All Episodes
Previous Next
July 9, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:12
July 9, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 247 Podcast.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I'm back.
Some of you probably a little fearful.
You hadn't heard it officially.
Would I actually be back?
Because three days without me being here, two of them on tape.
About as much as anybody can take right now.
Well, I'm back.
I'm here.
Happy to be here behind the golden EIB microphone, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB network.
Here's our phone number if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
So the media gathered now, awaiting breathlessly President Kardashian's announcement that he's going to extend the Bush tax cuts.
Now, I seem to remember President Kardashian blaming these tax cuts for most of his economic problems.
Am I right about that?
Even today, even over the weekend, President Kardashian blaming Bush for the economic woes the country finds itself in.
And at the top of the list of things that he blames Bush for are these tax cuts.
And so President Kardashian today is going to extend the very tax cuts that he says have caused his own economic problems.
Well, the reason I point that, why are you frowning?
I think this is a brilliant point.
That's what he's going to do.
He's announced the extending sum of the Bush era tax cuts for people.
Yeah, for under people to make under 200 grand.
But no, no, no, no.
He has been blaming the entire Bush tax cuts for his economic problems.
Now this is the second time that Kardashian has extended them.
There was the lame duck session of Congress after the uh after the 2010 midterms.
And now this the second time.
Now, I want to make I'm not going to predict this.
Eh.
No, I can't.
See, I would I back in June, I made a prediction on this.
I made a prediction that all of Obama's surrogates would keep talking about the need to extend the Bush tax cuts in order to convince the business community there would not be this tax Taxagedon.
Uh Tax Amageddon that was due to hit us in in January, what with all the health care taxes and all the others that are due to hit, that people like Clinton and Dick Durbin and the others would continue to talk about the need to extend them, but that Obama wouldn't say anything.
And my prediction was that next year, Obama would say, you know, I worked as hard, just like Clinton pull a Clinton, convinced the business community all year for the purposes of re-election, he's going to extend them, and then get to January, February if he's reinaugurated and say, no, I can't do look at they're doing a big ceremony here.
This is amazing.
A huge ceremony, the very thing that Obama has been blaming for our economic woes, he is now extending.
And of course, he's going to get all the credit for this.
The Bush tax cuts are the Bush tax cuts, but here comes Obama to save the day, launching a push to extend some of the Bush tax cuts.
It'd be for people that earn under $200,000 a year.
Isn't this interesting?
Isn't it amazing?
Here is a guy who wants to be re-elected.
Don't believe all this talk that he doesn't.
Here's a guy who wants to be re-elected as much as he's ever wanted anything.
And in order for that to happen, he has to push tax cuts.
It just confirms everything that we've said over the years about the left.
And that is when they're in trouble, and that's most of the time.
When it comes time for re-election, they go conservative.
They try to claim the mantle for themselves.
They do it only for a few short months leading up to the election, and they abandon all of that, of course, after they're elected.
But why is President Kardashian doing this?
I the economic news that came out late last week when I was away.
You know, folks, this number, 85,000 people went on Social Security Disability Insurance in June.
84,000 people found jobs.
More people went on disability than found jobs.
And of the 84,000 jobs, what percentage of those jobs were part-time and not really growth-oriented jobs.
This is just astounding.
85,000 Americans went on disability.
Now, has anybody heard from Nancy Pelosi yet?
Has Pelosi shown up and declared that having more people on Social Security disability is good for the economy.
Remember, every dollar spent on unemployment benefits was supposed to create a dollar 73 of economic activity or something like that.
So as Pelosi said the same thing about Social Security disability payments.
Well, yeah, every dollar of Social Security disability payments creates a buck and a half growth in economics in the country.
I don't know if anybody's going to ask him any questions today, But it gets reporters in trouble when they ask President Kardashian any uh any questions.
And I still I don't understand why we could balance the budget when taxes were only 18% of the gross domestic product during the Clinton years.
Now we're running a huge deficit.
Our taxes are 25% of GDP.
That's how much taxes are gone up.
Taxes were 18% of the gross domestic product during the Clinton years or 25%.
How is the how's with all these tax increases?
Why is the budget deficit continuing to skyrocket?
Another question I have, all of this rotten economic news, and it was it was it was horrible.
All of the the released data toward the end of the week, unemployment rate up to 8.2%, 80,000 jobs added in June, one-third of them at temporary agencies, 85,000 went on disability insurance.
The real jobless rate, if you count people who have given up looking for work but would like to find a job is at 14.9%.
That's the U6 numbers, basically 15% real unemployment.
Unemployment, of course it's going to get worse.
Of course, that's the I've got a story.
Jim Pathacoukas has a chart, some graphs here about how the economy and the employment circumstances are going to worsen the rest of the year.
The unemployment rate for blacks has jumped to 14.4%.
It's 11% unemployment for Hispanics.
780,000 fewer women are employed under Obama.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged late last week.
If you go back and you look at what the regime was predicting with their still year, You realize that unemployment was going to be 5.6% today.
If they if they had uh with the stimulus, that's what they predicted it would be.
At this point in Reagan's recovery, you know how many jobs you were creating a month?
273,000.
In the third year of Reagan's first term coming out of the recessions of 81 and 82, we were creating 273,000 jobs a month.
We are averaging under Obama since he took office, 75,000 jobs created a month.
It's a total of 2.3 million jobs that have been created.
But a lot of those are temporary.
A lot of them are part-time.
They're not growth-oriented career-type jobs.
Talk to anybody coming out of college.
And yet, and yet Obama's favorability rate in certain polls is at 47%.
Now this leads to an interesting question.
I read a couple of pieces yesterday that really touched a nerve with me, one of them by Michael Goodwin in the New York Post.
Let me set it up by describing something personal.
And I've mentioned this a couple times, well, many times during the course of this program.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, and I saw people in their 60s and 70s, I vowed that there were certain things those people did that I would never do.
For instance, I vowed I would never become in the eyes of anybody else an old fogey.
I would never be somebody who looked at the younger generations as the beginning of the end of our culture.
My parents did.
My parents, the Beatles and all of that.
It was just the end of the world as far as they were concerned.
It was the long hair, it was the rebel characteristics, all of that.
This is true for every generation.
Every older generation looks at the younger generation and thinks, my God, they're going to blow it, country's finished, we're off, we're all done.
It's just, and I vowed that would never happen to me.
I vowed I would keep an open mind and try to remember always the way I looked at the world when I was in my 20s and 30s.
Well, there are things that have happened here that befuddle even.
You and I, I'm going to take the liberty here of speaking for you.
Because I think this is pretty accurate when discussing most of you.
You and I look at what's happening to the country and...
And we are a multitude of things.
We are appalled.
We're angry.
And we're really scared.
Despite every effort not to be an old fuddy duty, an old fogey, despite every effort to avoid falling into that trap, as I've gotten older, as I have matured and aged, I haven't been able to avoid it.
It's not that the younger generations are to blame.
It's not that they're at fault.
It's not my point.
We're losing the country right in front of our eyes.
It is astounding.
The transformational changes leading to the actually has me depressed at times.
Now you and I see this the same way to one degree or a bunch of varying degrees.
But then you realize that other people don't.
And they're living it, and they don't.
In what I would consider a sane normal world, anybody from any party who had presided over this kind of, not just economic destruction, but national transformation wouldn't be considered a serious candidate for reelection at any time in this nation's history.
Anyone who had been in charge during these three years would be looking at a 30% approval number or re-elect number.
in what I would consider to be a sane world.
For the past two years, Every Thursday, we talk about the unemployment numbers on this country, in this country on this program.
And on a Thursday of every month, we look at it in great detail because we get the number for the previous month, before it's revised downward.
And it seems to me that it's almost like a slow drip water torture.
There is obviously cultural rot and decay taking place.
There is economic decay taking place, but it is so gradual that it's not accompanied by any shock value.
And since there's no shock value attached to it, there's no high degree of outrage.
There's more like just resignation.
People just resigned to it.
We get 8.2% unemployment, new normal.
It's just the way it is.
Not for you, not for you and me.
Not for you and me, but for seemingly A large part of the country.
And of course, this election is going to tell us how large a part.
This is the great unknown.
This is the great unknown question.
Just how many people in this country think this is the United States of America?
This is all it can be.
This is it.
And this is normal.
And how many of them vote?
When you look at 8.2% unemployment, when you look at more people going on disability than get jobs, folks, we are in uncharted territory.
We now have eight million people on disability.
We have 48% of the people in this country not paying income tax.
And yet, all of them, and this is this is important in trying to assess all this.
All of these people are eating and they're not going hungry.
And they all have their cell phones.
And they all are able to afford to use their cell phones.
And they all have their plasma TVs, and they're all able to sign up for cable and use them.
Despite all of the economic melees.
Now there's a re the reason for this is that we're $16 trillion in debt.
We've got an administration which is happily paying for this result.
There is no longer a stigma to being unemployed, a stigma to being on welfare.
And so just as we used to look at the younger generation, we who are seasoned and mature, and uh little worried about what they're going to amount to because they seem to be such degenerates and reprobates.
Now, instead of looking at it that way, this whole generational thing has become one view of the country versus another view of the country.
Whereas I promised myself I would never look as a seasoned mature individual at younger people as worthless degenerate perverts, like my parents looked at my generation and every other generation has.
Now, instead of doing that, I'm sitting here looking at an unknown percentage of the country and asking myself, how many of them know what it is to be an American?
How many of them know what that means anymore?
Or how many of them have a different definition of it entirely?
And I worry because the architect of all this transformation, the architect of all this destruction has a legitimate chance at winning reelection.
In a real sane world, this guy party would have thrown him out and they would have put Hillary or somebody else in there.
It ought to be clear, folks, it ought to be obvious Barack Obama does not want to create jobs.
He wants to create welfare recipients.
That's why he said that Friday's jobs report was a step in the right direction.
A step in the right direction.
The uh chairman of Democrat National Committee, Debbie Blabbermaus Schultz on television yesterday.
They're happy.
They're happy with the direction of the private sector.
She'll take job growth every month.
She'll take it.
But it is obvious that Obama doesn't want to create jobs.
He wants to create welfare recipients.
In the Hill.com, there was this story from yesterday, two-thirds of likely voters say that President Obama has kept his 2008 campaign promise to change America, but that it is changed for the worse, according to a sizable majority.
A new poll found that 56% of likely voters believe that Obama's first term has transformed the nation in a negative way compared to 35% who believe the country's changed for the better under his leadership.
Okay, fine and dandy.
I have a question.
If 56% of likely voters believe Obama has transformed the nation in such a way as to make it worse, then how can he still be at 47% in the swing states?
Ahead of Romney by a point, or tied with Romney.
How can that be?
Now, how can that how can that be?
It doesn't, it just literally doesn't compute.
Anyway, I want to I want to try to attack further this, I guess it maybe it is a generational thing that I was referring to just uh just a moment ago, but where we are as a country, I'm gonna use some help from Michael Goodwin in the New York Post on Sunday.
So sit tight, we'll come back and get into that.
Now, in his speech just now, where he announced the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the tax, and by the way, do you realize those Bush tax cuts, and I made this point before, those Bush tax cuts were tax cuts for the middle class.
The Democrats, since 2003, have been calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
The last two times Obama has extended them.
He has done so that they will continue to help the middle class.
Well, obviously, the Bush tax cuts were tax cuts for everyone.
Rich, middle class, everybody.
That only gets mentioned when Obama extends them.
Outside of Obama extend, and then these tax cuts, by the way, are the very thing Obama blames for the economic woes that he encountered when he became president.
The Bush tax cuts, the woeful economy that Bush left because of the Bush tax cuts.
And every time Obama needs them, he goes back to them and extends them.
Now, in his speech just now, he said our core mission as an administration as a country has to be rebuilding an economy where work pays off.
That is a lie.
He is not oriented that way.
Work does not pay off.
Work is punished.
Not working pays off.
More than it ever has in this country, not working pays off.
He honestly has the nerve to say when he's raising taxes on the people who are working to rebuild the economy, small business owner and entrepreneurs, those taxes are going up.
The Bush tax cuts will expire for job creators.
The people who create jobs will see their taxes increase.
This is independent of whatever Obamacare tax increases there will be.
So he has the nerve to say that when he's raising taxes on the people who are working to rebuild this economy and that small business, those are people who put their money to risk at risk and put it to work, and they will face a tax increase.
My friends, he does not want job creation.
He just said right now our top priority has to be giving middle class families and small businesses the security they deserve.
Simple question.
How is raising taxes on most small businesses going to give them the security they deserve?
How is raising taxes on most employers going to do that?
Who employs the middle class?
More and more, it's the federal government.
Victor Davis Hanson had a piece over the week in the corner national.
Yeah, I'm getting a good one piece.
I'm setting it up.
Stick with me.
Victor Davis Hanson over the weekend, National Review Online, Atlas still shrugging.
This is good because it is a great encapsulation.
If somebody wanted to ensure permanent 8 to 9% unemployment, one might try the following.
Run up, serial trillion dollar deficits, check.
Add $5 trillion to the national debt, three and a half years, check.
If you want to maintain permanent 8% to 9% unemployment, you do this.
You impose a 2,400 page Trillion dollar new federal takeover of health care with layers of new taxation, much of it falling on the middle class and employers, even as favored concerns are given mass exemptions via the waivers.
Check did that.
If you want to maintain unemployment 8 to 9%, scare employers with constant us versus them warfare rhetoric about a demonized one percenter class and its undeserved profits.
Talk constantly about raising new taxes and imposing regulations, ensuring uncertainty, and convincing employers of unpredictability in regulation and taxes.
Keep everybody on edge with unpredictability.
Check.
Number five, appoint a bipartisan committee to study the fiscal crisis than neglect every one of its recommendations.
Six, you would subsidize failed green companies while denigrating successful gas and oil concerns.
You know what I saw today?
Do you realize CO2 output the last what was it three years?
Three months.
The CO2 output, greenhouse gases, have fallen sharply.
Sharply, astoundingly.
And you know what the number one reason is?
No, that's what I thought too.
I thought it'd be the downturn in economics.
No, it's fracking.
The new way of producing natural gas and oil has caused the sharpest decline in greenhouse.
Everything Obama believes, everything the left touts is a lie.
The pursuit of profit, which is what fracking is.
It's a new way of getting natural gas and oil.
And the people that do that do it to earn a profit.
So the pursuit of profit led to the sharpest reduction in greenhouse gas.
Now, frankly, look, you know me, I don't think there's such a thing as greenhouse gases that are destroying the plant.
But just to use the left's own setup, the pursuit of profit, a new way of getting natural gas and oil has resulted in the sharpest decline in CO2.
Fracking turns out to be green energy.
Yep, but not to this bunch.
They're trying to shut it down.
Anyway, you would vastly increase unemployment insurance, disability payments, food stamp constituencies, while promising all sorts of mortgage, credit card, and student loan bail outs, which all of this is Obama's doing.
This is how you maintain unemployment at 9%.
You would borrow hundreds of billions for stimulus programs that are not shovel ready, but are rather aimed to bail out state budgets, pensions, and unions.
You would federalize elements of nonprofitable private companies while threatening to shut down profitable plants for supposed union or environmental behavior.
Do not address changing the above policies, but rather blame others for such self-induced stagnation.
If you do all of that, you pretty much ensure something like the current economy.
Do all that, and you get what we've got, and Obama has done it, and he's doubling down on it.
Now to Michael Goodwin.
Mitt Romney's a good guy.
He's a good man.
Smart, successful.
Not a hint of scandal in his 65 years, but he's boring.
Seems a little distant.
But those aren't the flaws that could prove fatal.
Romney's big problem is he grew up in another America.
Romney was raised to believe that there's a clear standard for adult conduct.
And that even politics has rules, and that it's the duty of a president to unite and lead the nation through its economic crisis.
Timing could be Romney's great misfortune.
Fate has given him a demoralized electorate that's growing distant from that old America, and an opponent who spouts its verities but actually believes in none of them.
Obama believes politics is a knife fight.
The only rule is that he must win.
Romney got to get politically killed.
Obama's conduct reflects the unholy mix of a Messiah complex with the muscle of the Chicago way.
His goal is to transform America, not fix it.
So we have here's a culture clash, which explains a presidential campaign operating in parallel universes.
Romney is making a broad pitch to the nation as a whole, and he's assuming that jobs, the debt, deficit, strong military, what people care about.
They always have.
You go back to Reagan, we're talking 30 years ago.
Was it 40 now?
Thirty years ago.
Reagan's three-legged stool.
Lower taxes, rebuild the military.
And of course, revive the economy.
That's what everybody wanted.
That's what Romney's doing.
Goodwin's point is that Romney is from a different era where that stuff mattered to people.
Parallel universe.
Obama knows that's no longer true for a big slice of the country.
He gives lip service to economic growth and a strong military and American exceptionalism, but they concern him only to the extent that they could be his undoing.
Obama's aim is to buy four more years by using the power of incumbency to distribute goodies that'll insulate his supporters from any immediate pain.
In exchange, they'll give him time to turn the nation into a European welfare state with an imperial president, like they have in Europe.
Obama's not making a national appeal.
He's microtargeting grenades.
We've told you all this.
I'm just, here it is in print.
You know, all these different constituencies.
Obama's abandoned white working class families.
He's abandoned the American mainstream, is my point.
Obama's not trying to get votes from the American mainstream.
Romney is.
And Goodwin here is speculating that could mean that Romney's out of touch.
We'll find out.
It's an interesting mental exercise.
For Obama, 8.2% unemployment, not anything to worry about.
That's something to work around.
It's a distraction to be paved over with side deals for friends, bailouts and trade barriers for unions.
A pass on immigration laws for Latinos, subsidized loans for students, huge handouts for green energy zealots, unleashed regulatory cops to crucify producers of fossil fuel.
Why Obama even leaks national security secrets to boost his warrior credentials.
The kind of thing that would have people clamoring to get rid of a president not that long ago.
The whole jobs thing now it's passe.
Because work is optional when unemployment and disability benefits are the new welfare, and an increase in food stamps is proof of fairness, and they're advertising for more food stamp recipients.
They're throwing food stamp parties.
Obama is actually targeting citizens of this new America, where everything's free, where everything's a giveaway.
All for the sake of his maintaining power.
With only half the country paying taxes, the other half isn't worried about spending.
For their government masters, dependency's good.
Women are patronized with a claim that Republicans are waging war on them, even though the Obama economy has done them no favors.
Black Americans get nothing special because 95% will support Obama no matter what.
He doesn't even bother buying their votes.
He is their only reward.
Obama's a deeply cynical guy, but the more disturbing fact is that his cynicism has freed him from responsibility, and that freedom is proving to be a campaign advantage.
The rising star, Who once claimed to see not a red or blue America, but a united one, has shed all of that for a message tailored to a country that he has polarized.
Give the devil his due, it says here.
Obama's a first rate campaigner approaching it with passion that he lacks for the Oval Office.
His team has sliced and diced the country into ethic, race, ethnic, racial, and class pieces.
He follows their roadmap.
He revs up the rhetoric on queue.
Bus tour in Ohio was a priceless piece of pandering.
In a town tied to auto manufacturing, he could tout his bailout of Detroit, suppliers and announced he had filed a trade claim against China over tariffs on Americans' cars, American cars to get their votes.
So it goes, one special interest cookie at a time.
No pretense of eliminating the deficit.
No pretense of paying down the debt.
Entitlement reform, that's for idiots.
That's for chumps.
And so are growth and job creation.
That's for chumps.
The new America doesn't care about that.
And Romney, as somebody who does, is in a parallel universe, maybe talking to a country that doesn't exist anymore.
This is the point.
I've got to take a break here because I'm way long.
So I'm sorry, next segment's going to be proportionately shorter.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
Okay, the three stools of Ronald Reagan, defeat the communist check, lower American tax, revive the economy, check, rebuild a military check.
Three things.
Now, what's Romney running on?
Romney's running on one thing, and he'd better change it.
No, he's not doing that.
He's not running on Omni.
He's running on the economy.
And he's got to get tougher than that.
The economy, he's got to branch out.
The economy speaks for itself.
But there's also the question here how many people really care about that.
We've got three years.
Nobody's demanding this guy be thrown out that I, well, other than us.
But I mean, a national clamor.
Thirty years ago, folks, 30, 40 years ago, with the same identical economic circumstances, there would be such anger and outrage in this country that the incumbent wouldn't even dare run again.
And that's not that long ago.
So let's do the three stools of Obama.
Jobs?
Doesn't care.
That checklist I went through, Victor Davis Hanson, that checklist, that is a long list of things you got to do to maintain unemployment at 9%.
That is a long list of, and he's done every one of them.
It cannot be an accident.
Now there are a bunch of fundraisers for Romney over the weekend, a couple of them, three of them actually in the Hamptons.
One was at David Koch's place.
One was at Ron Proman's place, only on a Long Island.
And even the donors, a lot of former Obama donors, LA Times has story, former Obama donors showed up, and the stories about all the advice Romney's getting.
And I'm going to tell you something.
This can be dealt with.
I don't know.
I'm not Goodwin's piece and the cultural divide and all that.
I'm not saying it's over.
But Romney is going to have to start treating Obama the same way he did Newton Santorum, folks.
He's going to have to do that.
We are dealing.
Romney has got to realize that running a campaign on traditional American values is not enough.
Sad to say, that's the hard cold reality.
Simply running around and telling people he's going to fix the account.
What?
What are you going to do with the economy?
Yeah, we all know it stinks.
What are you going to do?
What's the plan?
It's more.
Well, okay, 59 points.
Can you tell me three of them?
Well, you can't.
Okay, so don't tell me it's 59 points.
He must may as well have zero.
If you can't tell me what any of them are.
Big whoop.
It's not enough to say you're going to repeal Obamacare.
Because there's no accompanying talk from Republicans, Republicans in Congress that have similar type energy.
This has to be about Obama.
This campaign has to be about Obama, and Romney is going to have to look at Obama the way he tarred Newton, the way he tarred Santorum.
I don't care whether he does it of his super packs or whether he does it himself.
But Obama's not black, he's not Martian, he's not white, he is the destructor, and he's got to be stopped.
▲
Export Selection