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July 15, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:46
July 15, 2011, Friday, Hour #3
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I love the beginning of each hour on Friday because I get to do this.
It's Friday, and that means Live from New York City.
It's open line Friday.
I am in New York.
It's beautiful in New York today.
On a gorgeous day.
Well, worse than a few hours ago, President Obama went on national television, held another one of his news.
See, he hasn't wanted to hold news conferences for the first two and a half years.
He's held almost none of them because he didn't have any good explanation for why nothing was.
You think he wanted to answer any questions about Afghanistan?
You think he wanted to answer any questions about why unemployment was going up rather than down?
You think he wanted to answer any questions about how his stimulus wasn't working?
Now though he thinks he's got an edge.
He's using this whole debt ceiling thing.
He thinks to his own political advantage.
Yeah, let's force a government shutdown.
Let's threaten not to send out Social Security checks, and I'll blame the Republicans for it.
In the meantime, Republicans are thinking that this is finally the opportunity to deal with excessive government spending.
It's a tricky issue.
The public doesn't know what it thinks about this issue.
And when I say the public, I don't mean people listening to Rush, by and large.
I know where I'm coming from on this, and I think you know where you're coming from.
But you have a lot of Americans, the moderates that Rush often makes fun of, who nod their heads, in fact, flawed, get excited.
Government needs to live within its means.
We need to cut spending.
But then they get the heebie jeebies when that actually occurs.
Cutting spending means something.
I've just been through this in Wisconsin.
A Republican legislature was elected and an ideological Republican governor, conservative, Scott Walker.
Followed the whole thing, you saw the demonstrations that went on.
He wasn't even proposing radical cuts.
He had the advantage in Wisconsin in that the public employee benefits were so unbelievably lavish, far more so than in most of your states.
Most Wisconsin public employees paid absolutely zero for their health insurance, and they kick in zero for their pensions, which are wonderful pensions.
He merely went after those things, knowing that he had to take away collective bargaining privileges in order to do it, because the unions would never agree to negotiate away their benefits.
And there was tremendous controversy.
There still is.
What Walker has done, by the way, has been upheld by the courts.
It's gone through, it is law, and it is working in the communities that now have taken advantage of this.
They are now in great shape.
Rush talked about a school district in Wisconsin called Kokona.
I know he talked about it because that's my hometown.
Massive cuts in state aid under the governor's budget, but despite that, they went from a deficit to a surplus, and they are hiring teachers because they were able to tap into this excessive benefits that the public employees were able to get.
They stabilized their budgets all across the state of Wisconsin.
You have communities now with balanced budgets and in better fiscal condition than they were in.
But look at the angst that occurred in the meantime.
The public employees who were merely being told you got to pay a little bit for your health insurance.
Got to kick in for your pensions.
They went ballistic and a lot of people are still upset.
If nationally there is a government shutdown for a few days, and this thing is closed or that train doesn't run or whatever.
I think a lot of people will have a problem with it.
See you're dealing here with a very fickle American public.
Cutting government spending works, but the process of going toward doing it is very, very hard.
One way or another, Greece is going to have to cut its spending because the people bailing Greece out are making it clear we're not going to give you any more money if you don't make significant cuts in your spending.
Look at the process there.
Welfare programs, government programs, whatever they are, they are addictive.
Cutting them is very look at how the de look at the game the Democrats have played for the last 40 years on Social Security.
Every two years they run election ads, telling grandma and grandpa the Republicans are going to take away your Social Security.
They do it because senior citizens are often panicked by this.
Once government starts a program, it's very hard to get rid of it.
We're now at a point, however, where we have to get rid of it.
And I don't see among liberals any recognition of that fact.
They think we conservatives are just chicken little.
The sky is falling in the sky is falling.
You've been yelling about the debt and government spending forever.
Well, because chicken little was wrong, does it mean that the sky might not at some point fall in?
One trillion five hundred billion dollar deficit just this year.
It wasn't that long ago that that was the whole debt.
Frightening stuff.
Yet a total lack of seriousness about it.
I don't want to talk too much about my own area, but I do want to tell you about this.
In Milwaukee, right now, our mayor, guy named Barrett, wants to build a streetcar project.
It is the most you guys can look this up on the internet.
It is the most inane, stupid mass transit program you're ever going to see.
You heard about that bridge to nowhere on Alaska?
Well, this is a train to nowhere.
The train runs around in a circle.
It doesn't go anywhere.
It starts near the post office, runs around in a circle past a couple of taverns and past the basketball arena, and ends up back at the train station.
It's unbelievably stupid.
It's on a route where buses currently run.
Doesn't serve any purpose at all, but they want to do it.
Why?
Guess who pays for it?
Sixty-one million dollars in federal funds.
And the argument for spending them, why if we don't take it, somebody else is going to get it.
Nobody's going to ride that train.
The operating costs are going to be enormous.
It does nothing to provide any economic development in Milwaukee.
There's literally no reason to do it at all.
Yet, not a single federal bureaucrat in Barack Obama's administration has suggested maybe we shouldn't spend that money.
If we can't cut that $61 million of idiocy that serves nothing that serves no human need.
We're not talking here about the social safety net.
This is brand new spending on something that's utterly not needed.
If they can't even go and target that, then you tell me the president's really serious about going in there and finding real spending cuts.
The stuff that I just described, those are the easy cuts.
Cut stupid projects on the board that don't need to be done.
If we can't even do that, how are we ever going to look at the looming crisis in Social Security and Medicare when the baby boomers go on the dole?
These people are incapable of not spending money.
Check out the streetcar in Milwaukee.
The train to nowhere.
And then tell yourself that we haven't made zero progress in dealing with excessive bloated federal spending.
All right, it is open line Friday.
We played the thing.
I've got to deliver on the promise.
1800 28282 is the phone number.
Diane in Santa Barbara, you're on the Rush Limbar program.
Hey Mark.
Hi.
Um hi.
Um on both sides I'm hearing um about loopholes, closing loopholes, but there's no specifics.
And the ones that I'm real most concerned about are the ones that are the cheap ones that get um to eat and I have uh tax.
You know, yeah, GE didn't pay any tax at all last year.
Yeah.
GE Jeffrey Immilt, Obama's buddy, the guy that just lectured the rest of American businesses.
Why you can't keep bashing government, paid nothing in taxes.
No, they never talk about those.
There's a lot of loopholes I'd love to create.
Do you know how many green energy loopholes we have?
Ethanol's already being subsidized fifty cents a gallon.
Wind power, solar power, all of this stuff.
There are companies that are out there doing green energy projects that do almost nothing to reduce their electricity usage, and they do it simply to get the federal tax credits that are there.
No, they never identify them.
I certainly don't have a problem with cleaning up the tax code and getting rid of a lot of deductions that are out there that shouldn't exist in exchange for keeping the tax rates lower.
We shouldn't have public policy that is encouraging companies to do ABC D and E just for the tax break.
It's bad public Policy.
It results in companies doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
It results in them doing things that don't generate any capital, don't create jobs, don't do anything other than produce the tax break.
So I'm with you, but the president never talks about which ones he wants to give.
He did get on this corporate jet thing, though.
The last two weeks, every time he holds a news conference, he's yakking about the corporate jets, as if it's a bad idea that an American corporation would go out and buy a jet.
A jet that was probably manufactured in America, a jet that's serviced by Americans, a jet that's piloted by Americans, a jet that was sold by Americans, with salespeople getting commissions, all Americans.
Yet he's picked on that one.
That's the one that he's focused on.
Why does he choose that one?
Because it's the kind of thing that most people will never have in their lives.
They'll never be able to ride in their own private corporate jet.
He picked that one solely.
Because it's the one that plays into class envy.
I'm not opposed to getting rid of a lot of them.
I'm not wouldn't do it to raise corporate taxes, but he never talks about which ones he do.
He just implies that there's a zillion of them, and that's the reason we have the deficit because there are all these loopholes out there that big corporations are able to exploit.
Thank you for the call, uh, Diane.
Let's go to uh Houston.
David, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark, how are you doing today?
I'm great, thanks.
Great.
Listen, I was I'm listening to this whole thing and this this whole thing about cutting entitlements, and the one thing that drives me absolutely crazy is Medicare is not an entitlement, nor is Social Security because we directly pay for that out of our own pockets.
My check every every single time I get a paycheck when I can get one, actually has Medicare and Social Security white just taken out of it for future generations and this whole pond is a very good thing.
Well, but that's what they've claimed.
That's what they've claimed.
It doesn't really work that way.
It just goes into the federal, it goes into the federal budget.
I mean, I'm not worried about the words.
I mean, they're called entitlements because the law says you are entitled to receive them.
But the reality is is that the amount that we're paying in is going to be dwarfing the amount that's going to have to be paid out when the baby boomers do retire.
The thing that's just so Rob Long writes a column for the National Review, used to be a uh screenwriter for Cheers, he's still on a couple of TV shows.
He had a great piece in the current magazine in which he got together a bunch of 20 somethings in focus groups, and the moderator tried to ask them about aren't you a little concerned that the baby boomers are going to take away all the money with all the Medicare and Social Security that they're going to gobble up?
And they're just not dialed in, they're just not focused on it.
But we've got, as you said, a Ponzi scheme.
You've got people who've paid money in that are never right now going to get the benefits back in return because there aren't going to be enough people to pay the taxes in the future to sustain all the people that are going on to it five, ten, fifteen years down the road when the baby boomers all get there.
Everybody knows this.
Everybody can see it coming.
There's only one group of people, however, the conservatives, who are suggesting doing anything about it.
Whether people liked it or not, Congressman Ryan came up with a plan.
It was to switch Medicare away from a government run program to one in which people got vouchers to go out and get their own health insurance.
He believes it's a way of keeping Medicare solvent and paying for all of these bills that are out there in the future.
He got trashed for daring to address it.
But we all know what's coming with the entitlements.
We all know what's going to happen when the baby boomers get old.
We all know that there aren't anywhere near as many generation Xers behind them.
And we also all know what's going to happen if government employment is so high that in addition to carrying all of these entitlement programs, we're paying all of these salaries of government workers.
The head the thing is headed for a crash.
And that crash has already occurred in Greece.
It's close to occurring in Portugal.
Even Italy is starting to sense it, and they're all doing things about it because it's the only way the rest of the European nations will agree to bail them out.
Well, who's going to bail us out?
Do you think the Chinese are going to step in and bail us out or will they allow us to simply fall apart?
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Two years ago, Rush must take his vacations at exactly the same time every year.
Because I always pretty much guest hosted exactly the same times each year.
Two years ago I was making fun of the World Cup and how they were jamming that down our throats and the whole business of trying to make Americans embrace soccer even though most of us are bored to tears by it.
You gotta admit it.
It's a lot easier to swallow this time around.
You know how to make Americans embrace soccer?
Let us win it.
I mean, this is actually fun.
I'm looking forward to Sunday's game.
There yes, I'm fi if we win anything we win, I'm okay with.
If we win um I love this Abby Wamba with the with the head and all of this stuff.
I mean knocking all those goals in with her head.
You know what her concussion status is going to be in twenty years.
Yeah, I I like this.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'm not going to watch the third place game between Sweden and France.
In fact, I don't watch anything involving France.
But it's this is kind of like okay now.
It's our people winning.
Plus, it's now being played by the proper gender because everybody knows that soccer is a sport for girls.
To Prescott Arizona, Mark, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi, Mark.
I'm uh very impressed with your analysis of the two calls that came in.
The one lady that uh felt very badly for all those people that thought Obama was a nice guy, and then the guy that called in and said all our money is going into the military.
He does the the guy that thinks all the money that goes into the military believes the don't weigh demagogues who try to scare and misdirect everybody.
Well, military spending is a portion of the budget goes down every year on a percentage basis.
It's smaller now.
I think it's smaller now than it was even under Carter, who slashed it.
We all know where the we all you know are they saying that she wants a pay cut for the soldiers?
I mean, what when they talk about cutting defense, they never make it clear exactly what it is that they mean.
I mean, it's Barack Obama that's decided to pick a war with Libya.
It's Obama who has stayed in Afghanistan with no particular purpose whatsoever.
We've got it we we we're talking about offense budget, though, in a time in which you still face a more dangerous world than ever.
Everybody's going nuclear right now, yet they pick out that as the one area that they're willing to cut.
And I'm willing to take a look at the defense budget.
I think every conservative is you know, if there are areas that you can cut and get away with that you can do.
But we all know where the problem is and where the growth in spending is, and the growth isn't in the defense budget.
Medicare, medical, and social security.
That's it.
And the transfer payments.
And Social Security dwarf the small little pie segment that goes to the military.
And with all the trends we have in our society of the aging population, those are going to get worse.
And we if we aren't going to address it now, we're never going to address it with a Democratic president.
If you do get a Republican, and there's no guarantee you're going to get have it addressed with a Republican president, I I don't want to pick any overt fights here, but I don't know how many people are confident that Mitt Romney would come in and slash federal spending in the same way that some governors out there have done so in their own states.
You'd need to have a president who is truly committed to it.
But it's certainly not going to happen under Barack Obama, and it's not going to happen with a Nancy Pelosi Harry Reed Congress that believes in all of these government programs that not only thinks that they don't agree that we're spending too much money, they want to spend more.
You're not going to get spending cut with people who just created an entitlement out of 14% of the American economy and health care.
We're headed in the wrong direction with them.
And it's gotten beyond just philosophical.
I mean, the numbers are there.
We're taking in 173 million dollars a month and we're spending 307 million.
Even if they tried to raise taxes, they'd have a hard time figuring out how we're going to get another one hundred and forty billion a month in taxes.
I mean, that would be their own economy that would be destroyed as a result.
The federal government right now takes in about two hundred and twenty billion a month.
The interesting thing is that the first time.
It depends on whether or not you count it, it depends on whether or not you count certain transfer payments, but between one hundred and seventy-three and two hundred and twenty is the number you're coming in, and we're spending a 307.
It's just a number that can't, you know, can't continue.
Thank you for the call.
But the point that I think a lot of people struggle with when we talk about this, is that it's always easy for myself and frankly other conservatives to say we have to live within our means.
Everybody agrees with that.
Defining it is something else.
I do think we have to address the entitlements.
I'm open to the notion of raising the Social Security eligibility age.
Uh to uh to something right that just wouldn't cover me about.
I take it to sixty-seven, maybe.
I'm willing to look at it.
The point that I'm making is that you have to actually do cuts.
You have to have the will within you to be able to stand up when people start screaming and yelling and say, That's my money, that's my candy.
I need this.
We are way, way, way out of control.
And you're not going to get anybody to make those cuts unless there's somebody who actually believes in the need to do it.
And I'm sorry, that's not Nancy Pelosi or President Obama.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
I know what's going to happen here after all this good work I've done talking about government spending and President Obama's trying to use the uh debt ceiling as a way of embarrassing Republicans by shutting down the government and blaming the for I know all of that's just going to be forgotten, and I'll get nothing but ridicule for going soft on soccer.
As for the soccer people, they are impossible to please.
I'll be accused of not sufficiently embracing them.
No, I am looking forward to the game on Sunday.
And I hope it isn't a tie where they decided decide it by that those kickoffs or whatever they do at the end where they what do they call those shootouts or what hockey calls them?
Yeah.
Uh Snurley says he would not know.
Proudly ignorant of soccer.
You know who Abby is, though, don't you?
You do too.
She's the one that's not getting all the goals of their head.
You should you you would have just picked that up if you're an observant human being.
How can you miss the whole Abbey thing?
Like I s like I said, I'm being ridiculed here for going soft on soccer.
Everything I've tried to accomplish today's shot by me trying to do one nice little thing by commenting on our women's soccer team when we want to go build on Sunday.
To Ladera Beach, California.
Steve, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark, good afternoon.
How are you today?
I'm great.
Okay.
Got a couple of questions for you.
I'm a small business owner, so I'm always thinking strategic uh marketing strategies.
Aren't most billionaires that we know of they're all Democrats, aren't they?
A lot of them are.
Then call the bluff.
It's in the in the age of bumper sticker marketing, that's what seems to get through to people.
That's what they remember.
Tax cuts for the millionaires, tax cuts.
Who cares?
But if you say, okay, let's tax all the billionaires now, and let's suppose that brings in 25 billion a month now.
That's fantastic, Brock.
Where are you gonna get the other hundred you're you're minusing now?
Well, and here's the problem.
It never is a tax on billionaires.
They always say billionaires, and then you see where the tax rate is, and it's like a hundred and fifty or two hundred or or two hundred thousand a year, which takes in a ton of small businesses.
It takes in a lot of people who sold their businesses late in life and finally have a little bit of an income, and it goes way, way, way below that.
Now, I would be opposed to it even if it was merely billionaires, because I want those billionaires buying boats made by Americans and renting limos that are driven by Americans and using landscaping services that are owned by Americans and going out and taking trips in the United States and buying sports tickets and letting their money and buying beer from the beer vendor, I want wealthy people to spend their money.
That's how we have an economy, but it's never billionaires and it's never even millionaires.
He talks about the rich, he talks about the people at the top, and he always manages to go way down lower than that.
But even with that, we are now so deeply in debt that you could raise the tax rate on the top two brackets to one hundred percent.
Literally tell them, whatever you make, we're taking it all.
Now nobody, of course, would work if it was they had to give it all up, but if you theoretically could do it, it still wouldn't balance the budget, and it wouldn't come close because he's spending way too much money.
He's changing this subject to taxes.
And the implication for a lot of people is is that if we raise taxes a little bit, there wouldn't be a deficit.
The problem is is that you wouldn't come close.
You wouldn't come within a f you'd move the needle maybe one or two percent, harm the economy in the process, but wouldn't address at all the problem of spending too much money.
He is right about the fact that a whole lot of those billionaires are liberals to Midlothian, Texas.
Kevin, it's your turn on EIB.
Uh, yeah, Mark.
Uh good show today.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking my call.
Uh yeah, I'd like to make a proposal in uh in a kind of a simplified form.
Uh let's just say that uh we get the shot at doing a constitutional amendment on uh taxation is spending.
And yeah, flat tax is uh uh kind of a redundant term, but let's do that.
And then divorce taxation in politics from here on out.
Uh the question is what would the Democrats do after that?
Well I mean the question's so theoretical.
I I Not really Well, yeah, it is because right now it's impossible to do because Democrats would never vote would never vote for it.
You're talking about a constitutional amendment to create a flat tax, and I I think flat tax is the way to go, but let's be honest, you'd have to put it through a majority of both the House and the Senate, and then it would have to be ratified by a whole lot of states that are controlled by democratic legislatures.
It would in the long run work.
I'm dealing, though, with the fact that we're facing a crisis right now.
The but the budget deficit that we're facing this year, one and a half trillion dollars after one point one trillion in the prior fiscal year, those two years alone are more than all of eight years of Bush combined, it's being larded onto a national debt in which a huge segment of the budget is going merely to service the debt, and that's going to get worse in the next few years.
Here's the thing that liberals need to think about.
And I know in trying to get them to think about anything, you're asking a really tall question.
But if they truly care about all of their social services, if they care about the safety debt, if they care about the entitlement programs, if they care about the fortune that we're putting into shared revenue payments to government, which is generally used to pay for all of these social services at the local level.
Where's that money going to come from when interest on the debt goes from 20% to 25 to 30 to 35 to 40 to 45 percent of the federal budget?
As that debt keeps going up, we're going to have to pay more and more and more to pay the principal on all of these government bonds.
That's how we service the debt.
That's going to squeeze out all of this stuff that they say they care about.
If they want to keep the gravy train going, they have it an incentive to be fiscally responsible.
They're incapable of it, however.
The problem with liberals is, and I've made this comment in the past, and people think that it's simplistic and it's condescending.
The problem with liberals is that they're stupid.
Their stuff doesn't work.
You can't keep spending and spending and spending and taxing and taxing and taxing in an economy that is premised on free market capitalism.
It does not work.
Everywhere they've tried it, it's failed.
Take a look at any big city run by a liberal mayor.
Its finances are a basket case.
They've got crime all over the place.
Look at all urban school districts in America.
They're a disaster, and they're constantly claiming that they're poor and they're providing a poor quality product.
Look at all the states where you have Democratic governors and democratic legislatures.
They're all the ones where the budgets are all screwed up.
Take a look at the areas that are run by conservatives.
By and large, healthy and working.
Look at Rick Perry in Texas.
I mean, if he does run for president, he's got a great arguing point.
Mr. President, I created millions of several hundred thousand jobs.
I think it's close to a million.
In your recession.
Texas got out of the way.
Texas is actually embracing a free market economy.
We're losing jobs all over the place, and they're creating them like crazy.
The liberal model does it work when put into practice.
And right now you've got a guy who's not just a liberal, he's a radical.
The way they did stimulus was radical.
The dollar figure they chose for it was off the charts.
It was about, I called it a trillion.
It's about eight hundred and ten or so billion dollars that they spent on stimulus.
That was budget busting and it blew through the roof.
The thing is, they thought it would work.
They thought there would be economic growth.
They thought something positive would happen as a result.
I think that they're flummoxed, that the unemployment rate is still at nine point two percent.
Remember recovery summer?
Was that last year now or two years ago?
Remember when th was that last year?
Yeah, remember recovery?
They were bragging about it in advance.
They were convinced they'd have something to talk about.
Now they're pretending that that never happened, and now you know, well, we've had a few hiccups in the road and bush this and bush that and bush the other thing.
They thought that they'd get a result here.
They've been told all their lives that this stuff would work.
You go to one of these Ivy League institutions and be taught by a liberal economics professor.
All you need to do is redistribute the wealth, all the government has to do is stimulate, provide these services that gets the money into the economy, and things will be half what will be wonderful.
It doesn't work.
You would think, after all these years of seeing it not work.
They catch on, but they don't.
Some of us are former liberals.
When I was younger, I was a liberal.
I didn't know any better.
I was stupid.
I had no idea that none of this stuff worked.
Then I started living life.
Wasn't working.
Unlike them, my light bulb wasn't burned out.
Started opening my mind to other approaches.
Liberals are chill still chasing the same tail at the end of the dog.
For the country.
We have to make a choice.
Are we going to keep spending money that we don't have?
Or are we finally going to address the problem?
When that choice comes, it's going to be brutal.
I don't mean Obama promising to maybe look at this or do something about that.
But actually reduce the amount of money that the government of the United States is spending, reducing the mass transit aid that goes out in the country, reducing the amount of money that we put into social welfare programs, addressing the amounts that go into entitlements.
The alternative, though, is a terrible crash when we run out of money and there's nobody to bail us out.
You can say, well, even in Grace, the European Union, they're stepping in and they're ba who's going to bail out our economy.
The second largest economy in the world is China.
Do you think they'll do anything to bail?
If they do, imagine the terms on that deal.
Imagine what we're going to have to agree to in order to be bailed out by the Chinese.
When you've got a federal budget deficit at the number that we're at in a national debt where it's where it is right now, that isn't sky is falling in talk.
That's practically planning for a future that is going to be ours if we don't change the leadership in our country to one that recognizes that we can't keep spending money that we don't have.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
It occurred to me in the last segment I sounded as doom and gloom as Mark Stein, my fellow Rush co-host.
He he laughs though when he does it.
You read his stuff.
He's his latest piece in the uh national review.
He said, Can two generations screw up something that twenty generations built up?
The answer is pretty clear, yes they can.
Remember when President Obama said that this is going to be smarter government?
You know, the implication that Bush was stupid government.
Here's one for you.
The U.S. government is demanding the return of a document describing criteria for holding detainees at a detention center in Afghanistan after it gave it to a civil rights group by mistake.
That's a good group to give.
The dispute arose after the ACLU filed a 2009 lawsuit as part of a Freedom of Immigration Act request.
The ACLU said there were hundreds of people detained at Bagram with no meaningful process to challenge detention.
The government says the document should never have been released and is demanding that it be returned.
Mexican soldiers have found the largest marijuana plantation ever detected in Mexico.
I'm guessing that's breaking a pretty pretty big record.
Largest marijuana plantation ever detected in Mexico, a huge field covering about 300 acres, the defense department said Thursday.
The plantation is four times larger than the previous record discovery by authorities at a ranch in northern Chihuahua state in nineteen eighty-four.
We estimate that in this area approximately sixty people were working.
When they saw the military personnel, they fled.
A few were later reported detained at a nearby bock.
No arrests were made at the scene.
Police in Indonesia, Indonesia arrested the headmaster of an Islamic boarding school today after a man there died earlier this week, reportedly while trying to teach students how to make homemade bombs.
Kind of a kind of kind of a happy ending, though, I guess, the uh to the story, the terrorist killed himself trying to teach other kids how to be terrorists, to Redondo Beach, California and Greg.
Greg, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark.
Um, I'm calling in uh regards to the uh previous caller touting uh President Clinton's uh and what he did, but what I didn't hear was that in his election year, uh year and a half before the election, he he signed the Welfare Reform Act, cutting entitlements, he raised defense spending and and cut taxes, and you don't hear that.
Well, he did other than welfare reform, he did most of those things because he was confronted with a Republican Congress.
Clinton moved a little bit to the center, but mostly started to talk more moderate.
He had the advantage of a Republican Congress that was able to restrain his excesses, and Obama has that too.
For all of Obama's rhetoric here, pounding on the Republicans, the one thing he can't do is figure out how to get more money appropriated, which is why we don't have any budgets.
So there is a check on how far he can go.
For example, you would not be able to expand Obamacare now.
You have people elected who are there to repeal it.
He'll benefit from that.
The one thing he can't get past, and I'm somebody who right now would predict that Obama's going to lose next year.
What he can't get past is that whenever an incumbent president is thrown out of office, that president is presiding over a bad economy.
The historical record's just clear on this.
When we throw out a president, there's a bad economy.
The first Bush over was involved oversaw a recession.
Jimmy Carter presided over an absolutely terrible economy.
Go all the way back to Herbert Hoover.
When a president is thrown out of office, the American economy is in bad shape.
And under Obama, we are not moving in the right direction, and there's every evidence that in 2012 we're going to be sliding downward.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush on Open Line Friday.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
We spent most of today's program talking about the economy, the debate over raising the debt limit, the deficit, and so on.
All of this has been tied together, I think deliberately by President Obama.
Republicans in Congress tried to force fiscal restraint on the president by holding the debt ceiling extension hostage.
The president, however, I think believes that if there is a government shutdown because we don't raise the debt ceiling, he won't be blamed for it, that Republicans will be blamed for it.
So now everybody's looking for another way out.
Senator McConnell has proposed his, others are talking about their options.
Kim Strassel, who's a very good columnist of the Wall Street Journal today, says that this is not the time to try to find an end game because Obama will never cave.
She writes, if the GOP is so eager to call it Obama bluff, how about this?
Call him on his argument that he is acting like a leader working to fix the debt problem, offering the GOP the opportunity to go big.
That's the storyline Americans are being fed right now, and the GOP shores it up every time it agrees to another White House summit.
A shame, since in fact the only Obama offers are for mediocre cuts, higher taxes, and the opportunity for Republicans to help permanently enshrine big government.
That or for joint ownership of a failing economy and or shut down turmoil, let him own it.
She then asks, do we really now believe that he'll just roll over and give up all he's attained?
I don't.
I think Barack Obama is committed to high government spending.
I think he's engaging here only in talk, and I think we will achieve no reform under him.
The plan has to be the plan has to include a way to get him out of office next year because nothing will be fixed so long as he is president of the United States.
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