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Jan. 2, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:30
January 2, 2013, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Welcome back to the show, ladies and gentlemen.
It's Dugarbansky filling in for the Doctor of Democracy himself, Marshall Limbaugh, who will be back tomorrow, I am told.
You know, we're going through all of this, and the news is so shocking about the physical cliff conversation, and you know I hate the words.
I want to go through something that you will find equally interesting.
That in its own way, if you bear with me, here is a big payoff coming up in the next monologue.
I want to talk to you about a country, a real country, that is busy slashing the state government payrolls.
A country, a success story in many ways, happening in our midst, a country that is spurring private sector growth, whose private sector picked up enormous steam in 2012.
A country where the number of private non-state workers rose 23% last year alone, a country where the state sector employment dropped by almost 6%, and a country where the unemployment rate is only 3.8%, including people who did not seek work.
Now I am talking, ladies and gentlemen, about Cuba.
Cuba, under the leadership of Raul Castro.
I don't know if you realize this, ladies and gentlemen, he has been slowly dismantling in ways you can't even discuss here in the United States.
Many of the Soviet-style economy practices that had been enforced in Cuba.
Private sector jobs there have doubled in two years.
State jobs have been slashed almost 6% in 2012 alone.
Can you would you like to be able to say that about the United States?
Would you like to be able to say that?
In Cuba, the government cut 228,000 public jobs in 2012, on top of the previously announced 137,000 that they cut in 2011.
The goal of Raul Castro is to slash 20% a million jobs from the government payrolls by 2016.
Do you hear any, and I mean any American politician currently in his position of power or office using approaches like that?
Do you hear anyone even saying it, suggesting it?
The non-state workers in Cuba are now small businesses, small retail businesses, people who are self-employed, such as carpenters, seamstresses, painters, photographers, taxi drivers.
The state of Cuba, the government of Cuba, which is cash-strapped, sound familiar?
Cash strapped, they are closing thousands of small retail outlets such as state-run barbershops, cafeterias.
Because Raul Castro has come to believe that state-run enterprises are notorious for inefficiency.
They are leasing out government premises to others who are interested in running their own businesses.
The state is turning, during 2013, 200 medium-sized businesses that range all the way from shrimp breeding to produce markets to construction and manufacturing.
They're selling them off so that they are run by private enterprises.
Now, Cubans have complained that the communist country with all these social benefits is a place where many live off the dole.
Do you hear a lot of Americans complaining today that too many are living off the dole?
And yet in Cuba, that's what they are complaining about.
And Raul Castro himself has been complaining in many speeches about the number of people who are living off the government dole and who do not contribute to society over and over again.
I first covered the story a year ago.
It's back in the news story from Reuters from two days ago.
He said in his recent speech, Raul Castro did.
He said our state cannot and should not continue maintaining companies, productive entities, services, and budgeted sectors with bloated payrolls and losses that hurt the economy.
They are counterproductive, counterproductive, and form bad work habits, said Raul Castro in 2010.
I'm wondering if Raul would like to come up here and try some.
Look, I've covered stories before.
Raul Castro, I mentioned to our medium information voter, intelligent caller in the previous hour, Peter.
That no matter how hard you try to be involved and intelligent, the highest now you're going to rate yourself is as a medium information voter.
And we said, well, is it time people are going to start talking about term limits or flat tax are very simple, transparent, broad strokes.
The concept of taking away from completely from the regulatory agencies the ability to have the power of law.
So that everything that has the power of law goes back to where it rightfully belongs to be, and that's through our legislators.
So it's all discussed transparently in the sunlight.
Raul Castro recently called for term limits for their elected officials for that very same reasons.
They are investing in building villas and golf courses for tourism in Cuba.
Well, the left in Cuba are thrilled to be getting out from under the yoke of communism.
But they that you start to think, HR, that if they're building villas and golf courses in Cuba, you start to think about where people who like golf, like Obama might have a second home in retirement.
Cuba would it would seem fitting.
And look, ladies and gentlemen.
Here's what Cuba has learned.
When a collectivist form of government rules a society, there always will be individuals, some individuals who develop a lack of initiative.
So you end up with a stifling of creativity.
That's the result.
People don't have to work harder than anyone else, because the idea that the left and Obama promotes is that all rewards earned ultimately are shared.
So there's no denying that the incentive to work less is okay.
Productivity is spread equally for all participants, regardless of whatever your effort is.
Exactly, because you get the same regardless.
So under collectivism, which Cuba is abandoning, a ruling class of bureaucratic intellectuals, such as we see in Washington, D.C., these are the characters who are structuring communities and our lives today.
And you can't even follow, even if you want to be a high information voter, you can't even follow what they're doing.
You can't follow and understand the tax code.
You can't even know you have to search high and low and really hard to see if there's a budget even passed.
These characters, these modern day rulers, these mandarins inside the beltway with their long fingernails, they are the ones sitting there pulling the levers of your life, your money, your work efforts.
They decide what a citizen is entitled to possess.
And more and more they decide this according to various obscure socioeconomic philosophies they subscribe to.
They decide.
They sit there, these mandarins, deciding what is best for an individual, what is best for a country, what privileges you are entitled to and not entitled to.
This is a top-down for the greater good, ambiguous justification.
I said at the beginning of the show, an hour and a half ago, it makes no sense.
You can't make sense out of the senseless.
These characters, these mandarins With their long fingernails sitting there in Washington, D.C., they sit there applying the oppressive power of the state, and the power of the state is enormous.
Enormous, unspeakably enormous.
They do this to reallocate the wealth, to reallocate your time, your money, your life, your hard work, from those of you who work and produce to those who don't.
What Obama says is it too much to ask that the wealthiest pay more?
He's not asking.
There's no asking going on here.
There's a lot of telling.
And if you don't do it, they're going to come for you.
They're going to come for you.
So simply put, we have a type of collective.
Follow me now, a type of collective operating in DC, that, as I said moments ago, Cuba is abandoning.
The collective ultimately steals the talent.
It ultimately steals the ingenuity and the hard work of one citizen, you, and gives it to another under the broad name and excuse of social justice or a social compact.
A phrase I hate social compact.
This, ladies and gentlemen, I don't need to explain to you, whether you're a low or medium or high information voter, I don't need to explain to you.
This is morally repulsive because at the end of the day, it is theft.
It is theft.
Collectivism warps the self-sacrifice, the hard work, the ingenuity of the individual, you collectivism encourages the whole idea that it is necessarily a noble act to sacrifice for the greater good of all, regardless of your desire to achieve or not.
That is no longer part of it.
That is no longer part of it.
So the collectivist point of view is something created by the state, for the state.
The state allows you, you, the individual, it allows you, it decides for you, the mechanism and the level of your security of the economy.
A managed state that is going to manage all created products and goods and services, including your health issues it wants from the beginning of life to the end of life.
This is a false exchange.
Freedom is being exchanged.
Freedom is being exchanged for the benefit of the state, put in very basic terms.
That's that's that's it.
And there are characters who profit through this, government characters.
And they use this desire, the desire of jealousy, envy, I quoted Vaughan Williams at the beginning of the show, to possess another's wealth, as well as another's work.
They use this, and it's morally corrupt.
It's class warfare.
We know that we've talked about it.
Here Russia's talked about on the show.
It's not fair.
There's no justification.
Collectivism, ladies and gentlemen, becomes a philosophy designed to stifle ingenuity, to stifle creativity.
You gotta be free.
You gotta be permitted by your government to engage in free market, free enterprise capitalism, if you want to use that word.
Running long.
I gotta take a short break.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's Doug Ransky here for Rush.
We'll be right back.
Doug Rabianski filling in for Rush Limbaugh.
1-800-282-2882 is the phone number.
From the Washington Post, Washington Times, excuse me.
We have the headline, it appeared the day after Christmas.
Worst Christmas shopping season since 2008 is blamed on physical cliff.
Now you may remember the day after Thanksgiving, everyone said, well, business is up, the stores are doing well.
Didn't turn out that way.
People were very stressed over the uncertainty of where the economy is going.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have two or three more immediate physical cliffs coming up, all planned, all orchestrated by this government, and this one was planned and orchestrated.
So what are you supposed to think?
When you've got a president signing executive orders for salary raises for Biden, lawmakers, government employees, taking a vacation that already was $4 million, adding another $3 million plus of costs just to come back for the so-called last-minute budget negotiations of something that we all knew for a year or more had to be done.
So when I read a headline that says the worst Christmas shopping season since 2008 is blamed on the physical cliff.
The fingerprints on this story are the presidents.
They are the presidents, they are our people in government are the people responsible for this directly.
And we've got one more financial crisis after another that they've now put into the calendar to start occurring.
So we've got what do we got?
We got all-time record high gas prices.
We seem to be happy with that.
That's a new normal.
We've got an all-time record food stamp participation.
That's a new normal.
We've got crisis after crisis coming in February.
The sequester of spending cuts, that's going to come up again as a crisis.
In March, followed by another crisis on whether to increase the federal borrowing limit or not.
And this raising of taxes, 39.5%.
That ladies and gentlemen, bear in mind, that is just federal tax.
That is just federal tax.
It is, as I said in the last hour, it is the first time income tax raised rates have been raised in 20 years, in almost 20 years.
And that's just federal tax.
Think of people like me who live in my beautiful state of California, where our taxes in California are going up to 14%.
We're going up to 14%, ladies and gentlemen.
That puts us in California over the 50% mark.
Then you add in the new Obamacare taxes, the gasoline taxes that Obama has increased along with the higher gas prices I just mentioned, with local taxes that are on the incline as well, higher taxes on your phone, higher taxes on your cable bills, higher electric rates and higher taxes on those, higher gas bills.
Where does it stop?
Where does it stop?
You are you keep going, and you're well above 60% of your money, of your money being taken by the federal and state government.
So what does it mean?
When you they throw around these phrases, pay your fair share.
What does that mean?
That means is your fair share, the government taking 60% or more of your money, deciding that you're allowed to keep 40% or thereabouts, using class for warfare.
We go back to the collectivism I was talking about at the top of the hour.
Only the individual, only you can learn from your free will and your desires and your mistakes, what works for you.
This idea that one size fits all does never succeed.
Social planning in the way that these people in Washington are practicing is Is a trap.
It's a trap.
It's a slow boil of a slow form of subtle slavery to the government.
So when the population, the low information voter, is dumbed down enough, and you're taught that you should rely upon some bureaucrat, some intellectual bureaucrat who sitting over in DC will make your life easier, they'll make your decisions for you.
From that mindset, you lose self reliance and you have the reliance of a servant to the government.
That's all.
That's all.
And when the bureaucrats in DC fail to provide the services required, as they do, as they do, then who suffers?
Well, that's you, the individual.
The individual's been under attack for a long time.
The bureaucratic rulers never suffer.
They go offer their 747s.
After all, they have no way to sacrifice since they make the rules.
They make the rules and they fail upwards.
They make a call downstairs and say, hey, get the 747 ready.
I'm going to Hawaii.
They sign the paper.
Give everyone a raise.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Marshall Limbaugh Show, the first show of 2013.
Very delighted that you're along with us for the ride today.
A story out there in Politico.
Obama made Boehner flip on the physical cliffs, says Jeff Landry, who's a Republican from Louisiana.
He said the president was able to get the speaker to undo everything he promised he would do for the American people over the last Congress.
And I don't know how the president convinced Boehner to go with him that way.
I mean, more will be learned, I suppose, this very disappointing turn of events.
Okay, I've got here some information.
We're talking about the budget.
I began the show saying that you start talking about things like this, and you're trying to make sense of that which is senseless and it's senseless by design.
And all weekend long, I'm thinking, well, if they're having this conversation about budgets and taxation and spending, taxation expenses, cutting costs, that they would be also having a conversation about a budget.
Well, they haven't.
We are over 1,300 days since they passed a since the Senate passed a budget resolution.
Okay.
Over a hundred and one thousand three hundred days.
Now, the bill, the budget control act that was passed in 2011, the debt limit deal that I talked about at the beginning of the show, they agreed at that time that roughly 100 billion is to be cut in 2013.
What the bill did yesterday was delay that part for two more months.
So these ideas of continuing crises, continuing deadlines, continuing cliffs, these continuing authored and planned dates of crises.
Got one coming up in February.
They're going to have the big sequester spending cuts conversation.
Another crisis in February.
In March, another crisis, whether to increase the federal borrowing limit.
What do you think Obama has learned about how to play this stuff?
What do you think the Republicans have learned?
anything.
Now we're talking about the tax code and assuming that the information I have is correct, that in 2010 it was 71, almost 72,000 pages.
It's a changing number.
It's a hard number to pin down.
But But assuming it's that.
In that tax code, I made the claim to our medium information voter a little while ago.
Highly educated, highly informed man, Peter in the first hour, medium self-described medium information voter.
I made the point that, and he agreed, that eventually we've got to start talking about transparency on every level, because nobody can understand what's in that 71,000 page tax code.
Nobody can understand it.
How can you even follow it?
I made the point that every single page of that 71,000 pages is a tax code related for a special interest group.
And Peter got the answer to that question right.
So you can have all kinds of things, whether they're electric vehicle tax credits or gas guggler taxes, whatever it is, a credit for alcohol fuel used.
Go on and on.
Think of them.
The imagination Can't stop.
It's 71,000 pages.
Now, in this grand deal that was just hatched in the past few days, they also, Washington, D.C., your mandarins sitting there, your leaders have decided to dole out millions to some very strange groups.
It isn't enough that the president signs an executive order raising salaries, which the Congress has the good sense to then freeze.
It isn't enough that they go in expensive vacation to Hawaii.
It isn't enough that he then comes back and back, and that trip doesn't cost what the normal first class airline ticket costs.
Cost millions and millions of dollars, over three million dollars.
So here's what they're doing.
They're giving away more money in this deal.
The deal that I told you a little while ago, they only just read three minutes before the Senate voted on it.
Read, received, I should say.
I should say.
There's no indication they read it.
In the fine print of this 154-page bill are some real money giveaways, some real tax perks that have huge budget implications.
They give $430 million to my own industry, the Hollywood business, through special expensing rules, so that producers can expense up to $15 million of costs on projects.
Is Hollywood deserving of that?
I don't want to talk against my own industry.
And there's a lot of things Hollywood would like and would could use.
That is that's not one of them.
Should the American taxpayer be giving it $430 million to Hollywood?
$331 million to railroads.
Now here's one I like.
To the producers of rum, because I love rum.
$222 million for Puerto Rican and Virgin Island rum through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government when the rum is imported to us.
$70 million, $70 million for NASCAR.
That's how much you are giving NASCAR, 70 million.
Why are we giving them anything?
50.
Number one spectator sport in the country.
It's one of the top spectator sports in the world.
Well, that seventy million dollars.
59 million, almost 60 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage the production of algae biofuel.
And another $4 million to electric motorcycle makers.
Ladies and gentlemen, flights to and from Hawaii, giving money to Hollywood, giving money to rum companies, giving money to algae makers and NASCAR.
Something has to happen.
Something has to happen.
Every single page of that tax code being.
Because really, if you had a tax code that made sense, it should be one page long.
In fact, if you had health care plan that made sense, it would be one page long.
Maybe two.
Where do we go?
What are the bold things?
What does a Republican leader have to come out and do?
And I throw on the table the fantasies.
I ask the question.
Are we coming up on the time?
And I've never been a term limit person, by the way.
I'm not even advocating it now.
I'm throwing it out there for conversation for thought.
Because the inside the Beltway group is so insular, pulling the levers in secret on complicated confiscation of your work, your time, your money, and your life, in ways that you can't even follow and understand, no matter how intelligent and articulate you are, even if English is your first language.
Is it time to ensure that the power of entrenched incumbents is something that has changed?
I mean, this also goes to the question of how do we spare ourselves the effect of the low information voter?
Is it time to say throw out the entire tax code because the whole thing is so corrupt, 71,000 pages of political payback.
To rum producers this time and Hollywood this time, and algae growers, algae growers, algae growers.
I could stop putting chlorine in my swing pool.
Maybe I'll get it maybe I get some money from the government.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is where we're giving our money away to, to special interest.
And that's what the tax code is 71,000 pages of special interest tax giveaways.
Make the tax code one page long, please.
I mean, is it a fair conversation to say that the only hope the Republic has?
The only insulation from the low information voter, and there's lots of reasons people are low information voters.
Some of them, some of them are robots, some of them are naive.
Many of you are stressed.
Many of you are trying to be high information voters.
Impossible to be.
Is it time for something so simple, so transparent that we know how much money comes in, why it goes in, what the definition of it is, when it goes in and where it goes?
Yes, I'm talking flat tax.
I'm talking flat tax.
I'm saying, I'm not saying I support it.
But is it something that is so radical in the overhaul of the corrupt system that is now self-perpetuating of the inside the beltway civilization of the power elite?
How do we change those characters around?
How do we account for how much money is collected, where it goes?
You want to save the Republic?
Isn't it time that we have to start debating the really instead of getting way in the margins of what currently exists, way in the dust and the fog of the current nonsense?
Don't we think that it's time for big bold conversations about the safety net?
Because, ladies and gentlemen, the Republic is at stake.
Nothing new to this.
Meanwhile, you're supposed to be hypnotized, hypnotized, psychoanalyzed, homogenized, pasteurized, sedated, into understanding that everything what's going on now is all normal.
It'll all work out, it'll all be fixed, and it's all nonsense if we don't discuss the big things.
Because the rest of it all starts slipping away.
We'll be right back.
And you know, ladies and gentlemen, one of the weirdest parts of this is that Congress, we have no leadership.
They don't want to do something to simplify the tax code.
Why is that?
I guess we're not screaming loud enough for it.
It's one of the few issues that everyone agrees upon.
But reducing the complexity of the tax code never happens.
They talk a bit publicly about loopholes of which there is no such thing.
There's only a 71,000 page document called a tax code.
They talk about loopholes and yet they sit there creating more, more special interests get pandered to, even in recent hours while they're all complaining about this.
You see, when you've got a complicated tax code, it's very easy because they know you can't pay attention.
Very easy for Congress to pass new laws, modify and change around the margins old tax provisions.
That's all.
That's all.
New legislation can be written without any clear idea of how it's going to impact the tax code.
They leave the IRS to sort out uh conflicting regulations.
It is amazing.
It is amazing that we as a country are not screaming about taxes, I tell you.
That we are not screaming about it, because they're every level.
I must go to a call.
Colleen in Alta, California, my own home state has been holding for a long time.
Hello, Colleen.
Welcome to the Russian Lumber Show.
How are you today?
I'm good.
How are you?
I'm excellent, thanks.
You're fading a little bit on your end.
I'm fading.
Okay, Colleen.
Well, then what's on your mind?
There you are.
I was wondering how a citizen or where a citizen goes to get started serious consideration of a constitutional amendment that will hold these people responsible for what they're supposed to be doing.
You know, so and what's in your mind when you say that?
You have something in your mind.
Every year.
Create and balance a budget within three percent.
Deficit of the GDP for that year.
These people can't stand for reelection.
They don't care about anything but their own reelection.
That's why they keep passing all these little payoffs to their voters.
And is this an idea that you've had on your own or you've read this someplace?
I've heard it kind of bandied about.
I heard just basically it very, very briefly mentioned on the radio.
And I thought, man, that's a good idea.
Why isn't anybody talking about it?
Why aren't we finding out what we can do?
Where do you start with a constitutional amendment?
Who do you take this to?
How about just how about just saying that if they can't balance a budget and any year that they don't balance a budget, that they don't get their salaries, period.
Instead of executive orders raising their salaries.
Salaries aren't important to these guys.
What's important to these people is their re-election.
They want their power.
Of course, Colleen Urbansky's already dealt with that by by suggesting that term limits are time to be discussed.
Because if they don't do their job, they're limited.
In other words, they can't play with revenue anymore because they need the money to balance the budget.
Well, Colleen, the thing that we agree upon is that there's no transparency.
People can't even understand this stuff.
It's all got to be simplified.
There's got to be a grassroots movement.
And you know what we need?
We need people on our side who are excited about creating uh bold, bold, sweeping conversations nationally.
By the way, this happens to have another uh another very, very pleasing aspect to it.
The minute you start talking in bold big purple and orange ideas, you immediately start speaking over the heads of the media who are against conservatives.
I use as an example Herman Cain earlier in in the year, when he was out there talking about 999, doesn't matter whether you think it was a good idea or not, the whole country was talking about it and actually debating whether it was a good idea.
That's a way of speaking over the heads of the media.
And the media hated him.
Do you see what I mean, Colleen?
Absolutely, and I want to talk over their heads.
I want to get this to the attention of the people who can begin to do something about this kind of an amendment.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we've got we've got to we've got to do it.
And um I'm depending upon our conservatives to get look, if conservatives don't start speaking and thinking in great big, bold, dramatic ideas that we as a nation should start thinking about and debating.
If we continue just to tinker around the margins of what already exists, the status quo, we're done for as a party, we're done for as a movement, and we're done for as a country.
What do you think, Colleen?
State that might be inclined to start this kind of an amendment rolling.
What's that?
How do we how do we start this kind of a thing rolling?
Do we have a lot of people?
Well, we just have we're putting it in.
Look, we're putting this out there for millions.
Colleen, we're putting this out there for millions of people.
And hopefully the politicians who are conservative and genuinely want to win.
One of my great fears, and I got to scoot in a moment, Colleen, one of my great fears is that the political advisor class get to someone like Rubio.
And if we see a difference in his character and what we've seen all along thus far, you'll know they got to him and we're sunk again.
We're sunk again.
Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, it's Doug Ransky filling in for Rush short break.
We'll be right back.
Do you realize, ladies and gentlemen, that if you uh simplify the United States tax code, if if you simplify it, you're going to change the entire culture.
You make the tax code you see, what happens when you make the tax code more complicated?
Um at the mercy of special interests, lobbyists, they're lobbying for tax deductions, other breaks.
They continual lobbying to make the tax code more complicated, which is what our politicians are doing even today.
Even today, so that you can't understand it.
Many of the most complicated tax deductions and the most wasteful ever created were created with the best of intentions.
We have all different types of tax rules.
This has got to change.
And there's a lot of really, really good arguments for simplifying the tax code.
Because not only do the all these deductions, all the so-called loopholes, 71,000 pages of rules, not only do they mean that the ROS needs a huge budget of its own, just to keep track of these details.
But economists tell us that tax cuts, tax reductions don't help the economy.
And I could get into some details about this, about mortgage deductions and whatnot.
But the reality is that making the tax code easier to understand is a tough sell to the status quo in Congress.
And I'm saying to you that it's going to take somebody very bold and very brave to say, you know what, we need to shake it up with total tax reform.
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