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June 28, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:46
June 28, 2012, Thursday, Hour #2
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And welcome back.
Rush Limboy here behind the golden EIB microphone at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program 800-282-2882, and the email address Lrushbaugh EIB net.com.
I checked the email during the break, and some people ask me, do you really mean when you say our freedom of choice just met its death panel?
Yes, I do.
Our last caller, who uh mentioned the precedent set by this, had it right.
Even if this is repealed, if if if any tax increase that's happened in the past is repealed, the precedent has still been set now.
The court got out of the way.
There are no limits, folks, on what can be taxed.
Because this essentially is the federal government being granted the permission to tax behavior.
This is the federal government being permitted to tax choices that you make if you don't make the right one.
So essentially, your choice now costs you.
In the case of health care, you must buy it now.
The Supreme Court said that the Congress did not have the power to mandate that you buy health insurance.
The Commerce Clause did not permit that.
But that doesn't matter because the Congress can tax you.
They can make you buy anything now and call it a tax.
If they want to make you buy broccoli.
If you don't, you will pay a penalty.
If if someone passes a law, somebody signs it into law that everybody has to eat broccoli.
You might think that that's an extreme example, and it's only extreme in the sense you don't think anybody would ever mandate something like that, but we're here.
So our income is taxed.
Well, I don't have to go through the list, you know, everything is taxed, but now behavior is taxed as well.
There are no limits.
Even if Obamacare is repealed as a result of the election in November.
And don't forget, you know, the uh uh the Tea Party came into existence because health care was passed.
It was the passage of Obamacare that led to the Tea Party evolving from the grassroots, effervescing from nowhere.
Every day, ordinary American citizens fed up already with all of Obama's spending, all of his other tax increases.
Then health care came along and it was passed in a very unorthodox way that went against the grain of most people's sense of how things get done in this country.
And then after it was passed, the Democrats spiked the football and walked all through the Capitol in that giant gabble.
And then they made up lies about being spat upon and having racial epithets shouted at them.
And so the Tea Party was born.
And it led to all of those town hall meetings, and it led to all the union violence at some of these town hall meetings.
And the question now is just to what extent will history repeat itself.
In terms of the Tea Party expanding.
And if it never did go away, the Tea Party never went away.
The left hopes that it did.
The left tried to tell themselves that it went away, but it didn't.
It just transformed.
It started as a protest movement, and now is eventually a grassroots movement designed to find nominees and then get them elected.
And it's having pretty decent success.
But now it's going to re reenergize even more.
And November 2012 stands to be an even bigger repeat than what November 2010, the midterm elections.
Well, I would not want to be A Democrat.
They may be temporarily happily, they may be spiking the football and so forth.
But you're going to see more of them declining to go to the Democrat convention.
You're going to see more of them declining to be campaigning side by side with Barack Obama.
This is just going to make the Tea Party boil.
Look, I'm in the tea business now.
I'm a tea expert, and I happen to know what happens when you boil tea.
It gets stronger.
That's how you make it stronger.
You boil it, you steep it, you leave it in the hot water, and it gets stronger.
And that's exactly what is going to happen now.
It's happening even now as we speak.
But despite all that, the precedent, the caller had it exactly right.
The precedent has been set that there is no limit on what the government can tax.
In fact, the court went looking.
The court went mining for a way to make this possible.
The notion of a limitless expansion of the power of the federal government was affirmed today by the Supreme Court of the United States.
And that's why there's so much spiking the football on the left.
And that's why there is such happiness, because they know what this decision ultimately means.
When the federal government has the power to tax behavior, there's no end to what can be taxed.
And that's what Obamacare was always about from the get-go.
Obamacare is not about health care for the uninsured.
It's not about improving health care.
It's not about insurance.
It's about the limitless expansion of the federal government and the federal government's ability to exert behavioral control over the American people.
And the reason they sought health care as the vehicle for that is that you can virtually tie any expense, any behavior to health care expense.
You can tax the way people eat.
You can tax whether or not they exercise, whatever old wives' tale you believe about health.
And I just ask you to consider all the things that you've heard the last 30 years.
Things that you should eat and shouldn't eat that'll prolong your life or that will curtail the length of your life.
Imagine the federal government having the power to tax all of those things.
Just use the oat bran example.
20 years ago, oat bran was the single healthiest thing you could eat.
Imagine the federal government, some wacko liberal at the FDA or at Health and Human Services, then deciding, because some research survey has just said oat brand will make everybody live 10 years longer, mandating and everybody go eat it, and you don't?
And you don't.
Why do you think there are what is the numbers?
Is it 4,000 or 16 new IRS agents?
Whatever, it's thousands of them.
Why do you think that's part of this bill?
That's a pure police force enforcement mechanism.
And that's what health care has always been.
Obamacare has always been a stealth way for behavioral control over the American pit.
16,000 new IRS agents.
During the 2010 campaign, during those midterms, the Democrat National Committee told all of its candidates to avoid mentioning Obamacare.
Don't talk about it.
It was such a negative.
They can't avoid talking about it now.
And they're going to be forced to lie about it, and they're going to be forced to blatantly lie about it, and they're going to be forced to lie about it in ways in which the American people, a majority of, know they're being lied to.
They know that their premiums are not going down.
The American people know that they're not going to be able to keep their doctor.
The American people know that they're not going to be able to keep their current plan.
The reason is that Obamacare specifically ultimately destroys the private sector insurance market.
Will eventually shuffle everybody off to these state exchanges run by the federal government.
And it won't be long before the only place any of us can go for health insurance will be a government office.
Whether you like your doctor won't matter.
Whether you have your plan, your business, if you get your plan through your employer, it is not going to be long if this isn't repealed.
It's not going to be long before your employer takes advantage of the opportunity to pay the fine rather than the premium.
Because that didn't change the fine for the first two to three years, the tax for not buying it, much cheaper than the policy.
By the by design, employers will offload the responsibility of health insurance to the state exchanges.
That was always in the cards.
That was always in the plan.
Obama told his union buddies back in 2007.
I know we'd like to get single payer as quickly as we can, but it's going to take ten years.
We've played that bite.
It's going to take ten years to get there because we're going to have to do it piecemeal and incrementally.
Otherwise, there'd be a revolt.
You realize, uh folks, according to this precedent that's set by the court today, you could say that a carbon tax is now constitutional.
You could say, because this is a massive precedent.
You could say that a tax on having more than one child would now be constitutional, because the court has said there's no limit to what the government can tax.
Don't be buffaloed and fooled into thinking this tax increase was tied exclusively to health insurance or health related matters.
All that really has happened here is that the court told the government it can't make people buy things under the Commerce Clause, but it can with the tax code.
It's as simple as I can make it.
They can't use the Commerce Clause to make you buy health insurance or whatever else they want to make you buy now, but they can levy a tax on you for not buying it.
So what do you do?
You don't buy what is commanded to be bought if you don't do what is commanded to be done, and if a fine or penalty or a tax has been set up, these 16,000 IRS agents eventually will find you.
That's essentially what's happened.
That is the massive precedent the previous caller was talking about.
That's what has been established here.
This must be what Obama's meant all along when he's talking about tax reform.
Simplest way I can think of to have people understand this.
Court says you can't use the commerce clause to make people buy health insurance, but you can tax people who don't.
Well, why stop at health insurance?
If you are people that believe in massive federal power and love the exercise of massive federal power.
And when it's all done under the guise of social justice and fairness, it's all done under the guise that the rich have everything they want because they've been able to steal it from the poor.
Now we're going to make them give it back.
Am I health care free now, Mithra Limbaugh?
Am I health care free?
Hey!
Gotta take a brief time out.
We'll come back and get more of your phone calls in on this when we return.
Don't go away.
Let me repeat something I just repeated because I checked the email list and people that um believe it.
I'm blue in the face saying this too.
So for those of you who have heard it and understand it, please indulge me.
If your small business, if you are a corporation, major corporation.
Let me put it, let's say a different way.
You are an employee, small business or a big company, and you have your health insurance via your employment.
The president went out there today and said what all nothing's changing.
You get to keep your doctor.
If you like your plan, you get to keep it.
No, because here's why.
What was upheld today was the concept that you must buy health insurance or pay a fine for it.
Just not under the Commerce Clause.
And the way that was arrived at was a tax on behavior.
If you refuse to buy, there is a tax.
Now, as the law is written, the tax for not buying health insurance is much cheaper than the cost of a policy.
So if you work for a business, large or small, that wants to save money, and which business alive today doesn't because of the economy, if that business has an opportunity for the next year or two, maybe three,
I don't know when the numbers change, but certainly for the next two to three years after implementation, if the fine is eight or nine hundred dollars, the cost of an insurance policy for an employee is five thousand dollars.
What are you going to do?
You offload coverage and you say to the employee, sorry, I've got no choice.
I have to stay in business.
I'm paying the fine.
You're on your own.
Now you can go to the state exchange down there at the uh at the government office, and you can buy health insurance from them.
And you can try to get into a pool there, but it makes no sense any longer for us to offer these expensive policies.
Now that's not the case for the entire length of the of the law.
It's very seductive.
The fine is much, much cheaper than the cost of a policy, but only for two or three years.
Maybe four.
At that point, they catch up with each other.
Because the thinking among the people who wrote the law is it'll only take two or three years for businesses to offload their health care coverage as an employee benefit.
Then it all evens out.
And then the fines for not having a policy get larger than the cost of a policy.
That's this is all written into the law.
And it's it happens in in uh in elements.
It's uh it doesn't all happen in one year, but as each year goes by, the fine goes up.
But for two or three years, it's much lower than the cost of the premium is.
Then they catch up with each other, and then the fine overtakes the cost of the premium.
All of this is by design to get people out of the private insurance market.
Hill.com, CBO.
CBO report says health care law could cause as many as 20 million to lose coverage.
This was from March 15th of this year.
As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-provided coverage because of Obama's health care reform law, said the CBO, precisely for this reason.
This is also where the discussion of jail time the discussion.
In the original bill, there was a possibility of jail time with the fine.
And I remember Pelosi was asked about this.
And she thought throwing people in jail for not having health insurance was very fair.
Because she believed in the incentive staying out of jail to cause people to go out and make sure they're insured.
I don't know what this decision has said about that.
I it's 194 pages, and I haven't talked to anybody yet who's read the whole thing.
I haven't read it myself.
I just have got the PDF file, but I haven't obviously had a chance to uh to go through it all.
But that 20 million figure, by the way, that the CBO is admitting to is very low.
It's gonna be m many more than 20 million people who will lose employer provided health insurance and who will then be forced to go elsewhere to get it.
And if you don't, if you don't, there's the fine.
Let me grab Michael here, Tom's River, New Jersey.
Thank you for waiting.
You're next on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hey, hello.
I see something here.
This is Barack Obama's George Bush Senior Read My Lips moment.
As far as the taxes go, because that's what it's sold at.
Now, for the very same people that the Democrats claim to always want to lower taxes and keep taxes, you know, tax the rich, but don't tax the uh poor people.
These people who voted for Obama are now going to be the ones who are going to be taxed.
And if the IRS gets on your can, they don't let go.
These people don't know what they're getting into.
But but wait now, just a second.
I'm not trying to throw cold water on it, but none of that's going to happen between now and November.
This stuff that you're talking about doesn't kick in till 2014 by design, after Obama has already run for re-election.
This is going to be up to the Romney campaign to explain this to people.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
The Republicans need to jump on this now.
They can get the young vote, the college kids, who they can't seem to get a job.
Do they realize once they're 24%?
That's exactly their insurance.
They got problems.
That's exactly right.
They're running into all the student loan debt.
They're facing consequences of that.
They now know what debt means.
Some of them are running into as they get the little small business going in app uh app development, application development for uh computers, smartphones, and so forth.
They're finding out all the regulations they face.
That's a great opportunity, there's no question.
But Obama is gonna say that the tax, oh, yeah, there's some taxes, the rich.
He's millionaires.
That's who's gonna be paying to make sure you get your health insured.
That's what he's going to say.
the next few months.
I want to go back to the Groovyard of forgotten favorites.
It's...
Our archives.
By the way, one thing I should I think this is important.
It doesn't mean anything now.
It does not have the force power in anything, but the four judges, justices who dissented, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy, made it plain in their dissent that there was nothing constitutional about this act.
They found nothing in it.
They plainly said in their dissent, the whole thing should have been tossed out.
You can't have a greater divide than what we had.
You've got these you get the four libs who's it's never even considered that they might change their tune.
And you know, the chief justice, who we we know now, I think is a creature in the Washington establishment.
Uh a creature of the notion that government is the center of the universe.
It's pretty obvious.
But the four justices who dissented, they didn't even want to get into the idiosyncrasies of the majority opinion.
They found the whole thing tossable.
Now I want to go back to March of 2007.
We've played this bite before.
If you haven't heard it, I want you to hear it.
Nothing has changed.
It's Barack Obama speaking to employees or union members, the service employees international union.
The unions want and wanted single-payer health care, national health care, government pay it all, government provide everything.
They wanted it overnight.
They've wanted it for a long time.
Here's Obama.
He's campaigning for president.
This is during the um the primary, the run-up to the primary, trying to get their votes.
He's trying to tell them he knows what they want.
He's telling them he knows and he agrees he wants what they want, but he's telling them how it must happen.
My commendment is to make sure that we've got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president.
I would hope that we kind of set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort.
But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's going to be potentially some transition process.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
These are the people he doesn't lie to.
These are the people he tells the truth to.
Union people.
His number one donors, supporters.
I'm going to get universal health care by the end of my first term, but we're not going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
I want to.
Eliminating employer coverage is the key.
Getting rid of you having health insurance through your job, that's the ultimate goal.
It's what he was telling them five years ago.
He told them we can't do it overnight.
It's going to take some time.
And the reason for that is that if people find out what we're, there's going to be opposition to it.
We have to structure it in such a way that the people have no choice in the matter.
We have to structure it in such a way so that turning to the government is the only option they've got.
And that's why the fines, i.e.
the taxes, are much lower starting out than the cost of the premium.
They want people to pay the fine.
They want young people and others to pay the fine rather than buy the policy.
They want employers to offload their coverage.
They want this.
That's why the fines are so small at first to make that happen.
That way, when it happens, guess who you end up hating?
You hate your employer.
You get mad at your employer.
And guess who you end up loving?
Government, your savior, your salvation.
Your mean, rotten to the core employer canceled your coverage because he doesn't care about you.
All he cares about is profit.
And he saw a chance to offload your health program in instead pay just a cheap little fine.
Didn't care about you, didn't care about your family, about your health care, only cares about himself.
But then there's a light way down at the end of the tunnel.
And it's the light of Obama.
And even though your mean, rotten to the core boss decided to cancel your health insurance, guess who's there to help you out?
Government.
And you at the end of this process are to be thanking God for government.
Because without government, you might get sick and die.
Or you might get sick and go bankrupt before you die.
That's the plan.
It's how they think.
It's how they strategize.
And it's the plan that has been implemented, and now it has been found constitutional.
And the way they get there is the power now to tax what you don't do.
And that is by health insurance.
This is taxing your behavior.
Whatever they want to end up taxing in the future.
No more complicated than that.
No limits.
I asked Snerdley as just a little exercise during the break.
I said, hey, Bo.
Stop and think for a minute.
Tell me what are the federal taxes that you pay right now.
Uh let's see, income, right?
Uh property.
No, nope, those are state, local.
Oh, yeah.
Uh see, income.
Uh.
Well, you got user fees out there at the national parks.
Yeah.
Uh, gasoline, yeah.
Uh point is it's not a whole lot.
And it took an amendment to the Constitution to authorize the income tax.
Took an amendment to the Constitution to authorize the income tax.
Just to put into perspective what's happened today, without a constitutional amendment, the government can tax anything now.
Not just your income and not just the sleigh riot at Jellystone Park.
And not just gasoline, not just a user fee for walking into Yosemite or whatever.
Now, my friends, it's your behavior.
Whether Obamacare is tossed out, repealed or not.
Now a lot of court experts.
By the way, here's the dissent quote.
Kennedy said he and the other justices in the minority wanted to strike down the entire law.
In our view, the entire act before us is invalid in its entirety.
That's Justice Kennedy.
The entire act before us is invalid in its entirety.
This is the first time I think I've ever agreed with a Kennedy on healthcare.
Now a lot of court experts are saying that the dissent actually reads like a majority opinion, but with criticism of the actual majority tacked on at the last minute.
In other words, the dissent, these are just this again, this is speculation.
These are these so-called court experts looking, they're now reading both opinions.
And they said, this dissent sounds like it was the majority opinion.
Like it started out as the majority opinion.
And some of these court watchers are now saying it looks like Roberts was somehow convinced to switch sides along the way.
That is just gossip interesting for the sake of it.
Thank you.
But back in May, there were rumors floating around the relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold a mandate.
And that's all they were.
They were just rumors.
I don't know who was applying the pressure.
I don't even know if it's true.
Just it's just gossip.
This is the kind of stuff you can expect a lot of.
In the aftermath.
Yeah, you what do you mean no?
Well.
Well.
Okay, Snerdley reminds me.
You're talking about Leahy.
Senator Leahy went to the floor of the Senate and did you might say threaten Justice Roberts.
There were senators that went to the floor.
It was unprecedented.
There were really intimidating things said.
We reported on them this week, in fact.
Intimidating things said about and to Justice Roberts.
And I remember the reaction, ah, he's not going to care about that.
Rush, come on now.
It's the Chief Justice Supreme Court.
That stuff happens all the time.
But the the you probably will see it intensify as the afternoon and evening wear on that Roberts switched.
This is a theory.
Remember now, everybody.
Everybody thought the mandate was going down.
Everybody did.
The media was, in fact, the media was writing stories on what a worthless court this was.
Roger Simon and Politico.
There was really intense.
All last week and uh early in this week.
Everybody thought it was history.
That's why there was utter shock to it.
By the way, this wasn't the only decision.
Are you ready for this?
The Supreme Court struck down the Stolen Valor Act today.
Do you know what the Stolen Valor Act is?
This is the Supreme Court just said it's perfectly fine to lie About medals and awards that you received in combat.
Supreme Court today struck down the Stolen Valor Act, saying that the First Amendment defends a person's right to lie, even if that person is lying about awards and medals won through military service.
In 63 decision, Supreme Court justices said today that as written, the stolen valor act is too broad and ignores whether the liar is trying to materially gain anything through his or her false statement.
That would make it more kin to fraud.
So if your neighbor starts running around saying you got the medal of freedom, medal of honor, the purple heart, whatever, perfectly fine.
He can go make a fake medal, he can hang it around and perfectly no problem.
Now if he tries to make money off of well, no.
He can still do it.
The justices said that only if these liars were trying to profit materially would they have struck down the law.
But the First Amendment gives them the total right, the freedom to lie about.
I know.
You can literally go out of you can make it up.
Purple Heart, Medal of Freedom, Medal of Honor, what whatever.
Is it if see if you out I don't know, there might be hope for Sandusky depends.
I don't know if they if they legalize pedophilia or not.
We'll have to wait and see if it's in the healthcare bill.
Gotta take a break.
We got more of your phone calls coming, folks, on the other side of our obscene profit timeout here.
When I said court watchers earlier, I should have cited it's uh it's a blog.
The uh Volock conspiracy.
There's a blogger who is uh talking about the pressures that were put on uh John Roberts uh uh to change his vote.
And they've they're analyzing this and and uh uh through much of the um uh dissent, they got Scalia referring to the dissent, and there were notes that that uh Ginsburg was writing the dissent.
I remember reading earlier in the week that Justice Ginsburg was writing the dissent.
That the clear impression from court watchers was that the mandate was struck down, and now there's a theory evolving that somebody got to John Roberts.
I I really even hate passing this on.
When I say somebody got the John Roberts, that one of the one of the guesses is Obama's public uh assertions that the court was going to marginalize itself and uh become irrelevant is something that people are speculating might have influenced Roberts, not that somebody threatened him, but I don't want anybody putting words in my mouth.
I'm just it's just going around a blog uh and it will probably be amplified on as the uh as the day uh goes on.
Mike in uh New Brunfield, Texas.
Welcome, sir, to the EIB network.
Hello.
Yeah, honor rush.
Hi.
Um, you know, one of the problems in this decision is the same problem we have with uh personal income tax.
The the winning justices stated uh people of a certain income will have to pay.
And I I I read that as if you want to be lazy and not work and stay home, you don't have to pay that you're gonna be covered.
This is the problem that we have.
Um, you know, Congress may have the right to tax you, but they don't have the right to discriminate against you, and all this stuff about taking more money from one person, giving it to another is a form of discrimination, is a form against your civil rights.
Who says?
Uh the Constitution.
Constitution When did that start mattering?
Well, the const the Constitution says that they have to tax us equally.
Now, I had this argument with a Harvard attorney.
Happened to be my attorney.
Wait a minute, they don't tax us equally now.
I know.
Well, listen to this.
My this Harvard attorney said, Well, don't you think 30% is equal?
I said, No, 30% from somebody that makes a million dollars is not like taking 30% from somebody that makes ten or five because they just want to be lazy and stay home and watch TV.
But the Constitution says it has to be the same.
He went, hmm.
I said, and if the government believed that, why do they only pay you back what you put into Social Security based upon what you put in there?
Wait, wait, wait.
Uh having a constitution doesn't say anything about equal taxation.
Yeah, it says you have to be the tax has to be equal amongst the states and the people.
But not expressed as a percentage.
Well, what we should have, Rush, is a fee.
Well, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute.
You're making assertions that aren't true and then jumping off to um, you know, what what what would you like to uh to be the to be the case?
Uh I think what you're talking about is equal protection under the law, uh, which does not mean equal tax rates from people.
That that that is a political argument, single payer.
But the whole notion the rich ought to pay more, uh that's that's been around since I don't know, they were taxing stones for the pyramid.
Anyway, I gotta I gotta take a break.
We'll do that, be back right after this.
Don't go away.
It doesn't matter as to the outcome, whether or not Chief Justice Roberts was intimidated and threatened.
But it does matter.
I mean, finding out conclusively won't change anything.
But it will be quite eye-opening for people if it is established that the public intimidation of the Chief Justice by Obama, by senators and so forth resulted in a changed vote.
That will devalidate the court in terms of people's respect more than any decision could, whatever it would be.
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