11 o'clock Eastern time.
I don't know if it's good or bad that I had to listen to this.
It was 30 minutes.
It was another one of his press conferences.
You know, he didn't hold any press conferences until all of a sudden he decided that he's got something out there to spin and demagogue about.
So he's, what is this, like the fifth one now in two and a half weeks?
He holds another one of his press conferences, blasting the Republicans for being unreasonable.
I'm just trying to get a deal done.
I'm doing what the American people want it.
It is infuriating.
I never thought I'd say, I miss Clinton.
See, Clinton was the same thing.
Clinton would say anything in order to make people happy.
Clinton was always concerned merely about getting through the next day so he could get through the next election.
But at its core, somewhere, you at least had some sense that deep down within, after through all of the bubbiness of Clinton, somewhere there was a guy who sort of understood a little bit about how the American economy worked.
Clinton probably wasn't a socialist.
He was a lefty.
But someone, you know, the guy was in Arkansas for long enough.
He went past enough Walmarts and went to enough McDonald's and knew enough about the Tyson chickens and his wife made the money off the commodity deal that he sort of had some idea that you have to make some money in this country.
He sort of knew that you had a private sector that had to thrive.
I don't think this guy has any sense of that.
We have a president of the United States leading a free market economy.
That's what we are.
We are a free market capitalistic society and he's a socialist.
And in the meantime, we're in this entire giant massive mess created by him, his deficit, which is creating a national debt that is now terrifying.
We're headed on a path to grace because of his mistakes, his problems, his chickens coming home to roost, and he, well, the Republicans, they're the ones that are being intransigent.
They won't be reasonable.
They won't do what it's necessary for us to make a deal.
I know it bothers a lot of conservatives that they feel as though the president is winning the argument.
You see the public opinion polls, they ask Americans, do you think we should raise tax?
No.
Well, should we make massive cuts in spending or should we have those who are the wealthiest Americans pay a little bit towards well, then all of a sudden they want to raise taxes.
And they sense that Obama's winning that argument.
Of course he's going to win the argument with a lot of people.
He's got the home field advantage.
He's the president.
He's the one that gets to come out there and call a press conference and go on all the cable channels.
He's the one that's got the media on his side.
He's got the bully pulpit, but every president has that.
The sad thing about this, and it really is sad, is that right now Barack Obama has an opportunity to solve a major problem, get the credit for it, and get re-elected.
If President Obama pulled a Nixon going to China, if he addressed this deficit right now and agreed on significant entitlement reform and agreed to a real deal to lower federal spending and went back to the Democrats in Congress and said, look, we're going to have to do this at some point anyway, guys.
You know that.
The entitlements are not sustainable.
This is the way we save them for the long term.
He'd be reelected by a landslide.
He would have been the guy that rose above politics.
He would have been the guy who was presented with an option by the Republicans, took it and fixed things.
And the country would succeed as a result.
He can't bring himself, though, to do that because his ideology stops him from doing so.
He's a committed socialist.
So here he is, a committed socialist who is determined to protect his entire welfare state, determined to protect his entitlement state.
But has to figure out how to get through the next election without saying those things.
So he implies the sole reason why we don't have a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
The reason why we don't have a deal on the deficit is because the Republicans won't raise taxes on the rich.
It's just a lie.
And it's got to be countered because it is terribly irresponsible and it is leading the American people to false conclusions.
I'm going to give you one month here, next month, August.
The federal government, according to, we don't have budgets anymore, the latest continuing resolution, the government is going to spend $307 billion.
That's the federal government in August.
$307.
The amount of money that we are going to be taking in in taxes is either, depending on the Treasury Department's number or an independent group's number, $172 billion or $203 billion.
The Treasury Department is saying $203, but their numbers have been high for a year.
It'll never be $203.
There's an independent organization that has come out and said $172 billion.
It's been accepted by a lot of people.
That's the bipartisan policy center is saying $172.
Let's take Geithner's Treasury Department's numbers.
I'll give them their 203, which will never happen.
203 billion coming in, 307 billion going out.
That's not close.
We are not 104 billion a month short because we're not taxing the American people enough.
Bush's worst deficits, the worst ones under W were in the range of $350 to $400 billion a year, and that was at the height of the war in Iraq.
Those were his worst.
You're talking there about 25 to 30 billion a month difference between revenue and expenditures.
With this guy, it's over $100 billion a month.
You're talking about a 50% gap.
You'd have to take another $100 billion in revenues to match the amount of spending he's doing.
You can't take $100 billion out of the economy that he's already screwed up without destroying it.
The problem is the spending.
The numbers are real easy to track.
Currently, the federal government is spending about 25% of GDP.
It has never been that high.
Over the last 40 to 50 years, the number has been anywhere from 17 to 18% to about 21, which is where Obama inherited it from Bush.
In the last two and a half years, he's taken it from 21 to 25%.
That is a monstrous increase in spending.
And it's real easy to see when it happened.
Two years ago, he decided the way he was going to fix the economy was to spend nearly a trillion dollars on stimulus and expand existing federal programs.
Remember also that the entitlements were growing at the same time.
All of that has gone straight to the deficit.
When you're talking about a $104 billion gap, you are talking about a nation that's facing crisis.
I want to talk about that today.
And today is Friday.
Live from New York City.
It's Open Lines Friday.
Does brush take that long to play the Open Line Friday thing, or did I stretch that out too well?
Usually it occurs like within the first 15 to 26.
I'm the guest host here.
I don't know the rules.
It is Open Line Friday, but we've got this budget issue dominating the country.
They're talking about plan B's and plan C's and this option and the Meccano fallback option and Eric Cantor is the Antichrist and all this stuff is going on.
And I really think we need to tap into it and start countering it with some real facts.
Now those numbers that I mentioned, either 172 or 203 coming in, 307 going out.
Imagine this in a family.
When families get overextended, it's usually because the take-home pay coming in in a month is maybe $150, $200, $250 less than the bills that are going out.
At that rate, you're losing about $3,000 a year.
The gap here is enormous.
Every month that goes by, that we spend $100 to $130 billion more than we are taking in, it goes straight to the national debt.
The national debt is either $8 to $14 trillion, depending on whether or not you count the intergovernmental transfers.
We're tacking onto it right now at a rate of about a trillion and a half a year.
43% of this debt at the end of Obama's first term will have come from him.
The other 57% from all other presidents in the history of the country combined.
It's all spending.
Yet he gets up on TV an hour ago.
Well, we all know why we got into this mess.
We lower taxes and we didn't pay for them.
When did we do that?
This deficit has exploded under him.
When did he lower taxes?
I pay a lot of taxes.
I pay attention.
Does anybody recall a tax cut in the last two and a half years?
There are no tax cuts.
The last tax cut occurred under Bush in 2003.
The only thing he did a few months ago was he agreed to allow those tax rates to continue.
We didn't have a tax cut.
What he inherited from President Bush was, I admit, a budget in deficit situation.
We were fighting a war.
The president wasn't particularly successful in getting Congress to restrain spending.
The Bush deficits were too high.
But his worst ones were $350 to $400 billion.
This guy is running around now looking at $1.5 trillion this year and next year.
And it's all on the spending side.
Lack of taxes did not cause the problem that we are facing.
We do not have the deficit that we have because we don't tax the American people enough.
This is entirely a spending problem.
Any dollar that we give them now in additional taxes is just another dollar that won't be used to cut spending.
I don't care what the problem is.
Think of somebody that you know in your personal life who's got a problem.
Any problem.
Until you address the reason the problem exists, you're going to get nowhere.
Obama is taking the American treasury into the crackhouse.
Now we're addicted.
We have a terrible problem.
The country's got the shakes.
And he's saying, well, I won't go to the crack house as much, but you've got to give me some money so I can go there at least a few times more.
You know how that's going to work out.
This problem can only be addressed by cutting spending, and he will not do it.
I'm going to tell you as we go along here about somebody finally asked him today, Jake Tapper of ABC finally asked him, will you name just one thing you're willing to cut?
I hope you heard his answer.
Let's give out the phone numbers here at EIB, 1-800-2822882.
Rush is taking the day off.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm here on EIB.
Mark Bellingin for Rush.
When does Carmageddon start?
They say Los Angeles is going to be on tilt because they're going to close the 405.
I don't know.
Does it start today?
Whenever the media says something, whenever they have the Argeddon suffix in something, this is the Armageddon, this is this, it's never as bad as they say it will be.
I know zero about Los Angeles traffic.
I'm on record.
It will not be as bad as they say that it's going to be.
It never, ever is.
I've got to give you that answer because it's just so crashes.
From Obama to Jake Tapper, who actually became the first guy, so far as I know, to ask the question.
Mr. President, name a cut.
But we also need to talk to phone callers because it is Open Line Friday.
1-800-28-22882 is the phone number.
First up in Clinton Township, New Jersey.
Sylvia, it's your turn on EIB.
Hello, Mark.
Hi.
Hi.
You know, what I wanted to say, and give me one second.
I apologize.
My phone was just dying and I was trying to put the charger on.
Would Rush have granted her that second or not?
He probably would have because he's a generous host.
In my incarnation in Milwaukee, you would have been pushing me, Sylvia, but I'm on best behavior here.
You've got your second.
Okay, go for it.
I really appreciate that.
What I wanted to say, though, is regarding this deficit talk, which is just so serious, et cetera.
And obviously, the deficit talk boils down to two things, revenues and expenditures.
And I think it is very unreasonable of the Republican Party to say you can do anything except look at the revenue side.
And there's two specific areas that I would suggest that we look at outside of, you know, individual income taxes, whatever.
And I look at John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made a billion dollars in the fall of 2008 by betting against prime mortgages.
And he paid 14% in capital gains on that money.
You know, that is half the money that my husband pays working 50 hours a week and you want to raise the capital gains tax.
What else do you want to do, Sylvia?
And the other thing that I would look at is corporate tax rates.
I don't mind if they lower the corporate tax rates.
I know that we have among the highest in the world.
But to say that we have the highest and leave it at that because we have a 35% corporate tax rate when the reality, and everyone knows, is that corporations pay between 15 and 17% and complain nothing.
Sylvia, like I said, this is my best behavior version of me here, but Sylvia, we have unemployment in this country at 9.2%.
The needle on that thing has moved since Obama became president.
It's getting worse.
The housing market stinks.
Automobile manufacturing last month, the June figures are out freshly today.
They're down, down.
That's not a recovery.
You want to take how many, I'll ask you in a minute, how many billions out of that economy, which is already sick?
The worst thing, even the lefty Keynesians say that it's a bad idea to raise taxes in a declining economy.
We have a recovery that never really happened.
If we return to another recession, if we double dip, it could be a depression.
This is one of the weakest recoveries ever.
The highest GDP growth rate that he ever got to was 3% or 3.5%.
Now it's less than 2%.
The unemployment rate has not moved.
Raising taxes right now would be a disaster for the country and would be a disaster for Obama and his presidency.
You couldn't pick a worse time to do it.
But since you are willing to do it, we've got that number right now.
There's $172 billion coming in and $307 going out.
How much of this do you want to do with tax increases?
$10 billion a month, $20 billion, $30 billion?
What's your number?
Well, I don't know, Mark, because I haven't heard any specifics on what the cuts are going to be outside of making photos.
I haven't heard those cuts.
I haven't heard any of those specifics either.
You and I have that in common.
You know, and it's sad from either party, et cetera.
But, you know, it's kind of like I'll show you yours if you show me mine.
And if the Republicans aren't willing to show it, and when the president has to be aware of that.
Congressman Ryan has been very specific.
Congressman Ryan's been very specific in what he would do with entitlement.
And everybody has backed away from it.
Nobody's specific.
I'm just saying, you just said that you said nobody's been specific about it.
See, you really don't want to answer my question about how much of this problem needs to be dealt with with taxes.
I've told you what the problem is.
If you do this by raising taxes, you're not going to do anything to close the deficit because you have an insincere president of the Democratic Party when it comes to these budget talks.
Let's suppose we give them $50 billion a month in taxes, which is, what, $600 billion a year?
Let's suppose we do that.
They will not reduce government spending.
They will just use that to avert the need to cut government spending.
They will not cut spending until they don't have any money left.
And when they don't have any money left, they may be forced to do so.
You'd think that we would be at this point right now with them spending $135 billion a month more than they are taking in.
This problem was not created by lack of taxation.
The deficit that Obama inherited occurred with pretty much the same tax rates that we have now.
So what's changed in two and a half years to blow the deficit up by nearly a trillion dollars a year?
The only thing that's changed is all of his spending, and you want to address this by raising taxes.
You're not only missing the point here, you're pretending that if we raise taxes in this economy, that it won't have a terrible effect.
You've got to know that if we take all that money out of this economy now, the consequences for regular old Americans will be devastating.
Let's suppose we raise taxes to the extent that you want.
Where will the unemployment rate be then?
It's now 9.2.
Do you want it to be 10, 11, 12?
There could be no bottom here.
Well, what I will say, there are just two things.
One is that I am just tired of hearing billionaires described as job creators because John Paulson created not one job in the world.
You said John Paulson.
And two, now what was two?
Where do you want the job to be?
The job to be is what I ask you is, you know, the tax rates are the same as where Obama is.
And I ask you, where is the evidence that tax rates at this level have done anything for job creation?
There is no evidence that tax rates at this level have done anything for job creation.
That's because tax rates at this level are too high.
If anything, we need to lower them.
You've identified a major part of the problem.
This is a very simple problem that we have in this country.
Entitlement spending has grown because of all the problems that we know associated with the baby boomers starting to go out of the system, health care costs going up.
But he spent a trillion dollars in stimulus that didn't create any jobs.
The problem here is not that we're not taking in enough, it's we're spending too much.
See, this happens to us guest hosts.
One of us comes in for Open Line Friday.
First caller invariably is a lefty.
We got to raise taxes.
That's the problem.
See, they think that the guest hosts, they think that we're softies.
They're afraid to make the argument to rush, but this is one of these marks.
There's like 38 of us that do the guest hosting.
We'll go after him with that.
You can retort to that, or you can agree with her for that matter.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
I've got to get to the story since I've been teasing it for 15 minutes.
Jake Tapper of ABC.
He could have taken five seconds to ask that question.
Mr. President, will you name one thing you're willing to cut just one?
Instead, he went on for like three minutes.
But nonetheless, the question was there.
Mr. President, can you tell us one program, one item, one budget line that you are willing to cut?
The reason the question has been asked is that Republicans who've been in these negotiations have been tearing their hair out.
They're saying he won't agree to any specific cut.
All he agrees to is a number.
and then says something about, well, we'll find out how to breach that number.
But he never agrees to an actual cut.
The reason he doesn't agree to an actual cut is he does not intend to cut anything.
Anyway, Jake Tapper asked him this.
And the first words out of his mouth were, we will.
We will.
Do you know what will means?
That means he's not going to answer that question now.
And he talked about maybe looking then, maybe, at means testing Medicare.
Meaning, some people wouldn't be able to get all their Medicare because they make too much money.
We will look at that.
That's not a proposal.
It's not a specific line item.
He couldn't find a train anywhere in the United States.
He couldn't find one of his high-speed rail projects.
He couldn't find one of his pieces of pork.
He couldn't find one of the government buildings that he's put up.
He couldn't find anything anywhere.
The reason he won't name anything is he doesn't intend to cut anything.
They're not going to do any cuts.
This is a total bait and switch.
He wants to get a deal.
He wants to raise taxes.
And if he doesn't get his tax increases, he wants to run for re-election next year saying, I tried to fix things, but the Republicans won't raise taxes on the rich.
This is all about politics.
On my own program in Milwaukee, I've been arguing for two weeks now that Obama wants a shutdown.
I think you're starting to see some Republicans come to that conclusion.
He wants a shutdown and he wants cataclysmic things to occur and he thinks he can get away with blaming the Republicans for it.
This is right out of Clinton's playbook.
Whether it works or not, we don't know.
Got to remember what happened after the debacle of the 2010 congressional elections.
Remember that meeting in which Bill Clinton actually went to the White House and talked to President Obama?
Clinton faced this too.
He had a debacle in 1994.
He went and he said, Mr. President, you've got to stop talking so doggone radical.
You've got to do what I did.
You don't have to change anything you're doing, but you've got to talk more like a centrist and force those Republicans.
You force those Republicans to get to the table with you.
And then don't make any deals with them.
And then blame them for everything.
That's exactly what Clinton did.
That government shutdown in 1995, rightly or wrongly, was blamed on the congressional Republicans, and they never recovered from that.
That's what he's trying to do here.
He's the one pushing this to the brink.
He's the guy that wants a shutdown.
Why do you think he was threatening earlier in the week not to send out Social Security checks?
He wants to panic, people.
He believes the Republicans will lose the battle of public.
And there are some Republicans who agree with that.
They're terrified of this.
Senator McConnell is presenting his plan, the plan B or plan C or whichever one it is right now, to simply let Obama raise the debt ceiling on his own because he thinks that there will be hell to pay for the Republicans if there is a government shutdown with Obama going on television every day saying, there's Republicans.
If they only raise taxes on John Paulson, taking the line from the last caller, then we'd be able to keep sending out the Social Security checks.
I think he's trying deliberately to take us to the brink, that this is all about politics and it doesn't have anything to do with reducing the deficit.
He doesn't care about reducing the deficit.
He created the deficit.
This is his deficit.
I gave you the numbers for August because they're so, once you get into billions and trillions, people's eyes glaze over.
172 coming in, 307 going out.
Use the Treasury's number, 203 coming in, 307 billion going out.
That is a massive gap, and it all comes from his spending.
To Baltimore, it's Jeff.
It's your turn on the EIB program.
Hi, Jeff.
Hey, Mark.
How are you?
First of all, that first caller knew enough just to be stupid.
I mean, just amazing.
I could not agree with you more.
Being a small business owner here in Baltimore, this president has created everything wrong that is going with this country right now.
Soon as he gets in office, putting trillions and trillions of dollars out to bail out the big companies, which did not work.
What about the small companies that at the backbone of this country?
He isn't thinking about the small people at all.
Barack Obama is probably one of the worst presidents.
Well, not probably, is one of the worst presidents ever that this country has had, Mark.
And you're hitting it for a while.
Fiscally, his numbers are right there with Hoover.
And whether you blame Hoover for the Depression or not, the blowing up of the deficit is Hoover-like.
This is Depression-era numbers in terms of the gap between revenue and spending.
I mean, and he also, normally when you see a president who has this incredible kind of gap, you know, it happened to Roosevelt during World War II.
The numbers got out of control under W when he started the war, when we started the war with Iraq.
Those things do result in excessive government spending, and it ends when the military conflicts end.
In his case, he hasn't really started anything new other than flying his drones over Libya.
There's been no external reason for this.
It traces directly back to the decisions that he made after he got into office, which was to try to carpet bomb the country with this stimulus money, which may have had an effect if the money would have gotten somewhere to someone who creates a job.
Instead, he dumped it on all of his friends, he dumped it on the social service agencies, and he dumped it on government, and we got no economic recovery off of it.
As a result, money isn't coming in, but the spending is still going out.
And to think that the answer is in more taxes is just spacious.
For one thing, you could never get there.
You can't get another $140 billion a month in taxes.
That's a ridiculous number.
He's talking about taxing the wealthy.
We don't have that kind of money in the wealthy.
You couldn't even get it by going down to the middle class.
Until spending is addressed, we're going to have this problem.
And the thing that's truly, thank you for the call.
The thing that's truly scary about this is we're not talking anymore academically about it.
This is real.
$140 billion gap a month.
Let me give you the deficit numbers under Obama.
Fiscal year 2009, $1,400,000, 10, $1,293,000,000.
Now the projected for the current fiscal year 11, $1,645,000,000.
That's $4,350,000,000 in debt.
He's contributed 43% of the entire debt.
It's growing out of control.
It's now a terrifying number.
At some point, some government will have to cut spending.
Stein, who is the head of Council of Economic Advisors under President Nixon, Ben Stein's father, I think Herbstein, made the statement that what can't go on forever won't.
It will end.
Look at Greece.
Italy just passed an austerity program in the last 24 hours.
It's going to end.
But it's going to end very, very badly.
When we have to cut deep into entitlements, when we have to cut off all sorts of programs, when we have to make cuts far worse than we're facing right now, we're in a bad moment in this country.
It's going to happen.
We're spending way too much.
We have the ability, though, to gradually reduce it and to do it in a way in which this country can survive and thrive.
And he's got no interest in it.
He doesn't intend to cut anything at all.
If he did, he'd tell us what his spending cuts are.
Say, well, I'm not going to lay out my hand.
What do you mean, your hand?
You're the president.
Why is that a bargaining point?
Why is telling us what your spending cut some big secret?
If we're spending too much money and you agree we're spending too much money and you agree that spending cuts have to be part of it, why don't you just start reducing some of that spending?
You're in charge of the executive branch.
He can cut anything he wants right now.
He has no intention of doing so.
He's taking us to the brink and it's a scary place to be.
For him, this is all politics, but for some of us, looking at these numbers, it's the first time really that we have had serious problems about the survivability of our economy since the Depression.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm your guest host, sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
Whether you agree with the conservative slash Republican position on taxes or not, you certainly can't deny that it is our position.
We believe that raising taxes and sending even more money out of the private economy and into Washington is bad for the country.
We believe the government is already doing way too much.
We believe we're spending too much money and the spending is being fueled by having taxes.
That's our position.
I'll defend it.
What's Obama's position, though, on the other side on spending cuts?
He's now saying he wants spending cuts, but he wants a balanced approach.
If he wanted to cut spending, why has he not even attempted to suggest cutting spending until now when we're up against this debt ceiling?
What he wants to do is raise taxes.
Rahm Emanuel made the famous statement.
I mean, they were fresh into the White House.
09.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
That was their excuse to do then what they wanted to do, which was stimulus.
They wanted to spend.
Oh, we've got a bad economy.
This will be our excuse to spend a trillion dollars on all of our pals.
Let's do stimulus.
We'll use the crisis now.
The latest crisis, after his stimulus didn't work, we've got an exploding deficit.
Let's raise taxes.
He doesn't want to cut spending.
If he wanted to cut spending, there'd be some indication somewhere at some point in his entire political career, Barack Obama would have advocated cutting spending.
He can't even bring himself to answer and name one thing he wants to cut.
You ask me what I want to cut, I'll talk until next Thursday.
I'll do Rush 24-7.
Let me get you started on all these stupid train programs that we've got running around.
You want me to talk about ethanol subsidies?
I could go on and on.
Obama can't answer that because he doesn't want to cut spending.
Let's go to Edna Washington.
Bruce, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Morning.
Hi.
At least for me.
Yeah, your taxes will not go up one IOT if I get elected president.
By the way, the Bush tax cuts that was supposedly still in place for everybody?
Not if you're retired military, brother.
My taxes went up.
Thank you.
Well, I'm amazed that that didn't solve the entire deficit problem because they say that that's just the answer.
They say that that's just the answer to everything, Bruce.
This thing they're pulling right now, I think if I recall right, didn't they pull that back in the 90s, early 90s?
Because I was in the military at the time.
They were talking about not paying the military.
I don't.
I have a hard enough time figuring out what I did a week ago.
What I do know, though, Bruce, is that we faced a very similar debate in the mid-90s when there were loggerheads over the federal budget, when Gingrich and the House Republicans, the Contract with America guys, had just gotten into power and they rolled up their sleeves and they wanted to deal with federal spending.
And Clinton, admittedly, ruled them.
There was a lot of reasons for it.
Clinton was one of the great smooth talkers of our time.
He figured out that if we shut down the government, he could put the blame on the Republicans.
The difference then, though, was we weren't facing the kind of numbers that we're facing now.
You have a situation in which the debt ceiling has to be raised or the government can't write out all of the checks that it wants to write out.
There's debates as to what you could pay and what you could not pay, but there's no denying a lot of stuff wouldn't be paid.
When you're $130 billion short a month and you don't issue more debt, that's about $100 to $130 billion in checks currently being sent out that wouldn't be sent out.
You can pay Social Security and you can pay most of Medicare, but there would be some things that would be shut down.
I just think he wants this.
He thinks he can make the Republicans look terrible by sticking to their guns on the tax position, but the position they're taking is principled.
His is not.
In terms of his promise of making cuts in the future, if we raise taxes now, there's no reason to trust it.
Look where we are now.
We're in, what, July of 11.
It was in December of 10 that he made the deal with the Congress to extend the current tax rates for two years.
He's trying to reneg on that deal now.
If we agree now to raise taxes, which the Republicans aren't going to do, they're not going to sell out on that.
And he knows they're not going to sell out, which is why he's demanding it.
He's demanding from them something he knows that they won't deliver because he wants to take us to the abyss.
The president wouldn't follow through with spending cuts.
We'd just come down here three, four, five months later and he'd try to change the deal just as he's changing the December deal right now.
Everything associated with this is President Obama with terrible approval rates, facing the real potential of losing reelection next year, trying to portray the Republicans as being the captives of the rich, trying to grab an issue in which he has the ability to go out there every day and lay out his position and make the Republicans look unreasonable.
It's straight out of the Clinton playbook.
What it isn't, however, anything that has to do with leadership, and it doesn't do a thing to solve a terrible problem.
We are running toward a deficit this year of $1,645,000,000 this year alone.
That's almost as much.
I think that's more, actually.
The total deficit under Bush in eight years was $2 trillion.
This guy's almost got as much in merely the current year that we're in.
That's scary.
I'm Mark Gulling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Gulling sitting in for Rush.
I made a comment in the last segment that the president is asking the Republicans for something he knows they're not going to give them.
However, this thing ends, it's not going to end with Republicans in the House of Representatives voting for a tax increase.
Remember how many of them are brand new?
Virtually every one of the new ones vowed to go to Washington to address spending and not keep raising taxes.
So why did the president put tax increases on the table?
Why is he asking from them something he knows they're not going to do?
Can you imagine if Paul Ryan voted for a tax increase?
It would undercut everything he's tried to say for the last 10 years.
Can you imagine Eric Canter voting for a tax increase?
It's not conceivable.
The House Republicans aren't going to give him a tax increase.
Not only would the base destroy them, The Democrats who run against them next year would accuse them of flip-flopping.
They're not going to do it.
There may be some other way that we dig through figuring out how to raise the debt ceiling, but it's not going to come with a tax increase.
So why does Obama keep demanding a tax increase?
Because he wants them to have to keep saying no.
He's the guy that is picking this fight.
He's the guy taking advantage of the deadline with the debt ceiling.
He's specifically putting on the table as the thing that his last resort, the one thing he won't pull off, something he knows they will not give him, that they can't give him, because they're philosophically opposed to it and their base would not allow them to do it.
And it's against everything that they stand for.
It's against every Republican principle that exists right now.
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