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July 15, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:42
July 15, 2011, Friday, Hour #2
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The news today is dominated by this so-called showdown.
It's not a showdown.
It's a created fight.
It's a put up thing by President Obama between the president and Congress over the debt ceiling and are we going to cut a deal?
A long-term deal to deal with the deficit includes tax increases and spending cuts, etc.
There's a story out there that can't be ignored.
It's an economic story.
It'll make the papers tomorrow.
It's out there on the internet today.
I want to get to it in a moment, but without further ado, today is Live from New York City.
It's open line Friday.
That's so cool.
I could do that like every five minutes.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number on the Rush Limbaugh program.
It is Friday.
The end of the week, it's open line Friday.
Talk today, as I said, dominated by President Obama and his attempts to portray the Republicans as being intransigent because they won't raise taxes on Americans, but there's a story here that we've got to address, and it's related to this.
I mentioned it briefly in the first hour of the program.
This is a big deal.
U.S. auto factories produced fewer goods in June than the previous month, and overall factory production was flat.
It marked the third straight month of weak manufacturing output.
This is a big story.
The explanation that's been offered for the last really two years now, ever since recovery summer came and went, was that well, you know, unemployment's the last thing to improve during an economic recovery.
It's the last thing that gets better because employers are always reluctant.
They don't trust the recovery.
It's always the last thing to happen, but don't worry, it will get there.
They say that unemployment is a lagging economic indicator.
Okay, fair enough.
Manufacturing output is a leading indicator.
Manufacturing output is just that.
It's what our factories are making.
The auto industry was down last month.
Overall, American industry flat last month.
I don't see any more expanding going on.
We got a little bit of a growth rate a few months ago, where a little bit around two and a half, three percent growth in GDP, went down to 1.8 in the last report.
And now we see manufacturing output absolutely flat.
There are two issues here.
There's the issue of the deficit, and then there's the issue of the American economy.
They're related, but they're not the same.
To try to be talking at this stage about raising any kind of taxes is absolutely nuts.
There's not enough money going into the economy.
It's why Bernanke's threatening to do more stimulus.
What are we on?
At QE19 or QE 20?
Have the Federal Reserve buy up every last thing because no Americans have any money to buy anything up?
Of course auto sales are flat.
10% of the people enlisted is unemployed, and really 20% of them aren't working.
The people who bought cars last year are not in a market to buy one, buy any this year.
The economy's in trouble.
We focus on unemployment because it's the big number that affects people.
But if manufacturing output is slowing down too, that tells me the next move on unemployment is going to be that it's going to get worse, not better.
This is all on President Obama.
All of it.
They can keep pointing back to Bush this and Bush that.
Every economic number that we have had has gotten worse under this president, with the exception of the growth rate, which went up a little little little bit.
It's tinkling forward.
Tiny little improvements.
He can say that he inherited a recession.
What's he giving us?
Every fat every number that you look at now is turning worse.
The reason why I think he's demanding a tax increase from the Republicans now is he knows they're not going to give him one.
When they refuse to give him one, he agrees to some other kind of deal, a smaller deal to raise the debt ceiling.
He can say, I tried to fix things with the Republicans didn't raise taxes.
Even he knows that raising taxes right now would be disastrous for his own re-election.
How is he going to run next year for re-election, running on a 10% unemployment rate, GDP going down?
I'm the guy that inherited one recession and gave you a second.
Was that going to be his message?
He's going to know where to go with this.
It is open line Friday.
That means we're going to talk to listeners on the Rush Limbaugh program to Lincoln, California.
Claudine, it's your turn on Russia's show with Mark Belling.
Hi.
Um I wanted to point out that President Obama today mentioned new programs as a reason to raise the debt ceiling.
And that's more spending right there.
He said something like, uh, let's get this issue resolved so you know we can talk about new programs.
Yeah, he started prattling on about community colleges and a bunch of other things.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just there's just no end to this.
The amount that we are spending has finally hit the witching hour.
And if you look at the big picture, it's going to get worse.
The first baby boomers are this year turning 65.
The baby booms have been defined as 1946 to 64.
So people born in 46 are turning 65 this year.
The baby boom is just now transitioning from paying the taxes that support Social Security and Medicare to going on Social Security and Medicare and sucking in the money.
Even if we do nothing, that factor alone results in way more money being spent and way less coming in because those baby boomers are going to be paying far less in taxes when they get to retirement.
When you consider that we're at the numbers that we're at right now, that he's running a deficit projected at $1.5 trillion with the baby boomers still majority, almost all of them still in the workforce, it's frightening stuff.
It's frightening stuff.
We are staring at a Greece like meltdown.
We're looking at California being the entire look at the mess that they have in California right now.
That's going to be us if we don't address this.
And instead, even when he's trying to pretend he's talking about spending cuts, you're right.
He couldn't help himself.
He started yakking about all the new spending he wants to do.
Exactly.
Thank you for the talk.
Go ahead, Claudine.
We have to tighten our belt sometime.
And I think that's a good question.
Well, you know what?
It's apparent to me that Mitch McConnell is whether you will like his plan or not, Mitch McConnell is right about one thing.
This is not going to be addressed with Barack Obama as President of the United States.
I believe that a lot of these Republicans who've gone to especially the new ones, who've gone to Washington with the best of intentions, saying we're going to try to do something to force spending cuts now.
The one thing they can't figure out how to do evidently is make this guy cut spending.
You're never going to fix this when he's there, even if you can come up with a short-term plan to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for a few spending cuts.
It's not going to address the real problem.
How can you?
And the president has the White House.
We're not going to get anywhere on this issue so long as he is president.
If the problem is spending, and it is the problem, $172 billion coming in each month, $307 billion going out.
I don't see how that problem gets solved when you have a president of the United States who doesn't want to cut a single dollar of spending, much less than $135 billion gap that we currently have.
To Detroit, Michigan and Ken.
Ken, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Yeah, Mark.
Um, as we look at this whole issue of uh raising the debt ceiling, which uh, as far as I'm concerned, there's absolutely no legitimate justification whatsoever.
Uh another angle, another issue I think also is uh worth uh discussing is that President uh Barack Obama is uh setting a very poor example uh to the children in our country, and that is he's he's saying by wanting to raise the debt ceiling that rules don't matter.
Laws don't matter.
Uh we have a rule, you know, we have a law having to do with the debt ceiling.
Uh we we put this in place for a reason.
Well, yeah, but I mean, let's be honest.
The debt ceiling's been raised numerous times by Democrats and Republicans in the past.
I mean, every time we get to a certain level, they have to keep ratcheting up because the debt keeps going up.
So I mean, I I don't think it's fair to argue that we've never done this before.
The debt ceil, I don't even know how many times it's been raised, but it's got to be in the dozens.
Well, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, but in this case it happens to be a Democrat, uh, there's just absolutely no justification whatsoever for raising the debt ceiling.
I mean, uh it was put there for a reason.
And our country is in the uh shape it's in now.
Our economy is in the shape it's in because we keep raising the debt ceiling.
I am and I need to have full disclosure with Russia's audience.
I'm one of those people who argued for years that the national debt was manageable, but it could always become a problem.
The national debt, thank you for the call.
The national debt is funded, of course, through the sale of government bonds, treasury bills, notes, T bonds, savings bonds, and so on.
And there's always been a market for them, and we've been able to get by by running modest deficits in the past.
I would disagree with conservatives who would say we can't cut taxes because the deficit is going to go up.
For me, the highest priority was a thriving American private sector, and that means allowing more Americans to have money in their hands.
But I always, and people who listen to my local show in Milwaukee will back me up on this.
I've always said there is a point where you could spend so much money that it would be a problem.
This president has blown through the roof of that.
The deficits that were run by President Bush during the war in Iraq got to the point of being scary.
I've got the Bush numbers in front of me here.
Uh oh three for Bush 377 billion, oh four, four hundred twelve, oh five, three hundred eighteen.
In 06 he got it down to two hundred forty eight and oh seven, one sixty.
And then when the fiscal crisis occurred in 08 with the banking sector and so on, it went up to four hundred and fifty-eight.
The very first one of Obama a year later went to one trillion four hundred and twelve billion, three times the last deficit of Bush.
That wasn't a modest increase.
It was a radical change in public policy to simply explode the deficit so we could do more government spending.
That dollar figure, let's see, four hundred and fifty-eight billion in the last year of Bush, one trillion four hundred and twelve billion in the first year of Obama, nearly nine hundred, about nine hundred billion dollars.
It almost is exactly the same size as the stimulus.
They're almost identical numbers.
There wasn't any change in tax policy in there.
Obama didn't succeed in any big tax increase or tax cut.
What we did was we made a policy decision to spend more money.
He turned it over to Pelosi and Reed, and they gave all the money to their friends.
All the unions were taken care of.
We bailed out a bunch of urban school districts, and that money went straight to the deficit.
The problem that we face is entirely one of spending.
In the meantime, Obama's embarked on all of these new pet projects that he's in love with.
He loves high speed rail.
He loves any grant for mass transit.
He won't address it all the waste and community development block grants.
He's a big supporter in federal revenue sharing.
He talks about the student loan program as if it's the back vote of America.
He wants to expand all of these things.
He's a spender.
That's what socialists are.
They want government to run everything.
Margaret Thatcher's famous comment.
The problem with socialists is eventually they run out of other people's money.
Well, that's what's happening now.
We've run out of money.
We're nowhere close to being able to pay for all the spending that he wanted to do.
Rama Manuel was right.
The first crisis, 09, the fiscal crisis, don't pass it up.
Let's use it to spend a fortune.
And we'll claim we're going to do it to get the economy jump started.
The economy didn't jump start.
It's as bad now as it was when they did the stimulus.
No jobs were created.
Now we've got a new crisis.
Oh, okay.
We'll talk about the deficit, and we'll use it as our excuse to raise taxes so we can redistribute more money.
That's all that this is about.
The problem is they're playing with real fire here.
We're not talking about an argument about whether or not a one hundred billion dollar deficit is too much.
We're not talking about one fifty or two hundred.
He's running a deficit at the rate of one trillion five hundred billion and next years is expected to be just as bad.
Fourteen trillion in total national debt.
That's got to scare the bejesers out of you.
You're thirty years old.
Do you understand what you're staring at?
And you think it's bad now if we don't change these policies, what do you think is going to happen when guys like me go on Medicare and Social Security can't keep taxing me and taxing me and taxing me, saying he's taxing the wealthy and instead I'm sitting there sucking it down along with all the rest of the baby boomers.
We are playing with fire here.
We are spending way too much money and you've got a guy who's plan to address that well we've got to raise more in taxes same old song and dance.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush I'm Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
There's a great column in today's Washington Post from Charles Crowdhammer.
Crowdhammer's right about most but not all things but he he has had Obama nailed from the beginning.
He writes President Obama is demanding a big long term budget deal he won't sign anything less he warns, asking if not now, when how about last December, when he ignored his own debt commission's recommendations?
How about February, when he presented a budget that increases debt by ten trillion over the next decade.
By the way, nobody brings that up remember he did present a budget the one that even the Democrats voted down trillion dollars increase in debt his own budget?
How about April when he saw the debt ceiling increase with zero debt reduction attached all of a sudden we're to believe he's a born again budget balancer, prepared to bravely take on his own party by making deep cuts in entitlements really?
Name one He's been saying forever that he's prepared to discuss, engage, converse about entitlement cuts, but never once is he publicly proposed a single structural change to any entitlement.
Hasn't the White House leaked that he's prepared to raise the Medicare age or change the cost of living calculation?
Anonymous talk is cheap.
Leaks are designed to manipulate offers are floated and disappear give us one single structural change in entitlements in public.
As part of the pose as the forward looking grown up rising above all the others that plays politics, Obama insists upon a long term deal.
And what is Obama's definition of long term?
Surprise an agreement that gets him passed november sixth, twenty twelve nothing could be more political.
It's like his Afghan surge wind down date September twenty twelve has no relation to any military reality on the ground.
It is designed solely to position Obama favorably into the last weeks of his reelection campaign yet the Olympian above the fray no politics here pose is succeeding.
A pliant press swallows the White House storyline the great compromiser clearly exasperated sympathized the post news story being stymied by Republican intransigence.
The MEMI having been established, Republicans have been neatly set up to take the fall if a deal is not reached.
Obama is already waving the red flag warning ominously Social Security, disabled veterans benefits, critical medical research food inspection without which agriculture shuts down are in jeopardy The Republicans are being outmaneured.
The House Speaker appears disoriented.
It's time to act time to call Obama's bluff Crowdhammer then calls for giving up any notion of a long term deal says you're not gonna get it from Obama raise the debt ceiling and cut spending by a like amount pass it to the House, defy the Senate, demand that they pass it, demand that the president agree to it is that the president has picked this fight because he believes he can make the Republicans look bad if there is a government shutdown.
The debt ceiling isn't raised and they don't agree to anything and they cut off funding and trust me he will cut off funding for things that people care about.
He's not going to find cuts in the bureaucracy that no one will notice that he can pin it all on the Republicans It's the battle plan.
Crowdhammer's suggestion and it's related to what Senator McConnell has proposed that I think McConnell has gotten something of a bum rap on this is that you've got to take this off the table.
If there is a government shutdown manipulated by Obama created specifically so he can make the Republicans look bad why play his Game.
If there was the potential here to get real reductions in spending in exchange for perhaps slight tax increases, I think some Republicans might consider nibbling.
I wouldn't like it, but I do think some of them would be open to it.
The problem is that you'll never get the spending cuts from him.
And he's trying to make the Republicans break their word not to raise taxes.
This is all a game for the president.
It's been designed by Bill Daly as chief of staff.
Bill Clinton planted the seed when he went to the White House in December.
They are not serious about dealing with a problem that is threatening the future solvency of the United States.
His behavior is shameful.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
It is open line Friday.
Let's go to the phones.
Long Island, Bernie, it's your turn on Russia's program.
Thank you.
Uh Mark, uh, when uh Obama passed the monstrosity of a bill, this destructive Obamacare, the Democrat the uh Republicans of all persuasions uh stated unequivocally and promised the American people that they would at the next budget go around in hearings that they would defund Obamacare.
I hear nothing about that except from Michelle Bachman.
She's the only one who brings home that message.
Why don't any of the other Republicans pound on the table and say we will not fund Obamacare and not only will reduce the deficit, but also it's in not in keeping with uh the best interest of the American people and nothing.
Let me let me add to your point there.
Let us also understand that Obamacare hasn't even yet blown up the deficit.
He's talking about all of these taxes.
He's ignoring the fact that starting in 2014, these massive tax increases called for under Obamacare, which he calls the Affordable Care Act, that all of them kick in out all this the spending under it kicks in.
The de if if nothing is done about Obamacare and it goes into effect as drafted, you not only will have massive tax increases, but the deficit's going to get even larger.
Your second point was going to be.
So why don't we hear the Republicans stating that we must defund it?
I think the answer is they know they get nowhere with it.
And the secondly, one I mean, I that that's the answer.
I mean, because Obama will say I'm not going to agree to that, move on to the next thing.
Okay.
The second point is why don't they present their own comprehensive medical plan that would be beneficial to the American people, where there's only ten pages, not three thousand pages, where they remove the restrictive government regulations and controls and mandates and bureaucracy and maintain yet the integrity of the physician-patient relationship.
Well, you're asking me a big question.
Yeah, you're asking me an openness.
You're asking me a big question.
Why don't they submit a simple uh plan on Medicare?
Congressman Ryan has some Republicans like it, others don't.
But you know what the real answer to your question is, Bernie?
We're not going to get an answer for the Medicare problem, the health care problem, the deficit problem, until Barack Obama is not the president of the United States.
Even if the Republicans try to put repealing Obamacare off the table, and even if they had control of the U.S. Senate, we all know he just veto it, you're not going to be able to get rid of it, and you're not going to be able to solve any of the problems that I've been talking about today, So long as he's the president of the United States, the job does have considerable power and he's got a veto pen.
And the Republicans do have the ability to restrain his spending somewhat because they've got this debt ceiling card that they can play.
But the bottom line is that we're not going to have any real spending cuts.
We're not going to have the ability to do away with Obamacare so long as he's President of the United States.
And if this last nauseating two or three weeks of phony negotiations where the president just comes in and said pretends to act reasonably without participating at all in any kind of discussion about real spending cuts, if this demonstrates anything, it's that the problem here is President Obama.
He is the problem, and we're not going to get anywhere on it until he isn't the President of the United States.
Look at all of the look at all the brain power that you have among the Republicans in Congress right now.
There have been a lot of solutions that are offered.
If the President came in and said clean slate, okay, guys, we will do a big plan and there won't be tax increases.
Let's find right now several hundred billion, maybe a trillion dollars in cuts, I honestly think they'd draw them up.
They would be willing to do that, and you'd have them passed immediately.
It's simply not going to happen so long as he's the president.
Thank you for the call to Orient Ohio.
Uh Maggie, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark, thanks.
Hey, um, I've heard Rush say uh on many occasions, um how he says the um president is tearing down the economy of the United States on purpose.
And you know, I'd I don't know if I can't say I didn't believe Rush when he'd say that, and I I don't know what I'd how I would categorize that in my mind and justify that.
I don't know where I'd put that.
It always was in the back of my head.
And today I watched that press conference, and I'm sitting here on hold saying, I'm not a I can't believe I'm about to say to millions of your listeners that I believe that now.
I wholeheartedly and with a lot of hurt believe that.
And the reason they're for the hurt is because you know, you have the regular sheep, uh ideological sheep that that will always vote for someone like this guy.
But think about how many good people, you know, uh decent people that that put their faith in this guy and voted for him.
And he's actually I think he's actually trying to destroy our economy.
Well, your your question obviously requires a long, long answer, and I don't have the time to give that.
I just Rush has certainly made his point on the motivations of President Obama clear, and he's had obviously two and a half years of doing this show every day to say so.
So let me just react to a couple of the things that you have to say.
I wouldn't express myself in the exact same words as Rush, just as he isn't going to express himself in the words that I would use.
I do think Obama recogniz one thing, and that is he can't get re-elected if the economy stinks.
So to the extent that he needs to have an economy that is in something other than the toilet, which is where we're headed right now, I think he knows that he has to do something to improve the economy.
However, I also believe that the pattern that was established here was done for a purpose.
Spend a fortune so we can give all the money to our friends, knowing that that will create a deficit, which then gives us the incentive to do the thing that we really want to do, and that is redistribute income by drastically raising taxes on the high end of the brackets.
So I do think that there was a plan there, and that's where I agree with the point that Rush was making that Maggie was referencing.
Spend a fortune, know that you're going to have a deficit as a result, and then raise taxes.
I do think, however, that he thinks it will work.
All socialists think that their stuff is going to work.
Trust me, Karl Marx believed every word that he ever wrote.
They all think that this creates this incredible nirvana out there where you're lifting up where where the rising tide is raising all boats, and you're getting that rising tide by bailing water out of the boats of the rich.
I think that they truly believe that in the end, all of this will somehow work.
The evidence, however, is that it doesn't.
The socialist states of Europe are all collapsing right now.
China and India are thriving because they've embraced their own version of free market capitalism premised on profits.
Here in the United States, we see how well the first half of Obama, the let's spend a fortune is working.
I think he thought that while the deficit would go up through all of his spending, he thought unemployment would go down.
He thought there would be a recovery.
All big government socialists think that.
They think that if the federal government spends a fortune, that America will thrive.
I think he's befuddled that it didn't work.
I think he's amazed that the unemployment rate is still where it is.
That's why he has it in for the private sector.
Why, we did what we're supposed to do.
They're not knowing what they're supposed to do.
They're supposed to be hiring.
He's angry about it.
He thought it would work.
Just as he thinks massive increases in taxes, government running health care, he thinks this will all in his own addled way.
Now his identification of work and your identification of work and my identification of what works are different things.
He doesn't believe in a thriving private sector.
He doesn't believe in thriving capitalism.
He doesn't believe in the free market at all.
So by the normal definitions that we have, yes, he does want to destroy the economy.
He wants to destroy the notion of having a society in which individuals try to get ahead at achieving success, pay something back to the government, and that is used for a safety net for our fellow citizens.
That's the way we've been set up.
He believes in something else.
He thinks in the end that it will work in his own vision of what it is that's working.
And all evidence is to the contrary.
If it worked so doggone well, how come they went broke in Greece, had to get bailed out, and the people are so addicted to government money that they're rioting for fear that they're going to lose some of it.
I've got a little bit of experience in this.
My state, Wisconsin, we had a governor who came in a few months ago and said, you know what?
These Democrats who gave me a huge deficit, three billion dollars in a state my size that was a lot of money.
I'm gonna fix it.
The people on the receiving end of the money, the public employees who were merely told you've got to kick in a little bit for your health insurance, and you've got to kick in a little bit for their pension, they went nuts for six months.
They're still going nuts.
That's what happens when you try to wean people off of all of this government spending.
In the end, you have to do it.
Because you can't ever create a society in which the majority of people are receiving and the minority are paying in.
It doesn't work.
Yeah, so Russia's comment, I think, is correct in the sense that what President Obama is doing is taking a model that produced the greatest economy in the history of the world, the United States economy, and trying to turn us into a European socialist economy in which you look to the people who have succeeded and have them carry everybody else.
The problem is it doesn't work.
And now he's doubling down on it.
We're sitting here with 9.2% unemployment, factory output flat or going down, headed toward a double dip recession, and what does he want to do?
Take another one or two or three trillion out of it in taxes.
He knows what he's doing.
All of these liberal ideologues know what they're doing.
It has, however, never worked.
The one chance we are going to get to do something about it is a little over a year away.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Everything liberals run broke.
All the major urban school systems, they're always broke.
The big cities run by liberals, they're broke.
California dominated by democratic legislature forever, it's broke.
Their stuff never ever works.
There's no reason to think it ever.
Speaking of California, I've got this one for you.
Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill making California the first state of the nation to add lessons about gays and lesbians to social studies classes in public schools.
The bill requires public schools to include the contributions of people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender in social studies curriculum.
You know, I often I show Milwaukee, I beat up on public school teachers quite a bit, but I feel for them here.
What are these what are these contributions?
How what are they going to be?
Okay, you can probably find some contributions from gays and lesbians.
The transgender contributions?
What what where are we go Rue Paul?
I mean, where are we going with that?
What's that what's that hour going to be?
All right, kids, we're going to discuss the the bisex.
Nobody even says they're bisexual anymore, do they?
How are we going to know who they are?
Wow.
Now there's all four.
They've got the uh gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender social studies curriculum, and they have to it's I'm just reading this, include the contributions of them.
To uh Shreveport, Louisiana, Stephen, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program with guest host me, Mark Belling.
How are you doing, Mark?
It's always a pleasure to listen to you.
Thank you.
Even though I left the conservative camp a long time ago, uh I always love listening to you because you back up what you say with some evidence and some knowledge.
Especially expressing today about unemployment being a lagging indicator.
But I gotta tell you I I agree with the the woman who first called you know that there's no evidence.
There's no real evidence out there that lowering the tax rate on the top class actually produces a bigger and a more uh bigger middle class and more jobs.
Well the biggest evidence I would cite of that would be what happened to the United States of America in the nineteen eighties after Ronald Reagan lowered tax rates we had the longest sustained recovery in history.
Oh well except that Clinton produced more jobs than him and he doubled the national debt well I'm not going to defend Bill Bill Clinton but he actually left uh the first President Bush with a surplus not that I don't put me into the situation of defending Bill Clinton.
That's a new one for me.
I'm sitting here on national radio I'm not going to defend Clinton on this.
Anyway where are you going with this with you said the first call she wants to raise taxes.
My pro my the point that I'm making with regard to that is that we are in a recession and taking money out of the economy in a recession is a disaster.
President Obama wants people to go out and find jobs.
How are they going to find jobs if we bleed more money out of the economy so people can't buy things they can't invest.
You're talking here by the way not about nickel and dime tax increases he's talking about trillions of dollars in raising taxes.
How are we going to replace that money?
Maybe the you know the the Keynesians the la you know who are nuts nonetheless they've got a philosophy they say that you should stimulate when times are slow and tax when times are strong.
Even they would acknowledge that it's stupid to try to raise taxes now.
Well well our I will tell you this at least Adam Smith even agreed that there needs to be an income tax and it need to be a now let me uh I I mean what does this have to do though with the current situation that we're facing with this massive deficit and the debt ceiling you know three weeks away from being reached you know are you saying that we need to raise taxes?
If so at home no I will agree with you our biggest problem is spending I will absolutely agree with it and you know where I would start I would cut the military budget in half and get rid of homeland security spending first thing I would do.
It's amazing that's always the area that liberals find the military budget in half and get get rid of homeland security okay that's right nobody's talking about it.
That's where our money's going.
That worked really well when Carter did it.
I mean, military's going to get cut.
Everything's going to get cut.
Everything is going to have to get cut.
When we finally deal with this problem, and it's not going to be dealt with during Barack Obama's presidency, because he will not cut spending, everything is going to have to be cut, because we are, like I said, I'll give you the numbers again, $307 billion going out next month, $173 billion going in, according to an independent group, $203 billion coming in, according to the Treasury.
There's no way you can close that gap without cutting things all over the place.
the call you know I I've gotten two of these and we're only in the second hour of the program in which answer is raising taxes.
Who are these people to be lecturing the rest of us to raise taxes?
The Treasury Secretary of the United States is a tax cheat.
Who do you want to pay Tim Geitner?
Charlie Wrangell GE Well none of them pay taxes that's all their buddies I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush there's just I I've got to do a shout out here.
Tom Watson's going to make the cut in the British Open.
He's sixty two years old I mean he almost won it a couple of years ago he's twelve years past eligibility for the senior tour whatever they call that now he's going to make the cut.
Let's see uh Darren Clark and Lucas Glover are the leaders Rory McElroy still in the course but Tom Watson's number looks like he's going to make the cut it's just a great accomplishment We've got to stand up for our fellow old goats still trying to be competitive.
Uh I've been discussing in the first couple of hours on Open Line Friday, and obviously the show's been dominated by the budget and deficit discussions.
There are a lot of different ways to approach this.
But in the end it all comes back to one common denominator.
The deficit has grown to the point where it is terrifying.
Under this president, everything he has touched economically so far has been a disaster.
We see no recovery in sight.
He's creating new entitlements that are out there, and some of us are deeply worried about where we are going.
The stakes for next year's election could not be higher.
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