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Dec. 28, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:49
December 28, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 247 podcast.
Are we all goosebumpy yet?
Three o'clock Eastern time, the president and the congressional leadership meet.
We're told one last time as they attempt to reach a grand bargain or more likely a small deal to avert the fiscal cliff.
This thing is being hyped on all the cable channels, it's all over the internet.
One last chance.
This is all such total nonsense.
I want to tell you what I think is going on here.
You have to go back to the beginning of Barack Obama's administration to understand what drives him.
He in his first term, Ram Emanuel was a chief of staff.
And he managed to say something that I think just explained everything.
It explains the Chicago mentality and it would explain how Obama would govern his president.
That statement, which was just, it was b it was chilling when you heard it.
But everything that's happened since then has just underlined how accurate it is.
Ram Emanuel said, never let a crisis go to waste.
While this fiscal cliff has a lot of people freaked, stock market is on edge, corporate CEOs are bothered.
You even have Star Duck Starbucks baristas writing come together on the coffee mugs.
For Barack Obama, this isn't a problem.
This isn't a crisis.
This isn't anything to worry about.
He sees this as an opportunity.
I honestly think he's looking forward to this.
This is a chance.
It's his chance to do what he's wanted to do.
I think he sees this thing as an opportunity to redistribute income.
And that drives him.
He's not looking for a deal.
He's not looking for something that's going to help the economy.
He's not trying to avert a recession.
He's got different motivations here.
He's seeing this deadline and the knowledge that taxes are going to go up after January 1st.
And he sees this as one giant opportunity here.
So while everybody else may be looking to make a deal, Barack Obama, I think, is out there trying to redistribute income, which is what a giant tax increase here would be, especially if the money is taken largely from people on the higher end.
That's what's motivating him.
All right, I want to tell you about today's program.
In addition to discussing my belief that Obama is motivated by different things than most other Americans, we've got a great interview lined up for today's program.
It's going to be in the second hour.
Every now and then, somebody comes along and tells you that no matter how bad you think something is, it's worse.
This is eye-opening.
There's a new book out called Shadow Bosses.
It's written by Mallory Factor.
He's written about government unions and the remarkable amount of political clout that they have.
Now I live through this in Wisconsin where our governor Scott Walker went through a two-year battle with public employee unions to reduce their clout.
And I saw firsthand exactly how much power the unions have and the tactics that they're willing to engage in.
But even I am blown away by some of the revelations in this book.
Again, it's called Shadow Bosses.
Mallory Factor is the author.
He's going to be with us about midway through our number two on today's program.
In addition to that, you know what today is Live from New York City.
It's open line Friday.
Open Line Friday.
Rush always jokes about Open Line Friday.
I take open line Friday seriously.
Because I see this as an opportunity for me as the host to talk about whatever it is that I feel like talking about.
Rush talks about Open Line Friday being the day that the callers choose the topics.
This is the day in which I ignore all input from Bosnerdly and the staff and I talk about what I want to talk about in the program.
I I honestly think if I called in, you would screen me out.
But I you I I I I don't have to call in, I'm here.
Anyway, 1-800-282-2882 is the phone number on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I love that sounder.
You even had the New York sounder.
Very good.
I went in 90 seconds before airtime and asked broadcast engineer Mamon, you have the Open Line Friday sound reason.
Not only do I have it, I have the New York Sounder, since I'm doing the program from New York, as opposed to Rush doing the program at EIB Southern Command.
There is a New Hampshire one for Stein.
Really?
You're going to prove it?
So Stein has his own specific one because of his odd insistence on doing the program from the backwoods of New Hampshire.
Has anybody actually seen Stein's Stein's command post?
You've heard about it.
I see, I I'm thinking that this is I'm thinking this is, you know, the dried goods and the soup cans and you know, sixteen stories underneath ground.
I'm thinking bunker the whole thing.
That's my thought on it.
That's my belief.
You read Mark Stein's stuff, it's hard not to be pessimistic.
He's got a remarkable ability to be incredibly hilarious as he tells us that the world is coming to an end.
Anyway, I want to get back to where I was on the fiscal cliff, and my just general disregard for 99% of the analysis that's out there on this.
Will the Republicans agree to tax increases?
Will Obama budge on this?
I just think it all misses the point.
I mentioned on yesterday's program that President Obama, I think, is not motivated by the normal measures of success of American presidents.
And his goals and his ambitions are on a different chart than the one that we've always measured presidents on.
You go back and you take a look at the economic performance of a president, and we always judge the same things.
Was the unemployment rate good or bad?
Did we have good growth during that time?
Were the American was the American public generally prosperous or not?
Was the economy in a period of growth, recession, something in between?
Those are the barometers we use.
We also take a look at what happened to the federal deficit, other things like that.
I don't believe those are the things that motivate the president.
I think that he's got a completely different agenda.
And when he finishes out his term and he evaluates his presidency, he's going to be looking at different things.
His criteria are not the same as everybody else's.
I believe that Barack Obama doesn't buy into the premise of American capitalism.
I just don't think he buys into it.
Now, whether or not that means he's a Marxist or a socialist, I don't need to come up with terms like that.
I think, and I think that D'Souza was on the right track with the Obama 2016 movie, that President Obama believes that people who have great wealth in this country, or even high incomes, somehow didn't do that legitimately.
He doesn't accept the notion that we have a system that's a meritocracy in which the successful get to reap the rewards of their success.
He doesn't buy into that.
He's given interviews over the years, especially prior to his becoming president, in which he talks about how we need to do more in America to level the playing field.
That we need to have more people sharing the great wealth that we have.
We were a country that was set up on free market capitalism.
It was the land of opportunity.
You come to the United States, you start your own business.
The sky is the limit.
You know, I'm doing the program in New York.
Every time you come here, it's almost impossible not to look at all the tall buildings and all the giant corporations and the incredible wealth that was generated here.
It didn't happen anywhere else.
It happened in the United States because we more than any other nation broke down barriers to success and said, you can come here and you can go for it.
You could start an automobile company, you can start a bank, you could start a computer company.
You know, and if you do well, you get to have tremendous wealth.
On the other hand, if you don't do well, guess what?
You bust out and we're not going to do much to help you.
That was the American concept.
I don't believe that the president has ever fully bought into it.
It's not just that he never worked a day of his life in the private sector.
It's that his ideology is one in which I think he's so focused on the fact that some people don't succeed, even though they're intelligent, even though they're wonderful people, and he feels as though he's got to level all of that out.
So he looks at the situation that we're facing now with this fiscal cliff and sees it as a grand opportunity to raise taxes, to support his welfare state, and to redistribute the income.
I think that's the stuff that drives him.
Here's what's so sad about this.
Barack Obama actually has an opportunity, and I don't think most conservatives realize this, he has an opportunity in his second term to be a pretty good president.
Because he was re-elected, and because he has such credibility on the left, if Obama actually did, say that I want to produce economic growth.
He came out and said we're not going to raise taxes on anyone.
We're going to try to turn things loose in this country.
We're going to go for North American energy independence.
And you know what?
Even though I support all of these social programs, we're going to try to save the entitlements for the future.
He could probably get that done because he has enough sway with the Democrats that he could accept that.
And he would go down in history as probably one of the great better presidents because he was willing to sacrifice a bit of his political ideology, reform the entitlements, and put America back on a growth path.
I just think that isn't what drives him.
It's other stuff.
PJ O'Rourke, who's just a hilarious guy, has a column in today's Wall Street Journal in which he addresses this.
I want to give you a few paragraphs because I think he hits this thing right on the nose.
Writing to the president, he writes, You sent a message to America in your reelection campaign, therefore you sent a message to the world.
The message is that we live in a zero sum universe.
There is a fixed amount of good things.
Life is a pizza.
If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the box.
You had no argument to Mitt Romney's argument.
You had no answer to Mitt Romney's argument for more pizza parlors for baking more pizzas.
The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we've got, with low cost government subsidized pepperoni, somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza parlor owners.
In this zero sum universe, there is only so much happiness.
The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.
Oh, I think he has it here.
Do you not think that President Obama gets a smile on his own face when he thinks that he can cut into the amount of income that high income people have?
Aurora continues, There is only so much money.
The people who have money are hogging it.
The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.
Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution.
Take from the rich and give to the well, actually you didn't mention the poor.
What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well off Americans consider themselves to be members of.
So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich more or less.
It is as if sheriff it is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the deputy sheriff.
But never mind, the evil of zero sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be.
The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and indeed the duty to make more things.
Or maybe you just find it easier to pursue a political policy of sneaking in America's back door, swiping a laptop, going around to the front door, ringing the bell and announcing free computer equipment for all school children, and so it goes.
Again, that's PJ O'Rourke in today's Wall Street Journal.
He believes, and I believe that President Obama believes that the only way you can bring prosperity the American people is to take the money from some people and give it to others.
That's why I don't believe he's sincerely motivated to make a deal here on the fiscal cliff.
Everybody has told him, even Democratic economists say if we raise taxes right now, you're going to put the economy back into a recession.
That's why they're calling it the fiscal cliff.
If we have these giant tax increases and you're taking all this money out of the private economy, it's going to be bad for America.
He's tuning all of that out.
I don't think he cares if the consequences are bad.
He sees this as an opportunity to raise taxes, particularly in higher income people and redistribute the money around.
When you're speaking that language and everybody else at the bargaining table is speaking a different language.
When everyone else is there trying to improve the American economy and avert the fiscal cliff, and he's trying to get us to that cliff because the cliff in his mind isn't a bad thing, because the cliff is tax increases, which is what he wants.
How do you make a deal with that?
You can't make a deal with that.
This is why every single proposal he's made to the Republicans has been one that is anathema to them.
The last plan that he threw out which called for more spending and a new stimulus was a joke.
He didn't want to give the Republicans anything that they might be able to bite on.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, it's open line Friday and you're listening to EIB.
Mark Belling sitting in for rush.
Let me illustrate my point this way.
Let's suppose Barack Obama was never elected president and for that matter never got to the United States Senate.
Then his career peaked out as a member of the Illinois State Senate, and he was back to community organizing or whatever.
And he's on an airplane.
And his seat mate on the airplane is somebody who decides that he wants to start talking to Obama.
And he tells him, you know, what's your name?
Brock?
Brock?
I'm doing really well.
I got involved in franchise fast food restaurants.
It's a chain that was really up and coming.
There's a few of them out there.
You know, and I got the territory in my own community, I know fourteen restaurants, and I'm doing really, really, really well.
It's a great company.
Do you think Obama would be glad about that?
Do you think he'd feel good about that guy's success story?
Or would his initial reaction be yeah, I bet you hardly pay your employees anything?
I bet you're doing you're making all of your money on the backs of the low wages that you hand out to all of the saps that work for you.
I think that'd be his reaction.
I think for most people, when they hear somebody talk about a story of their success, they feel good about it because they realize that in America, if that guy did indeed in my mythical story here, which obviously is a story that's happened a lot of times to a lot of people, when you create all of those restaurants, yeah, there are some minimum wage employees in there, but they're also managers, and there are other people who have the opportunity to move up, and this restaurant is buying all sorts of goods from suppliers.
This is how we have an economy.
When somebody starts something and builds something, money and capital are created when we expand the general pool of wealth in America.
I just don't think he buys that.
I don't think he's happy to hear about the story.
I think he probably thinks that the guy got where he got somehow illegitimately.
That's why right now, I believe his number one priority is to figure out how we can raise taxes significantly on higher income people.
And that's what he's motivated for in these discussions.
He's not looking for a quote deal.
He's not looking to avert going off the fiscal cliff.
He's not looking to avoid a recession in twenty thirteen.
He's not looking to strike a deal with the Republicans on the debt ceiling.
He's not looking to do anything to restrain federal spending.
He's trying to figure out how he can significantly raise tax rates on higher income people because he thinks higher income people don't deserve to keep the current amount of money that they're making.
Whether or not you call that Marxism or socialism or radicalism, and people have been arguing about those terms for some time, I think the term isn't important.
I think it's the ideology that he has.
And he's not alone.
A lot of Americans have that opinion.
This is what the unions have been preaching forever.
That the big fat cats at the top are waking making way too much, and they're doing it off the backs of you.
You work so hard yet you don't make hardly anything, and they're making all of it.
This argument that we don't have, a fair deal in America, is one that a lot of people have bought into.
And the president of the United States, I think, is one of them.
I don't think he looks at his presidency as one in which he wants to be judged on the growth rate or the unemployment rate or anything else.
I think he wants to go down in the hip go down in history as the guy who expanded the entitlement state in America and managed to redistribute as much income as he possibly could and create an egalitarian society where we're all in it together.
I think that's what drives him, and that's why it's going to be very hard for anyone to make any kind of a deal with him.
Mark Belling in for Rush.
It's open line Friday, so I have to start taking calls rather than listen to my own raspy Wisconsin cold infested voice here carry on.
But I've got one more point that I want to make before we start talking to callers.
We actually have an opportunity right now to significantly cut into the deficit and deal with the debt problem that we have beyond merely cutting spending.
The energy thing is huge in America right now.
Look at what's happening in North Dakota and the Bakken field.
That, combined with fracking technology, the ability to go and get all the natural gas that we have all over the United States.
You could have tremendous economic success off of that.
When you have tremendous economic success, you produce a lot of tax revenue.
You don't have to raise tax rates to get it.
We could become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.
We could become energy independent here in our own country and in Canada.
But President Obama doesn't want to do it, and I don't think it's for environmental reasons.
I don't think for a minute he gives much of a rip about the environment.
I don't think that's what motivates him.
He just doesn't want energy companies to make all that money.
I think it rubs him the wrong way that somebody would go in there and start busting up the ground and coming up with all this energy and making a lot of money off of it.
He isn't driven by that.
You know what he's driven by?
He's driven by creating stimulus programs in which he hands out taxpayer money, redistributes it to the industries that he likes.
Almost all of which busted out, didn't go anywhere.
He wants to pick the winners.
He wants to decide who's going to be profitable.
He wants to decide who's going to be successful.
He doesn't buy into the system of allowing the market to do that.
Anyway, I am going to take calls.
New York City and Rob, Rob, it's your turn on EIV with Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark, it's a pleasure.
Um first Markstein is hilarious, I have to say.
He is hilarious.
The uh you know, they talk about people that take risks, don't deserve what they get with all the hard work they put in all the hours.
What about the people in offices who slack off or on Facebook or shopping and still get a paycheck?
Or the people that don't work and get money from the government.
I mean, they don't talk about that.
So no system is fair.
There's always gonna be somebody, and they're on both ends, probably.
People who get things that they don't deserve, and that's just the way it is.
There's nothing you can do about it.
When you talk about the people who kind of, you know, the slackers who don't work very hard in the workforce but draw the same paycheck as the guy next to him who's working a bit harder.
Who do you think most of the mo those people you mostly vote for?
I think they mostly vote for Democrats.
Because I I do, because I don't think those people generally buy into the s buy into this notion that if I work harder, I can get farther ahead.
They think that the deal is rigged and I think that Obama has appealed to that.
One of the s things that's so sad about the fact that he won is that he's now claiming he has a mandate for all of this stuff.
He's got a mandate for the redistributionism.
He said I ran on taxing and taxing high income people, I ran on taxing the rich, and I won.
That means the American public believes in that.
I think that he's emboldened here.
He believes that his ideology is taking hold.
And I think that for a lot of people, it is taking hold.
We've been so consumed with envy because they're pushing the class envy between the unions and the Democrats.
It's just been one attack after another after another after another on Every industry that you can think of in America.
It's been an assault on success.
And that's been his stock and trade here.
And I think that's what's driving us as we're on this whole fiscal cliff.
He knows it won't be good for the economy to raise taxes.
I mean, in the if we revert back to the 2003 tax rates, dividends are taxed at the rate of ordinary income.
That will be crushing for senior citizens.
Senior citizens, they can't put their money in savings bonds right now.
They can't put their money in a CD.
Those CDs are paying less than one percent.
They're out there owning dividend paying stocks five, four, five, six, seven, eight percent.
You start taxing that at ordinary income rather than the current dividend tax rates, you're cutting into the resources that senior citizens have.
That's not good for America.
I don't think he cares about that.
He just wants to grab the money.
This is all about him using the power of government to take away money from people, and he thinks that if he can use this fiscal cliff thing to end up taking a bigger piece of the pie and then spending it on government programs, he will achieve his great goal.
Thank you for the call, Rob.
Let's go to Ray in Dover, Massachusetts.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Yeah, hi, Mark.
Listen, how come nobody, not the Democrats or Republicans or even anybody on talk on talk radio is talking about what's the real problem here?
A thousand times bigger than the fiscal cliff.
And that's the Federal Reserve printing money out of thin air, which is an indirect tax stealing wealth by d lowering the value of everybody's dollar a thousand times greater than the taxes increase for the fiscal cliff.
In other words, there is no there's no limit to the debt.
It's not really debt.
They're just printing money out of thin air.
And that's an indirect tax stealing from all Americans, a thousand times greater than the than the uh the fiscal tax.
Now you say nobody on talk radio is talking about that.
You did not listen to me sitting in for rush yesterday because I talked about this yesterday.
Uh you are right about this.
I think most Americans have no idea how the Federal Reserve creates money.
They hear the term printing of money and they don't know what that means.
And if you don't believe me, try it out on people.
Well, the Federal Reserve's on this thing right now where they're doing this bond buying and they're buying mortgage securities.
People think they're actually taking money that exists to do this.
They're inventing money.
Every day the Fed decides how much money we're going to invent.
When they buy up those securities, they're doing it with money that in the past they didn't have.
It would be like if I could get up every morning and magically decide how much money I have in my checking account and write in whatever number I want to do.
The Federal Reserve is doing that, and I think it's going to eventually create tremendous inflation and it's going to erode the value of everything.
So you may not be hearing a lot of people talking about it, but I think it's a significant problem.
And it's the way I think that Obama figures that in the end he'll deal with the deficit.
We'll just have the Federal Reserve print so much money that we'll start you know buying down these debts and so on.
The problem with that is is that you get such inflation with it that it devalues the worth of everybody's assets that are out there.
If you've been saving money forever and ever and ever, and we get fifteen or seventeen percent inflation, which is possible it happened as recently as thirty years ago, the everybody's you know net worth declines.
So I think you're right.
I'm not a big fan of Ron and Ron and Rand Paul, but on that issue, they're right on the money.
They've been pressured on this.
The Federal Reserves out there is this mini god creating all of this money, and ob Obama's been wink-winking with Ben Bernanke over there, allowing him to paper over this crisis that we have by buying up all these bonds and averting the witching hour that's going to be there.
He makes a good point.
Let's go now to Baltimore and Seymour.
Seymour, it's your turn on the Russian Limbaugh program with Mark.
Yeah, hi, Mark.
I agree with you completely.
And in fact, Obama said it as much when he compared himself to Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt as a tremendous formative president.
Uh I think he might be right with Lyndon Johnson with Roosevelt.
He was totally mistaken.
And I'll just give you an example.
When Roosevelt proposed Social Security, he didn't tell Americans if you like your pension, you could keep it, because nobody in America had a pension.
He wasn't competing with the private sector.
He was in uh doing something that the private sector had failed to do, and that was something new.
Go back for a second, Seymour, to how you started your comment in which you said he talked about being a transformative president.
When you say transformative, that means fundamental change.
He wants to change us from what we are to something else.
And I think that's where, as you're you're commenting, the redistributionism comes in.
Now that term is one that, you know, a lot of people think, okay, that's, you know, a bunch of kooks on the right wing talk about redistribution of income.
When you expand all these entitlements, when you create Obamacare, when you're out there with stimulus that they're throwing money around all over the place, you need to have some source of the money to be able to do all of that stuff.
And he sees raising taxes as a way of paying for all of this stuff that he wants to do.
And he's selling it in the name of fairness.
He's selling it as a further expansion of government.
The problem with it is, and the reason this is so disastrous, it's so terrible, is we are already spending ourselves into the ground.
Wilbur Ross is a really, really prominent financier.
You may have seen him in the business pages.
He's talking about us being very, very close to Greece.
He's a billionaire.
He's been involved in a lot of American businesses.
Did an interview yesterday in which he said he we are very close to the Greek situation where the debt is going to be so bad and it's going to cut these chickens are going to come home to roost so soon and people aren't aware of it.
If we do go into a recession next year, that means never mind what he does with tax rates.
If we go into a recession, you're going to have less revenue coming into the government.
Forty percent of not much is less money than 30% of a whole lot.
If we have a recession, that deficit's going to explode.
That's the problem that we get from him, but you're right about this.
He talked about being transformative.
And this is his goal.
His goal is to take what started with Roosevelt, what was expanded under Johnson, and now take it to an entirely new level.
That's why Obamacare was such a terrible, you know, a terrible thing that happened in our America.
You ended you ended up with a new entitlement being created that pretty much everybody is part of, that goes to the middle class.
That was his main goal here.
Thank you for the call.
My name is Mark Belling.
It's open line Friday, 1800-282-2882 is the phone number.
Don't forget in our number two shadow bosses, Mallory Factor, good stuff.
That's still to come.
Mark Belling's sitting in for Rush.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Let me explain it this way.
Everybody says if we go over the fiscal cliff, it's a disaster.
The stock market doesn't want it.
Most Americans don't want it.
The corporate CEOs don't want it.
The news media doesn't even seem to want it.
Fiscal Cliff, bad.
We go over this thing January first, bad.
Taxes go up on everybody.
Not just higher income people, but they go up on everybody, all sorts of taxes that you didn't even remember that we had.
But if you're Obama, I don't think you see that as all that bad.
If his goal is to take more money from the productive so we can spend it on all of these government programs, does he really see this fiscal cliff as terrible?
We go over the fiscal cliff.
Tax rates go up on all income brackets.
I think he sees that as a pretty good thing.
So how do you end up trying to negotiate how do you end up negotiating a deal to avert something that one of the people in the negotiations doesn't want to avert?
When you have a negotiation, take the National Hockey League, what a joke.
The National Hockey League players and union, there's still no season in the NHL.
You do get the sense that somewhere they'd like to have a season and have their sport continue.
They haven't been able to cut that deal, but they at least have the same goal in mind.
I don't know that Obama has that goal in mind.
If the president decides he wants to agree to something, what do you think is his deal breaker?
What do you think is his number one priority that he won't give up?
I think it's taxes.
I think there's no way he's going to agree to anything that doesn't result in a significant tax increase on a large chunk of the American public.
I think he'd like to go lower than that two hundred and fifty thousand dollar threshold that he talks about.
I think he'd love it to be one hundred thousand dollars.
He's going to try to shove that number down as low as he possibly can.
The Republicans were elected also.
They don't believe in That.
Even economists are saying that that type of a tax increase is going to be bad for the economy and send us into a recession.
So if his deal breaker, his bottom line is something that the Republicans can't swallow, I'm not talking about raising taxes on a million and up, or eight hundred thousand enough.
If his deal breaker is a much lower number, because all he really wants is to get the money, how do you negotiate with that and how do you reach a deal?
I think he believes that if we go over this cliff and the public panics, he's got enough numbers out there with people in the middle class and the lower middle class that he can demand that the Republicans budge off their intransigence on not wanting to raise taxes on everybody else.
He also thinks that once that happens, the Republicans will have a civil war, that they'll be all busted up, that there will be chaos among the Republican Party in twenty fourteen, and he been and he benefits off of that, and he's probably right, that is what will happen.
Let's suppose you do have the January twentieth here.
We've gone over the cliff, taxes are up on everyone, the child care credits are gone, all that stuff that was put into place in the 2003 tax deal.
Suppose we get to that point.
Now, all these taxes are higher, the withholding that was taken out of people's paychecks way higher, the uh Medicare and Social Security tax, that break of two percent, that's gone.
Everybody's freaking out, and the repli and the president keeps getting up and saying, you know, all we have to do is get the Republicans to agree to raise tax rates on higher income people.
And they buckle.
If the Republicans do buckle, you're going to have a revolt among Republican voters.
It's going to happen.
So what should they do?
My advice to the Republicans is to understand this.
And understand that one of his goals here, in addition to get all getting all of this tax revenue, is to damage the Republican Party.
Once again, going back to Rama Manuel's famous statement from early 2009, never let a crisis go to waste.
If he can take this whole fiscal cliff thing and use it to do damage to the Republican Party, create tremendous disunity, where the Republicans who wanted to reach a deal and are willing to accept higher taxes on a lot of people are in complete conflict with the Republicans who don't believe that anybody's taxes should go up, he's achieved another victory here.
I think what the Republicans' bottom line has to be is we're not going to agree to a tax increase unless you make significant cuts in spending.
And they've got to stay unified on that.
Otherwise, he's going to win in this because his motivation isn't to avert the cliff.
I think his motivation is to use the cliff to get what he wants.
He's looking at this fiscal cliff thing as this great opportunity for him to, A, raise taxes, especially on people upper middle class and higher, and create tremendous dissension within the Republican Party.
Do you really think he's dreading this fiscal cliff?
I think he's flipping cartwheels.
Why'd he come back from Hawaii?
He's loving this.
This is great stuff for him.
Well, but that would mean that we'd have a recession.
He surely wouldn't want that.
I don't think he cares about that.
I think his priorities are the other things that I mentioned.
He wants to get the income because he's a redistributionist, and he wants to bust up the Republican Party and create all this angst in the party.
He wants people like myself and Rush to rip on Boehner if he negotiates a deal for a tax increase.
He wants the Republicans in the House to be yelling and screaming at one another.
He wants the Tea Party to resurrect itself and run against all these incumbent Republicans.
He wants all of those things.
Do you think he minds if we have a recession in the meantime?
I don't.
I don't think he's motivated by the best interests of the American economy.
He's motivated by the things that he cares about.
There's no way for me to prove this other than to watch what he does and see if everything that he does on this isn't aimed at achieving that goal.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
In a couple of hours from now, the president and the congressional leadership get together to meet.
I think it's a farce of a meeting, but they get together to meet, supposedly to try to avert the fiscal cliff.
I can Right now, tell you how you could cut a deal.
I've got the proposal the president could make that the Republicans would accept.
If the president this afternoon gives them this offer, they'll take it.
Since the fiscal cliff is a bad thing, and we don't want to go over it.
Here's my offer, Republicans.
We're not going to raise tax rates on anyone, but I'm also not going to agree to any cuts in spending.
We'll just move forward.
No fiscal cliff, no tax increase on anyone.
The Republicans might like to cut spending, but they will move forward if we can avoid these taxes.
They'll accept that in an instant.
But he's not going to make that offer because he wants to get the taxes.
He's not trying to avert the fiscal cliff.
He's trying to raise taxes.
He wants the cliff.
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