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Jan. 4, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:49
January 4, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
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Hi, how are you?
Great to have you back, folks.
El Rushball, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, all-concerned.
Maha Rushi on Friday, live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's open live Friday.
Lawmakers are demanding the truth from the CIA after the movie Zero Dark 30 suggested that torture was used to find Osama bin Laden.
You seen that movie, Zero Dark 30?
It's about the quest to find Osama bin Laden.
And apparently, the government shared some data with the movie makers.
And the movie has waterboarding in it.
And I guess the conclusion is that waterboarding and torture was used to find bin Laden.
And lawmakers are mad about this.
The CIA shouldn't have told them that's what happened.
America doesn't torture anymore now that Obama's president, don't you know?
There's a Democrat lawmaker's Dianne Feinstein.
She's all upset about this.
Great to have you back, folks.
Here's the phone number on Open Line Friday, 800-282-2882 and the email address, lrushbotebnet.com.
Matt Damon, what a guy.
I have to tell you, yesterday, I called Matt Damon an idiot, and that's the old me.
And I apologize.
The moment I said it, and I apologize again today, we have a story, again, from the UK Daily Mail.
Matt Damon, it's a story about how, you know, he's got this new movie out that attempts to destroy the whole business of fracking.
Just like the China syndrome destroyed the nuclear power industry for decades, Matt Damon has a movie out about fracking and how dangerous it is.
And the critics say that it's chock full of lies and it's not true and it's got a political agenda and so forth.
But anyway, Matt Damon was the director starting out.
And you know what he did?
He gave up the director role in order to have more time with his four kids.
What a guy.
Matt Damon making a statement, the values of fatherhood.
What a guy.
And we just wanted to applaud him here for this.
He said, directing that film, that's too much time.
Starring in it wasn't enough.
I gave up the directorship because I, and then he hugged his daughter.
He hugged his daughter tight as he revealed he gave up the director role to be with his four kids.
What a guy.
What a guy.
Now there's some critics saying that he gave up the director role because he wasn't any good at it.
But that's just mean people saying things about a great, nice guy.
But madness.
Earners who make $30,000 a year will make, or take, I should say, bigger hit in their paychecks than those earning $500,000 or more under the fiscal cliff deal.
And again, this story is from the UK Daily Mail.
Middle-class workers are going to take a bigger hit to their income proportionately than those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 a year, according to the supposedly nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Earners in the $200,000 to $500,000 a year group will pay an average of 1.3% more or an additional $2,711 in taxes this year.
This, by the way, that's just the that that's just the FICA tax, I believe, because there's a lot more.
They're going to be paid a lot more than $2,000, but just in this one tax, the payroll tax.
The people that earn $30,000 and up will see their paychecks shrink by 1.7%.
And 1.7% of $30,000 is a lot more than $1.3% of $500,000.
So the people that make $30,000, $40,000 are going to be out about $1,700.
The people who make $500,000 are going to be out $2,700.
The theory is that if you make $500,000, it's easier to miss $2,700 than if you make $30,000 and miss $1,700.
And by the way, folks, this is all true.
And you know what?
There's nothing that can be done about it unless you confiscate the money from the rich.
There's no way that this is ever going to change.
It's mathematics.
Now, this leads us into an argument debate over a flat tax.
One of the reasons a flat tax is going to have such a tough time, if you have a 20% tax rate for everybody, well, 20% of a million is a lot less than 20% of $70,000, let's say.
So the critics that come along, that's just not fair.
You need to be taxing on people of a million and 80%.
By the way, some Democrats are suggesting that we go back to a top rate of 70% now, what it was pre-Reagan.
Because the notion is, I'm telling you what's on tap here, I'll tell you what's really, it's not really Bush.
I'll tell you what's on tap here.
The Democrat Party and Barack Obama, particularly Obama, Obama has a lot of admiration for Reagan in a political sense, not policy-wise.
But Obama's admiration for Reagan is in the sense that Reagan was a truly transformational president.
Reagan genuinely changed the trajectory of this country.
He changed the overall foundation of this nation and its economy with Reaganomics supply-side trickling out, whatever you're going to call it.
Now, Obama hates that.
He hates Reaganomics.
He wants to be as transformational a president as Reagan was.
And what he seeks to do is erase every trace of Reagan from America, and particularly economically.
That means erasing the whole notion of lowering tax rates to grow an economy, lowering tax rates to allow people to keep more of what they earn, lowering tax rates to create more jobs, more tax.
That's what Obama wants to dispense with.
That's what he wants to get away.
What's happening here?
What is really the objective, and the light went off for me when I saw it was just this week.
A number of Democrats are actually suggesting, and they're trying to be intellectually honest about it, or they're trying to sound intellectually honest.
They are saying that the economy is on enough solid footing now and that Obama has proven that raising taxes, and Clinton proved it, by the way, raising taxes causes economic growth.
Remember, that's a big lesson from Clinton.
Reagan, the Reagan tax cuts were reversed by Clinton and retroactively.
And the Democrats want to say that the economic boom of the 90s was because taxes went up.
And a bunch of their low-information voters believe it.
And so the theory is raise taxes again now, cause economic growth to take place, which it won't, but the government will grow and Santa Claus gets bigger and Santa Claus gives away more.
So the appearance is it's growing and it's doing this.
And now the Democrats think since Obama has brought about a recovery by raising taxes and eliminating loopholes that we can go back to a 70% rate.
And I'll tell you right now, the Republicans in Washington are clueless.
The Republicans in Washington will hear a Democrat say that.
You know what their reaction will be?
Ah, come on, we never got 70%.
Don't be serious.
We're never going to go back to that.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are going to make every move possible to get back to it.
This is one of the big problems: that nobody takes a Democrat seriously.
The Democrats oftentimes, and Obama, will tell us exactly what they're going to do.
And it sounds so outrageous, nobody believes them.
Then they embark and they get it done on occasion.
So they are making a move.
And I'm just telling you right now that Obama's number one objective, well, it's hard to say number one, but in his top five is to erase all vestiges of the Reagan years, to have an entire and total, complete revision of the history of the Reagan years.
The Democrats are bothered by that as much as anything in American history bothers them.
The success of the Reagan years.
A big threat.
The success of the Reagan years was one of the biggest threats the Democrats ever faced because the success of the Reagan years demonstrated how wrong Democrats are, how dangerously wrong they are.
That's why there's been a constant rewriting of history ever since Reagan left office, and even while he was in office.
So just don't doubt me.
Express purpose now is to see to it that, for example, your average high school history book, textbook,
the largest reference to Reagan will be a paragraph, and it'll be about how Reagan destroyed this group and that union and how Reagan was responsible for AIDS and Reagan was against gay rights.
He was against all these social changes.
That's the objective.
That's what's being undertaken now.
And I'm not trying to depress you.
I'm just going to get you prepared.
When you then move to the Republican Party side and you understand that some Republicans didn't like Reagan and didn't like conservatism.
Some Republicans are big government guys.
That's where the power is.
That's where you get your hands on the money.
Reagan was about returning as much money to people who produced it and own it as possible.
So that's what's underway now.
And Obama doesn't have much opposition to this.
His primary opposition is here on this program and certain other talk shows.
But there's not much opposition to Obama in the government.
There's not much opposition to Obama in the blogs.
There's not a whole lot of opposition to Obama conservative media.
But there certainly isn't any opposition that he faces, not serious opposition in Congress.
It's pretty much let him have what he wants so that people don't dislike the Republicans.
That's their mindset.
While all this is going on, everybody in this country is getting soaked.
And that's the point of this UK Daily Mail story.
Middle-class workers are going to take a bigger hit to their income proportionately than those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 under the new fiscal cliff deal.
80% of households, 80% will pay more money to the federal government as a result of the fiscal Cliff deal.
Not 2%.
80%.
You know where the 20% that won't is?
It's what we discussed yesterday.
Asset wealthy people.
Think Warren Buffett, who, after the fiscal cliff deal, who after Obama has raised taxes on the rich, Warren Buffett's tax rate will remain lower than his secretary's.
Think Jeffrey Immelt of GE.
Think hedge fund people, specifically hedge fund people, because they are governed by something called the carried interest loophole, which is a very complicated thing to understand in depth and in detail.
But essentially what it is, you know, hedge funds invest other people's money.
And the money that is earned, the gain, the income is not taxed at income rates, i.e. 39.6% is taxed at 20% capital gains rate.
And that's really what you need to know about carried interest.
And those are the truly rich people in this country, the asset wealthy, people who do not ever worry about the cost of anything and yet don't have any income as defined by the IRS's income.
They have income, but it's capital gains income, income from investments, or it's carried interest, and they pay 20%.
Now, yeah, they were paying 15, and there is a 3.6% Obamacare surcharge.
So they're paying more, but they're not paying what the guy making 50,000 is making proportionally, and they're not paying what the guy making $2 million is paying proportionally.
80% of households will pay more money to the federal government as a result of the fiscal cliff deal.
For most households, the payroll tax takes a far bigger bite than the income tax does.
By the way, a lot of these people that see their paychecks getting smaller are people that don't pay income tax.
What is it?
47, 48% of Americans don't pay any income tax.
That's the result of Democrats and Republicans trying to get voters in the lower strata of the middle class.
So there's no income tax, but they pay Social Security tax.
They pay payroll tax.
And their payroll taxes just went up about 2.4%.
And so that can be as much as $1,500, $1,700 a year divided by however many weeks they get paid in the year.
So while Obama and the Democrats are celebrating, telling everybody only 2% of people seeing a tax increase, guess what?
In fact, they're actually running around talking about tax cut because on January 1st, the Reagan tax rates expired and everybody's rates did go up.
Then the next day, they agreed to the deal.
So for 12 hours, there was a tax increase that nobody paid.
But it was on paper and then the Democrats got to say, we cut your taxes.
The rates stay the same, but it was called a tax cut.
And now those people are waking up to tax increases on their payroll side.
So we'll see.
Got to take a quick timeout, my friends.
Open Line Friday.
Back with much more after this.
Okay, back to the phones and Jeff in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Open Line Friday.
Great to have you here, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Mega Dittos from the 0.0005% of callers or viewers that get through here.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to bring up, you were talking earlier about Ali Velshi talking about how the American people finally get the debt and understand the debt.
Isn't it a beautiful thing?
Isn't it a beautiful thing?
They finally understand.
You did a little tongue-in-cheek piece on it with the Entertainment Tonight clips, and that was very nice.
But I wanted to point out they have nothing on some of our representatives.
I cite Mr. Gerald Nadler of New York, who's a graduate of Columbia Fordham Law School.
And they're proposing that in order to solve our debt problem, actually the debt limit problem, that we issue trillion-dollar platinum coins and deposit them in the Treasury.
I know this sounds like some sort of joke or something.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, just say, Gerald Nadler, you're talking about here?
Yeah, well, he's one of them, but this is actually a real story.
In fact, I've been on hold for a while, and I was Googling around.
It's actually on the Drudge website right now, but it's been floated around for a while.
It was actually proposed by some idiot law professor up at Yale.
I guess I should say.
Trillion, trillion-dollar platinum.
But Allie Velshi says that the debt limit doesn't have anything to do with spending, so why do we need to do anything?
Well, at some point, the Treasury does have to write a check.
And right now, the only way they do that is the Treasury Department has a checking account at the Federal Reserve.
They probably the mother of all posters when they make deposits and stuff.
But they get the money for the ChiComs.
Yeah, well, they basically only get money in two ways, the receipts from tax revenues, or when they sell normally bonds and T-notes and things like that.
Well, the problem is we can't issue any more T-notes or bonds or whatever until Congress or if Congress.
But we can sell trillion-dollar platinum coins?
I don't believe it's legal.
I do have a legal background, but I don't believe it's legal.
But the way it works is the way it works.
Hang on, hang on.
I got to take a break here, and I'm really interested.
I know it's on Drudge.
I didn't click on that link because I hadn't read it.
So you are going to be informing me and everybody else about this.
Don't go away.
We'll be back and continue in mere moments.
Okay, we're back, and I got Jeff here in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Jeff, I clicked on the link, and here's what I got.
This is what I see.
In a nutshell, there are limits on how much paper money the U.S. can circulate, and there are rules that govern coinage, gold and silver and copper, but the Treasury has broad discretion when it comes to coins made from platinum.
There aren't very many restrictions there.
The idea would be that the U.S. Mint would create a bunch of these trillion-dollar platinum coins that Obama would order deposited at the Fed, who would then put the coins in the Treasury so they could pay all their bills to avoid a default.
Is that pretty much how you understand it?
That's pretty, that's probably 99% accurate.
I would just add one thing, and you sort of disappoint me, Rush.
I mean, not disappoint me.
It disappoints me.
I thought I was going to be able to teach the great one here something, and here in 30 seconds during a commercial break, you were able to get up to speed on that.
That's very impressive.
But the one thing I would add is the statute that they're using there, the whole point of the platinum coins was not that the Treasury could mint any old number of platinum coins for regular use and there was walk around with a bunch of platinum coins in your pocket.
The idea was that you could mint certain special commemorative coins and things like that.
But they never specifically in the statute stated that it was strictly for commemorative purposes.
So now some smart alex have come along and said, oh, well, okay, we'll print up a few trillion-dollar platinum coins.
I don't know why they stopped at $2 trillion.
Why not go for a full $16 trillion while you're at it?
Yeah, just wipe out all the debt.
That's what I mean.
They print coins and say that they're worth $16 trillion and be done with it.
Yeah, I know.
And, of course, it wouldn't be $16 trillion worth of platinum in it.
It would be like, you know, a dollar's worth of platinum or whatever.
And the idea is simply that when they deposit it at the Fed, that creates a little accounting lingo here, but it creates an asset on the Fed side of the books and on the liability side, the Treasury gets a trillion dollars worth of checking account money to play around with to write out checks.
The reason I don't think it's legal is the part that you mentioned first.
By law, the Federal Reserve controls how much coins and currency can be put into circulation, not the Treasury.
And this would, in effect, if this was a coin put into circulation, which they say they wouldn't do, it would be bypassing that law.
And if, on the other hand, the Fed's just going to hold on to it for now until whenever, then it becomes sort of a de facto IOU.
It's basically what they're issuing now, and only Congress can issue the IOUs, the bonds.
You know, you know whose idea this was.
The first time I heard it was a law professor up at Yale.
They have some wacky law professor.
Well, yeah, it was our old buddy Jim Pethukukas at the American Enterprise Institute who heard it from somebody else.
Now, he's a smart guy.
Pethukukas is a smart guy.
This is above my pay.
This all sounds like phony baloney, plastic band, a good time, rocket hole.
100%.
I pointed out the legal thing.
Monetarily, it's a disaster because you're basically increasing the money supply by a trillion or $2 trillion, however many coins you print up, with no possibility of ever contracting the money supply.
Why would anybody believe these coins are worth a trillion dollars?
Money's only worth what people believe it's worth.
Well, the thing is that it's not going to be in circulation.
It's just going to be sitting on the street.
But as I hear this, as you go, none of this is real.
This is smoke and mirrors.
This is not even dealing with the problem.
But the problem is that there are real people out there, our representatives.
I'm in New Jersey.
I get to hear that idiot Nadler speak periodically.
And I shouldn't say idiot, trying to be kindler, gentler to some of our people, the people that don't quite understand economics.
And I hear Mr. Nadler speak periodically, and he's behind this.
He's talking about it.
There are people, as I said, I've heard law professors say, oh, this is a great idea.
And trust me, a lot of lawyers don't understand that.
Well, let me tell you, there's another law professor at Georgetown who's suggesting that the fix for American politics is to give up on the Constitution.
Yeah, yeah, I read that.
Let me tell you something.
We got enough lawyers gumming up enough of the works as it is without them getting involved in this stuff.
I know.
But I mean, this is absurd.
We just don't have the money to be spending the way we are.
That's all it boils down to.
And everything that tries to patch that is, unless you come up with the money, you haven't fixed the problem.
Well, yeah, this is totally phony.
And that's what's so sad, and that's why I called because it was like a and I first heard it hit national prominence yesterday on the Neil Cavuto show.
Prior to that, I just figured, oh, it's a bunch of wacky law professors, you know, floating this idea.
It was, you know, just one of those things to keep them busy.
But there are serious people talking about this, and it doesn't, it's economic idiocy.
It's legal.
It doesn't impress me.
There's serious people talking about a lot of stuff, and they're dead wrong.
The fact that they're serious doesn't impress me.
It scares me, actually.
Yeah, well, it scares me because click on one of those links and click on, if you go to like the Huffington Post or something and click on what people comment, they'll say, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea to get around what the Republicans are doing.
Oh, to hell with that.
Why don't we just use Bitcoin?
To hell with printing up a whole new platinum coin here.
Use Bitcoin, which is the currency on the internet.
Yeah, why go to the trouble having to get platinum?
Why don't we just use, I don't know, bubblegum coins or whatever.
I don't know.
Anyway, look, I appreciate the call.
I enjoy discussing this esoteric stuff that just illustrates above all else how baseless all these fixes are.
And that's really what they do.
We're $16 trillion in debt.
We're heading in another four years for 20, minimum, $20 trillion in debt.
And nobody's doing anything about it.
We're just coming up with ways to get away with it.
And we're trying to kick the can down the road so that people are alive today will not be when this has to be dealt with.
Pure and simple.
Unemployment.
I appreciate the call.
Thanks very much.
Unemployment.
We had this news.
Normally, back during the campaign, we would have led with this news.
But it doesn't matter anymore.
At least it's not of paramount importance because we extended unemployment benefits.
So the number of people unemployed really is irrelevant, other than as an interesting discussion item.
And the basic numbers are these.
U.S. employers added 155,000 jobs in December.
And AP says that's a steady gain that shows hiring is up and held up during the tense fiscal cliff negotiations in Washington.
But it's not a steady gain.
It's even enough to keep up with the increase in population.
155,000 jobs a month is pathetic.
Joe Biden promised that we'd be hiring at a rate of 500,000 jobs a month in April of 2010 if we did the stimulus.
We aren't even keeping up with our birth rate.
Future job seekers, we're not even staying even much less creating new jobs that would actually reduce unemployment.
Then the AP says the solid growth.
There isn't any solid growth, folks.
But they say the solid growth was not enough to push down the unemployment rate.
The unemployment rate stayed at 7.8%.
Now, that is outright mendacity.
The unemployment rate in December, as reported, was 7.7%.
The revised rate was 7.8.
You know, they report the unemployment rate one week, and a week or two later, they revise it.
And that's when you get the real number, which is never reported.
Same thing with the number of applications for unemployment.
It's always revised, and the revision is always higher.
So the reported, just to show you the media dishonesty here, the reported unemployment rate in December was 7.7.
The reported unemployment rate, or in November, was 7.7.
The reported unemployment rate in December, 7.8.
So we went up 7.7 to 7.8.
However, AP says it stayed the same.
How's that?
Well, the 7.7 in November was revised to 7.8, but that wasn't reported because it would not make Obama look good.
So nobody knew that the real unemployment rate was 7.8%.
What was reported was 7.7.
And AP did not report the revision.
So now the rate for December is 7.8, and AP says it stayed the same.
So they're using the revised number that nobody reported.
They never do this.
Never.
They never report the revised number.
All of this still to make Obama look good.
The fact of the matter is the 7.8 is going to be revised upward, and it's going to be 7.9 or 8% in a couple of weeks, but it won't be reported.
Bottom line takeaway is that we're not making a dent in unemployment.
Now, internals.
Government unemployment numbers for December showed that while the general unemployment rate remained flat at 7.8%, which is a crock again, unemployment for women and African Americans rose despite an economy that created 155,000 jobs.
Unemployment for women went up to 7.3% from 7%.
The rate for African Americans went to 14%, up from 13.2%.
Now, this is from Cybercast News Service.
This is not reported in the mainstream media.
The mainstream media, AP, wow, the economy is still growing.
155,000 jobs.
Unemployment rates stayed the same.
For women and blacks, the unemployment circumstance got worse.
And it's for youth unemployment.
You ready for this?
The dismal job situation in America is even worse for young adults who are suffering an unemployment rate 30% higher than the national average of 7.8%.
According to Generation Opportunity, which charts unemployment for millennials aged 18 to 29, your kids, the rate is 11.5%.
It's 22% for young black Americans.
But AP and the Obama state-controlled media are reporting 155,000 jobs, 7.8% unchanged unemployment rate, but up for women and minorities and really up for young people, particularly black young people.
22%.
Not reported.
It's there.
You can find it.
It just not being reported by the drive-bys.
So it's getting worse.
It isn't improving.
And by the way, this is the only thing that can happen.
We can't create jobs because we're taking money out of the private sector.
When Obama starts raising taxes and fees and Obamacare kicks in, that's just money out of everybody's back pocket, including people that own businesses.
And when they have less money, there's less money to grow businesses or hire new people or in some cases even stay open.
It just isn't mathematically possible to create jobs with an administration that's taking so much money out of the economy.
Not possible.
What's happening is the only thing that can happen with current administration policy.
Ladies and gentlemen, I need to offer a correction.
Not my fault.
My source was incorrect earlier.
UK Daily Mail got the story wrong.
It was not Chris Jenner, the mother of Kim Kardashian, who responded in defense of Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian called a slut by some people on Twitter because she pregnant out of wedlock with Kanye West.
And the Daily Mail reported that Chris Jenner, Kim Kardashian's mother, lashed out by saying, Kim Kardashian is 32, she's pregnant, but y'all hose be 16 with four kids and no baby daddy.
Y'all calling her a slut?
Please have a seat.
It was not Chris Jenner who said that.
According to a website called Gossip Cop, the post was from a fan, just a fan of Kim Kardashian.
So the post defending Kim Kardashian, which again said, Kim Kardashian is 32 and she's pregnant, but y'all hose be 16 with four kids and no baby daddy and y'all calling her a slut, please have a seat.
It was not her mom that posted that.
And we wanted to make sure to correct this before the program ended.
We went into the week and it was posted simply by a fan.
Let me quickly, Boris in Queens, I've got 45 seconds of human holding.
I wanted to get to you.
Hi.
Thank you so much, Rush.
Happy New Year to you and all that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Great show.
It's an honor to be on your program.
I comment about the $16.5 trillion debt, there are only two ways to address the debt deficit.
One is to have the GDP grow at an average rate of 5% or higher for the next 20 years, which is virtually impossible on the count of a socialistic administration.
The other one is to inflate the hell out of dollar about 60% and then you effectively have $8 trillion worth of debt, not $16.
They already prepare an American public.
There's a CIA report circulated that Chinese are going to try to attack the U.S. dollar, that the attack is imminent.
Obama wanted to go over the cliff.
That would help him to blame Republicans, not Chinese.
But that's what they're doing.
He's right.
We can't grow at 5% for 20 years, but we can inflate to get rid of some of this debt.
And that's going to be the biggest tax increase low-information voters have ever seen if that happens.
You know what?
I meant to pick the football games this week.
Ah, darn it.
I'm out of time.
Andy Reid looked like the new coach of the Chiefs, and I meant to pick, ah, I do think the Seahawks.
are the team nobody wants to play right now.
I think that's, and they play the Redskins on Sunday night.
Anyway, have a great weekend, folks.
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