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Dec. 11, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
December 11, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Hi, folks, how are you?
Great to have you as we kick off another three hours of broadcast excellence, hosted and executed by me.
Maybe I should say performed by me.
Your guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, and despair.
Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone, our telephone number 800-282-2882, the email address.
Illrushball at EIBNet.com.
John Boehner speaking now from the well of the House.
He's reporting in.
He says he's an optimist, but he doesn't sound optimistic.
And what he is explaining, stressing the need to uh cut spending, did say he's hopeful we can reach an agreement.
And no matter where you turn now, I don't care where you turn.
In the conservative intelligence, you are seeing the Republicans have no prayer now.
They're just gonna have to cave in on this rate increase on the rich.
It's gonna have to.
They can't anymore just be perceived as a party catering to the rich.
They're just gonna have to do it, be done with it.
And as we discussed yesterday, there survives this idea.
You know, I really went home and I applied what little IQ I have to this.
Because if you were listening yesterday, you realize I'm very confused.
I thought about it quite a bit last night, and I I've I've found uh even even more people who believe it if we cave on the taxes, that Obama will then turn around and cut spending on the entitlements, and that this will be brought about by the media.
The media will then say, okay, Obama, the Republicans have done what you wanted them to do.
Now it's your turn.
This is supposed to happen by about February.
Really, there no matter where you look, there are more and more Republican intelligentsia types in the media.
Uh elected Republicans who really think that that will be the only course Obama has.
And I I guess I remain a lone wolf on this.
I guess I'm the only one who thinks what I think about this.
And I'll just repeat it very briefly.
I spent an hour explaining this last week, but I'm going to sum it up very quickly.
I think what Barack Obama is attempting to do here is get the Republicans to confess.
I think he wants the Republicans to concede that every economic problem in this country is because taxes have been cut on the successful.
Not just the rich, but on the successful, on people who've achieved.
I think Obama is after the notion that 200 plus years of capitalist economics has led us to this point.
Capitalism is to blame.
Part and parcel of capitalism, the Republican Party, conservatism, and tax cuts, quote unquote for the rich.
And I think what Obama's doing here is a modified FDR.
He's attempting to stack the deck for a couple of generations.
With liberals and Democrats winning election after election after election because they're the party of benefits, not features.
And the benefits accrue immediately, while the Republicans talk about philosophy, and in fact, the Republicans don't talk about philosophy.
Pete Weiner, my buddy, used to work for Bill Bennett, then worked for Rove at the Bush White House, then went to the Romney campaign, has a piece at uh at commentary.
Have conservatives lost the argument.
And I'm going to explain this in I did not even intend to mention this right now.
This is on my mind is working.
I'll get to it later in the program, but I'll just answer it very quickly.
We haven't made it.
Throughout this entire presidential campaign, we did not make the argument for low taxes equaling economic growth.
We didn't make that.
We were afraid to.
Even Romney was assuring people that taxes on the rich would not go down.
Even Romney was at the Republican Party stood for taxes on the rich either going up or staying the same.
Anyway, more on that as the program unfolds.
I'm telling you is that Obama is attempting here to get the Republican Party to I don't mean that Boehner stands up and says, I confess we're the problem.
That's not how it's going to happen.
It's going to happen by virtue of votes, Caves and policy.
Republicans are going to agree to raise taxes, and in the process, the Democrats will there's their conceding that tax increases are the answer, and tax cuts have been the problem.
The Republicans are finally admitting what we've known for 200 plus years.
If you don't have a job, it's because we've cut taxes from the rich.
If your home is underwater, it's because we've cut taxes at some point in this country.
The Reagan tax cuts immoral unjust.
The Bush tax cuts unimmoral and unjust.
Gotta go back to the Reagan rates.
Uh the Clinton rates.
Gotta go back to the Clinton rates.
That's yeah, okay.
Well, let's go back to, as I mentioned months ago, let's go back to Clinton era spending.
Well, we can't really do that.
Think the Republicans might submit a 1998 budget.
What would be wrong?
You guys like the Clinton tax rates, uh, here it is.
Oh, we can't do that.
You can't, you can't go back to spending in 1998 levels.
Why circumstances are all well?
Why do you say we can't on taxes?
Anyway, they're not making the argument.
And so the objective here is to get the Republican Party to essentially confess, to concede.
That's what's going on here.
There's nothing about economic growth going on.
There's nothing about solving the debt.
None of that is being discussed.
And you know what's a dirty little secret?
The media knows this, and everybody inside the beltway knows this.
What's going on?
The politico even has a piece today called crafting a boom economy.
And this by Jim Van De Gaye or Vinda High and Mike Allen.
No politician on either side, none in this article offers and says that raising taxes will provide any meaningful help with any fiscal problems.
They know that's not the case.
Now, on the record, they're not willing to nobody.
There is nobody willing to say on record that raising taxes on anybody will provide any meaningful help with our fiscal problems, including economic growth.
They're not being raised for that reason.
The political class, including the media, is lying to the American people.
The media are complicit with the lie, and they know it.
What's going on here is simply the advancement of the leftist agenda.
That's all that's happening here.
And if they won the election, you would expect that to happen.
Sure, you would expect them to try.
You would expect there to be opposition to it, but the there's an abject fear in telling the American people the truth.
Even Warren Buffett's quoted in this piece, saying, both Democrats and Republicans privately agree that none of what's being talked about matters a hill of beans to anything.
They just don't want to be the first to speak out on their side.
That's Buffett.
They said nobody in Washington has the guts to tell the American people the truth about what needs to happen.
So we're getting politics as usual and the politics as usual are Obama and the Democrats won, and they are advancing their agenda.
And as part of that agenda is the decimating of the Republican Party.
And to do that, you get them to agree that tax cuts are fundamentally to blame for all that's happening.
Even though everybody knows that's a lie.
Here.
Last night, Anderson Cooper 360 spoke with former Green Jobs czar Van Jones about the fiscal cliff negotiations.
Anderson Cooper said, How close do you think Obama and Boehner are to a deal?
And from your perspective, is a bad deal better than no.
See, this is all smoke and mirrors.
Everybody's caught up in the inertia of the template of the moment.
It's created out of whole cloth, and everybody, both parties and the media just follow right along with it.
And it becomes the perception becomes the reality.
It's all smoke and mirrors.
There's none of this is about economic growth.
None of this is about reducing the debt.
None of this is about changing the direction the country's headed.
None of this is about creating Jobs, none of this.
And may I hit you with a blunt instrument, blunt force trauma with a question before I play the Van Jones soundbite, which proves exactly what I'm saying here.
Can you anybody tell me?
When was the last time that our side won one of these budget fights?
Tell me.
I may be forgetting some.
And maybe I'll define losing and winning differently than you would.
But what when's the last time we won one of those?
Seriously.
When's the last time we prevailed?
We've lost this debt limit thing every year that it's come up.
We've had no budget for four years.
The Constitution's been shredded on that score.
Nothing but continuing resolution after continuing resolution, which puts constant pressure on every every every dime of spending once it becomes a crisis and emergency.
Anyway, here's Van Jones answering the question how close do you think Obama and Boehner are to a deal?
And is a is a bad deal better than no deal.
A bad deal is a bad deal, and we shouldn't accept it.
The Republicans have a problem now.
All the polls show the vast majority of the American people say that people who've done well in America should do well by America and start paying America back.
Now, folks, that last bit is what this is all about.
Start paying America back.
The reason you are poor is because you were once rich and the rich of today and yesterday and the yesterday before that stole it from you.
The rich have stolen most of what they have.
They have worked together and conspired to create an economy where only they benefit for 200 plus years.
It was part of our white European racist founding, and what Obama is all about is making sure that the people who have unjustly profited from this unjust, unfair capitalist system for 200 plus years now pay America back.
This embodies what Obama is all about.
This embodies what everything in his administration is all about.
embodies what a lot of his voters vote for him for.
I don't know.
The majority of people that vote obviously voted for Obama.
I don't know...
I just be a wild guess what percentage of those Obama voters actually think that it's time for payback, but I'm telling you it's a large number.
They've been convinced, not by Obama, but by three or four generations of the corruption of the public education system.
They've been corrupted by a news media.
They've been corrupted by a vast liberal entertainment complex that includes movies, books, and music.
It's payback time.
The people that have stuff today didn't really earn it.
And they don't share enough of it, and it's payback time.
And that's what tax increases on the rich are all about.
And that's what the redistribution of wealth and income is all about.
And that's what all this debt is all about.
It's payback time.
This is Van Jones, whether he knows it or not, and I think he does, articulated specifically.
All people need is the courage to believe it, but that is exactly why Obama's policies are what they are.
It is time to pay America back for 200 plus years of stuff.
Not the last eight, not the last ten, not the last twenty, but for all of it.
And we'll be back after this.
We'll be back after this.
So I checked the email during the break.
Okay, Rush, that politico piece.
They say everybody in Washington's lying to the American people.
They know it and the media knows it.
What are they not telling us?
Folks, it's real simple.
The only way that we are going to reverse the trajectory that this country's on.
In fact, let me first stipulate, or not stipulate, but remind you what this article is saying.
What everybody, there's not one person interviewed, and politico talk to the movers and shakers, both parties.
There's not one person interviewed who will admit that raising taxes on the rich is going to have any positive economy impact.
None.
Everybody in this debate knows, from Obama to Bahner, everybody else knows that raising taxes on anybody is not going to change the economic trajectory that we're on, which is straight down right now.
Everybody knows that.
And Warren Buffett says both parties know it.
They just don't have the guts to tell there's not there's nobody has the gust to tell the American people truth.
Steve Mill will rush what's the truth.
Very simple.
The only thing that will reverse the trajectory that this country is on is massive spending cuts.
And that's what they don't have the guts to really make the case for.
There are people that talk about it.
We need spending cuts with the tax increases.
We need some spending cuts with the but look at the amount of spending cuts they talk about $50 billion, $100 billion, $500 billion stuff that we spend every five minutes or ten minutes.
The real fix for this, we have we're $16 trillion in debt, not because we're undertaxed.
We're $16 trillion of debt, not because of capitalism.
We're $16, going to be $20 after Obama's finished in these next four years.
$22 trillion in debt.
Not because you aren't paying enough taxes, not because the country was founded unjustly and unfairly, and not because the poor were once rich, but the rich took it all from them.
None of that.
We are in debt because we've been spending money that we don't have.
We have been spending money that we've never had.
We've been spending money that we've been printing, we've been spending money we've had to borrow that we're not paying back.
And the only real fix is a cutback in benefits.
That's what reductions in entitlement spending mean.
The practical result of entitlement spending reform is fewer benefits paid out.
The reason is we can't afford to pay them as it is.
But there isn't yet the courage or the guts to say to the American people at large what I have just said.
And so it's the usual politicizing.
The Democrats won the election, they're taking the advantage here of that to advance their agenda, and if they can wipe out the Republican Party and then deal with whatever mess later down the road if they choose to.
But their priority is not reversing the trajectory that we're on.
Their priority is their agenda.
They want bigger entitlements.
They want more of them and they want more entitlement spending.
And if they have to confiscate money from the rich in order to pull that off, they will do it.
That's just who they are.
That's just what they want.
But that's the solution to the problem what we're in.
Then there is no amount of tax increases that will fix it.
There's no amount of tax increases that will reverse the trajectory that we're on.
There's no amount of punishing achievement.
There's no amount of paying America back that will fix the mess that we're in.
Politicians have caused this mess in concert with voters.
In some cases, who demanded these benefits and want these benefits because they are unable to provide for themselves the same things they're getting in the form of benefits.
And this has been going on a long time.
Not just, it's not a recent development with Obama and liberalism and socialism.
Everybody wants to live well.
Everybody wants To have a nice life.
Everybody wants to be able to pay the bills.
Everybody wants to have no pressure when it comes to the bills coming in at the end of the month.
Everybody would like to be able to pay for the basics and have some left over.
And for the most part, everybody in this country does or has.
But everybody's in debt for the most part as well.
And it's scary.
Individuals are in debt, government is in debt.
The ability to retire that debt is quickly vanishing.
I don't does anybody really think we can retire $16 trillion national debt.
How can we do that?
And in four more years, $22 trillion.
How can we ever pay that back?
But you have to get started.
You have to make an effort if other things are going to fall into play.
But anyway, the point of this is that that's the fix.
That's the solution.
It's not what's being discussed in a budget deal today.
It's not Boehner and Obama.
We're not looking.
It's not Obama, period.
Obama is exacerbating the problem by virtue of winning.
We are in no way shape manner reform as a country as a society discussing what's really necessary to reverse the trajectory and create growth in the economy.
Let me explain it to you this way.
Yes, yes, I saw Jeffrey Imelt and his comment about the Chincoms and how it works for them, and I'm going to explain to you why.
Communism is exciting to Jeffrey Immelt.
I'll get to that in due course.
There's a lot.
We are loaded here today.
I mean, I'm going to have to spend a little bit less time on each subject that comes up in order to get them all in, and I do want to get them all in.
But here's here's where we are, folks.
Entitlements are vote buying schemes.
Social Security was a vote buying scheme first.
I know a lot of people think FDR was a compassionate guy.
And he really was concerned about the old and the feeble and having some bit of social security.
Have a decent vote buying scheme.
Cutting taxes is a vote buying scheme.
However, cutting taxes boosts the economy.
Every time it is tried.
The amount of revenue, new revenue generated by tax cuts in the 80s, was nearly 900 billion dollars.
We lost revenue to the Treasury during the precious 90s and the Clinton tax rates.
Raising rates reduces revenue because it reduces economic output.
Raising rates creates rising unemployment, fewer taxpayers.
But still cutting taxes is a vote buying scheme.
Just like entitlements are a vote buying scheme.
However, where we are now, the tax cut doesn't buy as many votes as the tax increase does.
Increasing taxes is a vote buying scheme.
There are far more people who are not rich than who are.
And class envy has seeped into our culture.
A Politico George Washington University Battleground poll out yesterday.
60% of likely American voters favor raising taxes on Americans who make more than $250,000 a year.
So raising taxes is a more popular vote-buying scheme than cutting taxes.
And by the way, that number becomes 77% when you poll Hispanics.
77% of Latino voters support raising taxes on the rich because, as Van Jones said, it is time to start paying America back.
Folks, there are people in this country who genuinely believe that they were once prosperous, and it was taken from them by the people who are now rich.
They have been made to believe that the rich have somehow unfairly just reached in and grabbed a share much larger than they deserve because they're craftier or they have more connections or they've had more favorable laws passed by their cronies.
But however it happened, they believed that it happened.
And now it's payback time.
But entitlements are vote buying schemes.
Cutting tax is a vote buying scheme, but cutting spending is not a vote buying scheme.
And so nobody is talking about cutting spending seriously.
You don't get a single vote.
Well, you will, but you won't get anywhere near enough votes advocating spending cuts or entitlement reform.
You don't get anywhere near the number of votes that you get when you create an entitlement.
The creation of an entitlement is a benefit, an immediate benefit.
Cutting spending is a denial of a benefit.
You don't have a prayer.
You're not going to get any meaningful amount of votes by offering to cut spending.
Cutting taxes will get you some votes, but you're going to be outnumbered by those who want to vote for people who are going to raise taxes.
So it's taken us as a society and a culture.
How often have you heard about the income gap or the wealth gap?
And it just keeps getting better.
Rich keep getting richer.
The poor keep getting poorer.
And this, of course, is said to be the fault of capitalism.
And again, it's the fault of tax cuts for the rich.
The rich keep getting richer because cronies allow the rich to keep their money and take everything from the poor.
That's how the rich get rich.
Don't doubt me on this, folks.
I'm I've been doing this for 25 years.
There's certain realities now we have come to accept.
We have to come to accept.
Of the people who vote, which is still a small percentage of the population.
It's a key distinction, however, of the people who vote, we are outnumbered.
We are outnumbered by among the people who vote.
And among the people who vote, they believe what I just told.
They believe, and they're on the way to believing even more that capitalism, tax cuts for the rich is the reason that they don't have what they would like to have.
And the government providing for them is simply payback.
They're not sponging.
They're not freeloaders.
They're getting what was always theirs that was never provided to them.
These people believe that government's the primary source of prosperity.
These people believe that wealth comes from the government.
And the government has been unfair in assigning wealth to the people who are rich.
Cronyism, tax favors, whatever.
They believe it.
Twenty-five years.
We've been on the it's been trending.
So income inequality.
Income inequality is the root, the foundation that drives all of this.
The fact that there is income inequality can't be denied.
The fact that there is wealth inequality can't be denied.
There never has been, but that doesn't matter.
There never has been income equality, and there never has, but has there also has never been immortality, but look at the number of people who expect to live beyond the life expectancy by eating certain things, not eating certain things.
The left is pervasive.
The tentacles of liberalism socialism are deep into this culture.
I'm telling you right now.
The national football football, as you know it is over.
It's only a matter of time.
It's finished.
When I saw that that cover story time magazine and the idea that no more kickoffs because of injury, that you take the ball on the 30, it's fourth and fifteen.
Folks, it's it's just a matter of time.
And you start listening to the people talk about the negatives of the game.
It creates aberrant behavior, there's too much drinking, uh, people are shooting people because of the concussions, it's it's altering minds.
It's just becoming too dangerous, and we as a society are becoming too bloodthirsty in wanting it.
And I'm telling you, I'm just I'm giving you a forecast.
It's not tomorrow.
I don't know when, but it's over.
That's the direction that we are trending.
Well, you just sit tight.
I got a quote sound by Bob Costas coming up.
Dennis Miller, earlier this week, you know, he he spent a couple seasons in the Monday Night Football Booth.
He sees it.
He says this game can't go on.
You might as well just stop it and retool it and start again because what's happening is that they are starting to make the spectators feel guilty watching this savagery.
This potential life-altering injury on every plot.
And he's right.
That's how the left does that.
They guilt you into accepting their global warming belief.
They guilt you into accepting everything they want.
They make you the one responsible.
You the spectators, the fans, you're the real reason football is the bloodthirsty killer sport that it is.
Because you're willing to pay to peep see people maimed.
You're willing to pay to see the risk these people put into their lives by playing this game.
I'm telling you.
I've seen this for 25 years.
I know the left.
I know liberalism.
I know how they accomplish things.
I can see it on Snertley's face.
He thinks I'm nuts.
I've exaggerating, maybe misreading this, I'm not.
This all may not transpire in my lifetime, but I'm just going to you are going to see the beginning.
World, you are seeing the beginning of it.
You're seeing the signs of it.
In virtually every walk of life.
The global warming argument's a great model.
So is the entire subject of environmental destruction.
And at the end of each of these stories, items, topics.
At the end of it is the fix, and the fix is an ever growing governing body with ever more power to regulate whatever is deemed harmful, dangerous, risky, including capitalism, which is deemed to be the riskiest thing people.
Well, you're risking everything you've got.
Why people risk everything they've got, investing in this or investing in that's not something that people should be doing.
We need people taken care of so that they never lose anything.
They never get hurt playing football.
They never get hurt in a car.
We don't destroy the planet with global warming.
We need people to stop eating popcorn so that they don't get sick and die and put more pressure on the healthcare system.
Stop drinking sodas that are bigger than 16 ounces.
Stop smoking cigarettes, stop doing all every all of it, folks.
There's another fun foundational fundamental to it too, and that is for all this to happen, you got to lose a lot of freedom.
You have to give up a lot of liberty in order for all of this to transpire.
Anyway, that's time for a brief obscene profit timeout.
But the income inequality that is providing the impetus for all this supposed discussion talk about fixing the economy.
It's quite interesting to talk about this in the way Con Carroll has at the Washington examiner'll get to it when we get back.
Don't go away.
Don't go away.
Guess the two things that are proven to not help with income inequality.
The two things that are proven to not help with income inequality.
And by the way, I'm not accepting the premise.
I'm simply stating that the left is basing a lot of what they're doing in terms of shaping the minds and hearts of duped Americans on this premise that there should be equality.
Obama, listen to him talk.
Fair shot, fair shake, level playing field, equality, fairness, all that.
It appeals emotionally.
The reality is there is no such thing as equality or sameness from Person to person or thing to thing.
Impossible.
Likewise with income.
There will not be income equality unless you're in a union.
And even then, there are differences.
But so, not accepting the premise, simply utilizing it here.
Two things that are proven not to help with it are high taxes and unions.
One thing that does contribute to income inequality is high numbers of illegal immigrants.
And this is never discussed.
And as usual, we can never solve a problem because we are forbidden from discussing it in reality.
Now, Con Carroll has a piece a couple days ago, the Washington Examiner, entitled The Income Inequality Factor Liberals Can't Talk About.
In fact, it's not just liberals, nobody can talk about it and survive.
President Obama's made it clear that he has one political goal this December, raise taxes on the rich.
Last December, Osawatomi, Kansas, he explained why.
In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1%'s gone up by more than 250% to 1.2 million dollars a year.
Now, this kind of inequality, a level that we haven't seen since the Great Depression hurts us all.
That's Obama a year ago.
So the question do higher taxes on the rich reduce income inequality?
No, they do not.
And all you need to do is make a quick comparison of state inequality data and their corresponding tax codes.
So take a look at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently released report called Pulling Apart a State by State Analysis of Income Trends.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities used census data to determine which states had the biggest gap between the bottom fifth of income earners and the top five percent.
And according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the states with the highest level of income inequality are Arizona, New Mexico, California, Georgia, and New York.
All of these states, by the way, are on the Forbes list of death spiral states.
Every one of these states is in a death spiral, Forbes magazine.
They are the states with the highest level of income inequality.
The report identifies a more progressive tax system as one-way states can battle inequality, but it never tells us which states have the most progressive tax codes.
Matter of fact, New York and California have two of the most progressive tax systems in the country.
California and New York tax the rich like nobody's business.
And they are in the top five states with the greatest, highest levels of income inequality.
Now, if raising taxes on the rich was fair, if raising taxes on the rich somehow elevated the people at the bottom, then California and New York would not be in the top five states with the highest level of income inequality.
So taxing the rich does not prevent income inequality.
What does?
Well, many people on the left believe that stronger unions can help reduce income inequality, but state by state comparisons don't help that cause either.
New York, California, New Mexico are all forced unionized states, meaning if you take a job with a unionized firm, you have to join the union.
So New York, California, New Mexico must join the union.
Highest income inequality states in the country.
So high taxes on the rich and forced unionization do not matter a whit to reducing income inequality.
Now, the three states with the least income inequality, Iowa, Utah, and Wyoming.
And you know what?
All three of them are right to work states.
Workers have the right to choose whether or not they want to join a union.
So if low taxes and weak unions are not causing income inequality, what is?
Well, the three states with the highest income inequality also share a border with Mako.
All of those states have huge illegal immigration populations.
According to the Pew Center, one out of the top five, every one of the top five unequal states is among the top ten states with high illegal immigration policies.
Income inequality, according to the data, highest levels of it in states, high taxes, forced unionization, and huge immigration.
So what's the solution?
Ending all three.
And you can't talk about it and survive.
We'll be back.
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