All Episodes
Previous Next
July 19, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:43
July 19, 2013, Friday, Hour #3
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Yes, America's Anchorman is away and this is your undocumented anchorman sitting in.
Honoured to be here.
Rush returns live for a full week of authentic all-American excellence in broadcasting on Monday.
We ended the previous hour with the news that the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the President of the United States are on the same page when it comes to the iniquity of the George Zimmerman verdict, which is pretty remarkable considering all the differences that there are with Iran right now.
Iran's going nuclear and all the rest of it, but at least they agree on the George Zimmerman verdict, according to the President's latest remarkable appearance.
And he's now said not just if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon, but I am Travan.
I could have been Travan.
This is a guy who's vacationing, by the way, at Martha's Vineyard for the umpteenth year, Martha's Vineyard, where you don't see a lot of guys like Trayvon walking around.
And if you did see any guys like Travan walking around, they'd be picked up and put on the ferry back to the mainland instantly.
The Prince of Wales, this would be about, I would guess, about 15 years ago.
The Prince of Wales was meeting with some British soldiers.
He was reviewing some British soldiers.
And he stops by a black soldier and asks him whether he's ever suffered any discrimination.
And the black soldier goes, well, you know, a little bit, nothing to write home about.
You know how it goes.
And the Prince of Wales said to him, well, I understand discrimination because I was bullied at boarding school.
So the Prince of Wales tells this black guy that he knows what it's like to feel discrimination because he was bullied at boarding school because they mocked him because he was a prince, because he was the heir to the throne of Britain and Canada and Australia and Jamaica and Belize and what have you.
And so they'd pants him or whatever for it and they'd mock him and he would be there sobbing into his sleep as he tried to, because he was bullied for being a prince and being heir to the throne and he was sobbing and he was saying, you know, singing the ancient spirituals of his people, you know, swing by sweet limousine coming for to carry me home and all that kind of thing.
He had a terrible time, terrible time.
That's what Obama sounds like when he says I could have been Travan.
He's had a life of privilege.
Columbia, Harvard, Martha's Vineyard.
He's the Martha's Vineyard president.
He's the royal president.
He takes $100 million to make a week-long visit to Africa.
Do you know how many African countries you could buy for $100 million?
But just to send him anywhere, even on Martha's Vineyard, where there's nobody, nobody on the island except people who think exactly the same as he does.
He needs a 40-car motorcade to pretend to visit an ice cream parlour.
And he says, I could have been Trayvon because people looked at me funny in department stores.
What we're seeing in America, to go back to the Robert Wright point, is essentially where liberals isolate themselves in psychological gated communities.
They ensure they're never on these streets.
They're never on these streets where you have to make a snap decision about people or whatever.
They're not in the neighborhoods that were kind of nice, okay, 30 years ago.
And now there's more and more break-ins and you have to start a neighborhood watch and people have laser alarms on their houses and you can't leave stuff on your porch anymore because it gets stolen.
They're not in those neighborhoods that were kind of nice.
So they weren't great.
They weren't lavish.
They weren't luxurious 40 years ago, 20 years ago.
But now they're worse.
Now they're worse.
Obama is insulated from that and has been insulated from it all his life and has chosen to live his life entirely insulated from it.
His wife was a $350,000 diversity outreach coordinator for the University of Chicago hospitals.
There's no more worthless job in America than a diversity outreach coordinator.
It was so essential to the University of Chicago hospitals that when she quit to become first lady, they didn't even bother replacing her.
It's great to be the people who do the $350,000 a year gigs peddling all that pap.
It's much, it's very, very different to be living on the sharp edge of it, on the sharp edge of it.
And as I said, these are fractious times in America.
I mentioned that the actress Ray Dawn Chong, who starred with Oprah Winfrey in the colour purple, has now used the N-word, or as I like to think of it, the Paula Dean word.
The Paula Dean word.
Ray Dawn Chong, Chong is a dead giveaway for, you know, Ku Klux Klan members.
In Mississippi, all the big Kliegels in the Klan are called Chong.
Ray Dawn Chong called Oprah the N-word and called her a total beotch.
She's a great brown noser.
She's that fat chick who was a cheerleader or the wannabe cheerleader in school.
She was the fat chick in school that did everything.
So she's opened up on Oprah.
And I can barely even remember the colour purple, which was Oprah's big movie.
But the color purple, it must mean the craziest movie set in the world.
author of the color purple alice walker african-american feminist author alice walker this week compared george zimmerman to the killer of che guevara and i read through this story and it's actually rather worse than that because in fact she compares uh she compares george zimmerman to the reptilian space lizards uh that uh that some people do you know this conspiracy theory
There was a guy I used to work with at the BBC who went a bit funny and turned up and had a press conference to announce that these were the guys behind everything.
These people who believe that the world is run by paedophile Satanist Illuminati controlled by the Queen and the Bush family, who he says,
the people who believe this say are actually reptilian humanoids descended from the blood drinking space lizards of the star system alpha draconis uh and and that uh and and uh that these uh and don't worry you can say to yourself well you know i'm not going to go anywhere near the bush family or the queen or the royal family It's worse than that.
There's apparently all 44 American presidents have apparently been space lizards from the star system Alpha Draconis, as was Bob Hope.
Bob Hope was a space lizard.
Lady Gaga and the country singers Chris Christofferson and Boxcar Willie are also apparently space lizards from the Satanist Illuminati space lizards from Alpha Draconis.
I would never have thought that Chris Christofferson, of all people, Lady Gaga, I can see, but I can't see Chris Christofferson being a space lizard from Absurd.
Now, Alice Walker, now Alice Walker now basically saying that George Zimmerman is also one of these people.
She says that Zimmerman shares the cold-blooded reptilian ancestry of some humans and compares him to Credo Mutua, the South African shaman who claimed to be abducted by reptile-like alien creatures when he was looking for herbs in Zimbabwe.
I hate that.
You know, you think it's like a three-day weekend and you think you go looking for herbs in Zimbabwe and then you get abducted by reptile-like space aliens.
So Alice Walker is now saying that it's not just the Bush family who are reptilian, space alien, paedophile, Satanist Illuminati, but George Zimmerman is part of the conspiracy too.
Anybody who's been involved in the color purple has gone completely insane.
The question now is to think, now that Alice Walker has said that George Zimmerbud is part of this reptilian space lizard conspiracy, whether Barack Obama will get on board with that one or whether he's just going to restrict it to taking away your gun rights and having a federal prosecution.
If I was George Zimmerman, by the way, when Edward Snowden gets given his asylum in Russia and vacates whatever corner of the Moscow airport he's sleeping in, if I were George Zimmerman, I'd say, can I have that corner of the airport after you?
He has no future in the United States, no matter how many not guilty verdicts come along.
We're going to be talking.
Oh, by the way, you know what it is?
It's the end of the week, and you know what that means.
Live from Ice Station EIB, it's Open Line Friday.
Yes, 1-800-282-2882, it is Open Line Friday.
And that means that you get to talk about anything you want to talk about.
So if you want to talk about the bankruptcy of Detroit or you want to talk about the conspiracy of paedophile, Satanist, Illuminati, space lizards, feel free.
Anything goes.
If you can pin the bankruptcy of Detroit on paedophile, Satanist, Illuminati, space lizards, feel free to give it a go.
But we're going to be talking in just a moment to Jimmy Carter.
No, not that.
No, not that Jimmy Carter.
That Jimmy Carter, James L. Carter, has said that functioning democracy, there's no such thing as functioning democracy in America anymore.
So he's enjoying the Obama years immensely.
But this James Carter has written a piece in the Wall Street Journal on America's high corporate taxes.
And we're going to be talking to him about that in just a moment.
1-800-282-2882 do call.
Did you know that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world?
That goes back to what I was saying earlier about the importance of borders.
You're free to move out of Detroit.
If you don't like what Detroit's doing to you, you can move to a suburb.
You can move to another part of Michigan.
And it's the same thing with businesses.
In the global economy, businesses are free to set up shop anywhere around the planet.
And almost anywhere in the developed world is a more favorable place to open a corporation than the United States is right now.
We'll talk to James Carter about that up next on the EIB Network.
James Carter worked for both the Bush administration at the Treasury Department and for the Obama administration at the Labor Department.
And he has a piece in the Wall Street Journal called America Goes It Alone on High Corporate Taxes.
Welcome to the show, James.
Good to have you with us.
Thank you.
Well, your piece has some terrific numbers in it.
The U.S. last cut its corporate tax rate in 1986.
Back at that time, 218 of the world's 500 largest corporations were in the United States.
Today, that number is down to 137.
And that is connected to our corporate tax rates.
Oh, definitely.
As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk used to say, he would say, you know, one-third of the world is asleep at any given time, and the other two-thirds is up to something.
And it's true.
Much of the world is up to something because they're aggressively reworking their tax codes to boost their competitiveness, boost their economies.
And sadly, while the United States does this, we here in the United States just dither.
And in fact, Japan is in a similar situation, which is why I wrote this article with my co-author, who is a former member of the Japanese House of Representatives.
Yeah, and when people talk about low corporate tax rates, they always talk about it as a kind of right-wing thing.
But in fact, countries that are by any definition left-wing European social democracies all have lower corporate tax rates than the United States.
The Scandinavians do.
Ireland's is about a third of the United States.
Well, last year when Japan cut its corporate rates, that gave the United States the unenviable distinction of having the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.
It was pretty much as if we traded gold and silver metals for having the least attractive corporate tax regimes in the world.
Right, right.
And in fact, since 1993, when we actually increased our tax rate, 1993, the world has seen 133 different corporate rate reductions around the world since 2006 alone.
And the United States is falling behind by standing still.
We have the highest rate, and we're suffering as a result of that.
And what's amazing, because I understood that when I moved to this country, I'd had businesses, small corporations in countries that I thought of as socialist basket cases.
And I was staggered to find that when I set my corporation up here in New Hampshire, the United States is higher.
And there seems to be.
And again, it's worth exploring what's happened since the turn down.
Canada has cut its corporate tax rates.
I mean, you don't have to go far away to find a more favorable business environment than the United States right now.
No, exactly.
Not at all.
In fact, it's even worse than that because not only do we have the highest rate, we also have an antiquated system when it comes to the treatment of international income.
Because the United States earns and sells a lot of goods overseas.
After all, 95% of our customers, at least potential customers, are outside the borders of the United States.
But because we have an antiquated system that taxes this income differently than virtually every other country in the world, there's a handful, that puts us at a severe disadvantage vis-à-vis our competitors.
And by that you mean this claim to global jurisdiction, which is basically if you have a subsidiary, if you're an American company with a subsidiary in Europe and you pay taxes in Europe, if you try to bring any of that money back to the United States, you're then doubly taxed, you're taxed again.
And no other developed nation does that.
Well, there aren't many anyway.
There are a few.
But generally speaking, all companies everywhere will pay tax to the government in the country where that income was earned.
In fact, U.S. multinationals paid more than $100 billion each year on that foreign income to foreign governments.
And most countries allow that income to be brought back to the home country where the company is headquartered virtually tax-free or at a very, very low rate.
For instance, Germany excludes 95% of that income that a German company would bring back to Germany from sales, say, in France or elsewhere.
But the U.S. is just the opposite, as you say.
We impose an additional layer of taxation on that income once it's brought back to the United States.
And that only has some very negative effects.
First of all, as I mentioned in the piece, there's the lockout effect.
Because the second layer of tax only kicks in when the company brings back the money to the United States.
Companies say, well, let's get the money abroad.
We won't bring it back.
So today, we have a situation where we have about $2 trillion of deferred foreign income held abroad.
And, in fact, you have U.S. headquartered companies borrowing money here, even though they have billions overseas, because it's cheaper for them to borrow money and leave that money overseas.
So that's $2 trillion of income that we could be using here at home.
And you mentioned that New Zealand, a few years ago, went over to an American system and wised up and then reined it back in to a territorial instead of this global jurisdiction thing that the United States has.
New Zealand, as I recall it from the time, figured out that if you force, incentivize people to keep their money overseas, there's actually no point to having a New Zealand company as such, because it never brings the money back to New Zealand to invest it in the New Zealand economy.
And that's exactly what's happening with American companies right now.
Everything just stays abroad.
And, of course, the other effect, which I mentioned, which is very damaging, is the move-out effect.
Because of our antiquated corporate taxes to many companies, especially those with large sales outside the United States, are actually worth more in foreign hands than in U.S. hands.
So it shouldn't be surprising, then, that U.S. companies either decide willingly to locate overseas to cut their tax bill, or they're taking over by foreign entities.
And that really is one of the more shocking things when I was doing the research for this, the fact that since the start of this year alone, we've had 484 U.S. companies acquired by foreign entities.
That averages out to nearly 2.5 companies each and every day being taken over.
Yeah, which is incredible to me.
I mean, I remember when, I think this was about three or four years ago, when Tim Hortons, the donut company that has places on north and south of the U.S.-Canadian board, it was a Delaware company, and it announced it was relocating to Canada to, quote, take advantage of Canadian tax rates, unquote.
And Americans, that phrase makes no sense to Americans, because they still think of this as a low-tax society, even as the rest of the world has changed.
And the U.K., for instance, has been very explicit about what it's been doing.
It actually abandoned the worldwide system that we have back in 2009, and it has several times reduced its corporate rates with the explicit objective of becoming the most competitive in the world.
Right, right, which is where the last ones to get the message on this.
Thanks for that, James.
That piece is in the Wall Street Journal, America Goes It Alone on High Corporate Taxes.
Lots more still to come on The Rush Limbaugh Show.
Yes, Rush returns live Monday for The Real Deal behind the golden EIB microphone on America's number one radio show.
This is Mark Sun.
I should have.
I made so many mistakes this show.
I got the name wrong of the Royal Newfoundland fencibles.
But this is the biggest mistake of all.
I said that James Carter, who we just spoke to, had worked in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
And one of these things where I was forwarded a kind of curriculum vitae, and it all, as is the way on the Internet, the rich text format all disintegrated between its point of origin and getting to me.
And so I read the particular dates upside down.
But, in fact, he did all his service for the government of the United States under the Bush administration, deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury and deputy undersecretary at the Department of Labor.
He did.
You said he was a Clinton appointee.
OK, well, I withdraw my apology then.
So, but I said he – I don't know.
I don't know about that.
I said he'd worked at the Obama administration.
I can understand why a guy would – he's going to be suing me for defamation.
It's open light Friday, 1-800-282-2882.
Detroit, there is a proposal to build a fence around the city of Detroit.
Detroit – I made a joke about this, the border fence thing, that if they ever build that border fence, it will be to stop you getting out rather than to stop Mexicans getting in.
And, in fact, that is true with this fence they're proposing now.
Now, should Hamtrak – Hamtrak – Hamtrak, which is a suburb of Detroit, but that borders Detroit, wants to build a 12- or 14-foot wall around the city to keep Detroiters out of their city.
And they want state-issued ID to get in.
They've got – so, in other words, they're looking at it like people look on the U.S.-Mexican border, that it's a border between the first world and the third world.
By the way, if you drive through the tunnel from Windsor, Ontario – I've always thought Windsor, Ontario is like the most boring town on the planet.
But when you drive through the tunnel and you emerge on the American side, you do think you have gone from the first world to the third world.
So the Hamtrak, which borders Detroit, wants to build a 14-foot wall to keep – it's a Detroit wall.
You'll be able to have prisoner exchanges.
If there's anyone who's stuck there behind the wall in Detroit who shouldn't be there and feels they've got a legitimate excuse to get out, then – well, I don't know about Amnesty.
They could probably apply for refugee status, I would say, Mr. Sludley, because they'd be in the same situation as, like, the Sarnaev family from Dagestan.
They could apply to be admitted to the Detroit suburbs and – because I'm sure this wall, this 14-foot wall around the city will have the occasional gate or door in it.
But you would need state-issued ID to get in or out.
And that is the proposal of one city council candidate.
And this place, Hamtrak, by the way, is entirely surrounded by the city of Detroit except for a little small portion on the west side that borders Highland Park.
And this guy, Faberjack, Faberjack, Richard Faberjack, says that the wall would repel outsiders from Detroit who are coming into his little shishi burg and committing crimes and vandalizing their city.
So that's where – there'll be a border fence in Detroit.
That's where we're going with that.
Let's go to Richard.
Speaking of the great state of Michigan, Richard is calling us from Farmington.
Great to have you with us on the show, Richard.
Well, good afternoon, Mr. Stein.
Thank you for taking my call.
Just to inject a bit of humor into an otherwise grim day here, the reason that Detroit fell without a shot to the Newfies was that at that time Detroit was still largely a French city.
Hey, hang on a minute.
Hang on.
I'm not going to let you get away with that because, you know, something – go through the tunnel to Windsor and the Dominion of Canada, God bless Canada, is having massive celebrations for the Bicentennial of the War of 1812.
You know, because, like, we kicked Yankee butt.
It's, like, huge up there.
And they've got whatever it was, HMS, whatever it was, that sank the Chesapeake.
They've got on a new stamp up in Canada.
They're going big time on it.
Burning the White House will be on the next stamp.
They're going big time on it.
And so I happen to know – I happen to know that the general who surrendered Detroit to the British in the War of 1812 was General Hull, which no Quebecer will tell you is a French name.
You own that defeat.
You own that defeat, Richard.
I am half French myself, so I'm just making an elusive joke.
Okay.
You have stated well most of the root causes of what's happened to Detroit.
I think maybe you're a little bit unfair on the pension side.
And the reason I say that is because, by and large, the pensioners are just ordinary people, most of whom just took a job that was offered to them, and they worked their job for 20 or 25 years.
And, you know, they're expecting to get what they were promised now.
So, having said that, the union leadership of these people, all of whom were present in those smoky rooms while they were making all these sneaky deals with the leadership of the city, are the ones that, you know, weren't possible.
You know, if we could still exhume them and hang them, I mean, that probably would be a good idea.
You know, and this is the mess that we have.
It's a failure of style over substance.
It is a complete and utter and perfect example of liberal government and what happens that, despite of 100 years of failure, people are still trying it.
Well, you know, you're right about the corruption there, and you don't have to exhume a lot of these guys.
I mean, a lot of them are like flesh and blood and still walking around, like Kwame Kilpatrick, who's – I think he's just – he's about to take up long-term residence in one of the state penitentiaries, as I understand it.
So it's something that is actually – and as you say, you know, when you take a job with government, one of the things people do – the reason they take jobs with government is because of the security and the benefits.
And it's not their – and you're right in the sense that it's not their responsibility when you take a job in 1980 to worry about whether in 2013 the job you've – the pensions you've expected all those decades are actually affordable or not.
And so many of these people – many of these people took these jobs, thought the benefits were attractive, and it never occurred to them that, in fact, the money wasn't there for them.
The political class in Detroit is absolutely corrupt.
I mean, I don't even – I can't even follow all the details of Kwame Kilpatrick, some exotic dancer who turned up dead and his wife had been – his wife had caught her canoodling with the mayor or something.
I don't even – I can't even – it's like – it sounds like some absurd daytime soap opera.
But these people, the political class, have done very well because they tell people, don't worry about it.
Don't worry that it's unaffordable.
We'll – as you said, we'll tell you the same old cliches, the same old lines, and people will still vote for us, and we will never, ever get out of office.
And that's what happened.
By the way, I've driven through Farmington, Richard.
How far are you from actually the border of Detroit?
My house is something less than five miles from the actual northwest city limit of Detroit, just a few miles down the road.
But Farmington doesn't actually border it, does it?
It doesn't actually border the city, does it?
No, no, it does not.
There's actually a town or two that interposes itself there between us and Detroit.
But it's close enough.
And, you know, I'm old enough to remember an entirely different Detroit.
I'm a little older than Russia, actually.
And, you know, an awful lot of things have changed.
But, you know, sadly, Kwame is only the most recent, you know, of a long list of mendacious cretins that have, you know, learned well the old art of manipulating the factions.
And that's what they do.
And this is what has happened.
And this has been coming for a long, long time.
A long time.
You had the man who did the most damage individually was Coleman Young, who used to call himself the MFIC, by which I can't say the full thing on the radio.
But instead of being referred to as his honor or the mayor, he liked to be called the MFIC, by which he meant the mother in charge.
And you can work out for yourself the word I've left out there.
But he basically did more damage to Detroit than anybody else, Richard.
Yes, he did, sadly enough.
But it's not the end of the world here.
There are a lot of actually a lot of good things going on in Detroit, surprisingly.
And I think that, you know, with proper leadership, with people that are bound and determined to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, that, you know, Detroit will come back.
It's just it's just it's and the people in the city of Detroit are going to have to wake up and understand, you know, that the lovely dream they've made all these years is it's not a dream at all.
It's a nightmare that now they have to face up to the real world.
And I think they'll rise to it.
I think it'll happen.
You know, we still have all the good things that we always had.
And now we just have to exploit them properly.
Oh, OK, Richard.
Thank that's a that's an optimistic.
Thank you.
Thank you for your call.
I must say, by the way, I love just skimming through the Detroit news stories.
This was one.
This is one from CBS Detroit yesterday.
A family finds marijuana and pipe in Burger King kids meal.
It actually, in fairness, in fairness to the city of Detroit, it's from some town half an hour outside the city limits.
But it does it does show you how life can.
And it does actually illustrate in a very practical sense why people can be so deluded when you've got the marijuana and the pipe that they're coming with the Burger King kids meal.
You can understand why people are growing up in utter delusion.
You know, have it your way, have it our way with the marijuana and the pipe.
That's that's Burger King in Michigan.
Mark Stein in for rush.
We'll take more of your calls straight ahead.
I'm getting everything wrong today.
I've apparently just offended Polish Americans across the land by mispronouncing the Detroit suburb of Ham Trammick.
I called it Ham Trammick, like Amtrak, but apparently it's Ham Trammick.
I don't know whether you can take Amtrak to Ham Trammick or whether you can take Am Trammick to Ham Trammick.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Let's go to Paula in Virginia.
Paula, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Thank you for waiting.
Oh, thanks.
I appreciate it.
I just wanted to talk about something a little more lighthearted while I watch Obama shoot himself in both feet.
and that would be our friends across the pond.
My 20-something great-great-grandfather, I think 26th great-great-grandfather, was Edward IV.
What?
Really?
Yeah.
So you are the rightful queen of the United States.
You better believe it.
Well, I mean, I tell you something.
I never thought I'd say this, but after looking at what this republic, this experimental republic, has dwindled down to after two and a half centuries, I think we need to restore the monarchy, and I'm in favor of you becoming Empress Paula.
I think we should march on Washington starting tomorrow.
Great.
Let's say that it is.
I've always liked Edward's nickname, Ned.
Right.
Oh, yes.
So if the royal couple are listening, and I can't imagine they're not, I'd like to suggest if it's a boy, Edward, William, Charles, Philip, we'll call him Ned, and a girl to be Victoria, Diana, Elizabeth, Mary.
Call her Tori.
Oh, Tori.
I love that.
High-class Brit chicks called Tori.
But Ned is a very, there is actually a society for Neds.
There's a society of Neds somewhere in America, and I know this because I had a friend called Ned who was on television in Britain for many years, and he used to keep getting asked to join the Society of Neds in America.
I can't remember who was in it except for a guy called Ned Washington who wrote The Nearness of You.
It's not a pale moon that excites me, that thrills and elights me.
That guy.
He was the only Ned I know who was in this Society of Neds.
But I think Prince Ned is a pretty good name, Paula.
By the way, how do you feel about Prince Rush?
You're like, you're not.
Oh, she's listening to you on the radio.
I think Prince Rush has a kind of ring to it, don't you think, Mr. Snadley?
I like it.
It does have a ring.
Prince Rush.
I don't want to suggest it.
I'm not formally suggesting it, because the next thing you know is Obama's going to go out and give a press conference where he calls on Her Royal Highness to name the baby Prince Trayvon.
So I don't want to politicise it.
So I'll back off on the Prince Rush thing, and we'll go with Paula's suggestion that they go for Prince Ned or Princess Tori.
So there we are.
Don't forget, Rush will be here.
We're still waiting.
We're on Royal Baby Watch around the clock here.
And Rush will have all the Royal Baby news.
I don't know whether he's flown over in EIB1 smoking seven cigars on the way to Heathrow to cover the Royal Baby news, but he will have Royal Baby Watch live on the EIB network starting Monday.
So we'll find out whether it's going to be Prince Ned or Prince Rush.
Mark Stein on the EIB network.
More straight ahead.
Mark Stein in for Rush on the EIB network.
Did you know the Obama administration has spent some $400,000 on paintings of cabinet members?
How many cabinet secretaries are there?
About 20?
That's about $20,000 per painting, per portrait of these cabinet members.
There's a little notice provision in a bill that has just cleared the house that would end the government paying for official portraits of house committee chairs and cabinet secretaries.
Again, this is like government, this is who, who, normally with a painting, it's like if you get a painting by a decent artist, it's a pretty good investment.
Not when you pay $20,000 for a portrait of Janet Napolitano.
No, that is not, that painting is not going to be worth $20,000 in 10 years time or 50 years.
There is, but there's no limit.
There's no limit.
By the way, they don't, they did commission paintings of the Detroit City Council, I believe, oil paintings that are about $40,000 a piece for every member of the Detroit City Council.
And you can see them now because they're actually on the FBI most wanted list.
So it's like better than the usual artist's impression he gets.
Very, very good.
But that's, that's, that's now been ended.
Apparently a bill has passed the house to end the practice of obscure committee chairs having these, these oil paintings done of themselves as if they're Roman emperors.
▲
Export Selection