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Aug. 22, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:39
August 22, 2011, Monday, Hour #2
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Yes, great to be with you.
Direct from our EIB compound in far northern New Hampshire.
It's not like the Obama compound and Martha's Vineyard or the Kennedy compound or those Massachusetts compounds.
If you've got a Massachusetts compound, you get Valerie Jarrett and Carly Simon swinging by to have cocktails with you.
If you're in a New Hampshire compound, you just get staked out by the ATF.
So it's a whole other thing.
It's 2 Mark Monday on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and I'm going to throw it over now to my fellow guest host, Mark Belling.
If you have trouble keeping all the Rush Limbaugh show guest hosts defined in your mind, Mark Belling is the one with the accent.
Yeah, that's the one.
All of Rush's guest hosts are named Mark, except Walter Williams and a couple of others of us, but most of us are named Mark, and I think that's done by design.
Rush wants everyone to confuse all of us so that none of us can rise in stature and we're all going to be kept at this same level of guest hostum.
I think that's at least what the plan is.
Mark Davis is not with us.
He's being left out of this little party that we have here.
Do you ever get confused for me?
Yeah, I do.
I do actually.
I love it when I get hate mail for you.
Davis did something on Friday about Facebook and the First Amendment or whatever.
I got 85 emails either agreeing with me or disagreeing with me.
So all of the people who were agreeing with Davis, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
And I'll be doing the show again on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The ones that were wrong, I just said that I was not doing the show, that it was Mark Stein doing the program, making those stupid points.
Anyway, we're both here, and the occasion for this is you've written a book.
The rest staff came to me and said, it's really hard for Mark to talk about his own book.
Why don't you come and interview him about it?
Well, okay, fine.
Do I get paid if I do that too?
Do we both get paid?
I didn't get an answer to that question, but I do have a lot of questions that I want to ask Mark.
The title of the book is After America, Get Ready for Armageddon.
Okay, this is an upper.
This is one of those that we're going to grab and read on the plane and smile and laugh.
Give me the premise of the book.
That's a downer premise.
You're saying we're done.
You're saying it's over, right?
I'm saying it's over unless.
You don't write a book like this because you want it to come true.
If you write a kind of an apocalyptic doom-mongering thing, you write it to alert people so they'll prevent it.
But the happy ending, we are going to have to work for.
One thing I love about Rush is that he rightly recognized what a croc hope was.
Hope of change, hope of audacity, audacity of hope, or whatever it is.
Because hope asks nothing of you.
It just means you can kind of lie on the floor.
You can watch Dancing with the Stars all day long and just hope things will – leave it to Barack Obama and just hope things will get better.
And that isn't enough.
Yeah, hope was really faith.
You're right.
Faith in him.
He'll fix it.
Hope.
Yeah.
You just leave it to the magical figure to descend from the heavens and make everything nice.
And if there is a happy ending for America, and there is a question mark over it, if there is a happy ending for America, millions and millions of ordinary American citizens are going to have to make it happen.
So hope won't cut it.
If there is a happy ending, you're going to have to get out there and make it happen.
As happy as you are, though, and as jovial and witty as you are, you are a pessimist, right?
Well, I think one of the advantages that I think that we foreigners have is that we've seen all this stuff before.
It's been tried everywhere around the planet.
It's failed everywhere around the planet.
So we're ahead of the game on that.
And in a sense, I think millions of immigrants in this country, in fact, it was a Polish guy who called me up a couple of years ago on this show and said, I came here to get away from all of this stuff.
Where do I go now?
And I think millions of immigrants in this country have an advantage in that respect.
Compared to the natives, we're like the canaries in the coal mine.
We recognize the smell because we've smelt it before.
But our elitists, Mark, have been pushing us to adopt everything that's ever failed.
Whenever they try to shove, be it nationalized health care or any other kind of mandate or social, everybody else does it.
Every civilized nation in Europe does it.
That's been their rationalization.
Europe does it.
The rest of the world does it.
The civilized world does it.
The response should have been, yeah, look what happened.
But instead, we march to that same drum.
Yeah, and I think there's a difference here, too, that when we do it, we're doing it on such a bigger scale.
Because in the end, you know, if Iceland turns out a bust, it's nobody's problem except Iceland's.
When you do it on the scale of with 300 million people, when you do it on a multi-trillion dollar scale, you're inviting a scale of disaster far beyond Iceland or Portugal or Greece.
When a multi-trillion dollar catastrophe slides off the cliff, it lands with a much bigger thud than Iceland does.
And I think that's really the, I mean, you always hope when you write a new book that you'll kind of get a bit of a publicity, Philip.
And I had the day before the U.S. edition came out, I had the big downgrade.
And then the two days before the British edition came out, basically half the population of London decided to reenact chapter five of my book by burning half the capital city to the ground.
And I think that is actually the next stage of the story: that it's not, that big government is not in the end just about the waste of money, but about the waste of people.
And that's where the downgraded debt in Washington and the downgraded citizenry looting and pillaging in London actually hook up.
You're essentially saying that we're going broke and it's going to be uglier than we imagine on the way down unless we do something about it.
You've got a stat that you have in the book that just blew me away.
In fact, you have it right at the beginning.
By the year 2020, 19% of the world's GDP will be foreigners holding our Treasury securities.
That number almost can't be true.
No, it came from a fellow at the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury.
In other words, these are government officials.
They wanted to know on the present spending plans of the United States government, not whether there was enough money in America to pay for it.
This is where Marie and Warner Robbins, Georgia, is behind the curve.
Because basically, we accept that there's not enough money in America to pay for this stuff.
We're now arguing about whether there's enough money on the planet.
And these guys, these economists, including a fellow from the U.S. Treasury, say that on the current spending plans of the United States government, by the year 2020, the rest of the planet will have to sink one-fifth of its entire GDP into U.S. Treasury.
What you're saying is that's not fathomable.
One-fifth of the world's wealth would be foreigners buying up American bonds.
Yeah, and if you look at this year, for example, where the Fed has basically been buying...
That leaves 80% for the entire rest of the global economy.
20% is simply invested in American debt instruments by 2020.
Yeah, exactly.
So in a sense, we have outspent the planet.
So unless Harry Reid knows a big sugar daddy out there on planet Zongo in a distant galaxy, we are really running out of people to stick it to.
And again, I would say that this is like really why all this talk about like putting John Kerry on some big congressional supercommittee to report back to us with modifications for the Social Security Disability Program that will kick in in the year 2040.
There won't be a 2040 by then because our date with destiny is looming over the next four to five years.
Now, the subtitle is Get Ready for Armageddon.
Presuming we don't get serious about this.
Presuming we literally run out of money, that we're facing default.
How is that going to play out in America?
Tell me what you see happening.
Well, I think we will have, I mean, I mean Armageddon in a kind of semi-biblical sense, that in the idea of a few lonely citadels of civilization besieged by forces of darkness on a ruined and reprimitivized planet.
I mean, I'm talking the full thing here, because I think if you look at what's happening at the Wisconsin State Fair, if you look at some of these flash mobs, you imagine there's going to be tens of millions of people for whom there are no jobs, who will never enjoy the life the baby boomers had.
In other words, post-prosperity America, the American dream will only be used in a sarcastic sense.
There will no longer be a real thing.
Young people will be expected to be taxed to the hilt in order to pay for the, prop up the unsustainable benefits of baby boom parents and grandparents enjoying a life they will never live.
Private sector workers will be expected to work till they drop dead in order to pay for the unsustainable government union retirement packages of the woman who lived next door.
Someone like Marie who was on earlier, she works for the government, gets to retire early, gets to enjoy a 20 or 30 year long vacation.
The guy next door has to go to work at the hardware store every day until he drops dead to pay for her pension.
The nation will fracture on those lines if we don't fix it now.
You're saying anarchy.
The people are desperate.
They see that there is no hope, that they're just going to go take the money from somebody else, that they're desperate, that it's over for us as a civilized society.
I mean, is that what you're saying is going to happen on the street?
I'm saying that it's going to be a messy dissent.
If you go south of Tucson, for example, right now, you already see signs on the highways, United States interstates, where the government has put up signs saying proceed beyond at your own risk.
In other words, the sovereignty of the United States government does no, even though it's American territory nominally, the U.S. government's writ does not run on that land.
And I think that's sending a little foretaste of what it's going to be for large tracts of this land once you get deep into collapse.
That's why you don't want to go there.
Anyone who's lived this, knows what it's like to be in a declining and decaying state does not want to get mixed up in it.
So it's better to turn it around before we're in that situation.
I think you're right about this.
If you take a look at what's happening in Greece, where mild austerity measures were proposed, they're going nuts.
They're crazy.
They're rioting all over Europe.
In my own state of Wisconsin, where all the governor did was make state workers kick in for their lavish pension in health care and told them that they couldn't bargain for some of these benefits in the future.
Just doing that, not firing anyone, not taking anything away from anyone.
The level of hysteria and screaming and the over-the-top rhetoric was unbelievable.
Imagine when we get to the point we're actually going to have to take things away from people.
When people are accustomed to getting things from government, they go ballistic when they lose it.
If you lose something from your private employer, like say your job, he fires you, you walk out of the door and you feel badly.
When a family member takes something away from your parent takes something, you can cope.
When we get it from government, we simply presume we will always get it and we go ballistic when we don't get it anymore.
And that's, I think, what you're saying we're up against.
Yeah, and take things away, the words you use is a very good way of putting it.
I quote that old Gerald Ford line in the book, that a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.
But there's an intervening stage, which is what they're at in Greece and Britain and France and elsewhere, is that a government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back when the going gets rough.
So you have government workers, like in Athens, burning to death bank clerks because of the mildest of austerity measures.
You have lunatics who have been raised at state expense all their life, lobbying concrete through store windows in London to steal new iPods and Xboxes because the government is proposing the very mildest, tweakiest little tintsy-wincy cuts in those benefits.
And I think that is really the great evil of big government, that it corrodes a nation's human capital.
And it's not funny, this in a way, because it can do it in a very short space of time where you have these kind of brain-dead zombie husks who, at a certain level, understand that there's no money to pay for it, but simply know no other life than just being sustained as kind of zoo animals by government all their life.
You know, we talk about the levels of addiction and, you know, alcohol's at a certain level, pots at a certain level, then heroin, it's worse.
People who get on it can't get off of it.
And they say that crack is the worst thing of all.
After one or two times, you can be addicted.
The worst one at all is the entitlement mentality.
I think that you're absolutely right about that.
I'm Mark Belling.
He's Mark Stein.
His book.
You know, if people are mixed up enough, they might think I wrote the book.
After America, get ready for Armageddon.
I've got a few more.
The book is great.
The points that Stein is making here are brilliant and have to be heard.
We're talking about saving the society and way of life that we have.
I'm Mark Belling with Mark Stein sitting in for Rush.
You've got marks coming at you from every direction.
Mark Stein is guest hosting the program, but not right now.
I'm Mark Belling, but Mark Stein's okay with that because I'm guest hosting this program so we can talk about him and his book.
After America, get ready for Armageddon.
I know what you're up against in people buying this book.
The whole concept here is the ultimate downer that it's over, that we're done.
Who's going to spend whatever it is that you're selling this thing for?
You know, to read that we have got nothing left.
But I got to tell you, in reading the book, it reminded me one of the greatest sports books I ever read.
I think was written maybe by Jimmy Breslin.
It was about the 1962 Mets, the first year of the Mets franchise.
And the title was, Can Anybody Here Play This Game?
And it described that terrible.
Mark doesn't know anything about this being, you know, a non-American subject.
They think they went 42 and 120 or something like that.
And it was a hilarious book just describing the futility of that team and the great players who were over the hill.
Casey Sengel was the manager.
I think Gil Hodges was on it.
That's what reading your book is like.
I mean, it is hilarious.
So at least if you're right, it's kind of funny watching our excesses sink us.
How have you been able to maintain this good humor and make the thing funny?
But you know, at a certain level, there is something funny about it in a dark way because whoever comes next, whether it's the Chinese Politburo or the Mullers or space aliens poking through the rubble, they will wonder why we did this to ourselves.
And I was giving an interview about the book last week, and somebody happened to email me a story in which a deaf nudist went to a nudist convention and complained that there was no signing for the deaf at the nudist convention, because apparently it's hard to get deaf nudists who can sign for the deaf at nudist at nudist conventions.
You need a, I guess it's a non-speaking part.
Anyway, I was reading this, the outrage of the deaf nudist finding that the speech at the deaf at the nudist convention was not signed for the deaf.
And you think, this is hilarious.
This is in summer on the lawns of Europe playing croquet in August 1914 in a more absurd way.
The idea that anyone could think this is what we need to worry about when you're $15 trillion in the hole is that we don't have enough deaf nudist interpretations.
Well, you're right.
We've become a grotesque distortion of ourselves.
You talk a lot and you write a lot about multiculturalism and the whole rot of it.
But we are multicultural, but it's not just in a demographic way.
We have two societies here, one that is totally dependent, a culture of total dependence and will do anything to continue getting all the stuff they're dependent upon.
But, and there's the people that you're writing the book for, the people who listen to Rush.
There are people who get this, people like myself who are appalled by this, who are outraged by this.
We have a work ethic.
I started working when I was 16 years old.
I've worked my entire life.
I've paid my taxes way too many of them.
We hate that this is happening.
We've always felt that America is superior because we did believe that you can get ahead and you deserve your rewards if you get ahead.
We believe in a safety net, but we don't believe in this.
So we really do have two societies, and that's what's crashing together right now.
And that's why there's such bitterness in our politics.
But that's what makes it fascinating here.
There's a question, Marco, for America.
In most other parts of the Western world, this question has been settled.
If you live in Greece, the question is settled.
There's simply too many members of the government class and the dependent class.
And if you're in the tiny little productive class in between, it makes no sense you being there.
If you had a terrific business idea in Athens, the best thing you could do is buy a one-way plane ticket and get the hell out and do it almost anywhere else in the world.
To where you can make some money, yeah.
Yeah, and the fascinating thing about America is, yes, it is a 50-50 nation.
And it's not always clear, as we saw in 2008, which side's going to come out on top in that 51-49 split.
But it still is a split here.
There's still something to play for.
And one side has to lose, and one side has to win.
You're right about that's where the Tea Party movement came from.
People have tried to explain it.
That's where it came from.
It's people screaming back, saying, no, I want to save my country.
Right, right.
And that's what, and that's the only country in the world that spawned a Tea Party movement.
There's no Tea Party movement in Greece.
There's no Tea Party movement in Portugal.
The only place that people are.
It's the only country that has people care enough to try to fight back and stop this thing from happening.
And I think that's what your book really is an attempt to do.
I'm going to stick around for another segment.
Now you've got me revved up.
Now we're going to talk about this.
Mark Stein has written, After America, Get Ready for Armageddon.
It is a call to arms to save our country from being spent right into the ground.
I'm Mark Gulling.
And Mark Stein's also here.
We're double marking you today.
Kind of a Marky Mark.
Who was Mark Stein?
I'm a bit worried when they changed the intro I did.
That's really a sign you've taken out of the bank.
You think you're getting the show back, huh?
Who was Marky Mark?
Was that Mark Wahlberg?
I think it was.
You think I know that?
That's right.
He's in on Friday, I think.
He's guest hosting for.
You know, in 30 years, every guest host is going to be named Joshua.
It just was kind of a baby boom thing.
All the mothers and fathers started throwing marks around in our era.
Mark Stein has written After America, Get Ready for Armageddon.
He's really hosting the show today.
But we want to get into the themes in his book.
He's suggesting that we are spending ourselves into the ground, that it isn't just going to be a minor problem that we can solve by tweaking something that we may be over, that the American society may collapse if we run out of money.
There are some who disagree with that.
And we're going to take a call from one of them.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number at the Rush program.
Let's go to Bill and Queens.
Bill, I'm told you don't necessarily buy Mark Stein's premise, right?
No, you know, I think that we've been held back in this country so long by regulations, primarily from growing, and that there's a palpable fear in the country that it is over.
I think most people see what Mark is talking about.
And we're ready to change things, but we're being held up by the cork in the bottle that is the current administration, and the Democratic Senate.
Now, when they're gone, you know, hopefully in a year, from my mouth to Garcia, I think we're ready to take off like a rocket ship.
I think there's $2 trillion, I believe the Wall Street Journal said, that we spend in regulations alone.
I mean, that's $2 trillion that we can throw into the economy without raising a tax.
Your suggestion is that if we let the American economic engine get back to work, that there will be corporate profits and income enough that the economy can grow and we can pay our debts.
What's your response?
Let me get Mark Stein's reaction to that.
Yeah, I think it's more than that.
And I'll tell you why, because the great lesson of the modern era is that you don't need, like they do in the banana republics in Latin America and Africa, you don't need a president for life if you've got a bureaucracy for life.
The left understands that sometimes you'll lose an election, as they did last November.
But that if you see the bureaucracy, if you put it in place, that it's there in the basement growing like a toxic mushroom, bigger and bigger every day.
Now, you can have economic growth in this period, but you can't have economic growth that is keeping up with the increase in government spending.
Basically, economic growth in the modern era has averaged about 2%, taking into account increase in population.
So in other words, if you're talking about growth in GDP per capita, it's kind of the best you can hope for is really 2%.
Now, you can have exceptional periods of that, but you can't bet on that because what's going to cause that economic growth?
You can't have economic growth when you've thrown 10% of your GDP down the toilet every year just in complying with federal paperwork.
Well, let's go.
You've got to roll back millions of regulations.
You've got to privatize dozens of government agencies.
You've got to actually close down cabinet departments.
And if a Republican candidate is not talking about that, he's not serious.
Well, let me be devil's advocate here.
And I'm not necessarily agreeing with this point of view, but I want you to respond to the point that as recently as 10 years ago, we had a balanced, well, go back, the end of the Clinton administration, there actually were some balanced budgets because the economy was so booming from the 80s and 90s run-up that we were able to spend all of this money and still have a balanced budget.
What's to say that the American economy can't get back to that level, that we actually can produce enough to pay for this orgy of spending?
No, but I think that's, you can't pay for the orgy of spending.
Why not?
Because it's too much.
When you've got a $4 trillion budget, which is now the federal government's model, you can never cover that.
Just the interest payments on that will, by the beginning, by the middle of this decade, be covering the entire cost of the People's Liberation Army of China.
In other words, every listener to this show will be picking up the tab not only for the U.S. military, but the Chinese military as well.
And I think, so you can't get the $4 trillion, you can't grow your way out of a $4 trillion budget.
You can grow your way out of a $2 trillion budget.
So if we were to return the budget to what it was a decade ago or to what it was two decades ago, we can grow our way out of this.
But you cannot grow your way out of a $4 trillion budget.
I mean, when you look at the numbers, they're just stunning.
The one that I keep using, and the last time I did Russia's show back in July, $170 billion is what the government is taking in in August, and something like $305 or $306 billion is what we're spending.
That's a gap that's just off the charts, and it's all been Obama.
Even Bush, who ran deficits that were way too high, those were in the range of $200, $300 billion.
The worst one was around $400 billion.
We're now talking $1.5 billion on top of $1.5 trillion, rather, on top of $1.5 trillion, on top of $1.5 trillion.
The numbers have just gotten out of control.
The stimulus made things so much worse.
He threw all of that money away without any revenues to be able to pay for it.
It's just been in this last few years that we've just exploded all of this.
And that's why I think you're sounding the alarm.
Now, I don't think a lot of people would have bought your premise 10 years ago.
They would have presumed that growth could keep up with spending.
But what Obama's done in these last few years, coming out of a recession where the revenues were declining, is he's blown up the spending and the gap.
Now it's just terrifying.
Yeah, and I think that's the real issue here: is that when you normalize the word trillion, you basically are the sickest guy on the planet because that word is unique to Washington.
Nobody in the biggest basket case in Europe, no one is using the T word.
The trillion-dollar word is unique to Washington.
And so nobody, and so it's the actual hard dollar sums here that are a threat to us.
And where it goes, Mark, I mean, this is the strange thing that people seem to think that China, which is on course to become the dominant economic power in the world in 2016, so for example, the guy, that means, by the way, that the president we elect next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the dominant economic power.
This is a huge shift.
The idea that it is in an American citizen's interest or in the world's interest to transfer global economic leadership to a communist politburo with a peasant economy with no genuine market, no property rights, no human rights, no free speech.
The idea that you can do that and life goes on and we can all just go to the beach and watch American Idol is delusional because your money drive us.
We've always been, whenever there's a problem in the world, we've all, okay, America will fix it.
We'll step in and we'll do something.
Are we really going to expect China to take on that role?
I think that they'll just look the other way and say, let it burn whatever it is that's burning.
China doesn't care if there's an earthquake in Haiti.
China doesn't care if there's a tsunami that devastates Sri Lanka.
China doesn't care if there's an earthquake in Pakistan.
And China doesn't care if terrorism occurs so long as it isn't occurring in China.
Yeah, yeah.
They're a conventional nation-state with a narrow view of their interests.
By the way, it wouldn't hurt us to try acting like a conventional nation-state in the national interest again.
It's like this idea.
I mean, my problem with the United States is that it thinks of itself at Washington as a kind of, you know, one of those foundations that funds boring programs on NPR or PBS, that it's a kind of charitable endeavor with unlimited sums of money.
Whereas, in fact, it ought to think more like China.
It ought to calculate its national interest and advance its national interest.
The answer from the left to all of this is we can fix it all, just tax the rich.
Now, we know that that's ridiculous.
You could tax 100% of the income of everybody who makes more than $100,000 a year, and we couldn't pay for all of this.
How do we politically get past their retort to all of this, that we can take care of all of these people?
That it only exists because we're not taxing the rich.
How do you answer that?
Well, I think we actually have to reclaim the language on that because there's nothing liberal or compassionate or progressive about looting the future to bribe the present.
It's actually morally disgusting.
It's actually profoundly wicked.
And these liberals, I love the way, you know, the kind of dopey NBR liberal mentality that thinks it's nice to spend money on stuff, even if that money has not been created, even if that money is yet to be earned by generations yet unborn.
There's nothing kindly about that.
They think it's out there.
They think the rich are just hogging it.
That's what they think.
You know, that we could pay for it if the rich people just gave up a little bit of their millions.
But you know what?
The rich people have got their money out there.
The only rich guy who hoards his money is Scrooge McDuck.
If you remember, Scrooge McDuck, he used to like to get in his bulldozer and plow the dollar bills around in the warehouse.
Keep them in the warehouse, plan them around as a private amusement.
Every other rich guy is out there.
He's spending money.
He's hiring people.
He's going to restaurants.
He's ordering dinner.
He's gassing up at the convenience store.
The idea that somehow rich people hoard their money is completely preposterous.
The idea that if you take $20, let's keep it small, you take $20 from a small business in my part of New Hampshire and you give it to Barney Frank, that Barney Frank is going to do more for the economy and societal health than leaving that $20 in the guy's pocket to spend at the local sports bar or at the grocery store is completely preposterous.
Well, I think the failure of stimulus proved that.
Mark Stein's book is After America, Get Ready for Armageddon.
We're going to turn the program back over to Mark, but I wanted to give him the platform to be able to talk about some of the really, really important ideas that are in this book.
And the bottom line is that unlike these people in Europe who fled Europe when it became too much of a social welfare nanny state, we Americans don't have anywhere else to go.
What are we going to do?
Go to China?
Go to Russia?
This is our country and we've got to save it.
And the good thing about this crisis is, is that we have gotten to the point that things are so terrible that you can start making the case to people in the middle that we have to do something about it.
And Mark Stein's new book is the gospel, and we all need to evangelize.
I'm Mark Belling.
The show will turn back over to the other Mark right after this.
Hey, I've got my little ident back.
I was getting worried there when we had the Mark Belling one at the bottom of the hour because Mark Belling was only guest host.
Remember this.
He's not today's designated guest host.
He's just guest hosting for the pre-scheduled guest host.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I know he's, I know he's bugged first.
But Mark Belling will be back here in his formal official guest host role.
He'll be guest hosting for Rush tomorrow, not just guest hosting for the guest host.
So he will be here tomorrow and also on Wednesday.
And then Mark Davis will come in to take you through the end of the week.
I just want to pick up, by the way, on a point Mark made just as he was wrapping up that last segment about what happens if we don't change course.
One of the reasons that decline in post-war Europe was so agreeable is because there was, guess who there to cushion it?
The United States.
The United States, after the Second World War, became the world's order maker.
When I was on this show a couple of weeks ago, I explained that the transfer from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana was one of the smoothest transfers of global dominance in history.
If you think it's going to go that way when you change from an American-ordered world to a Chinese world, I think you've got another thing coming.
So in other words, what enabled Sweden to be Sweden and Belgium to be Belgium and Italy to be Italy was the fact that America was America.
When America decides to turn into a large Greece or a large Portugal, who is going to be there to cushion America's decline the way America was there to cushion Europe's decline?
Essentially, most of the Western world has been operating on a defective business model.
If you look at Germany, for example, the United States Army lives in Germany.
The United States Army lives in Japan.
We garrison, not as traditional great powers did, ramshackle, dusty colonies on the other side of the planet.
The United States government and U.S. taxpayers garrison some of the wealthiest societies in human history, Germany, Japan, South Korea.
When people rave about, oh, it's, oh, you often hear this when you talk to American liberals.
They love it over in Europe.
Oh, I went to Germany, and it's wonderful.
They get paid to do this.
The government gives you some money to do that.
And the government, who pays for that?
American taxpayers do, because by absolving Germany of the need to pay for its own defense, it frees up a huge chunk of the budget to be diverted into social programs.
And yet it still isn't enough, as the Europeans are learning right now.
So when you operate, when you switch to a defective business model that is only possible even in Europe to the extent that it is possible because you have the United States as the global order maker, who is going to play the role of America in the post-American world?
And if you're willing to take a gamble on that, you know, if you're willing to continue looting the future to bribe the present, none of this money exists, by the way.
None of this money exists.
Quantitative easing is simply the cyber version of printing money.
We say, oh, we're more sophisticated than those bozos in Zimbabwe.
I mean, they've actually got to, they're doing it the old-fashioned way.
They've got to actually print the money on paper and the ink's still wet when you load it into the wheelbarrow to take down to the corner store to buy a quarter milk.
We're far more sophisticated.
We create the money electronically now.
It's exactly the same thing.
We are outspending.
When 70% of U.S. Treasury debt is being bought by the Federal Reserve, the world is telling you a message that you're outspending not just America's ability to fund government at this level, but the entire planets.
And that's why you can never grow your way out of, to go back to what Bill was saying, you can never grow your way out of a $4 trillion federal budget.
It's simply too big.
It's simply too big.
You've got to get that back down closer to something like $2 trillion.
You've got to cut it in half.
And you can do it everywhere.
When you see the stupid motorcade going down, as I said at the beginning of the show, when you see it going down a dirt track in the middle of Martha's Vineyard, the 40-car motorcade, ask yourself, why couldn't it be a 20-car motorcade?
Calvin Coolidge had a one-car motorcade.
Eisenhower had a four-car motorcade.
Why does it have to be a 40-car motorcade?
If we cut it in half, could we afford it?
Could the president get by with a 20-car motorcade?
And look at everything, because when you're spending $4 trillion, but only collecting $2 trillion, that's the question you should be asking.
And the fact that we're not even asking it, by the way, the fact that we're not even asking whether we need the 40-car motorcade and we could get by with the 20-car motorcade is exactly the reason I wrote my book.
Mark Stein in for Rush, lots more straight ahead.
Breaking news from the halls of Martha's Vineyard to the shores of Tripoli.
The president is rumored to be about to break his vacation to make a statement, presumably on events in Libya.
So we will keep tracking that.
By the way, just to wrap up Mark Bellings and my conversation about my book, After America, Get Ready for Armageddon, if you go to rushlimbore.com, you will find more information on the book and how to get hold of it.
Rushlimbore.com.
You know, the great thing about going to rushlimbore.com, particularly if you're a Rush 24-7 subscriber, is that it's as if Rush is not away.
You've got lots of great audio material, lots of great transcripts.
You can immerse yourself in Rush and you don't have to be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts.
But you can also find a little bit of information about my new book out there, After America, Get Ready for Armageddon.
Mark Stein in for Rush.
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