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July 6, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:43
July 6, 2012, Friday, Hour #3
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Is it possible Al Gore was right?
I'm just kidding.
I mean, it is really hot.
I'm from Milwaukee.
My birthday is the 4th of July.
I mean, we're not used to running the grill when it's 95 degrees.
I was at Miller Park for a baseball game.
My birthday afternoon was 100 degrees at the field.
That's Milwaukee, not Scottsdale, 100 degrees.
Now I'm here in New York.
The weather's followed me here.
It's like 95, 96 degrees here.
Just to make sure Al Gore wasn't right.
It's not very warm right now in Europe, you know, warm here.
That's what the media does, though.
When it's really, really hot, they'll jump on people and start saying, see, climate change is going on.
Climate change is going on.
They'll never do that when we have more normal weather, and they never will focus on global warming in the parts of the world where temperatures were actually lower.
Still, it is kind of hot.
Speaking of hot, one of the things that I wanted to do today, which is live from New York City.
It's Open Lines Friday.
One of the things I wanted to do on Open Line Friday was spend a few minutes with Russia's audience and talk about something that was resolved a few weeks ago, and that was the big recall election in my home state of Wisconsin.
And I know that the issue has sort of been talked to death, so I don't want to go back over every detail of it.
But I think I've got a unique perspective to be able to offer.
And I'm going to be joined in a few seconds by the governor of my state, Scott Walker.
However intense you may think it was in Wisconsin, it was worse.
Our governor inherited a budget mess.
It wasn't a complete nightmare, but it was bad.
For a state our size, and we're between five and six million people, we had an annual budget, we had a budget deficit of about $3 billion.
And he decided that he wanted to deal with this without raising taxes and without gutting service and without laying off employees.
So he decided to go after the benefits that public employees get.
And he realized that the core problem with those benefits and that the reason that they had gotten so obscene and the reason there were so many dirty deals embedded in government contracts was because of collective bargaining.
This was a shot across the bow.
The left reacted with ferocity for a couple of reasons.
One, government unionization is one of the core strengths of the Democratic Party.
The big government employee unions are linked in the Democratic Party at the very, very top.
It's a critical power block for them.
But secondly, they thought that Wisconsin was a state where this was going too far.
They were going to make a national example of Walker.
They were going to head off any sort of notion that conservative governance actually cutting spending, going after fat, and taking on some people who were getting the money was going to work.
President Obama early weighed in and said, I'm with you in Wisconsin.
Our state Senate, the Democrats and our state Senate left the state for a month so that they couldn't be forced to vote.
Our state capital was virtually occupied.
For a year, this went on and on and on and on.
And then they circulated petitions to recall the governor out of office.
In the end, it all failed.
He was re-elected by a wide margin in that recall election.
He's stronger right now than he has ever been politically.
The Democrats and the union movement is thoroughly beaten in Wisconsin.
And this is the key and the reason that I wanted to bring Governor Walker on.
Walker right now has the almost unanimous support of every Republican and every conservative in the state of Wisconsin.
We, our side, conservatives, have been screaming out for a Republican to get in and not just talk conservative when they're running, but to govern conservatively.
And then when the media and everybody else gets on you, instead of weaseling around and wimping out, stand and fight.
And when somebody does that and it works and he survives, it's like vindication for all of us who've been screaming for somebody else to do this.
If Romney is elected president, I think he can do it.
But it does mean that you've got to be willing to take an unbelievable amount of incoming mortar fire.
I'm joined right now by the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.
Governor, good afternoon.
Hey, Mark, great to be with you.
I'm saying good afternoon, even though I'm doing a national program because I'm kind of a rookie at the whole thing.
And for some people, I don't think it's yet afternoon, but it's probably close to afternoon.
Everywhere else, anyway.
It's hot enough to feel like it probably is about anywhere, right?
Yeah, it's really, really hot.
I don't think when you implemented your program, when you first announced it early in 2011, you thought that the response would be as vicious as it was, but you knew it would be strong, right?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, as you know, in the past, even before I was governor, I was the only Republican ever elected in Milwaukee County and took on the status quo there and got a lot of pushback.
Anytime you take on the status quo, you do that.
I knew that would be the same in state government.
I just had no idea it would get the kind of national attention it got, that you'd have Trump and the National Union leaders coming in, really going all out to try and take us out.
And in the end, you know, we said, you know, I think not only conservatives and Republicans, but a whole lot of independent voters want people.
They want leaders who are willing to take on the tough issues and then keep their promises.
And that's what we did.
And hopefully maybe it'll inspire a few other people beyond just Wisconsin and other states and particularly a few in Washington to do some of the same.
You had one big advantage in a couple.
One, you had a Republican legislature so that you were able to get the program through and you didn't have to, in order to pass your program, get the support of Democrats.
But the second, under Wisconsin law, you weren't eligible to be recalled until a year after you were in office.
That gave you the opportunity for your program not only to pass, but to be put in place to see whether or not it works.
It seems to me that whenever a conservative or a Republican proposes a reform, be it Congressman Ryan right now, with what he's talking about on the entitlement programs, or for that matter, any conservative reform, they demonize it.
And they say that the sky is going to fall in and they say that it's going to be terrible.
You know, they're always telling Granny that she's going to be kicked out of the nursing home, all of these awful things.
In your case in Wisconsin, because your program was passed in the spring of 2011 and you weren't eligible to be recalled until an election in June of 2012, the program was in place for a year.
And people saw that none of these terrible things that anyone said was going to occur occurred.
Instead, taxes went down, no teachers were laid off, budgets were stabilized, and our budget deficit, which is just killing so many other states, were gone and we have a balanced budget.
Had you been eligible for a recall earlier on and you wouldn't have been able to say, look, this thing worked, I think things might have been different.
Do you agree?
You're absolutely right.
Well, people ask right after what happened in Ohio.
And we're talking about my good friend John Kasich there as governor.
And I said, well, the difference in Ohio was with that referendum question, they got it right on the ballot.
The law, because of the way the law is, in Ohio's case, the law didn't go in effect until after the ballot was taken.
It lost.
It was, I think, outspent about 11 to 1.
And voters in the Buckeye State never got to see the benefits.
I said, if I'd had that vote last March, I might have fared the same fate as what happened with the referendum.
But a year later, people saw that our reforms saved our taxpayers more than $1 billion.
We saw our property taxes go down for the first time in 12 years on a medium-valued home.
We saw a budget deficit that was well over $3 billion now be a surplus.
In fact, we literally set money aside for the second consecutive year for a rainy day fund.
And most importantly, our reforms helped the private sector, not the government, the private sector create new jobs.
And our unemployment rate is literally the lowest it's been since 2008 at well below 7 percent.
People saw over time the reforms worked.
And all the boogeyman in the world wouldn't matter when you saw your taxes went down, when you saw for people like Tonette and I and other parents who have kids in public schools like our kids are in, our schools in many cases were the same or better.
The truth trumps, and as long as we got the truth out, we knew we'd win.
One of the things, though, that you did was that you gutted the power of government unions.
They can only bargain now on wages, and even then, they're capped to a number that's near the cost of living increase.
You've essentially gutted government unionization in Wisconsin.
That's a hard thing for a lot of people to swallow.
But the fact is, is that it works.
Do you believe that other states are going to be willing to do that?
And are you willing to defend the notion that public employee unionization really is a bad thing that is at the root of all of these problems?
Well, I think there's no doubt about it.
And that's not just the conservative idea.
Think back years ago.
President Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that.
You're talking about being in New York.
Mayor LaGuardia talked about that.
They understood there's a difference between public and private sector unions.
In the public sector, there had been a vicious cycle where the taxpayers were out of the loop.
And what we did was stand up and take the power away from a handful of special interest leaders in the unions and instead put it back where it belongs in the hands of the taxpayers.
And I think there's no doubt when you see the significance because it wasn't just our election which got the most attention, but on the very same day, in two very blue parts of the United States, in San Diego and San Jose and California, in those communities, those municipalities, the voters passed referendums to change the pensions there as well.
You cannot ⁇ I mean, it's just to the point where you compare it to what everybody's gone through in the private sector.
You can't sustain government, be it at the state or at the municipal level, unless you get a control out of these out-of-control benefits.
And these are the sorts of things that, not just for Republicans, but I think for a lot of discerning Democrats, recognize if they don't get it under control, there's not enough money that can be raised via taxes.
It's going to bring down the states and it's going to bring down the cities.
And I'm just glad that for my kids and someday my grandkids' future, that ultimately we're in a state where we got things under control.
Have any Democratic governors contacted you or through intermediaries, their aides or supporters, contacted you in the past few months?
Trying to learn a little bit here?
Well, no, they have not directly, because as you can imagine, you saw what they tried to do to me.
You can only imagine what they tried to do, that power base in the Democrat side.
But I'll give you an example not of a Democrat governor, but the Democrat who's the state treasurer in Rhode Island very aggressively sought to take on some of the same pension reforms because she knew from a different perspective.
I like to save money and put it back in the hands of the taxpayers as both consumers and entrepreneurs because I think that's the real way you stimulate the economy.
She had a different view.
I give her credit for taking the issue on, but she wanted to use it for more spending on social programs.
But again, I think it's one from either end of the spectrum.
Realize if it's just getting burned up, if it's just getting like a virus eating up more and more of your budget in a way that's not productive, it's an issue on either side.
But I think for others, you know, Deval Patrick signed a similar in Massachusetts where they did just collective bargaining for local governments for health care, and he was very quick to say, I'm not Scott Walker, even though the irony is the legislature passed something that was not entirely like, but in some ways very similar.
I think you're going to see other governors and other mayors creep that way, but they're going to be quick to try and say they're not me.
The reason I ask the question is there are all sorts of states right now that have terrible budget gaps.
And in many cases, it's because the pension obligation is as terrible as it is.
But in Wisconsin, you didn't change the pension benefit.
What you did is you made the employees kick in for them, but you got the savings in other places by doing away with some of the abuses of collective bargaining.
In other words, the pension benefit was able to be preserved in Wisconsin.
This can be done in other states, but it means getting rid of the collective bargaining.
And that's where I just think for political reasons, they don't want to bite it off.
But if the public employees understood they'd be able to keep their pensions, if we simply dealt with some of the excesses of collective bargaining, that would be different.
Look at our, you know, Wisconsin's neighbor to the South, Illinois, right now.
They're in a total mess.
The pension system's threatening to eat them up.
But the Democrats who run that state simply cannot bring themselves to deal with the collective bargaining question.
Right.
That's the great irony.
If you're someone who's not necessarily pro-public employee union, but pro-good public employees, if you support good, hardworking workers who are productive, what we did is actually very beneficial for those good workers out there.
They understand that now in the future in our state as well as in our schools and our local governments, we get to pay for performance.
We get to hire and fire based on merit.
We no longer have seniority and tenure.
We can instead put the best and the brightest information.
Without collective bargaining, you can pay some employees more than others.
If you need to get rid of somebody, you can keep those with less seniority.
All the workplace rules are changed.
I want to hold you over after the break because I want to change our focus for a moment here.
And I'm going to ask you to give some advice to Governor Romney as he's running for president because you staked out a very, very strong position.
And we all know what happened.
But the reality is that you're stronger politically in Wisconsin than ever because it all did work.
So I want to get a couple of answers from Governor Walker on his advice for President Romney and whether or not the Walker approach could work nationally.
My name is Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
It's Open Line Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
We're going to get to your telephone calls.
But I've got a couple of additional questions for Wisconsin.
Governor Scott Walker, the governor of my state, who has been through a remarkable 16-month period and survived stronger than ever.
And the reality is that the Democratic Party in our state is shaken.
Their public employee union base is now broken, and member after member after member is dropping their membership because they don't think the union can do anything for them.
They aimed at Walker's head, and they missed.
And you know the old saying that if you're going to take somebody on and you don't take them out, they're going to emerge stronger than ever.
I want to ask you a couple of questions about Governor Romney.
Do you believe a lot of people, and I think his staff believes, that they can win the presidency by saying, we're not President Obama.
We're competent.
He's not.
Do you think that's enough?
No, I think it's got to be a combination.
I mean, I think back, granted, I was only 13 two days before Ronald Reagan was elected president back in 1980, but I think it was a combination between a referendum back then on President Carter's failed policies.
Certainly, I think all of us who were around back then remember the famous line, are you better off today than we were four years ago?
But we also remember more than three decades later that Ronald Reagan stood for limited government, lower taxes, and a strong national defense.
And that was clearly ingrained in voters' minds as well.
And I think you've got to make the case that we need a change, which I think is fairly self-apparent.
Just look at today's job numbers, and I think Governor Romney was right.
It's a big kick in the gut.
But I also think he's got to do more of what he did today, and that is lay out a very, very clear strategy for how he's going to get the nation's economy back on track by putting the people back in charge again and by tackling the big budget crisis that the president's failed to act on.
By laying out the strategy, though, it gives the other side something to attack.
The upside to it, though, as you saw in Wisconsin, is that if you win, you can claim that you have a mandate to implement your changes.
If Romney wins and doesn't make it clear that he's going to go after certain things that may be politically unpopular, I don't think he'll have the same fallback that you had.
Don't you think he's got to be willing, whether it's aggressively abrasing the Ryan plan or whatever he intends to do with entitlements, he's got to lay out some of his controversial ideas now so that he has the ability to implement them, presuming he does win.
Well, I think it's important not only for him, but I think starting with places like Wisconsin where we're going to be able to pick up a Republican Senate seat that previously was held by a Democrat, and I think that's one of a number that will help us win the United States Senate as well.
If you have the House, if you have the Senate, you have the presidency.
You remember this from what I said in Wisconsin, but I said about a week after I met with all the Republicans in the Assembly and all the Republicans in the Senate, and I said it's put-up or shut up time, meaning voters gave us a chance.
They completely changed from Democrat control to Republican control because they wanted us to do something.
And I said, if we're just a little bit less bad than the other guys, two years later, they're going to put somebody else in charge.
And thankfully, most of the new Republicans, the new wave that came in helped us out.
And my hope would be the same thing would be true here.
But I think it gives you a roadmap for success.
If you say, hey, I ran on this, this is what the American people say they wanted.
This is what we're going to do.
And then you do it.
I think it not only helps you get things done.
I think it makes your case even stronger for reelection.
So I think going big and going bold is good for him.
And I also think Governor Romney's capable of that.
I mean, think about it.
His experience as a businessman, his experience as the executive who turned the Olympics around, which were poised to be a national city.
That if he puts a program out there, he'd be able to back it up and sell it and deliver if he's elected.
We're up against the clock, but I want to thank you for joining us.
I speak to Scott Walker on my local program all the time, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to share.
My pleasure good to be with you, Mark.
I'm perspective on Rush's program.
Thanks, Governor.
I get this all the time from people that I meet around the country.
How did Walker do it?
I think, as you just heard, it's not as complicated as people want to make it out to be.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
I know Dr. Walter Williams yesterday celebrated 20 years of sitting in for Rush.
I don't know how long I've been doing it.
I think it's pretty long.
And the reason I know it's pretty long is I remember I was doing a segment and some idiocy came from some liberal state.
It might have been California where.
And I was making fun of California or wherever it was.
And a guy called up, probably from California, and saying, who are you to talk?
You have Russ Feingold from yours.
And he was right.
My state's been governed entirely by liberals as well.
And those of us in Wisconsin who've been in the wilderness for so long, I mean, both of our United States senators forever were Democrats, Democratic governor who served two years.
We are just trotting around like proud turkeys with our chests all puffed out.
We've got Paul Ryan, we've got Scott Walker, we've got Ron Johnson, and it has been a true privilege to be able to watch them fight the fights that they've been fighting and see some successes.
I mentioned briefly going into the last break, when I meet people from around the country and I'm in a horse racing partnership, I'm just always taken aback by how much people in other states knew about what was going on in Wisconsin.
I was just at a cookout with a friend who had a couple of his relatives from out of state in, and one of them, well, you know, I had a chance to meet Scott Walker at an event a year ago.
I was really impressed with them.
They all knew about this.
In the same way, after Chris Christie came in in New Jersey and he came in before Walker in Wisconsin, when he put in his reforms, and while his style is different from Walker, very pugnacious, more in your face is Christie, the reason he became a hero for so many conservatives is you had the sense that this was a person who was going to not only talk the talk, a lot of Republicans do that, but walk the walk.
And we've been dying for that.
Just not only say it, try it.
Do it.
It will work.
You hate to keep going back to Reagan.
Reagan said if you lowered tax rates, that you could create an economic recovery.
He was right.
Reagan said you could bring down the Soviet Union.
He was right.
When conservative ideas are actually put in place, they do always work.
And the left is always forced to move on.
But that position of getting there and getting through the incredible backlash when you try to implement it, that becomes the roadblock that stops us.
It stopped President Bush W when he came up with his plan to try to privatize a portion of Social Security by creating private accounts.
People got the heebie-jeebies over it.
Had we done it, that problem, that part of the entitlement problem would be solved for us because it would have worked.
We just didn't get the chance to get there because the backlash was so strong that some Republicans got weak knees.
Walker did have the benefit of large Republican majorities and his base just backing him up saying go forward, go forward, go forward, don't stop.
Anyway, this is Open Line Friday, even though I have refused so far to take a call this hour, and that's going to change right now.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number on the Rush program.
Let's go to Clemens, North Carolina.
Brian, it's your turn with Mark Belling.
Thanks, Mark, and I appreciate you continuing the good work of the EIB Institute.
Thank you.
The thought I had, and I'd love to get, I actually have two that I'd love to get your response to.
And I've been reading through Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom, and thinking about where we are in terms of this regime having really total control of the economy.
Thinking of Germany where they had 53% of GDP, Chile with the Yendy, and 73% with 75% of GDP.
And I know the last figure I heard was it's 25% of GDP, but I'm thinking with the Affordable Care Act.
It'll go up.
And that 25% is a record for the United States, other than perhaps during wartime.
Yeah, and I'm thinking of Frank Dodd with how that's paralyzed small banks to lending and thinking of how broad the bureaucracy is and how much control they have in other ways.
How close are we to them really having de facto control of the economy right now?
Well, whenever conservatives say that Obama is a socialist, the media smacks us down saying that's ridiculous, that's ridiculous, that's ridiculous.
Well, socialism is essentially state control of an economy, the state providing most services, the state dominating and overwhelming an economy.
We're getting larger and larger.
Look, the key to all of this is to see how he did stimulus.
While there were some public works projects, the majority of the money went to governments, either to hand out to nonprofit organizations or for them to do more hiring themselves.
His inane comment of a few weeks ago when he said the private sector is doing just fine, it's government hiring that's in the tank, implied to him that we need to have even more people working for government and government even larger.
That's the real problem here.
We are an economy that has been set up.
All of the measures we have, the growth rate, everything else, is based on private sector economic activity, either American citizens in their own private lives spending and investing, or private sector American businesses growing and making decisions.
But we've become an economy where government is controlling everything.
And the mistake Obama has made, and it's a mistake that I think sometimes Republicans make, is that they presume that government can fix everything.
Well, the economy has a problem.
Government must do something.
Government must stimulate, or worse, Bernanke with the beard, there, well, I'll just expand the money supply again.
We'll keep printing more money.
We'll do another operation twist.
Well, we'll buy some of the long bonds and sell some of the short bonds so we can keep interest rates at a manageable level.
This has been all government, government, government, government.
What we need to do is create a scenario that allows the private sector to go out and invest in its own.
And that means the government largely getting out of the way, lowering the regulatory barriers, move out of health care rather than more into health care.
Can I say that?
Yes, you can.
Let me make one more point about this.
The point I was making is that every measure we have that we use to see how we're doing, the stock market, the growth rate, whatever, is based on the private sector.
But our country is run by people who don't believe in the private sector.
It'd be like a McDonald's being run by a vegetarian.
It wouldn't work.
Yes, you were going to say it.
Well, you mentioned citizenship.
And I was just thinking about that in relationship to how collectivist, redistributist socialists run things.
Their whole intent is to make us, as Hayek said, or as serfs or the other ideas, just subjects.
And how, you know, what people need to understand, these people that are willing to support a regime like this, is that, and Thomas Sowell talked about this really well with intellectuals and society.
You know, there's an infinite number and permutations of values in a country this size.
And the idea that a regime is going to be able to manage all that and dictate what's best for everybody is absolutely insane.
Thank you for the call.
The point that he makes, and he got a little bit wordy there, obviously, is valid, though.
It's a really good point.
And that's the problem with Obamacare.
Well, you can argue forever, does this mean government would be running health care?
When government creates and manages exchanges, and when government says that every insurance policy has to be the same and has to cover A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, when government makes that dictate, it's controlling it and running it.
The whole problem with every socialist system and the problem with what we have going on in the United States right now with so much government spending is that you can't spend more than the private sector is able to generate an income through taxes.
And they are outspending what the private sector can produce.
And every time you expand government, it's a greater burden on the private sector to make ends meet.
And the private sector is pretty much saying, we're trying, but we can't keep up with all the spending that you're doing.
You can get bored with these numbers.
Well, government is now 25% of GDP and all of that stuff.
So I'll just simplify it.
Government's too big for this country.
We don't have enough money to pay for this.
It's one thing to have a social welfare state in Europe when your entire national defense is being carried by the United States.
When we're bailing out everybody, buying their products and supplying their military, for a while you can run with a government as big as they've had it.
Even now they've gone bust.
But there's nobody to bail us out.
We need to do two things, lower the amount we spend.
But the second part has to be talked about, too.
We need to have more economic growth so there's more money going into Washington, not by raising taxes, but because income and profits are up so the people are actually sending more in because they're doing better.
Those are the two formulas for which we can get out from this.
But Obama not only is not serious about reducing the spending, he's done everything in his power to put a damper on the economic growth that he needs to close the deficits that he created.
Atlanta, Georgia, and Jim, Jim, it's your turn on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Mark, it's an honor to speak with you.
Well, don't talk to me.
I just wanted to pass on to you regarding the Liberal Post, CNDC.
They posted a huge article today about Europe, which will basically undermine everything we're attempting to do in North America.
And they're pretty much running out of options.
In fact, they lowered their interest rate to almost zero yesterday, the European Central Bank.
And they have no options left.
It's a very deep article.
Well, long article.
I mean, well, Bernanke's tried it in the United States, and they're talking again, well, we'll lower interest.
I don't know how you can lower interest rates any lower than they are.
The 10-year bond in the United States is 1.6%.
Anybody who's trying to make any money through savings, they've been tapped out of the market.
The problem isn't borrowing costs.
The prime rate is still, what, 3.75%, 4% somewhere in there?
The problem isn't borrowing costs.
The problem is that American businesses right now don't have the confidence to go and expand yet.
They keep playing this interest rate game, which is making paupers out of anyone who needs to live on interest, but the rates themselves haven't stimulated anything.
Look at the housing market.
You had people who were going out there and buying at the top when mortgage rates are higher than they were right now.
But this idea that you can just keep expanding the money supply, printing money and making money free with low interest rates, if that was going to work, it would have worked.
It doesn't work.
It's not worked for a long time.
Even Milton Friedman was one of those who believed that you could manipulate interest rates to help out the economy.
And I think that what we've seen over the last few years is that low interest rates are a result.
They're not something that can cause really anything.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Bo Snerdley challenges my thesis on interest rates.
He says he's of the opinion that you can't stimulate anymore because they're already as low as you can get them.
I think you're right.
Clearly, if interest rates were at 7% and you went to 5%, that would create economic activity.
When they're microscopic and they get even more microscopic, you know, you're barely going to move anything at all.
I think better put, my point would be this.
I would rather have higher interest rates with pro-growth economic policies in place than low interest rates with policies in place that are aimed at just deterring economic growth.
A pro-business government with higher interest rates is better than an anti-business government with money-free.
And I think we're seeing that really everywhere right now.
Okela, Florida, and Nick, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
I really enjoy when you fill in for Rush.
Thank you.
You know, Herman Cain has an 888 plan, which I really believe in.
I stand behind and support.
But what happens is I have an idea for the private sector to cure Social Security and Medicare.
And it's called 20-20-20.
If you enter the workforce when you're, say, 16, for the first four years, you just learn how it works.
But from the age of 20 to 40, you are not only earning, but you're investing for the future.
And I'll tell you what, that future is coming.
From the age of 40 to 60, you basically from the age of 60 to 80, you're going to become responsible for the health and welfare supplemental to two other people.
They may be your parents.
If you're not going to be able to do that, this is all kind of utopian.
Huh?
Don't you think that that's kind of utopian?
It would be wonderful if everyone did that, but we live in a world in which so many people have been given the promise by government that we will take care of you.
You don't have to give anything to anyone else that will carry you all along.
And that huge social welfare structure that we have in place is really, really hard to get rid of.
What you describe is essentially the way life used to be in the United States.
Exactly.
You get into the workforce, you learn a trade, you earn some money, you set some money aside, and when you get older, you've got enough not only to care for yourself, but to leave for your kids.
What we have now, though, is a society in which government has taken away that role from being the provider of all of this.
Instead, it's going to be government and not the individual citizen.
And we have so many people that the rest of us are carrying.
That's what a giant welfare state can create.
Thank you for the call.
Let's go to Yuma, Arizona, and Bubba.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, Mark Bubba here.
I'm a 70-year-old man living in Yuma, Arizona, right on the Mexican border.
And I just read in the paper the other day that our unemployment rate is 29.6.
Where are these people getting this 8.2?
Well, that 8.2%.
You are right.
The 8.2% number is extremely misleading.
It doesn't count any of the people who have given up working.
It doesn't count any of the people who have chosen not to seek work at all.
And then in your area, the whole employment numbers are screwed up by the illegal immigration problem, where some people who are working aren't counted because they're off the books, but others who are not working are also not counted because they're under the radar and not here illegally.
You've got all sorts of people who are working.
Anybody who lives in a big metropolitan area knows that this number is a myth and it's manipulated all the time.
That's why the failure to get any improvement in it at all is so scary.
We have so few people right now that are working and paying taxes to support this giant welfare state that's out there.
But you're right.
The numbers are not an accurate reflection of how many people who aren't working in the big cities, particularly those with a large minority population, many of the unemployment rates are well beyond double digits.
Even the actual rate right now is artificially low because of the number of people who've left the workforce.
The report that I indicated earlier, and it said that the unemployment rate would be 10.9% if the same percentage of Americans were in the labor market itself as when Barack Obama became president.
He's literally driving people not only out of work, he's driving them not to seek work.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
Openline Friday, what a hoot.
We covered a lot of territory today.
Why we stink at tennis?
Why Obama's destroying the economy?
We have the guy with his 2020-20 plan that isn't, is that still on TV tonight, 2020-20?
Is Barbara Walters, who's 90, 90, 90, still doing it?
I actually saw a promo.
I think she's going to expose whether or not heaven is real or not.
I'm not making that up.
I think that's what she said she was going to talk about.
The internet may shut down on Monday, according to the FBI, this malware threat.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.
And finally, this, the story about the guy in Miami who got fired and now is offered his job back.
He left his lifeguard post to save someone.
And they fired him because this is where you're supposed to be.
The reason the policy was in place is fear of litigation if there wasn't a lifeguard where a lifeguard was supposed to be.
Do you understand how many bad decisions happen in the United States because someone is afraid that someone else is going to be able to sue them?
Anyway, I'm Mark Belling.
Glad you could listen.
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