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Aug. 1, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:59
August 1, 2011, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Okay, greetings.
Fun lovers.
Music seekers.
Here we go.
I thought we might escape it since it's you know sort of an odd year, but not to be the case.
Come on in.
Come on in.
Let's do it.
Come on in.
It's the 23rd anniversary of the EIB network today, August 1st, 1988.
Happy 23rd anniversary.
Thank you very much.
That's the voice of Mr. Snerdley.
Here is the uh here's the case.
There's the card.
And uh that's the broadcast engineer Brian Johnson who snuck on the ditto cam behind to put the uh the balloon.
Why don't you guys all come over here and be seen?
Oh, come on.
Come on, snurdily stand behind me so you can here's uh I hear snerdly.
You got uh you gotta you gotta okay, there's Snerdley, there's come on, come on, Don.
Come on over and this is gonna do the come on, that doesn't count.
Come on in here.
Cowards.
Anyway, it is the 23rd anniversary of the EIB network today, ladies and gentlemen.
August 1st, 1988, we started uh in New York.
I thought 23rd, I know it's an anniversary, but there's nothing special about the 23rd.
Uh well, I mean, it's not the 25th, it's not the 20th, it's uh sort of in the middle there.
But uh well, I don't know that we won a budget battle.
I I don't I don't know that the budget battle has been won.
Um I I'm I'm I'm undecided about this.
I I'd love to support it.
I would love to support it, but there are things about it that that uh give me pause because I think still a lot of it has been done from the context of fear, not being blamed, all concerned about a default which wasn't going to happen.
Uh and I, you know, I I heard yesterday, look at we're only one third of government is as good as we can do, and it isn't bad.
There there supposedly are no tax increases in this.
Yet the CBO, the CBO is counting on the Bush tax cuts expiring.
Next year, the Bush tax cuts are set to expire.
That's going to be a tax increase without anybody having to vote for one.
Now, it's also possible that the Bush tax cuts will be extended.
Follow me on this.
It is possible the Bush tax cuts will be extended.
Um I think it's 50-50.
Now, Bom's making a big deal about having those expire and and and so forth for new revenue.
But if we extended the Bush tax cuts once in order to not do damage to the economy, the economy is worse.
I'm just telling you, the possibility.
Follow me on this now.
The possibility that the Bush tax cuts should be extended is about 50-50.
If that happens, then what happens to the CBO score?
The CBO score is thrown out the window.
The CBO score is BS anyway, but if the Bush tax cuts are extended, the CBO is gonna score that is a major cut, which will have to be replaced.
A cut in government revenue.
If the Bush tax cuts are extended, that's less revenue than the government's counting on, which means that the commission will have an automatic excuse to go in and raise taxes.
And if they permanently patch the alternative minimum tax, you know, that's something they do annually.
If there's a permanent patch to the ATM, that's another piece of uh uh uh well, another element that the CBO could say constitutes a loss of revenue to the government.
And we can't have that, folks.
All of this is about raising revenue.
All this is about raising the debt limit.
So if there's a permanent ATM patch and if the Bush tax cuts are extended, we're looking at what the CBO would say is a two to four trillion dollar shortfall.
Which means that this special commission can go in there and if they want to raise taxes to make up for it.
These kind of little things that are that are lurking here, we don't know how it's uh how it's going to pan out.
I better blow out these candles on the cake before I start a fire in here.
Okay, I've made my wish.
Well, you're not supposed to tell people what the wish is.
So I'm not going to tell people what the wish is.
Here we go.
Oh, trick candles.
Yeah, here they come.
Trick candles.
Okay, Brian, I blew them out twice.
You can come get them.
Have you noticed, by the way, uh, ladies and gentlemen.
The White House isn't, the White House isn't.
Have you gone to Whitehouse.gov and losing and read their five pages on why they're happy about this.
Why are the why are the Democrats?
Let me there is I've got I have got three or four stories in this stack about how big the Tea Party won this thing.
Big big Tea Party win.
Now why?
Why portray this as a Tea Party win?
It's a Tea Party win, Obama doesn't sign this.
Now just stick with me as this will all be made clear.
This will all be made clear as the program unfolds before your eyes.
Whoever came up with it, I think it was I've I don't know, I forget who somebody referred to this deal as a Satan sandwich.
And I think it was a Democrat that was uh Emmanuel Cleaver.
I think referred to it as a Satan sandwich.
And this Emmanuel Cleaver, right?
And and so the Satan sandwich is in the details.
Now we were supposed the stock market was supposed to rally.
Once we got the deal.
Stock market was supposed to big sigh of relief.
Uh let me check, folks.
The stock market at Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 126.
Stocks fret over data and downgrade risk.
You see, we're not out of the woods when it comes to the downgrade.
The debt could still be downgraded because there's really no significant cut in spending.
What we have here is 10-year cuts.
We have a trillion or so over 10 years.
Obama's getting his 2.4 trillion in spending.
Now, granted, there's a second tranche that has to uh uh be authorized to the end of the year around Christmas time, but it locks in the stimulus in the baseline.
It grows the baseline.
The second phase, the second tranche would cut almost a trillion dollars from defense if the cuts occur.
Are you aware of this, Snerdum?
Yeah, that is very troublesome.
That there's a the mechanism is a 50% cut in defense and a 50% cut in all the other entitlements combined.
Defense taking the major hit.
There is no balanced budget in this.
Meanwhile, credit will be downgraded, excuse me, because this does not impact the trend of spending in any significant way.
And as for no tax increases, uh let me just put it this way.
The Commission will demand that the Bush tax cuts are matched dollar for dollar by new tax increases if they are extended.
I mean, there's no way about if the Bush tax cuts are extended, that equals a loss of revenue to the government.
Remember, we're getting this new rhetoric out of Washington.
Tax cuts are spending.
By the way, happy Ramadan.
We really have a lot to celebrate too.
We got the budget deal done.
We avoided uh we avoided all this catastrophe before Ramadan as well.
Now the first votes in the House scheduled for about now, 12 noon.
Why is that?
Probably just a coincidence, isn't it?
That the first votes in the House are scheduled while this program is going on.
I mean, it's not like they would want to try to get a vote in before the big show starts here.
No.
And the stock market, it did go up a little bit, but then crashed back down to Earth.
I think people have started reading the deal.
So remember last week, last Friday talking about plan C. Looks like we were right last week when we said we were going to get Plan C, which nailed it.
I told you.
I told you that Boehner and McConnell and Obama and Reed were all talking about a separate deal, and this is what we got.
And now guess what?
Goes back to the House, doesn't it?
And now guess who the pressure's on?
The pressure's on the House Tea Party guys.
And that's why the Tea Party guys are being in the press.
That's why they're said to be winners.
They're trying to pressure their vote.
The pressure is on the Republicans again.
They thought that they'd pass this off to Dingy Harry into the Senate.
And Dingy Harry said, We know what me and Mitch, we've been discussing this, and it looks like there's some stuff that we can work with here, and they've come up with a compromise.
And now it's back to the House.
And there's some stuff in it that Tea Party people do not like.
Now the end of the Bush tax cuts, the sunset of the Bush tax cuts are locked in.
The Obamacare tax increases are locked in.
Together, those two items alone will mean the biggest tax increase in the history of the country.
And anybody wants to tell you that there aren't any tax increases in this.
Technically they may be right.
This piece of legislation does not have a specific tax increase in it.
But what's slated to happen over the course of the next few months results in one.
The Bush tax cuts end.
The Obamacare tax increases are locked in, and we know that Obamacare was not even up for grabs.
Obamacare wasn't even on the table in this.
And you know that there are massive tax increases in that.
You note how nobody said a word about it.
So the end of the Bush tax cuts, the arrival of the Obama tax increases, and we're looking at the largest tax increase in the history of the country.
And on top of that, the debt deal includes a new bipartisan committee that'll look at new revenue sources, new revenue increases.
And yet everybody's crowing about how this deal doesn't include any tax increases.
And the commission, this super select commission, will demand that the Bush tax cuts are matched dollar for dollar by new tax increases if those tax cuts are by some chance extended.
Now, you may think it's a long shot that the Bush tax cuts would be extended.
Obama did it once for campaign purposes.
If he thinks that he could do it again for campaign purposes for the economy, and tell his troops he's getting tax increases elsewhere, then it's possible.
And the permanent patch on the ATM, all of this, given the baseline, could be scored as a massive cut in government revenue.
A huge loss of government revenue, which, of course, is going to have to be made up.
Now we've already cut defense 400 billion dollars in the last two years.
The media is calling this a victory in order to get the House Republicans to vote for it.
I got to take a break here.
But I'll go through just some of the headlines of these stories.
Big win for the Tea Party.
And this is the second time that this tactic has been tried.
Big I forget it was, I think it was um last March when Boehner had this massive uh uh extension of the debt ceiling and all these massive cuts that equal 500 and some odd billion dollars or whatever.
Remember Boehner, big winner, boehner big winner, get everybody yep.
Bogus.
Boehner big winner to get everybody to go along with it.
Same thing now.
Tea Party, big, even the U.K. newspapers.
Tea Party, big winners.
It's all designed to get the Tea Party people to think, hey man, hey, hey, look at the media says we want the media knows.
The media knows that people in Washington, I am a little hoarse today, folks.
I I didn't do much speaking over the weekend, which is actually why.
My voice is lazy and tired.
The media knows that people who live and work in Washington crave support and praise from the media.
They know it.
Just like parents know that little kids love praise.
And so they're doling it out today.
So let's take a quick break.
You'll note that the stock market did not do what everybody said it was going to do.
Stock market is falling despite the great deal.
This was to save the stock market.
This was to stop interest rates from going up.
We've got audio sound bites in Louis Gomert and uh Mike Lee, a couple of Republicans who are going to vote no on this.
And I want you to hear those.
Plus, we'll get to your telephone calls as well.
Lots to do as we kick off another brand new week from the Limbaugh Institute of Ideological Purity.
Welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, a cutting edge of societal evolution, the Bush tax cuts.
If the Bush tax cuts expire, uh this would mean that the CBO, congregal budget office score would assume a three to five trillion dollar tax increase.
Now, House members were told on their uh conference call last night that the CBO would be scoring the deal as if the Bush tax cuts expire because they are supposed to expire.
Okay, so that means a three to five trillion dollar taxing.
Grab audio soundbite number thirty.
Just this morning, the White House press briefing.
One of the selling points for the Republicans to other Republicans to go ahead and support the deal is that it will be impossible for this select commission to raise taxes.
It would be impossible.
Jay Carney disagrees.
Jake Tapper says, House Republicans seem to be arguing that the Super Committee is going to have a difficult time doing any tax reform at all because it's it's gonna be scored by the CBO, the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in January 13.
Could you comment on that?
I've seen that, and I would simply say that the suggestion that it is impossible for the joint committee to raise tax revenue is simply not accurate.
It's false.
If the joint committee decides, for example, that part of a balance deal should be to eliminate tax subsidies for oil and gas companies or corporate jets, or if they decide to limit the value of itemized deductions for high income earners, as the President has called for, they can do that and they would raise revenue through doing that.
Second, nothing in the legislation that's being considered by Congress specifies at all that the committee operate under any specific baseline.
Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.
So you see all of these presumptions that everybody's been acting on, the White House is saying, nope, you're wrong.
Now there's one other thing about the Bush tax cuts expiring.
The CBO is using their March baseline, March of this year as opposed to January.
And because they're doing that, that they're assuming the Bush tax cuts expire, which means that they will not count as savings with regard to discretionary spending.
So they don't count.
The Bush tax cuts expiring don't give anybody any credit toward anything other than the government more revenue.
Other than a tax increase.
Now, if the Bush tax cuts were extended.
If the Bush tax cuts were extended, the CBO would say that's costing us up to five trillion dollars.
So five trillion dollars would be added to the debt if the Bush tax cuts are extended.
When everybody knows that these tax cuts generate new revenue.
This is so convoluted.
And I know this is hard to follow, but the assumption is the Bush tax cuts are going to sunset.
But people are asking what happens if they are extended.
And this is a possibility, along with the patch permanent patch of the alternative minimum tax.
They do that every year to keep more people from being affected by it.
Some point they're just going to make it permanent.
I don't know why they don't just get rid of it.
Well, yes, I do.
And I'm going to write out the power that the ATM gives them.
But the Congressional Research Service revised the total cost of permanently extending all the Bush tax cuts to over five trillion dollars over the next ten years.
Now that revised amount, which is much higher than the 2.8 trillion figure that the Congressional Research Service reported in September takes into account the cost of servicing the debt due to lost revenue and indexing the alternative minimum tax.
This is one of these dirty little secrets that that's thrown in.
It's sort of like a virus.
A computer virus that will end up forcing this select committee to go in and raise taxes.
And don't forget that's what Obama wants out of this.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
And we're going to start here with Louis Gomert.
Now, this is Friday night in Washington on the House floor during a debate on all of this.
One of the things that I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about in the nineties when Congress was not even a blip on my radar, was the zero baseline budget.
Is he explained it?
We have automatic increases in every agency's budget in the federal government.
Every agency has automatic increases every year.
Why?
We could save trillions if we just required every budget in the federal government to start out and prove what they need for the year.
A zero baseline budget, no automatic increases.
Right.
But we, of course, don't do that.
There is no zero baseline budgeting.
For example, the stimulus bill has now been added to the baseline.
Stimulus basically a trillion.
So the trillion dollar stimulus bill adds to the baseline that every uh agency works off of.
And don't forget this figure we had last week, did really the the figure that puts all this in the best context or is the best illustration I've heard yet.
If this deal did nothing more than freeze federal spending next year at this year's level, if this deal did not spend a dime more next year than we are going to spend this year, the Congressional Budget Office would score that as a nine and a half trillion dollar cut.
Because the baseline is projecting nine and a half trillion dollars in new spending over the next ten years.
Minimum.
That's how convoluted our budgeting is.
Zero baseline budgeting would mean every year starts fresh.
Every department looks at what it spent versus what it got versus what it needed, and adjustments would be made.
And if the food stamp crowd ended up spending five hundred billion dollars less than what they got, then that's what they would get next year.
But that's not the way it works.
They get an automatic increase regardless what they spend in the previous year.
This morning on Fox News, America's newsroom, Allison Camarata was interviewing Louis Gohmert.
She said, Congressman, how are you going to vote on this new deal?
I pulled it off the internet this morning around 215 a.m. and then spent a few hours going through it.
We hear one thing in summary, but when we're told that there's going to be cuts beginning in 2013, and they'll go over through uh for 10 years.
We know that in out years, anything beyond one or two years from where we are right now is not likely to happen.
And then when you pull the bill and you actually see that, gee, the for 2013 you've got 546 billion for security category and 501 billion non-security, and ten years later those have been increased 200 billion dollars.
It's hard for me to see how that's a cut.
Especially when you know that for one thing, apparently the baseline numbers are considering that the Bush tax cuts expire in January 2013.
I mean, we could fight, but this presumes that they go out of existence.
There it is.
The the the Bush tax cuts going out of existence and what that does to the baseline, you can't.
You cannot ignore that because that is going to equal.
As far as the way the the government looks at that, that they they would they would look at the Bush tax cuts ending as new revenue.
And it is on that basis that a lot of people say, oh, no tax increase.
But if they are extended, then CBO scores them as a five hundred and odd dollar, trillion dollar cut.
Anyway, Camarada said, Well, the details they're giving us are pretty interesting because we we'd heard that the one trillion dollars in cuts starts immediately.
You're saying that's different from what you're reading.
No, it's different from what I'm reading in the bill itself.
Those trillion dollars, yeah, they're agreed to now, but they will be over a ten-year period and and apparently not start until 2013.
And uh, the federal budget automatically goes up every year.
It's the dirty little secret of Washington.
And uh one of the things that the Speaker and Paul Ryan promised on Friday is we're gonna get a vote in the House to go to a zero baseline budget instead of the automatic increases.
But uh then too.
But you're not seeing that the dramatic cuts to defense at a time like this, it's not a good idea.
So she said, well, uh uh sounds like you're a no vote, Congressman Gobert.
I'm looking for a reason to be a yes.
I haven't found it.
This is too serious.
And you know, we promised that if we were in the majority, we would give three days before we crammed anything through.
And since we didn't have it, I was up all night going through this thing, and I'm just telling you, I find one concern after another in this.
How long is it?
It's only 74, but one of the problems with going through legislation like this, you have to not only read the legislation, you have to see what sections are referenced, because that's a common tactic, make it where you can't find it just reading this, you have to see how it affects the uh reference legislation in the bill.
So for example, there's no enforcement unless the OMB director starts, files a sequestration report.
Now call me cynical, but suppose the OMB director is a very good friend of the president, and the president just says, I don't issue a report.
There's no enforcement mechanism.
No enforcement mechanism.
St. Camerata says, well, do you think that your fellow Republicans in the House will vote for it?
Do you think that they have had a chance to read it by the time they're asked to vote for it?
We've got a uh conference at 1230.
We just got noticed uh just shortly ago, and I hope that we can educate people and have some questions answered, because this doesn't look good.
It really doesn't look good.
There's a lot of problems in here.
Uh oh, and another thing that I find, if you want to get around all the uh cuts, then you just call it emergency legislation.
Now, I'm not sure somebody said we declared the census money as emergency legislation, uh, even though we've known it was coming for 200 years.
So it's not that hard to declare something emergency so you can get around caps.
Right.
Uh that's why we needed a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution so these games can't be played.
Right.
That's what you that's Congressman Louis Gomert from Texas, a sharp guy.
Uh uh, and uh should really should never have voted for the Boehner bill that went to the we all knew this was coming.
We all knew this was coming.
Look at all the outs for spending.
Emergency declaration here.
OMB, friend of the president, don't issue a report.
No enforcement mechanism.
Emergency legislation is how they get around paygo.
Folks, I gotta take a quick time out.
You sit tight, and we'll be back before you know it.
Don't go away.
And we're back, Rush Limbaugh and the uh excellence in broadcasting network.
Now, the CBO, uh, ladies and gentlemen, uh try to make some sense out of this.
The Congressional Budget Office will score the Bush tax cut continuation as an expense.
Because remember the way the CBO works.
It is asked questions a certain way and answers questions it is asked.
You can get any answer you want out of the CBO.
They can only score things they are given.
So if they're asked to score the Bush tax cuts expire, what happens?
They give you the answer.
If the Bush tax cuts are extended, what happens?
They give you the answer.
Permanently extending the Bush tax cuts will cost five trillion dollars.
Now, right there we're shafted.
A tax cut which generates revenue is called a cost to the government.
A benefit to the people is a cost to the government, and we can't have that.
Now, let me tell you something else that folks that concerns me here.
The left wants the polls to say that this grand bipartisan bill has gutted government spending.
They're doing this in the context of talking about the Tea Party winning.
No, no, no.
Before you just stick with me on this now.
They the the left wants the polls to say that this grand bipartisan bill has gutted government spending.
It's all part of the Tea Party winning.
The left will embark on an all-out effort to declare the debt ceiling elevator deal as a Huge cut in the size of government.
Government haters win, blah, blah, blah.
So when the economy continues to implode, and it will by design, this is a campaign year.
It is a presidential election year.
They are going to portray this as a massive cut in government.
You've seen it.
That's why everybody's talking about it being a big win for the Tea Party.
That's why Snerdley came in here and asked me how I felt today, because he thinks I've scored a big victory.
That this deal's a big victory because all this spending is cut.
There aren't any tax increases.
Well, there are no spending cuts, and there are big tax increases no matter what happens.
The Bush tax cuts expire, tax increase.
If they are extended, the commission's gonna have to make up the money, tax increase.
Emergency procedure, what have you?
Plus, we're gonna get the tax increases from Obamacare.
So no matter how you slice it, taxes are going up.
There hasn't been a significant cut in spending, nothing that's reducing the rate of growth of government, nothing that's making it smaller.
So, this is the point.
When the economy continues to implode, and the deficit keeps skyrocketing.
Guess what Obama gets to say in his reelection narrative.
Quote, we tried slashing government spending.
I went along with it, but it didn't help.
Can we all agree now?
Finally, that the rich will have to pay their fair share.
Can we all agree now?
That we're going to have to raise taxes on people making 200.
We've tried, we tried cutting, it hasn't worked.
That's what I fear or see coming down the pike as part of Obama's reelection narrative.
Back after this.
Okay, this hodgepodge of a first hour of busy broadcast excellence in the can.
And we're here making the complex understandable.
Somebody has to do it.
I'm happy to be the one.
Sit tight.
We'll be back before you know it.
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