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Feb. 4, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:21
February 4, 2013, Monday, Hour #2
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Hey folks, great to have you here.
It's Rush Limbaugh, the most listened to radio talk show in the country where we have more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
We love talking to you on the phones now and then.
Phone number 800-282-2882 if you want to call.
Email address LRushbaugh at EIBnet.com.
Turns out there was a New York Times story last week on a bunch of football facts and trivia, and it turns out that they do use a Juggs gun at the annual Combine, which is where that's the radar gun.
That's what they call it, the Juggs gun.
That's the actual acronym for the thing.
You're thinking of Raquel Welch, and it's not that, Snerdley.
It's an acronym for whatever the radar gun is.
Turns out that 50 miles an hour is a rocket for a football pass.
Elway clocks in at 60, and that's considered freakish.
Colin Kaepernick is around 50.
Drew Brees at 52 miles an hour.
But they check these quarterbacks at the Combine, which is where all the college prospects show up and basically go through the meat market and show their wares.
Also, Snerdley said to me, we're talking about Super Bowl commercials.
He said that GoDaddy commercial just, just, what did you say?
Made you nerd revolting.
The GoDaddy commercial was revolting.
That was the one with Bar Raffaelli, the model sitting on a bench making out with the nerd.
And the point of, with, by the way, Danica Patrick standing there watching.
Danica Patrick is the spokeswoman for GoDaddy.
She's standing there watching.
Well, Bar Raffaele.
And what revolted you about that?
Okay, he said.
It was the sound.
The sound is what revolted him.
See, there's a reason why in love scenes, television, and movies they play music so that you don't hear the sounds.
I thought, Snerdley, you'd look at that commercial and maybe think it'd give you hope and you'd like it.
But the anyway, people are talking about, that's all GoDaddy cares about.
In fact, the GoDaddy, the GoDaddy, if pornography opens you up to gay sex, the GoDaddy spot may turn you off to heterosexual sex.
It might have been a sneaky trick all the way around.
Dear Rush, an email from a subscriber, Rush24-7.
Dear Rush, I don't know if your low-information voter outreach is attracting any low-information voters.
It is, folks.
By the way, we have research on this.
It is.
It is working.
But it is helping me a lot.
I work with low-information voters.
And I look as confused when they talk about Jay-Z and Beyonce and the Kardashians as they look when I talk about the national debt in Benghazi.
I can't watch entertainment tonight because I can literally feel my brain cells dying.
But thanks to you, Rush, I'm no longer uninformed about what concerns my low-information co-workers.
So he is becoming aware of what the low-information crowd likes, and therefore his relationship with low-information coworkers is improved.
And he's writing here today.
James Stout is his name.
And he was writing here to thank me.
Barack Obama, pregame interview with Scott Pelley.
Let's, oh, before we get to that, there's one more I want to play.
Jim Nance on Face the Nation also.
Shannon Sharp's on Face the Nation.
All this talk about concussions in football.
Jim Nance, Play by Play, CBS, made a very important point, a point that's been made for years on this program.
We're talking about should your children play football?
You have daughters, I have a daughter.
Research shows that at the college level, a women soccer player is two and a half times more likely to suffer a concussion than a college football player.
I don't hear anybody saying right now, should we put our daughters in these soccer programs?
The point is, this issue spreads well beyond the NFL.
You know, it's exactly right.
And we have been on this for 10 years.
We originated the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign, which was related to concussions in soccer and how dangerous soccer is.
And we did this because kids are being moved into soccer by parents who are wreathing and hearing about how dangerous football is, for example.
They think soccer is just a bunch of kids running around on the field kicking a little white ball.
What harm could there be?
And there are injuries galore in soccer, and there are concussions.
In this statistic, I've heard this.
Women soccer players in college, two and a half times more likely to suffer a concussion.
For that to be true, that means that there are far more female soccer player concussions in college than there are male football player concussions.
And nobody would believe this when they hear it, but the data is data.
It's undeniable.
I first heard about the dangers of soccer.
It's more than 10 years ago.
And we immediately began a campaign here to alert people to danger because we're interested in that.
You know, we want public service and all keep our own kids safe campaign.
And I was the spokesman, and we did PSAs.
And so people began calling about it, thinking that I didn't know what I was talking about, or I was teasing.
I was doing satire, putting them on, and they refused to believe it.
And it was that skepticism that convinced me that it's even more dangerous than we thought this game of soccer.
So we put together over the course of the years a number of PSAs that to this day, we still run during commercial breaks.
People who are on hold or who are listening to this program online will occasionally hear this campaign.
We have not given it up.
Please don't do it on the air much, but that's why I want to just play one as an example to show you how on the cutting edge this program is.
And now a word from the national Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.
I have played soccer since I was in kindergarten.
I think that it has affected me.
After soccer games, I would be lightheaded from hitting the soccer ball.
I broke my leg playing a soccer game two years ago this time.
I was in physical therapy for eight months with a hip injury, all from soccer.
Keep Our Own Kids Safe, National Celebrity Spokesman Rush Limbaugh.
Thank God, Lisa, that you are among the fortunate few to have learned in time.
But think of the people who have not learned, who don't know, who are being led down the primrose path.
My friends, I think it's time for serious, drastic action.
It is time to ban soccer from television.
That obviously is encouraging a lot of people to play.
Don't let any of the sponsors that sponsor soccer advertise on TV.
Something must be done now.
You heard her story.
It's not worth risking my body injuries that I could be stuck with for life.
I mean, who knows what I could do like five years from now?
I could be like a paraplegic.
I mean, who knows?
It's not worth it.
Join Rush Limbaugh and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign.
Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you.
You'll find them everywhere.
I was an actual caller, ladies and gentlemen, an actual caller to the program who was acknowledging that I was doing great work and I was on the right side of this issue.
And she wanted to alert others to the risks that she faced.
Mike, there's one more that we play.
Where a guy who's obviously suffered brain injury calls and doesn't know it.
Yeah, here, play that one.
Listen to this.
And now a word from the national Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign about the danger of soccer.
I see soccer as not a violent sport.
It's a symptom of violence, not really a cause of violence.
Keep Our Own Kids Safe National Celebrity Spokesman Rush Limbaugh.
Are you a paid member of the soccer lobby?
There have been people in other endeavors of human activity who have known of inherent risks and have lied about them.
If anything, your words will serve only to embolden people's efforts to spread the sport of soccer, and I hope that doesn't incorporate an increased number of injuries and so on and so forth.
Well, me too.
I can only bring the information to the people.
If anger at me, if anger at me causes others to get more people into this game, I can't be held accountable for that.
I love the game, and I play a little bit of football as well.
And I tell you, I would never take my chances on the football field.
And you took chances that you didn't even know you were taking on the soccer field, and that's my point.
You didn't even know because they hid the data from us.
Last time I checked, I didn't have any brain damage.
Well, oftentimes victims are the last to know.
You should ask your family members if there have been any changes.
Join Rush Limbaugh and help support the Keep Our Own Kids Safe campaign.
Look for the Keep Our Own Kids Safe chapter near you.
You'll find them everywhere.
See, right there, right there's a guy brain damage and didn't even know it.
Was in utter denial.
Mike, do you have the dates on those?
I mean, this goes back.
I mean, the reason about cutting-edge stuff is I say we haven't spent a lot of time on the air, but we continue to run these PSAs during commercial breaks online and people on hold.
This has to be 15 years old stuff.
I mean, that's how it's easy 50, maybe 20 years ago we started.
I mean, we really on the cutting edge of this.
And then, you know, everybody followed football and the dangers.
Get this.
Time magazine, November of last year, study.
Soccer players without concussions still have brain changes.
Small study professional soccer players found that even those who have never experienced a concussion still have changes in the white matter of their brains, likely from routine and unprotected headers.
And the soccer ball is not hard, hard as a rock, but it's hard enough to cause brain injury.
And all of these people play the game and are clueless, and they're being lied to.
In fact, they're being told the game is safer than football.
And young couples are sending young skulls full of mush out there to play this game, ostensibly to avoid being hurt.
Meanwhile, football is coming under the microscope.
Soccer is getting away here with hardly any attention at all.
Here's more from the article.
In the study, the researchers compared brain scans of 12 male soccer players from German elite-level soccer teams who had not experienced a concussion to brain scans of 11 competitive swimmers who had similarly never experienced repetitive brain trauma.
And in a nutshell, players who never had concussions, who played soccer, had just as bad brain damage as those who had concussions.
So you can get brain damage from soccer without even getting a concussion.
They're not even alleging that in football.
You've been warned.
Well, I don't know if Obama's imaginary son Trayvon would be allowed to play soccer or not.
I don't know if Obama knows anything about this.
All Obama knows he wants to raise revenue.
That's all he knows.
We need more revenue.
Let's go to Obama.
This is Scott Pelley, pregame interview before the Super Bowl.
Question.
You saying that there's going to have to be additional revenue throughout the next four years?
There's no doubt we need additional revenue coupled with smart spending reductions in order to bring down our deficit.
And we can do it in a gradual way so that it doesn't have a huge impact.
And as I said, when you look at some of these deductions that certain folks are able to take advantage of, the average person can't take advantage of them.
The average person doesn't have access to Cayman Island accounts.
The average person doesn't have access to carried interest income where they end up paying a much lower rate on billions of dollars that they've earned.
And so we just want to make sure that the whole system is fair.
I wonder, I do this.
I'll admit this to you.
I watched this interview yesterday and he mentioned carried interest.
And I wondered how many of you remembered me talking about how carried interest is charged, what it is.
It was in a discussion that we had on the program about asset wealth versus income wealth and how the asset wealthy, the really rich, are unaffected by any of Obama's tax increases.
The Warren Buffetts, the Bill Gates', the people who, when Obama says the rich aren't paying their fair share, the people they're thinking about, the really truly wealthy, are not subject to Obama's tax increases because they don't pay income taxes.
Hedge funds are notorious.
Hedge funds are allowed to calculate and categorize their income as carried interest.
And carried interest has a 15, I think it may not 20% tax rate on it as opposed to the 39.6 tax rate for high-on-income.
And I read a piece to you, read excerpts from a piece, Michael Arrington, who was one of the founders of TechCrunch.
And he was gloating in part over how he's a carried interest guy.
He's asset wealthy.
And through all this talk about raising taxes, he wasn't going to get hit.
Now, his column makes the point that he doesn't think that's fair, doesn't think it's right, but that he'll take it.
He'll take it.
Most of the money I make now comes from investments from Crunch Fund.
The vast majority of that's what's called carried interest.
Even though I'm investing other people's money, the government calls it a capital gain.
So instead of paying 39.6% of that money, I pay only 15%, maybe 20%, under the new rules.
In other words, income is a sucker's game, carried interest rocks.
Everybody wants the rich to pay more in taxes.
They're thinking about Romney and Buffett when they say rich people, but really rich people like that are totally protected.
Their accumulated wealth can only be touched by inflation.
And if they're in the hedge fund game, most of their income is taxed at 15%, 20%, carried interest.
And I wondered how many of you remembered this discussion that we'd had and the differences between asset wealth and income wealth.
And there's going to be less and less income wealth as income taxes rise.
The greatest enemy to the accrual of wealth or the accumulation of wealth, the greatest enemy is the progressive income tax.
The more you earn, the higher your tax rate, the less you keep, the longer it's going to take you to get wealthy.
And that's by design.
But the asset wealthy are untouched.
So when Obama mentioned carried interest, that was something new.
And the hedge fund guys aren't going to like it.
And the Buffett and those guys aren't going to like it.
Now, whether he follows through on it is another matter, but he mentioned it.
It was January 3rd, almost exactly a month ago, that we first brought up the issue of carried interest and asset wealth versus income wealth and the fact that the asset wealthy are not experiencing higher taxes at all under any Obama proposal or new implementation.
Back to the phones today.
Cater, Illinois.
Josh, great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hey, buddy.
Good to talk to you.
Hey, there's in the game yesterday, if they'd just maybe teach them how to wear their helmets properly, they could save a lot of concussions.
I've seen more helmets on the field than I think I've ever seen.
Well, let me tell you something about that.
We had a story just last week from some sort of a clinician specialist who made the point that there is no helmet in the world that will ever prevent a concussion because a concussion is the brain slamming into the skull, and there's no helmet that can stop that from happening.
It's not possible.
It's an illusion if people think they come up with safer helmets and not for concussions.
Now, skull fractures and that kind of thing, yeah.
But actual concussions, until you can pad the inside of the skull, which a helmet doesn't do, then it's all academic.
There's a lot of ways to get concussions.
I mean, Hillary got one just by, what, falling down the stairs.
So, you know, like, what's Seal?
How do you know he didn't get a concussion from a car accident or a running into a blocked wall?
Hell, he might have played soccer in the offseason.
There you go.
Who knows?
With Hillary, we do know she wasn't hanging from chandeliers.
That's Bill.
But she did get a concussion slipping and doing something.
That's exactly.
There's several ways to get one.
They just always assume it's football or it's the easiest thing to blame it on.
I know, I know.
It's just a vehicle.
Football is a vehicle for empowering central planners and authoritarians.
All it is.
I appreciate the call, Josh Glenn in Waterloo, Iowa.
Hi, great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hi, Rush, longtime listener, first time caller.
Thank you, sir.
Anyway, thank you.
Hey, I was wondering, I was watching the Laura Donald show on CBS this morning, and the boy King had an interview last night before the game, and he was saying how much health care was costing so much money.
I thought he fixed that.
Yeah, well, another misdirection.
The real news on that, I don't know if you heard this or not, the IRS put out news release late last week that the average family will see their health premiums cost $20,000 a year.
Yep.
That's average family health premiums will cost $20,000 a year.
Story was from CyberCast News Service.
It was on January 31st, and here's the, here are the dirty details in a final regulation issued last Wednesday.
The IRS assumed that under Obamacare, the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year, just three years from now.
The IRS's assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 a year is found in examples that the IRS itself gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty that they will need to pay the government if they don't buy a mandated health plan.
The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumption to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.
The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of five or two adults and three kids is $20,000 or the fine.
Now, this is, you can say five into $24,000 per family member.
But remember, Obama said his plan would result in premiums dropping by $2,500.
And Obama is now saying, or did say, that we're going to, that the deficit and our spending problem was largely due to Obamacare.
And Obamacare had to fix that.
$20,000 per family from the IRS.
Now, as we said last week, Obamacare lets insurance companies charge older people rates that are three times higher because of their age.
And of course, smokers have to pay more, assume the overweight are going to have to pay more, the obese.
This, by the way, is the cheapest family plan, and this is the IRS.
This is the bronze plan.
The silver and gold plans are going to cost a lot more.
Now, in the early stages, remember, you can pay the fine.
It's going to be much, much less than this by design.
Remember that?
The fine is much less than this.
The point is, the objective is to get people out of the private health insurance market because Obama and the Democrats want to close that down.
So if the cheapest health care plan three years from now for a family four or five is $20,000, and the fine, let's say, is, I'm going to take a stab in the dark because I don't know exactly, but the fine's nowhere near that the first couple of three years.
It's $3,000, let's say.
I mean, it's a big, big difference, whatever the number is.
And young people, especially, are going to say, what?
I don't need $20,000 for, oh, I'll pay the fine.
And then I'm covered.
If I pay the fine, I need some emergency coverage.
I'll go to the emergency room and it'll be subsidized.
I'm taken care of.
But then after a while, it's not too long, the fines are more expensive than the health insurance.
And by that time, so many people have opted out of buying insurance because it's so expensive that the private sector health insurance industry basically will wither away on the vine.
And the only option people are going to have is to go to the exchanges set up by the federal government, run by the states.
Ergo single-payer health care.
I mean, the ultimate objective of Obamacare is single-payer, government-run health care.
But they can't do that overnight.
People wouldn't accept it.
So, this plan, and it's always been part of Obamacare, has been to raise prices significantly, but have the fine much cheaper so that people opt for that.
When you're opting for the fine, you're not buying insurance.
That's not good for insurance companies, right?
If you're not buying policies, and the more people who opt out of buying policies, the less business there is, obviously, for private sector health insurance.
The objective is to finally wipe them out, have them close up.
So, the only place people will eventually have to go for insurance is the government.
Here's the fine: the IRS calculates that a family earning $120,000 per year that did not buy insurance would need to pay a penalty of $2,400 in 2016.
I knew it was a significant difference.
Now, what are you going to do if you're faced with this option?
On the one hand, you must do one of two things: you must buy health insurance.
Figure, if you don't have a family, figure $4,000 for you individually, ballpark, $4,000 a person, family $4,200, $16,000 to $20,000, family $5,000, $20,000, or $2,400 a smile.
What are you going to do?
If you're young, you'll pay the fine.
You're not going to get sick anyway, you're thinking.
You're certainly not going to have a catastrophic illness.
So you'll roll the dice that you won't be in a big-time accident.
You'll pay the fine.
You're legal.
IRS is off your case.
That's a huge difference.
Let's take it for a family of four.
Let's say that they're faced with $16,000 to $20,000 a year.
Health insurance.
You don't have that.
Who has that for health insurance?
Nobody's got that.
If the employer doesn't cover it or a portion of it or all of it, and you've got to come up with some of it, you still are not going to be able to afford that.
But the fine, $2,400 taken out of your tax, I'll do that.
It's obvious $2,400 is a much more attractive option than $20,000, particularly if you're young.
The fine from the article, the IRS calculates, again, $120,000 per year family earning that much will pay a penalty.
They don't say tax, by the way, penalty of $2,400 in 2016.
One way or the other, here's the right way to look at this: one way or the other, the government is going to get your money.
The government wants your money.
They don't want you, they're calculating that you won't buy health insurance at those prices when you're young, but they're still going to get their money.
What Obamacare is in part, because it's many things, but it is, among other things, a way for the government to get money from the uninsured.
Stop and think of it that way.
If you're uninsured, you work someplace, but you're not full-time, so you don't have a plan.
Or you do work full-time, but your boss is a creep like most bosses are.
And your boss doesn't give you your health care in total.
You still have to pay the fine.
If you end up being uninsured, you still have to pay.
Right now, prior to Obamacare, if you were uninsured, you didn't pay anything.
You went to the emergency room.
You finagled.
You did whatever you had to do.
Everything was fine.
It was an option not to pay health insurance.
And maybe you didn't pay insurance as you went to the doctor.
You just paid for it.
No longer.
Now everybody is going to pay.
And the thing is, how many people think Obamacare is free?
How many people think that Obamacare is this massive new entitlement ain't going to cost them anything?
Somebody else is going to be paying for it.
Under Obamacare, even the uninsured are going to be paying a minimum of $2,400 a year.
And that $2,400 does not buy you insurance.
It's a penalty for not having it.
It's just a new tax, $2,400.
And you do not get insurance coverage for that.
It's a penalty for not having it.
Family of four or five starting in 2016, $20,000 for the low-end plan.
What's the solution?
First thing, get rid of the kids.
If that doesn't wipe it all out, then get rid of the spouse.
That's the fastest way to get these costs down.
But who's going to do that?
Who's going to get rid of the kids?
Nobody's going to get rid of the kids.
Who's going to get rid of the spouse just for this?
Well, we'll have to wait and see.
Got to take a brief time out.
Don't go.
Debbie in Salt Lake City.
I'm glad you called.
Great to have you here.
Thank you, Russ.
Negative Dittos.
I've been listening since 1990 in Sacramento for you, and I want to thank you for the time that you take out of your busy schedule to inform us.
It's very well appreciated.
Well, thank you so much.
I appreciate that.
I do do this in my spare time, and I really appreciate you acknowledging that.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome.
How is the NFL going to survive if the NFL players don't learn the game in high school and college?
I mean, is the NFL just going to let 20 and 30-year-olds jump into the game and expect them to play?
I was like, give me a break.
Obama needs to worry about doing a budget, and he needs to get out of football and out of the way.
Well, I think you're exactly right.
I think this is absolutely absurd.
The idea that Obama has got to protect your son from football.
But your daughter or your son, he'll send off to combat.
He'll send them off to war.
He's got no problem arming them up and sending them off down harm's way to fight war, fight battle, end up in foxholes.
But football, you got to ask why.
What is the point?
And the point is it's control.
It's a way to expand government.
I mean, I know this sounds, that probably turns a lot of people off.
I'm trying to persuade.
They don't think anything wrong with a big government.
I just, I've got to find a way here to get the low information people because this is just absurd.
The president of the United States ought not to have anything to do with this.
He ought to be so busy, so occupied with things that he and his office only can deal with.
Other people deal with this football stuff.
free market will take care of it The media is already on a on a path here to do damage to this game.
They don't need Obama.
But for Obama to weigh in on this is exactly like you said.
So some might say in response to your question, well, he doesn't want to wipe out the game, so young kids are still going to be able to play it and come up through the pipeline, as Obama called it, Pop Warner, and junior high in high school and college football and so forth.
What Obama wants to do is simply take this opportunity for control over people's lives and use it.
In this case, he's seizing this opportunity under the umbrella of human safety.
Football is barbaric.
He doesn't want your child not playing.
He doesn't want his son playing as the game's currently played.
So Obama, who's already an expert in health care, he's an expert in retail.
He's an expert in energy.
He's an expert in in disaster cleanup now we're learning is an expert in professional sports administration.
This guy's got more talent in his little finger than anybody ever knew.
He's got more experience.
Look at all the things this guy is the expert at.
He's the expert, as I say, in healthcare.
He's the expert in how to get the economy growing.
He's the expert creating jobs.
He's the well.
He's who everybody turns to.
For all this, he's got to be the expert.
And now, lo and behold surprise surprise, Barack Obama is the expert in football safety.
So Obama is going to seize this opportunity to utilize power.
To what end is irrelevant.
The stated objective is going to be to make football safer by somehow reducing the number of concussions, and one of the things that we could do to reduce the number of concussions is change the way the game is played.
So we have rules and regulations involving less use of the head, maybe have rules where you can't tackle as hard and you can't be as mean when you tackle, and maybe you can only tackle with one hand.
Well, we that we leave that to open, you can calculate how measure meanness.
That's why we have to leave this up to Obama.
Nobody else has been able to figure that out.
He obviously has got the answers.
So you make people that play it in a less mean way, in a less aggressive way, we get the fans to stop being less, or make the fans to be blood, less bloodthirsty, so that the game is changed and therefore the game is safer.
See, and Obama will spearhead the effort or assign people to do it, and that's the opportunity here back after this unbeknownst to many, but they probably wouldn't care if they found out New York City's schools have been giving out tens of thousands of doses of the morning after pill.
Yes, it's a Mayor Doomberg plan.
I've got details and much more.
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