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Nov. 26, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:47
November 26, 2012, Monday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hey, happy Cyber Monday to you.
Yes, America's Anchorman is away today.
And this is your undocumented anchorman, Mark Stein, sitting in, no supporting paperwork whatsoever, living in the shadows and loving it.
Welcome to the start of a brand new week at America's number one radio show.
Rush returns live on Wednesday.
Mark Belling will be here tomorrow because Mitt Romney may have binders full of women, but Rush has binders full of guest hosts.
Yes, folks, it's our post-Thanksgiving massive store-wide clearance.
All our Mitt Romney gags are price to clear.
You can get great deals on Big Bird gags.
85% off on Mitt Put a Dog on His Roof lines.
We'll give you two for one on cracks about Mitt Romney closing down your factory and giving your wife cancer.
All our Mitt Romney gags are price to clear because it's Cyber Monday.
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.
It's always been my favorite American holiday, the day we give thanks to Almighty God for all the blessings of this land, as the Oscar-winning Jamie Foxx did last night on the Soul Train Awards, live from Las Vegas.
He said, quote, give an honor to God and our Lord and Saviour, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, unquote.
So we give thanks to our Lord and Saviour for all the blessings of this land.
Food stamps, extended unemployment benefits, loosened social security disability criteria, I don't know, free contraceptives, death panels.
I may have missed one or two, so call me up and let me know.
We thank our Lord and Saviour, Barack Obama.
1-800-282-2882.
We're live from Ice Station EIB in far northern New Hampshire, just south of the border.
So if you're fleeing the country, do drop by.
We'd love to see you as you escape.
It's 16 degrees and snow on the ground up here.
I was stampeding for Black Friday bargains at the general store and I slipped and sprained my ankle, so I spilled all my bait.
It was horrible business.
I didn't really save anything.
HR is with us in New York, down in Florida.
Mr. Snerdley is off today.
Maybe he's enjoying a, what do they call it in Florida?
A social liaison with Jill Kelly.
We'll find out later in the week.
But it's a busy Newsday.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo is tweeting that they're glad Mubarak is gone and that the revolution now means that America is happy to deal with a fellow democratic country.
Do you know, I'm not, I'm not one, and I believe it's actually a condition of my green card that I'm not allowed to ferment insurrection against the United States government.
But in a non-fermenting sense, I do think that come April the 15th, I might withhold the 78 cents or whatever it is, my share that goes to support the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, because this is without doubt the dumbest embassy on the planet.
They're the ones, by the way, who all during that business back on September the 11th last year were sending out these ridiculous tweets saying how much they objected to that video guy, the unknown YouTube video guy in California.
And for some reason, they started tweeting me.
They put me on their Twitter feed, and I got on the receiving end of whatever idiot is in charge, whatever tenured idiot is in charge of social media in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.
And now he's at it again.
Oh, glad Mubarak is gone.
We're glad we're dealing with a fellow democratic country.
Mohamed Morsi has just seized more dictatorial powers than Hosni Mubarak ever had.
I love the way Politico put it.
Politico said, Morsi's move came just days after he was praised by U.S. leaders for helping to negotiate a ceasefire.
Hmm, odd that.
I wonder if there's any connection.
But anyway, he's now seized more dictatorial powers than Mubarak ever had, but there is some pushback on the streets of Cairo.
There's horrifying scenes on the TV of police beating back frenzied protesters in Tahrir Square.
Oh, no, wait, that's Walmart in Long Island.
Anyway, we'll keep an eye on that.
Earlier this year, when I was the day before I was sitting in, Rush said as he was taking his leave, he said, Mark Stein's going to be with you tomorrow to tell you why you're all doomed.
So I noticed that since the unpleasant events of November the 6th, that Rush has been sounding a little bit more of the we're all doomed thing.
So I think he's moved a little bit closer to my position on the total societal collapse thing.
So we'll deal with total societal collapse in the course of the today's show, but we'll also try and keep our spirits up.
You know, there's always an upside to total societal collapse.
It's buying in at the low end of the market.
You know, the good things can come of it.
So we'll try and look on the good side of total societal collapse.
1-800-282-2882, the fiscal cliff is getting nearer.
The fiscal cliff, by the way, is just the warm-up for total societal collapse.
It's not really the big thing.
It's just a kind of little thing just to get you in the mood for it.
Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham, says he would violate the Grover-Norquist anti-tax pledge in return for entitlement reform.
Good luck with that, Senator.
What's the betting that by the time all that shakes out, we'll get the first part of Lindsey Graham's sentence, but not the second.
Warren Buffett has a big piece in the New York Times today calling on a minimum tax for the wealthy.
This idea that we would have no problems with deficits, no problems with the debt.
The official national federal debt, $16 trillion.
If you add in state and municipal debts, there's a few more on top of that.
And if you add in all the unfunded liabilities and total debts of the United States, it comes to about $220 trillion, which is about $200,000 per person, just to keep you in a good mood in this post-Thanksgiving period.
But Warren Buffett says, no, no worry, all we have to do is just make the rich pay their fair share.
The Forbes 400, writes Mr. Buffett, the wealthiest individuals in America, hit a new group record for wealth this year, $1.7 trillion.
And he thinks they need to pay more.
The problem with this, by the way, $1.7 trillion sounds like a lot of money.
And for most countries, it would be a lot of money.
The problem here is that it's just over the average Obama federal deficit for just one year.
The average federal deficit for Obama's first term is about $1.3 trillion.
So if you confiscated the entire wealth of the Forbes 400, if you took every single penny they'd have, you'd have enough to pay off one year of Obama deficits.
If you took everything they had.
So what are you going to do next time around?
You're going to have to move in an entirely different Forbes 400.
You have to persuade a lot of Saudi oil sheikhs and a lot of Russian oligarchs to come and move to Malibu and the Hamptons and agree to be next year's Forbes 400, so then you can confiscate everything they've got and pay off another year of federal deficits.
That's the problem.
There aren't enough of the rich for what this government is spending, and there never will be.
I mean, there's only one Warren Buffett.
And that's the point.
I mean, he's the guy.
Obama quotes him as if he's the great sage.
You know, Mitt Romney, he's a rich guy, so he just steals from people and gives your wife cancer, closes down your plant.
You don't need to pay any attention to him.
But Warren Buffett, he has great insight, so we must pay attention to him.
He's the third wealthiest person on the planet, Warren Buffett.
The first guy is a Mexican, so he's beyond the reach of the United States Treasury.
Mr. Buffett is worth about $44 billion.
So if he donated every single penny he's got to the government of the United States, they would blow through it in four and a half days.
If you took every single penny that Warren Buffett had, it would cover four and a half days of government spending.
This government, the Obama administration spends $188 million an hour every hour that doesn't go.
Every hour, every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including Christmas, Thanksgiving, Ramadan, the works.
So the $44 billion, if you took everything Warren Buffett had, four and a half days.
The fourth richest guy on the planet is French, so he's beyond reach.
The fifth is a Spaniard.
Number six is Larry Ellison, who's American, but he's a loser.
He's only worth $36 billion.
So he and Warren Buffett between them could keep the United States government going for a week.
And then you're down to your Christy Waltons, who'd see you through.
She's got $25 billion, which would see you through a couple of days of the second week.
There is not enough, this whole tax the rich thing.
The problem here, the problem here is that government is way bigger than the capacity of even the rich to sustain it.
Remember this Buffett rule that everyone was excited about?
If only Warren Buffett paid tax at the same rate as his secretary.
The Congressional Budget Office worked this out and they figured that it would raise, the Buffett rule would raise $3.2 billion per year, which is what the government of the United States borrows every 17 hours.
So in 514 years, I worked this out.
I worked this out in, I'm not sure whether it's in the hardback edition of my book, it might be in the paperback intro of it, but it's in one version or another.
I worked it out that if under the Buffett rule, the United States government would raise enough money in 514 years to pay off Obama's 2011 federal budget deficit.
So if you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years would be the year 2526.
The easy way to remember it is if you remember Zager and Evans' futuristic pop hit from the psychedelic 60s in the year 2525.
In the year 2525, we'd still be paying off Obama's 2011 federal budget deficit, but in the year 2526, the next year, the Buffett rule would have paid off just one year of Obama deficits.
So in other words, in 514 years' time, the Buffett rule will raise so much money that in 514 years time, we will have paid off the 2011 federal bufficit.
Federal bufficit.
That's what they should change it to.
Federal deficit.
They should rename it the federal bufficit in order of Warren Buffett.
This is the absurdity of nobody spends on the scale government does.
Yes, the rich guys, they've got all the yachts and they've all got all the Gulf Streams and they've got all the rest of it.
But it's government spending day in, day out, $188 million an hour that it doesn't have every single hour of the day.
There is no way to plug that gap.
So if you think the wealthy are going to be hit by what's coming, the fiscal cliff is going to drag everyone else down with it.
And on that cheery note, we will get off to another great rollicking start on the Excellency Broadcasting Network.
1-800-282-2882, Mark Stein Infra Rush.
Mark Stein Infra Rush on the EIB network.
1-800-282-2882.
China is putting up the world's tallest building.
Remember the world's tallest building?
Once upon a time, America used to have stuff like that.
But now China is putting up the world's tallest building.
Listen to this.
In 90 days, the 838-meter skyscraper dubbed Sky City, they're building five stories a day on this thing in the capital of Hunan province, Changsha.
It's something called, I love this name, by the way, the Broad Sustainable Building Company.
If you had something called the Sustainable Building Company, that would be in America, that would be some pathetic thing building federally subsidized yurts in Vermont or whatever.
But this Broad Sustainable Building Company in China is putting up the world's tallest building five stories a day.
The whole thing will be finished in 90 days.
How long has that hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan been there now?
12 years, and we're all getting excited because finally there's a finally after, what is it, 11 years since 9-11.
You can see a little bit of it just poking above the ground now.
11 years.
11 years that's been there.
China is putting up the world's tallest building in three months.
Japan.
Japan has just unveiled the first of its new generation of high-speed magnetic levitation trains that will be able to do speeds of more than 310 miles an hour.
You know, I was on that thing, what's that train that goes from Boston to Washington?
The Acela?
They call it the, is that what they call it?
The Acela?
Because it's meant to sound like accelerate as if it goes fast.
Yes, it does go fast compared to normal lousy Amtrak trains.
The Montrealer, which went from New York to Montreal until they got rid of it.
One reason they got rid of it was because in my part of the world, between White River Junction, Vermont and Montreal, it averaged 16 miles an hour.
So you would have been quicker bicycling.
When you're on the train, bicycles and you came up alongside Route 2 bicycles were passing you when you're in the Amtrak Montreal.
So they call this thing the Acela, or whatever it's called, between Boston and Washington.
And they pretend it's a high-speed train.
It averages speeds of 78 miles an hour.
That is not a high-speed train.
The European trains are doing 150.
I think the German one gets up to 200.
They've got this new one now in Japan that does 310 miles per hour.
If you're going to have big government, it should be doing stuff like that.
Because you've at least got something to show for it.
You can say, oh, well, yeah, my taxes are high and the government's spending a lot of money.
But I've got this big high-speed train.
I've got this big Chinese building that they're putting up.
It's the world's tallest building and they built it in 90 days.
Big government, Obama goes around talking about only government can do the Hoover Dam.
Government can do the Golden Gate Bridge.
Government here doesn't do any of that.
Government builds bureaucracy here.
That's all it does.
That's all it does.
And it is sad.
It is sad to me that we're trying to figure out ways to save money.
They keep saying we can't cut any of the fat out of the budget.
All the fat's been cut.
This fiscal cliff is going to be devastating because all these huge $3.5 trillion federal budgets, there isn't a lot of fat in them.
What do we have to show for the $3.5 trillion?
You know, why don't we, I would be in favor of across-the-board cuts in everything.
Because by any reasonable standard, at least 30 to 40% of the budgets of every single federal department is entirely wasted.
What do we have to show for it?
Where are our 300-mile-an-hour trains?
Where are our world's tallest buildings?
You know, there isn't a single one because otherwise the creeps and faunas on the network news would be putting on the old hard hat and standing in front of them and saying, Obama built this.
Obama built this for you.
That's where the money went.
You cannot point to where this money has gone.
We've got a $3.5 trillion budget and it doesn't fund anything except bureaucracy and dependency.
So now China will put up the world's tallest building in 90 days and Japan will have 310 mile per hour floating trains.
310 mile per hour floating trains.
I was in the so-called club, what's that thing?
How do you say it again?
Club Acella.
I was in the Club Acela Lounge at Penn Station, which is very nice.
It's like you can go in there to get away from all the panhandlers and pimps and muggers infesting the rest of the station.
Very nice.
So you go into the Club Acela.
They've got those buck 79 mousetraps that you get from Victor, you know, those little wooden mousetraps with the big V on.
They've got Buck 79 mousetraps at the so-called prestigious Club Acella Lounge in Penn Station in New York.
That's the high-speed rail network abtrack style versus the 310 mile an hour bullet train in Japan.
At some point, we've got to get on top of this stuff and demonstrate that we can actually make this still make things, still do things.
If you're going to have big government, there's an argument for doing it big government Japanese style and having space-age trains.
There's an argument for doing it French style and having the Teje-V, the high-speed trains.
There's an argument for doing it like the Swedes and the Danes.
I caught a train from Sweden to Copenhagen Airport, goes across this big, huge body of water in about 15 minutes.
In other words, it's quicker to get from Sweden to an airport in a foreign country than it is to get from downtown New York to LaGuardia Airport.
If you've got big government and nothing to show for it, you've got the worst of all worlds.
And that's what they should be talking about cutting in the fiscal cliff.
Big government here funds bureaucracy and dependency.
More straight ahead on Rush.
Yes, Rush returns Wednesday, but don't forget you can go to rushlimbore.com.
And if you're a Rush 247 member, you need not be discombobulated by sinister foreign guest hosts one jot or tittle.
Rushlimbore.com.
This staggered me in the news today.
Associated Press medical writer Lindsay Tanner.
Bounce houses.
Kids' injuries soar.
Inflatable bounce houses can be dangerous with the number of injuries soaring in recent years.
The numbers suggest 30 U.S. children a day are treated in emergency rooms from bounce house accidents.
It's America's silent killer, folks.
Bounce houses, bouncy castles.
You know these things?
You see them at parties.
You see them at children's fairs.
Most involve children falling inside.
And many children get hurt when they collide with other bouncing kids.
They're now looking at whether the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission should take action.
Other recommendations include not overloading bounce houses with too many kids and not allowing young children to bounce with much older or heavier kids.
They say that bounce houses should be supervised by trained operators.
Now, that's great, isn't it?
So it's like, just when you thought, if you were thinking, wow, there's like no jobs out there, whatever, there's never been a better time to become a credentialed, licensed bounce house operator.
You know, you can do it at an American college.
You'll just have to take out a six-figure debt to do it.
But then you could easily do a bachelor's in bounce houseology, and you would be legally permitted to supervise children in bouncy castles.
Bounce house injuries are similar to those linked with trampolines.
And the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended against using trampolines at home.
And they now say policymakers should consider whether bounce houses warrant similar precautions.
So this is going to be the next thing, folks.
You cut children bouncing around.
Oh, it's all good fun bouncing into children.
But if you haven't got a licensed bounce house operator there, fully credentialed and preferably with a master's in bounceology, then you could be risking your child's life.
You know, at some point there's got to be an end to this.
What kind of adults are raised, emerge from this protective environment?
For example, if you go back to D-Day, remember D-Day?
People used to know about it.
It used to be in the history books.
D-Day was a big thing back over on the beaches in Normandy, right?
And they're like all these Americans on there.
They're like farmers, they're insurance agents.
They've just been called up to go and serve their country in time of war.
And they're landing craft and they're landing on this foreign continent they don't know and they jump off those craft and they scramble up the beach and the Germans are firing on them.
And do you think a nation raised to be scared of bouncy castles would ever be able to do that?
So you'd like have the guys, the guys who've been raised, been told, oh, you can't go in a bouncy castle unless there's a licensed, fully licensed, credentialed master of bounceology there to supervise you.
And you can't do any extreme bouncing and you can't bounce with people who are of different age groups and everything.
And like 20 years later, then they're on those landing craft off Omaha Beach in Normandy.
And they're told, okay, you've got to get, it's time to jump off the landing craft onto the beach.
Oh, I don't know.
The beach might be springy and bouncy.
I don't know.
Is there a credentialed bounce operator here?
What kind of adults are going to emerge from this kind of cocoon?
Bounce houses now.
America's silent killer, bouncy castles.
Let us go to Patrick.
Patrick, who is in, I've never taken a call from this particular jurisdiction from the Turks and Caicos Islands in the British West Indies, one of Her Majesty's domains.
Patrick, great to have you on the Rush Limbaugh show.
Hello, Mr. Stein.
Thanks for taking my call.
I have everybody telling me after the election that I am supposed to relax, slide into the managed decline, watch life go by.
You know, Obama won.
And, you know, meanwhile, I've got this, you know, gaping wound in my chest.
And in your book, After America, yes, there's some pleasantness about this, but I feel like I would be completely giving up and giving in and becoming the kind of robot that I think Mr. Obama wants a lot of us to be.
Yeah, you certainly don't have to give in, Patrick.
By the way, are you just vacationing down in the Turks and Caicos?
No, I live here.
Great.
So you've already fled the country.
I'll tell you what, if you get...
The shrug for me started about almost 20 years ago when I was living in Santa Barbara, California, and it became illegal to be alive.
Right, right.
Yeah, everything's against the law in California.
What island are you in in the Turks and Caicos?
Providencialis.
It's the most populated one.
No, no, no, I know.
I love Grand Turk when you've got all the dogs wandering in the streets and everything.
Grand Turk is right.
Grand Turk reminds me.
It's a Grand Turk, it really is.
No, I love Grand Turk.
It reminds me of the British West Indies when I was a kid.
It's refreshingly unchanged, Grand Turk.
And the Turks and Caicos, for those of you who aren't familiar with them, the government in London fired the government of the Turks and Caicos on the grounds that they were hopelessly incompetent and corrupt, to which people responded to Gordon Brown's actions saying, in that case, why don't you fire yourself?
Which is a fair enough point.
So the Turks and Caicos is under direct rule now.
So you've already fled.
Well, I tell you what, Patrick, have you got a rec room?
Have you got a basement?
No, not exactly.
Well, you need to find some room in your house because once the new fairness doctrine kicks in, Russia's going to be doing his show from your house and beaming it in from offshore.
It'll be like they used to pirate radio in the 60s.
It'll be like that.
You have three governments to deal with, like me.
I deal with the American government, the local government, and the British government.
And I really would like to get it down to just one government screwing me at a time if possible.
Yeah, that's right.
We need some economy of scale.
Why do we have to be screwed over by multiple governments?
Well, I'm sorry to disclose your location, Patrick, because as I'm sure you know, as a U.S. citizen who makes the mistake of venturing onto the rest of the planet, the United States Treasury takes a great deal of interest in your bank account.
Oh, yeah, they're here.
They're around, believe me.
Yeah, so don't worry.
We're not going to reveal that you're in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
We're going to alter it.
We'll say you're in Bermuda or St. Kitts or Papua New Guinea.
Okay, by the time this goes to air, we're not going to give away that you're in Providenciales, in the Turks and Caicos Islands, in the British West Indies, turn left by the church and swing past the grocery store and it's dead ahead.
We wouldn't dream of doing that to you, Patrick.
The point is a pleasure talking with you.
And a pleasure talking to you too.
You know, Patrick said it would be easy to give up.
And that is what big government banks on.
And in fact, I think provided Obama's margin of victory in November.
What Mitt Romney thought was the argument for voting for the Republican Party, Romney basically used the, are you better off now than you were four years ago?
And he says, the economy is dead, and I'm going to make it come back to life.
And people accepted the first half of that proposition.
The economy is dead.
But then they think, oh, no, well, then I want to cling to the party of food stamps and the party of disability checks and the party of increased unemployment benefits.
If the economy is dead, would you rather take a wild flyer on Mitt Romney promising to bring it back or just hug ever closer to the big government security blanket?
And that is what Barack Obama very successfully used, I believe, to win his margin of victory.
That essentially people have subconsciously, not necessarily consciously, but they've subconsciously digested the reality of the last four years and they've concluded that nothing is going to get better.
And Patrick is right.
You don't think like that.
You can take this back.
You can't do it at the national level.
The national level's gone now for two years or for four years and maybe beyond that.
Who knows?
But this is still a federal republic.
And at the local level and at the county level and at the state level, you can find examples of Republicans with great innovative ideas who did very well.
That's the laboratory of democracy.
This place, 300 million people are not going to go over the cliff together.
That's not going to happen.
There will be people who emerge from the rubble and they will be doing it at the state and local level.
And that's where the energies are going to have to be focused for the next four years until the next Republican candidate who has to be dragged across the finish line and then gets demagogued into being a hater of women and a guy who doesn't believe in evolution and whatever cockamame drivel they manage to heap over his head.
But in the meantime, you don't have to give up.
You can make a huge difference.
Just in, for example, these Obamacare healthcare mandates, you can make a huge difference in persuading state governments to claw back and resist the big national power grab of Barack Obama.
It's not a federal, he's not operating a federal government anymore.
He's operating a highly centralized national government.
Don't let him do it.
Make sure your state guys, where they're sane, not obviously in California or New York and places, but where they're still sane, make sure they reclaim and push back against the power grab from Washington.
Mark sign in for Rush more straight ahead.
A gas worker in Springfield, Massachusetts managed to blow up a strip club on the weekend.
It's amazing this scene.
It looks like something out of Benghazi.
And I gather we now know that it was in fact a gas worker from the local utility company, but it wasn't enough.
Susan Rice went out on Meet the Press on Sunday and said it was something to do with that YouTube video, a movie protest that got out of hand.
But this strip club, downtown strip club in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been completely leveled.
It's a huge explosion.
The whole thing's gone.
They don't know where there's nothing left of this thing.
There were pasties and tassels flying everywhere.
People like seven miles, you were driving south on I-91, you got like pasties on your windscreen, skidded off the road and onto the shoulder.
The poll.
The poll.
The poll took out some electric substation in Staten Island, and it would have put the whole place out of power, but they're still out of power from Hurricane Sandy, which was, what, six months ago now?
Anyway, so it was a devastating scene.
So do spare a do spare a thought at this time of year when we're thinking about charitable giving, because after four days, after four days, people in Springfield, Massachusetts are still stripperless.
So obviously our hearts go out to them.
Many of the, there's 38, there are 38 strippers now who now have no club.
They've got nothing to wear.
This thing's literally taken the clothes off their back.
So it's astonishing scenes of devastation.
FEMA is handing out, FEMA, I gather, have arrived in Springfield.
FEMA declared a federal emergency site around the Springfield Strip Club, and they are handing out federal G strings.
Each G string, by the time it's been passed through the federal bureaucracy, costs $4,783.
But they have been distributing them because these strippers are in need.
It's an appalling scene of devastation in Springfield, Massachusetts.
One minute it was just the strip club, one minute it was there, next it's gone.
But FEMA are there and are distributing federally manufactured, fully compliant, fully compliant G-strings to the strippers.
It's not like the Bouncy Castle thing.
A fully accredited, trained, licensed guy with state and federal permits is on the scene handing out temporary G strings to these strippers in the hope that they will be able to rebuild the devastated stripper community of Springfield, Massachusetts.
So our hearts go out to them.
Let us go to Jeff in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
Jeff, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks, Mark.
Thanks for taking my call.
And listen, great job on your book, After America.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was very informative.
But I just want to tell you today, I've been thinking a lot about this whole matter of the fiscal cliff and all of the talk that we hear from our political leaders of how we're approaching the fiscal cliff.
And I think most of that is just smoke and mirrors.
We're not approaching the fiscal cliff.
We've gone over the fiscal cliff.
We are in the canyon of debt from which we are never going to climb out of.
It's not going to happen.
We have debt in this country, Mark, that we cannot pay back.
And the sooner that we face that and deal with truth and deal with reality, the sooner we're going to have a remedy to get better and understand that everybody is going to need to take a haircut.
We're going to need to declare bankruptcy.
We're going to need to restructure.
And we are going to need to address these issues of not only Social Security, Medicare, which are over $130 trillion of unfunded liability presently, but all of the other spending, the wild spending that goes on at the federal, even the state and local levels, because this problem is not just a problem at the federal level.
State governments are in trouble with their pension programs.
My state in particular has a $40 to $50 billion unfunded liability presently for state pensions.
And plenty of other states are in similar circumstances, as well as municipalities.
The city that sits adjacent to my town, the city of Scrant, which was in the national news, has been a bankrupt city for a long time, but they keep borrowing more money and borrowing and kicking the can down the road, and eventually you're not going to have anything left to do, and you're going to have a real crash.
So I just can't figure out why it is that we can't get political leaders in this country with enough character and integrity to come out and tell the American people the truth.
No, you're right.
It really is.
You're right there, Jeff, and well said.
And the interesting thing is when you talk to guys in Washington and you look in their eyes, you can see there is no intention ever of paying this stuff back.
And it's the same at the municipal level and at the state level.
And the municipal level, as they're done in California, broke cities can pass it up to a broke state and the broke state can then pass it on to a broke nation.
Where does the broke nation pass it on to?
There's not enough money on the planet to cover this level of spending, which is why this pathetic dance of the Warren Buffetts and all the rest of it is so pathetic, because that's barely skimming the surface of it, of the real honest accounting of the binge that we've been on for a generation now.
Thanks for your call, Jeff.
I've got to run because I'm up against a break.
But he's absolutely right.
You look in these guys' eyes and they have no intention of paying this stuff back.
And that entails certain consequences.
Mark Stein in for rush, lots more straight ahead.
Mark Stein Infra Rush.
You can win.
They're taking bids now for a strategy session with Sandra Fluke.
You can bid on a strategy session, personal strategy session with Sandra Fluke.
The leading bid at the moment is $20, $20.
So if you're willing to go up to, say, like $22.73, you could win your own personal strategy session with Sandra Fluke.
It doesn't sound as much fun as a personal strategy session with Jill Kelly and her identical twin, but you can't have everything.
Mark Stein Infra Rush on the EIB network.
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