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Oct. 19, 2011 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:55
October 19, 2011, Wednesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away today.
And this is the worst Mark Davis impression you've heard in a long time.
No, it's your undocumented anchor man sitting in.
Mark Stein, honored, honored to be here.
We don't get our own personal idents until the Obama Amnesty Bill goes through.
But once we do, you're not going to have to put up with that again.
I don't know what happened.
Mark Davis will probably object to my using his ident.
I don't know why that happened.
Someone should be fired.
What's this country coming to?
I am not Mark Davis.
I am a sinister foreign interloper, no supporting paperwork whatsoever.
I was just doing a little light lawn work at Mitt Romney's place, but Mitt said I'm running for office for Pete's sake.
I can't have a legal, so here I am.
Looking at it as Occupy EIB.
I'm not leaving until those corporate fat cats agree to pay the outstanding $267,000 tuition debt for my master's in transgender and colonialism studies.
Hey, we're live at Ice Station EIB today in northern New Hampshire.
The revolution is spreading.
I drove through the demonstrations on my way here at Occupy Dead Moose Lake and Occupy Deer Tick Notch, and I was impressed at how this unstoppable movement just started on one tiny little block in Wall Street and it's rolling across the country.
So even here in New Hampshire, we're being occupied.
They're calling for tariffs on imported plaid from teleprompters down there because I don't think there is any teleprompter in New Hampshire, though that guy who stole Obama's prompter may well be in New Hampshire by now.
So I shall certainly keep a lookout for that.
Because if I see a guy standing, you know, I believe we've got a description of the suspect HR.
What's the guy?
He's a male suspect, approximately 5'11, 190 pounds, 30 to 40 years of age.
So if I see somebody like that BA in philosophy, so if I see a guy like that standing in an empty field with a glassy stare saying, pass this jobs bill now over and over and over, I will definitely call it into the New Hampshire State Police.
What's the country coming to when Obama's prompter gets stolen as he's on this non-campaign non-tour across the country?
Last time I was here a couple of weeks ago was the morning after the Republican presidential debate the night before.
Here I am again on the morning after the Republican presidential debate the night before.
So I'm beginning to sense a pattern here.
You'd almost think that the mere whiff of a presidential debate and Rush abandons us for Mark Davis and Mark Belling and me.
But I don't know.
Yeah, we're the morning.
I'm the morning after pill.
And we're here, so we'll talk about the Republican presidential debate.
1-800-282-2882.
This was the Vegas, the Vegas debate.
What's that guy's name?
Huntsman.
Huntsman declined to participate in the debate because Nevada has moved up its primary ahead of New Hampshire's.
And so in order to show solidarity with the people of New Hampshire, he declined to join the other candidates on stage in Las Vegas and had his best debate performance yet, I thought.
I believe his poll numbers have gone up now from totally undetectable to barely detectable.
So that's exciting.
No John Huntsman on stage.
All the other guys were there.
Wayne Newton was there.
Wayne Newton was there.
Mr. Vegas.
Wayne Newton came out after the debate and endorsed Mitt Romney.
He said he came in hoping to support Rick Perry, but the impeccably tanned crooner said he thought the Texas governor's attacks on Mitt Romney were mean-spirited and that Romney was a gentleman and now he'll back Romney.
But 20 minutes later, he appeared on TV and said he was endorsing Representative Michelle Bachman.
So this seems to be, it's like these college valedictorians, the high school valedictorians, where they have 12 of them now.
I don't see why you can't endorse 12 different candidates.
And so Wayne Newton is doing that.
Wayne Newton has endorsed both Mitt Romney and Michelle Bachman.
So that endorsement is certainly worth something.
Mitt Romney, I think of him, I would say, I see Wayne Newton as more of a Romney guy myself, because in this picture, they look alarmingly, Wayne Newton looks alarmingly like Mitt's, slightly, maybe slightly older, or slightly, not necessarily older brother, but a brother who's had a bit more work done.
Mitt Romney is kind of the Wayne Newton of candidates, I sometimes feel.
But anyway, Dan Kashane, Dan Kashane, thank you for all the joy and pain.
That is going to be either Mitt Romney's or Michelle Bachman's campaign theme from the night.
Who did you think won the night?
1-800-282-2882.
We know Wayne Newton is now endorsed both Romney and Bachman.
Who would you endorse after that performance?
It wasn't a great performance from Rick Perry, I didn't think.
There has to be some historian, some scholar somewhere who can find us an example of a candidate who's come in and has imploded more totally than Rick Perry has in his six weeks in the public spotlight, but I cannot think of one.
He has this line that I like that he uses all the time, that he's the son of a tenant farmer.
I like the way, by the way, he gives the impression.
He's got like five or six lines and he just sort of assembles them in random order when he's asked about something.
But the one he keeps going about is he's proud to be the son of a tenant farmer, which was, wasn't that a Dusty Springfield hit in the 1960s, Mike?
The only man who could ever reach me was the son of a tenant farmer.
I love that song.
Maybe we can dig that out later.
And I thought one of the more slightly surreal aspects of the debate was in the question on foreign aid, foreign aid, when Mitt Romney essentially said he was in favor of outsourcing foreign aid to the Chinese.
He did make the point that we borrow money from the People's Republic of China, then to give it to Uganda and to Rwanda and to Chad and wherever.
And he thought there was something to be said for simply eliminating the middleman and letting the Chinese pick up the tab for America's foreign aid budget direct and give it straight from Beijing to the Rwandans and the Sudanese and the rest of them.
So that was the kind of policy innovation of Mitt Romney.
I forget what the direct quote was.
I think he said, I think we ought to outsource foreign aid to the Chinese, which seems reasonable.
They're foreigners, so they'd be much better at it.
They've got an advantage on us.
So that was the big development on the Mitt Romney policy front.
I must say, oh, one of the, by the way, it's the little things in this.
It's the little things in this.
You know, Rick Perry was asked about the border fence, the border fence in Texas.
And I found this fascinating because it's a perfect insight into what's wrong both with the United States in its present condition and with the level at which this debate is being conducted.
Rick Perry was asked about the border fence, and he said, sure, you can build a fence, but it takes anywhere between 10 and 15 years and $30 billion, he said, during the debate.
He said there's a better way to do it.
Why does it take 15 years to build a border fence in the 21st century?
Why?
Why does it take 15 years to build a border fence?
What's the reason for that?
You know, I don't want to outsource everything to the Chinese, but the Great Wall of China was built between 220 BC, before Christ or whatever they, what do they say now?
Before the Common Era or whatever you meant to say, the politically correct term.
The Great Wall of China was built between 220 BC and 206 BC.
In other words, 14 years.
took 14 years to build the Great Wall of China.
And it's, and it's, well, yeah, well, no, they didn't.
It was pre-Cat.
It was pre-Caterbolia.
You're right there, HR.
They didn't outsource it.
It wasn't to, you know, you didn't have to apply for stimulus funding or whatever.
So they got it done in nothing flat.
220 BC, boom, they're cutting the opening ribbon, 206 BC, 14 years, start to finish.
Why does it take Rick Perry, why does it take the United States 15 years longer than it took to build the Great Wall of China?
Why does it take longer than that to build a border fence in the United States of America on the southern border, which speaking from my corner in northern New Hampshire, that's the short border, by the way.
And you can't get it done in less time.
That's the problem.
Why do we accept that?
Why can't the superpower put up a wall, put up a fence in less time than it took to build the Great Wall of China?
Well, yeah, there's obviously it's got to go through the environmental impact study.
Yes, that's true.
There's all that that they didn't have.
I don't think they had an environmental impact study back when they put the Great Wall of China up.
But maybe that's something else.
Maybe they could build a Great Wall of Texas along the Rio Grande.
And instead of just outsourcing foreign aid to the People's Republic, we could outsource the U.S. border fence to it.
Rick Perry's other great idea was that we should have unmanned predator drones on the southern border.
It's not just for Waziristan anymore.
He wants unmanned predator drones on the southern border.
You know where they've already got unmanned predator drones?
Did you know this, HR?
got unmanned predator drones on the northern border, right?
They've got unmanned.
This was the Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Incompitano.
She announced that last year that they were having unmanned drones, unmanned drones patrolling the northern border.
The same guys who sort of fly over and zap entire Waziristani villages so that Obama doesn't have any embarrassing problems with capturing people and figuring whether he's going to detain them at Gitmo or try them in a courtroom in Manhattan.
They get their way around that problem by obliterating entire communities in remote parts of Waziristan with unmanned drones.
Well, that's the thing.
Janet Ncompetano thinks the threat is from the northern border.
So they got these unmanned drones patrolling the 49th parallel.
Not far from where I am right now, by the way.
Derby Line, Vermont, the border runs through the middle of the town library.
I forget which order it is, but something like fiction is in the United States and non-fiction is in Canada.
So if you're in the town library at Derby Line, Vermont, and you look up over the fiction shelves, you may just see an unmanned predator drone hovering, hovering over fiction A to D, ensuring the national security of the United States.
Why does it take this?
I'm not a Ron Paul fan, and I'm not a Newt Gingrich fan.
I don't think these candidacies are going anywhere in any meaningful sense.
But they were the only guys there who actually got to discussing these issues in primal terms.
Ron Paul was the only one who used the word broke.
He's rightly pointing out that why are we, in effect, subsidizing German social programs 66 years after the Second World War?
We're broke.
We're broke.
He's the only one who used the B word, broke, broke, broke.
We have to.
We've got $15 trillion of debt.
We have to pay back $15 trillion just to get back to being broke.
That's what we would be, if we paid back $15 trillion, we would still be broke, but we'd be only 17 cents broke.
Ron Paul is right.
There's something faintly unreal about the complacency of both the questions and some of the answers in this debate.
So I'm not a Ron Paul fan.
He's an isolationist.
I'm not an isolationist.
I'm not a Newt Gingrich fan.
I can't see any rationale for his candidacy other than that he's doing it to bump up his public speaking fees and all the rest of it.
But these are the only guys who are actually talking about the issues in primal terms.
And it's something's very wrong when only Ron Paul was prepared to use the B word, broke word.
We're broke.
Broke, broke, broke, broke, broke.
And there's something faintly surreal about seeing as complacent a debate, aside from all the little snippy, snippy, snippy stuff between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.
The meter on the public conversation needs to be a lot further along in some of these debates.
We'll talk about that, and we'll talk about lots of other aspects of today's news.
Mark Stein in for Rush, 1-800-282-2882.
Mark Stein, in for rush on the EIB network, 1-800-282-2882.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, as the Republican candidates snipe at each other on stage in Las Vegas, horrifying, horrifying Wayne Newton with their mean-spiritedness, the president continues his non-campaign non-tour on his Canadian bus, his armored Canadian bus.
The Canadian bus was in Boone, North Carolina.
And the president, as it's reported here, cooed over a baby at a general store.
Was that the baby he picked?
I haven't seen any guy pick up a baby like that since Michael Jackson dangled his over the hotel balcony at whatever it was at the Dorchester Hotel in London a couple of years ago.
And then the president stopped at Reed's House Restaurant near the North Carolina-Virginia border to shake hands with the lunchtime crowd.
It's good to know they've still got a lunchtime crowd at Reed's House restaurant.
One man told the president he was in the funeral business.
That's important work, Obama told him.
Yes, indeed.
They're both in the same line of work, really.
Obama is the undertaker-in-chief, carrying out America by the handles.
It's good to know that he recognizes a man who does fellow important work as he does.
So the president's tour is continuing.
He's warned, he's warned that the opponents of his half-trillion dollar jobs bill.
By the way, this is another half trillion dollars that we haven't got because we're broke.
As I said, we have to pay back $15 trillion just to get back to being flat-busted broke in the affordable range of broke.
Just to get back to having no money, we have to pay back $15 trillion.
But the president wants to add another half trillion dollars to that, and he warns that opponents of his half trillion dollar spenderholic bill will risk a public backlash if they reject proposals that would stave off teacher layoffs and boost hiring to fix aging public infrastructure.
Are you concerned?
Is there much of a public backlash against teacher layoffs?
He keeps promising.
He's got this line here where he says the Republicans don't want to put teachers back in the classroom.
I don't even know why.
Why aren't they in the classroom now?
Are they all down at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration?
Like the California teacher who got fired for saying that it was all the fault of the Zionists?
I don't know why there aren't any teachers in the classroom, but when they all get back from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, they'll be heartened to hear that when this jobs bill goes through, they'll get another raise and they'll be able to retire at 48.
The good news is that Harry Reid says even if states aren't laying off teachers, they are going to receive the money for not laying off teachers anyway.
In other words, so if your state, if you're in one of these spenderholic states that hasn't laid off any teachers or public sector union workers, you're still going to get your share of the half trillion dollar of federal money that doesn't exist for not to compensate for laying off those laid-off teachers.
Even if you haven't laid off any laid-off teachers, you'll still be getting the money for laying off the teachers.
That's how it works.
So states could, states all around the nation can pledge not to lay off anybody, and Washington will still give them their share of the half trillion dollars for laying off workers.
That's how it works.
It's that easy, folks.
Another half trillion dollars that we haven't got.
By the way, by the way, do you really think it's actually in the interests of a vast continental power of 300 million people for something such as teacher layoffs in 15,000 school districts for the precise degree of teacher employment necessary in those districts now to be regulated and subsidized from a central authority in Washington?
Do you think that's going to do anything to get us out of the multi-trillion dollar hole this nation is in?
Or is that just more the same?
Barack Obama, warning that Republicans are going to face a backlash if they stand in the way of his plan to put teachers back in the classroom.
Because that's what we need.
More teachers back in the classroom, fewer teachers out at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.
Fewer teachers like that school district in Atlanta where they were all spending time at each other's homes taking the eraser to various incorrect answers and writing in the correct answer in order to get their no-child left behind funding.
He's going to put an end to all that and we will have more teachers in the classroom.
And Jolton Joe Lieberman.
Jolton Joe Lieberman says the president's plan to pass his jobs act in bite-sized pieces is not going to work.
When you look at the president's jobs act, even if you break it into bite-sized pieces, it's spending money we don't have and you've got to raise taxes to pay for it.
And to me, all that just makes the job of the debt reduction committee.
Is that still around, by the way?
The Super Friends Super Congress Super Committee, is that still working?
Are they still in business?
They've got a report back by the year 2040 on raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67 or whatever.
So good luck with that.
But Jolton Joe Lieberman says we don't need bite-sized pieces.
We need one great big bill that is going to give a real jolt to job creation.
In the meantime, as Barack Obama says, funeral business is important work.
If you're in the undertaking business, this is a great place to be.
More straight ahead.
Yes, great to be with you.
And Rush will be.
Sorry about that.
Somebody stole my teleprompter.
Great to be with you.
Rush returns tomorrow.
And I'm taking your calls.
If you've got a candidate you think emerged best from the Republican debate in Las Vegas last night, maybe two.
Maybe you're like Wayne Newton and you decide to endorse both Governor Romney and Congresswoman Bachmann.
Maybe you've got two.
We'll go with that.
That's how easy it is.
You should be able to write in two candidates when you vote in November, I think.
If you've got a favorite candidate, one you think emerged best from last night's debate, give us a call.
1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Steve in Lawrence, Kentucky.
Steve, you are live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Hey, love the show today, Mark.
It's fantastic.
Great to hear you always on the show on Russia's show.
I really appreciate it.
Well, that's great to hear, Steve.
It's an honor to be here.
As I said, I could be doing lawn work for Mitt Romney, but it's great to have this opportunity.
I'm really enjoying it.
I did have two words for you, though, on building that fence.
It would take 15 years because of union labor.
That's right.
The Ming dynasty in China didn't have to worry about that.
Invading hordes and everything else, people were just jumping at the chance to build a wall.
They're not really jumping at a chance down here.
And union labor, you know, with Barack Obama, anything over so many millions of dollars has to be union labor.
And you've got the union people saying, well, let's not work so fast, guys.
We've got to make this last.
We've got to hire on your children and your grandchildren to help build this fence.
That sort of thing.
That would be the problem, Mark.
Yeah, that's true.
But it's actually, it's fascinating to think of it in those terms because I'm just going off the top of my head here, but my memory is that the Great Wall of China is about 5,000, it's either 5,000 kilometers or 5,000 miles long.
So it's actually, no, I think it's 5,000 miles.
It's 5,000 miles long, the Great Wall of China.
So it's longer than the Canadian border.
But yet we still, even with union labor, you would have thought.
But basically, would it take them that long now to build a Great Wall of Massachusetts along the Rhode Island border?
Basically, you'd be looking at three decades for that, too, wouldn't you, basically?
Steve.
That's just how it is.
Oh, marvelous, marvelous.
So that's the problem right there, by the way.
Rick Perry, if Rick Perry was a conservative, he'd want to know why it takes 15 years to put up a wall on that southern border.
And you shouldn't.
How long is the southern border, H.R.
Yeah, 5,500 miles for the Great Wall of China?
That's 5,500 miles.
That's longer than the Canadian border.
That's the Canadian border and halfway over to the Irish coast.
And the Chinese could put that up in 220 BC in less time, in 220 B.C., in less time than it takes the Obama administration to do it with union labor to put the Great Wall of Texas up on the Rio Grande.
That's your problem right there.
And we need to start taking that stuff seriously, by the way.
Because if you take 15, if you can't put up a fence, we're talking about a fence.
We're not talking about a great wall here.
And even if you electrify the fence like Herman Kaine wants, how long does that take?
I mean, that's like these things they have.
Yeah, you could have a wind-powered electric fence, couldn't you, H.R.?
I think that might be the answer.
So you'd have wind turbines.
So if they place the ladder on the fence too high, they just get it sliced up like they do in those condor cuisinarts out in the California desert.
Those great rusting, unused wind turbines you see when you drive out from Los Angeles to Palm Springs that aren't good for anything except for slicing up all California's ornithological life.
And that's the problem right there.
It takes 50.
When Rick Perry, Michelle Mulkin had a great piece on her website a couple of days ago about the unconservative inclinations of the candidates on stage in these Republican debates.
And we know some of the obvious ones, like Mitt Romney with his Romney care plan and all the rest of it.
But when a candidate stands up and says it takes 15 years to put up a fence, he shouldn't accept that.
It doesn't take 15 years to put up a fence.
When the Chinese put up the Great Wall of China, they had pressing needs to put up that wall in a hurry.
And the United States government has a pressing need to secure its southern border.
Why should it take 15 years?
Why do we accept that it takes 15 years?
That's the soft bigotry of low expectations, as a previous Texas governor once remarked.
Let's go to Lisa in Chesterfield, Virginia.
Lisa in Chesterfield, Virginia.
You're live on the Russian Board Show.
Mark, Haig, good afternoon.
A pleasure.
I want to crack open a pine guinea if I hear you.
So I just wanted to call, we're in Chesterfield, Virginia, where President Obama is today.
And didn't get a whole lot of national press, but the event here, like the other two in Virginia for today, they're all closed to the public.
So you cannot go to Obama's presentation at a firehouse today.
But a county or two over, Louisa County, where they had the earthquake the end of August, they actually wrote a letter to the White House.
Governor McDonald wrote a letter to the White House and asked Obama on his coach tour to stop in Louisa County, where they were turned down for FEMA assistance because of the earthquake damage.
And the president said no.
So he is not going by the county.
They were very specific.
They said it wasn't for political purposes.
They wanted disaster relief for FEMA to revisit the area.
And he said no.
And his event today is closed to the public.
So it makes absolutely no sense besides an absolute marketing campaign to push his re-election.
So he takes this armored Canadian bus and the 40-car motorcade, which is apparently necessary now when the citizen executive of a republic, a small government, visits towns in his own country.
He takes his armored Canadian bus and the 40-car motorcade to visit a small town, and then no citizens of the small town are allowed to go to the event.
Is that how it works, Lisa?
Correct.
Correct.
Well, I certainly hope that he's hired union members of equity or other acting unions to appear at these events with him, because I think it would look terrible if he were just to just to leave it to random White House staffers.
So I hope he's at least providing work for unemployed actors who can play local townsfolk when he appears at the firehouse in Chesterfield.
He's not, is he going to be picking up any more babies while he's there, Lisa?
I tell you what, we're an Army family with five, and we're near my five.
How's that?
So I don't think so.
But, you know, the sad thing is, is who is his audience?
If it's closed to the public, who is his audience for an event like that?
It's just such rubbish, frankly.
It really is just a marketing campaign.
And frankly, he should go back to the Oval Office and actually try to be a leader and do something, get something done, accomplish something in his term.
He is accomplishing something.
It's the Barack Obama show, and you and everybody else are just extras in the Barack Obama show.
And if you apply to go through the rigorous background checks, they might let you in there to stand behind him with a glassy look on your face, droning hopey changey.
And four more years, four more years, these people are saying.
They were suckered once in 2008, but that's no reason not to get suckered again.
Lisa, thanks for your call from Chesterfield, Virginia.
She's got five kids, but she doesn't want to let Barack Obama dangle any of them.
He was doing the old Michael Jackson dangle over the hotel balcony thing with that kid yesterday.
I thought, I'm not an expert in childcare, by the way.
I just play one on the radio.
So if you are an expert in baby holding, do feel free to call me up and correct me.
But it looked a very strange way to hold a baby.
I mean, you know, I normally just, when mine were that age, I normally just strapped them to the roof of the pickup truck, and that normally kept them quiet.
Or you had to remember to take them off there if you went through the drive-through lane at McDonald's because otherwise they tended to get a bit bruised.
But they didn't mind otherwise.
Mark Stein in Farush, 1-800.
282-2882.
We're talking about last night's Republican debate.
And I thought most candidates had actually a pretty good night apart from Rick Perry.
And I thought the crowd were terrific.
I love the way they cheered, and they cheered stuff they like, and they booed stuff they didn't like.
And I thought they were much better than the taciturn Yankees or effete Dartmouth College professors or whatever they were who were at the last New Hampshire debate, who just sat on their hands all night for Charlie Rose.
Charlie Rose moderated that one.
Anderson Cooper moderated this one.
And I don't know whether you've seen, do you know who Anderson Cooper is?
He's got one of these unwatched shows on CNN, and he's now got an unwatched daytime show as well.
His unwatched daytime show had a fascinating feature, I think it was yesterday or the day before, on whether the cell phone you're using has fecal strep germs on it.
And he went and Anderson Cooper had his own cell phone tested by Sanjay Gupta, and it turned out to have fecal strep germs on it.
So you're thinking, my God, how low can a man go?
He's so desperate for work, he'll do this lame fecal strep cell phone feature on daytime TV, the pitiful things people are reduced to to making a living in the Obama economy.
And then you see he plunges further into the abyss by having to host the Republican debate.
You've got to feel sorry for Anderson Cooper's debate, for Anderson Cooper's career.
But I thought most of the candidates, apart from Rick Perry, had a good night.
If you still think Perry is the guy, I'd be interested to hear from you because he's got to do something.
He's had his whole approach to his disastrous debate performances in previous weeks was to go negative this time.
And the tone he pitched it, he pitched it wrong.
They were booing him last night.
This is the guy who was the great white hope of the Republican Party only a month ago, and they were booing him last night.
If you're still a Perry fan, call me up, 1-800-282-2882, because I'd love to know why.
Mark Stein in Farush, lots more to come.
I think I said the Ming dynasty had built the Great Wall of China, which shows what I know.
I think it's the Kin dynasty.
I get my Chinese dynasties or dynasties.
Yeah, Chinese vases.
I get my dynasties mixed up.
It's always that way with dinner.
You have one dynasty and you want another one 10 minutes later.
But I think it was the Qin dynasty, not the Ming dynasty.
We were just talking, HRD was just talking about Herman Kane's 999 plan, which I always like the name of, actually, because 999 is what they use for 911 in the United Kingdom.
If you want to call for an ambulance, you dial 999 rather than 911.
And America could certainly do with calling for an ambulance right now on our present numbers.
And he's come up with a plan for that.
I think it would be better, actually, as a 911 plan with lower rates.
And I'm not, I'm wary, although I generally believe in consumption taxes.
I'm wary about a national sales tax or a national value-added tax because if you give, as Michelle Bachmann pointed out in the debate, once you give a new tax, introduce a new tax.
They always say with taxes: okay, we've got tax A and it's 40%.
So, if we introduce tax B, it'll enable tax A to come down to 20%, and tax B will be introduced at 5% and will never go higher.
And then, the next thing you know, once they've got two taxes they can raise, oddly enough, both of them manage to go up.
And I think the idea that you would introduce, you can't bind, you can't bind government now and forever into the future.
So, Herman Kane can talk about his 9% VAT rate, but if he were to introduce that tax, you can bet it wouldn't stay at 9% for long and it would start going up pretty quickly.
But Herman Kane is right to attack the tax code in this country because it is disgusting.
It's absolutely disgraceful in a free society that people on relatively low salaries need professional help in order to complete their tax.
Nobody knows what the tax code is.
There is no correct answer.
You can say, I earned $40,000 a year.
What do I owe in taxes?
I earned $100,000 a year.
What do I owe in taxes?
And there is no correct answer to that.
You can take it to 12 different accountants and they will give you a different answer.
More than that, you could take it to 12 different IRS agents and they would give you 12 different answers.
Because when a tax code is that big and that unwieldy, there is no correct answer.
And that's disgusting, by the way.
They always say ignorance of the law is no excuse.
When the tax code is as big as the United States tax code is, you can't but be ignorant of the law.
And that's why fundamental structural reform is critical if this nation is to survive.
It's not difficult.
But Herman Kane, on that front, is the only one who's actually proposing something that gets to fundamental reform.
As he says, the present tax code needs to be blown up, needs to be bombed into confetti and to fall like confetti across the fruited plane because it's an abomination.
When a tax code is that big, you are no longer a free society.
And the IRS, by the way, has far more powers than equivalent revenue agencies in other Western countries because they don't just freeze your, if they decide out of the blue, one of those IRS agents decides that you paid $7,833, but in fact, they ran the numbers and figure it should be $8,012, they can freeze not just your bank account, they can freeze your wife's bank account, they can freeze your kids' pocket money.
They basically have huge powers, and you have no means of knowing what you owe without professional help.
And I think that's simply inappropriate in a free society.
The other thing I think I would like to see more of on that stage is a correct attitude to the money that's being spent.
The spending, getting rid of the massive wasteful spending that confronts you at every level.
There's a story from the Washington Times.
A man living as an adult baby is cleared of Social Security fraud.
This guy was in the news because Senator Tom Coburn called for a benefit review because this man likes living as a baby.
He likes lying around, going to sleep in a crib, wearing a diaper, and being spoon-fed by a woman who play acts as his mother.
I remember this from, I think it was about 20 years ago in London.
It turned out there was some club that specialized in this, and that various, I think it was members of parliament and other prominent persons, liked to go there for lunchtime and climb into a diaper and a onesie and be spoon-fed applesauce by their play acting mother and lie in a crib.
And then they'd get up an hour later, put on their pinstripe suit, and go back to Parliament and vote in some new spending measures.
And say what you like about that, but those guys were at least picking up their own tab for that.
This is not a disability, it's a fetish.
But under the government, the present government of the United States, this guy gets paid.
He gets paid by you.
He gets paid by taxpayers under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which isn't called the Americans with Kinky Fetishes Act, but that's what it is.
The Americans with Kinky Fetishes Act now covers, now pays this guy.
He receives taxpayer-funded supplementary security income payments because he likes to play act as being a baby and wearing a diaper.
That's the state of the nation, the waste of the nation.
More ahead.
The University of North Dakota looks like it's going to retire its fighting Sioux nickname in an age of political correctness.
I don't know what happened.
The Sioux, maybe the Sioux decided to sue.
I don't know.
But at any rate, the Fighting Sioux decided not to fight back after the Sioux decided to sue.
Mark Stein in for rush.
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