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Dec. 11, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:30
December 11, 2012, Tuesday, Hour #3
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Well, the Michigan House of Representatives has done did it.
They have passed the right-to-work law.
And it's going to pass everywhere else, and it'll go to the governor, and he will sign it, and all hell will continue to break loose in Michigan.
Some might say the ground zero for the labor union movement in this country.
Wisconsin paved the way.
The states are showing some of the recipes necessary to fix what is wrong at the root level with this country.
Great to have you back, folks.
El Rushbow serving humanity simply by being here.
Telephone number if you want to join us.
800-282-2882.
The email address, lrushbow at EIBnet.com.
Eric Schmidt, 57. The chairman of board of Google, offered the job of Treasury or Commerce Secretary, even the new Secretary of Business position.
He turned it down.
He said, I said last time, and I've said again, Google is my home.
I have no interest in working for the federal government.
And then this story is in the UK Telegraph.
The next line.
Mr. Schmidt played a key role in the re-election of Obama last month, helping to oversee Google's $700,000 donation to Obama's camp.
How do you oversee that?
How does that qualify you for anything?
I just don't understand the language.
What does somebody do when they oversee a donation?
Does he run around and harangue the employees?
They send out warm, threatening notices to the employees.
How do you oversee Google's 700, maybe he raised it?
I don't know.
Elmo Puppeteer, Kevin Clash, faces his fourth underage sex accusation.
A fourth accuser is coming forward to claim that he engaged in underage sex with the former Sesame Street puppeteer Kevin Clash.
You know, we're getting into Sandusky territory here.
Four of them now.
We're getting into Sandusky territory at PBS.
On Monday, Florida-based attorney Jeff Herman filed his third lawsuit alleging that Clash is 52 engaged in sex with minors.
The attorney also has filed suits on behalf of two of the previous three accusers.
All three cages, or cases, I'm sorry, allege civil.
In other words, non-criminal violations and are pending in the Southern District of New York.
The president of ESPN, John Skipper, has told producers that they need to spend less time talking about Tim Tebow.
I said, guys, we didn't handle this very well.
Going to training camp wasn't a problem, but we just stayed on it relentlessly and too long.
So ESPN's president has told the anchors and the reporters, don't, don't, no more coverage of Tebow.
It's overblown.
He doesn't deserve it.
He hasn't done anything.
Why is there so much coverage of Tebow, do you think?
It's because he's a Christian.
And they can't believe it.
And they're waiting for Tebow to screw up big time.
They can't wait for Tebow to have a giant moral decline.
They want something big that.
It's why there's a body watch on Teebo.
I have no doubt about it.
Now to the audio soundbites, Nora O'Donnell.
Talked about this yesterday, folks.
Remember, if you were here yesterday, I was expressing confusion.
I didn't understand why so many Republicans think that if they just let Obama have his tax rate increase on the rich in this fiscal cliff deal, that automatically Obama will have to then start talking about entitlement cuts.
I was genuinely perplexed.
I was scratching my head and I was lamenting sorrowfully that I'm just not smart enough to understand this.
So we have some soundbites about this.
CBS this morning, the co-host was Nora O'Donnell, and she was talking to the CBS political director, John Dickerson, and they had this little exchange about the fiscal cliff negotiations.
There's been so much attention on the Republicans and whether John Boehner can get his conference together on whether they'll go for increased tax revenues.
But I keep thinking getting the Democrats to agree to any entitlement cuts may be harder than that.
Well, you're right.
What they need is basically enough to give John Boehner something he can go back and sell to his Republicans.
And Boehner can't go too far on tax rates because he knows that the further he goes on raising tax rates, the bigger a prize he'll need on entitlements.
John Boehner needs something big that he can take back to Republicans.
Yeah, well, Nora O'Donnell gets it too.
She says, you know, I'm beginning to think the Democrats won't cut entitlements.
Somebody sign her up and run for the Senate as a Republican.
We need somebody who can think like this in our party.
Honestly, folks, I know what the thinking is now.
I studied it.
I still don't understand it.
But there are Republicans, there are media people, Republican conservative media people who really believe that if we cave, if Boehner gives Obama what he wants on taxes, increases on the rich, that the media will then go to Obama and say, okay, the Republicans have done their part, and now it's your turn.
You have to cut entitlements.
We have people on our side who honestly, seriously believe that.
And here's Nora O'Donnell this morning on CBS.
You know, I just don't see.
I'm beginning to think the Democrats won't cut entitlements.
Beginning to think they won't?
Can somebody find for me any evidence at all that Democrats are going to cut entitlements?
There isn't any.
I'm sorry if I keep repeating this and I'm getting blue in the face.
There is no common ground here.
The Democrats do not want entitlements cut.
They want them expanded.
They want to spend more money shoring up environment entitlements.
They want more people dependent on them.
If the Republicans think that there is common ground to be reached here, they are sadly outclassed and mistaken.
There isn't any common ground.
There's no place for a bipartisan agreement.
This is like the Israeli-Palestinian fight.
There's only one outcome.
Either two, perpetual ongoing arguments and disagreements, or one side loses, is either defeated or caves in.
But there isn't any common ground here.
And Nora O'Donnell, I'm beginning to think the Democrats aren't going to cut entitlement.
Who in the world ever did?
Here's F. Chuck Todd on the Today show this morning talking about the same thing.
The best I understand, though, is that they're actually closer on taxes and entitlements than on the debt ceiling.
That seems to be the biggest sticking point.
The White House is determined to get it out of the political arena.
Republicans are not ready to get rid of that leverage that they would have in February in exchange for what they'll agree to on taxes.
Look, here's the thing.
You know, folks, let me, can I apologize?
I really am starting to feel a little guilty about even subjecting you to this because I don't want anybody to think I'm getting sucked in by the daily diatribe here.
This is all smoke and mirrors.
None of this is about anything that matters substantively.
All this is politics.
There's nothing more to it than that.
This is not about deficit reduction.
It's not about economic growth.
It's not about new jobs.
It's not about the debt ceiling.
Not about any of that.
This is purely and simply politics.
And the media is all excited and caught up in it because that's all it is.
And that's what jazzes them every day.
That's all it is.
I think the best the Republicans could do.
And by the way, I'm not joining the chorus that Boehner has to cave in on the tax rates going up on the rich.
I just think that's going to happen.
I always have.
If Obama won the election, I've always thought taxes on a top 1 or 2% are going up.
I've never doubted that.
I've never thought anything would be other than that.
But I still am hearing, I'm still hearing people say that Obama wants a deal because of his legacy.
He doesn't.
He doesn't want a second term starting out with an immediate recession and brand new increases in unemployment.
And I'm saying you are, with all due respect to those of you who think that, I don't think he cares.
That's not the legacy.
You're plugging Obama into your standard, ordinary board game, the way you cover politics in Washington.
Presidents and legacies means X.
Yeah, he wants a legacy, but he doesn't care about the legacy that you think he cares about.
This is not your average Democrat president.
He's not concerned about debt reduction.
He's not concerned about the deficit.
He's not concerned what history says about him about that.
He's into transforming this country.
If 50 years from now it is written that he transformed this country into a socialist democracy, that's the legacy he wants.
And if he wants to do that, there are certain specific things that he must do, and he cannot worry about unemployment.
He's not worried about it now.
He hasn't worried about it in four years.
I think it's nonsensical to plug Obama into this standard operating procedure theory of politics, presidential politics in Washington.
So you know what the Republicans ought to do?
Deny him the best thing they could do, I think, is to deny him their complicitness in any deal that happens.
Because one thing I do believe Obama wants, he knows that there's going to be disaster after this.
He knows that there's going to be continued economic disaster.
He knows there's going to be continued shrinking in the American private sector.
He knows that the income gap is going to continue to widen.
He knows that there is not going to be any increased prosperity in this country overall.
He knows there isn't going to be any new wealth created.
He's denying the private sector that chance.
He's taking too much money out of it.
Make him do it alone.
This, to me, is the only leverage the Republicans have, and that is just don't be part of any deal.
If taxes are going to go up on the top 2%, don't sign off on it.
Just let him do it by himself.
Make him follow through on all these things that he wants.
Make him do them himself.
Because one thing I do think I know about Obama, as we go over the cliff, he wants both parties' fingerprints on it.
That part of his legacy, he is concerned about.
That part of history, he is concerned about.
He wants, if we're going over the cliff, he wants Democrat signatures and Republican signatures.
And I'm saying, don't sign it.
Deny him this bargain.
Deny him this grand deal.
Do not make it look like Obama brokered some kind of an agreement that Republicans found acceptable and then signed on to.
Just let him do this.
I don't call this walking away, although that might be the practical result.
But if he wants, who had the phrase, let him own this, let him own it.
Keep your fingerprints off of it.
Do not, in other words, confess, do not concede that tax cuts for the rich have led to this problem.
And if they sign on to tax increases going up for the rich, they are effectively wiping themselves out.
They are admitting, they are confessing, they are conceding that tax cuts for the rich have been the source of the problem.
And they'd better not do that.
I'm telling you, if they're going up anyway, don't put their fingerprints on it.
Let Obama own this.
And I don't mean from the standpoint of the media blaming him so that he comes around on entitlements.
I don't mean that.
I'm not suggesting that this can affect Obama behavior in the future.
For the sake of the Republican Party, do not sign on to this.
Deny him that.
He wants the Republicans sharing the so-called credit for this, and they'd better not.
It's really not that complicated to me.
But again, I'm not in their shoes.
It's easy for me to say here, effectively on the sidelines.
But if the Republican Party is going to try to stand for being the party of low taxes and economic growth, they'd better not put their names or their fingerprints on anything that raises taxes on anybody.
Particularly if it's going to happen anyway, let Obama own that.
Got to take a break.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments.
Don't go away.
Back to the phones we go.
El Rushboat to Detroit.
This is Mike.
I'm glad you called, sir.
Great to have you with us at EIB Network.
Hi.
Hello, Rush.
Thank you.
It's truly an honor to be on your show.
Thank you, sir, very much.
I'm here calling from the soon-to-be right-to-work state of Michigan.
Flansing survives the party of the terrorists up there today.
But anyway, the reason I'm calling is to get your opinion on an idea where I'm not in favor of raising the taxes on the wealthy like any good conservative.
But what if Boehner and the boys put together a plan that also included immediate comprehensive cuts across the board?
Let me tell you something I suggested.
I don't know.
Whenever I first heard, Snerdley can help me out here.
Whenever we first heard here, the Democrats start defending raising taxes on the Rich Pact to 39.6.
Hey, it led to prosperity during the Clinton years.
Whenever that was, how many months ago was it?
I don't know, but it's a decent amount of time ago.
What we said on this program at that time, okay, cool.
If 39.6 as a top rate is really good and really led to prosperity, then let's go back to the Clinton spending levels at the same time.
And how do you do that?
It's not hard.
The Republicans could submit a budget identical to one that was, say, in the Clinton years.
Pick 1997 or 1998.
Just pick one.
When the Clinton rates were what the Democrats are now panicking, well, not panic, they're just drooling over.
And then put the same spending numbers in there.
By definition, that's going to be a lot of spending reductions.
1998 is, gee, how many years ago?
That's what, 14 years ago.
Is that right?
Regardless, whatever it is, the fact of the matter is that they could do that and make Obama reject it.
See, I think there's any number of things they can do.
We hear all this talk, Republicans don't have any leverage.
In fact, grab, what is it?
It's Britt Hume.
Sounds like 12.
Yeah, Britt Hume.
This is last night on the Fox News Channel special report during the All-Star Panel.
If you have an ounce of compassion this Christmas season, save it for John Boehner and the House Republicans.
President Obama is treating them as if he has them over a barrel headed for the fiscal cliff, and he does.
On top of it, Boehner is under attack from the right for being a weak negotiator.
But he's not a weak negotiator.
He's just got a weak hand.
Okay, so the assumption is he's got a weak hand.
I'm fine.
All you have to do is say no to it.
We're the party of no anyway, right?
Just say no to it.
Because I'll guarantee you, Obama wants, and again, folks, I'm really sorry for being repetitive, but oftentimes it's necessary.
He wants the Republican Party fingerprints on this deal because it's a disaster.
What he is authoring is a disaster, and he wants Republican fingerprints on it.
Deny him that.
Deny him some bargain.
He wants a 39% tax rate.
Give it to him and submit a budget with spending from the Clinton years.
Submit a budget that, by that definition, is going to contain pretty significant spending cuts.
That's what we want anyway, isn't it?
We want entitlement reform.
The only real fix for the mess we're in is spending cuts.
Propose them.
The Republicans just lost.
I guess they're thinking that it can get worse.
How can it get worse?
How much worse can it get?
What's going to happen?
Well, they're going to hate us.
Ah, they already hate you.
I just, again, I'm on the sidelines.
I'm not in their shoes.
I don't live and work where they live and work every day.
I don't negotiate with Obama.
And I know it's much easier here from the armchair to come up with ideas like this.
But I don't know.
It just seems so, and we've been proposing this.
Whenever I first heard this Clinton tax rate be re-implemented, well, let's do the spending levels too.
Suggested just send a budget from the Clinton years up there and make him reject it.
I think it would be a great move.
April 22nd, 2011.
Is in the archives of RushLimbaugh.com.
April 22nd, 2011 is when we proposed, okay, you like the Clinton tax rates?
Let's do the Clinton spending level.
Let's send a budget up there from 1998.
April 22nd, 2011, and maybe before that.
Whenever, that's just the first one we found in the search of our website.
By the way, the federal budget in 1998, know what it was?
$1.6 trillion.
The federal budget in 1998, $1.6 trillion.
That's just barely above what the deficit is and has been for the past four years.
Obama has had $4 trillion deficits, $1.2 trillion, $1.3.
The entire federal budget.
And by the way, everything was fine back then, right?
I mean, that's what the Democrats say.
Everybody had what they wanted.
Everybody had what they needed.
It was an economic boom time.
We had surpluses.
Remember, the Democrats and the media love to talk about the Clinton surplus that Bush blew to smithereens.
So we had a top rate of 39.6.
We had a federal budget of $1.6 trillion.
Our population isn't growing that fast.
In fact, we're dangerously close to the birth rate in this country is not at replacement levels.
That's huge, too, by the way, but for another day.
So we had, by the definition of the Democrats in the media, we had a boom in 1998.
Why, the only thing going wrong then was Lewinsky.
Well, we had massively cool surpluses on the verge of being created.
We had economic growth.
We had a boom going on.
The Democrats tell us that today.
And now the amount we were spending in 1998 is the deficit now.
Anybody really believe that our budget, which is over $3 trillion, it's absurd to think that we cannot do everything we need to do for what we did with $1.6 trillion.
And we were still running deficits then, but nowhere near the size of the deficit today.
In fact, we're nearing the surplus that they love to talk about.
So let's just go back to that.
Why?
It was magic.
Let's just recreate the Clinton era here in Obama's second term.
Jerry Wilmington, Delaware, you're next.
I'm glad you waited, sir.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hey, Rush, how are you?
Good.
I've been to you for over 20 years.
Appreciate that, sir.
I know, you know, you are a distinguished professor of advanced conservative studies, and I know that you can give me an intellectually honest answer to a couple of questions I have.
One, you know, the electorate still blames Bush for the economy.
Well, of the people who voted, a majority blame Bush.
Correct.
In your opinion, when did Obama's policies kick in and Bush's policies were not affecting the economy anymore?
When did this exactly become Obama's economy?
Because you know when he took office, seven years ago.
Six weeks after he took office.
Six weeks.
Yeah.
That's when he passed the stimulus.
Bush never did anything like that.
The stimulus and the various tax increases.
I think Obama owned the economy within actually a month.
Within a month, all of Bush's effect should have been out the door.
In fact, there's so much.
Look, the Bush, they're trying to tell us today that the Bush economy led to the recession, created the recession and all that, and the economic collapse in 2008.
That wasn't Bush.
Bush tried that.
That was the subprime mortgage problem that came due.
That's when the excrement hit the fan.
Bush actually tried to prevent that from happening.
Look, the Bush people never defended themselves.
I don't know why I am, but they never defended themselves.
But that economic collapse, the seeds were sown during the Bill Clinton era.
That economic collapse was a Democrat Party recipe.
Now, the Republicans helped because in the second term of Bush, there was incredible federal spending.
But the idea that Obama's policies had no impact whatsoever on this economy for his entire first term is absurd.
You don't believe that, do you?
No, I don't believe that, but it would be absurd also to say that eight years of Bush was out the window after four weeks.
Come on, really.
I'm telling you that Obama put his signature on this economy in the first 30 days with a trillion dollars of brand new spending, unfunded and unpaid for.
Well, Bush put in an unfunded drug bill, and there were two unfunded wars.
You cannot expect that Obama could turn things around in five or six weeks, Rush.
Come on.
I don't expect Obama to ever turn things around.
He doesn't want to turn things around.
Obama built on what was going wrong.
Well, you know, the stimulus that was passed.
Are you telling me that Obamacare is somehow Bush's?
Say it one more time.
Obamacare.
Did Bush do that?
Oh, absolutely not.
That's definitely Obama's doing it.
And in the long run, that's going to help the economy.
Yeah, yeah.
I forgot.
I forgot.
Yeah, you know, I forgot that.
That's right.
Obamacare is going to reduce the deficit.
You're right.
I forgot that.
I'm sorry.
The long run.
But, you know, the other question I had was: you know, you kept saying.
When, by the way, what is the long run?
When will the deficit start coming down because of Obamacare, do you think?
In my opinion, the next five to ten years, you're going to see the authority.
Well, that's helpful.
Deficit come down next five, ten years.
That's helpful.
Well, I mean, you're talking about health care.
You're talking about a huge part of the economy.
It's going to take a while for that particular part to kick in.
The government's running health care now.
That is automatically going to fix it, right?
Well, I equate it to everybody getting Medicare.
And, you know, if you like Medicare and you want to give it to everybody and everybody contributes, I really think that's going to help in the long run.
That's not what's happening.
Medicare is staying as is.
It has its own taxes.
It has its own tax table.
It is not part of Obamacare.
Now, you might think that Obamacare is structured like Medicare for everybody, but it would have been much cheaper just to do Medicare for everybody.
It would have been much cheaper just to ensure the 30 million that didn't have it.
We could have done that for one-hundredth of what Obamacare is costing.
See, Obama cares not about health care.
I can't believe we're still litigating this.
I cannot believe.
What is this?
2000?
Massachusetts?
10 again, all of them?
What do we do here?
Sorry, what was that?
Isn't that what Romney did in Massachusetts in terms of trying to insure everyone?
But it didn't work, did it?
I believe it is working up there.
Oh, okay.
Okay, I missed that.
Well, you were more informed than I.
Well, I mean, I need to hire you as a professor here at the Distinguished Institute.
Well, I don't know if I would be conservative studies, but, you know, I am a Democrat.
Right.
I just think that when did Bush's influence end?
You're asking me when Obama's kicked in.
When did Bush's influence end?
Well, on the day that the day that the stimulus was passed, I would say from probably six months after that date, you can probably attribute 50% of what was going on to what Obama was doing.
Is that right?
Six months after the stimulus, 50% of what was going on was Obama's.
And as I understand, most of the stimulus hasn't even been spent.
Well, no, it has.
It was spent in the campaign.
But you're right.
A lot of it, not all of it, but a significant amount of it was not.
Same with TARP.
Same with TARP, which, of course, that was a crisis.
We had to spend that 24 hours.
The economy was going to end.
The world was going to end.
Do you remember that?
Oh, I remember everything Obama inherited.
Yeah, that's right.
And that was part of my second question.
Exactly.
Part of my second question is, when did another president inherit such a worse set of circumstances?
Who?
Obama.
I think Obama inherited next year, Obama's going to inherit a bigger mess than he inherited in 2008.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Explain that.
There's no question.
Poor old Obama, he's going to inherit two disasters.
Well, we're going to have one less war.
The unemployment is falling.
You know, it's going down.
No, it isn't.
We are going to be $20 trillion in debt by the time Obama finishes his second term.
Obama is inheriting a bigger mess next month than he inherited in 2008.
And that, Jerry, is because he caused a bigger mess than existed in 2008.
He has given himself his own problem.
Except to him, it isn't a problem.
It's the direction he wants to go.
Reagan inherited a much worse economy than Obama did.
Explain that.
I don't see.
He didn't have a financial banking collapse.
He didn't have a mortgage home situation collapse.
Two wars going on, falling unemployment, a budget deficit, and debt.
It was much worse.
Reagan had two recessions in his first four years, in addition to the disaster that Jimmy Carter left him.
You can look it up.
I still don't think that equals what Obama inherited.
Oh, well, we just have to agree to disagree.
But regardless, the mess that Obama's going to inherit next year or next month when he's inaugurated, that's the biggest mess ever that any president's ever inherited.
You can go to bank on that one, Jerry, old buddy.
By the way, I would submit, ladies and gentlemen, that the economy really started plunging before Obama was even inaugurated.
If you look at November and December of 2008 is when unemployment started skyrocketing.
That's when people started being laid off because small businesses knew what was ahead of them.
They knew.
Because Obama talked about all he was going to do, health care, nationalized health care, all the stimulus.
They knew what was going to happen.
And they started laying people off in preparation for it.
Now, random numbers, 1998, we had a budget of $1.65 trillion, and revenues are $1.71 trillion.
Let's go back to 1990s, just submit the Clinton spending levels and the Clinton levels of taxation.
If you move that forward to $2005, that would be revenues of $2 trillion, expenditures of $1.9 trillion.
You move it to $212, of course, you get what you get.
You get federal spending $3.3 trillion and a deficit of $1.6.
It's incredible.
Or $1.3.
It's absurd.
There's no earthly reason.
We do not have the expenses that we're spending for.
It's just crying shame what's happened.
It is a genuine shame what's happened in this country.
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