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Sept. 24, 2013 - Rush Limbaugh Program
35:37
September 24, 2013, Tuesday, Hour #3
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You know, I come into New York, I'm really not a hick.
People think that because you're from Milwaukee that you are a heck, admittedly I'm dressed like a tourist.
I've got I'm wearing sneakers rather than dress shoes because I have to walk around and I want to be comfortable when I'm doing Russia's show.
I just see things differently than all of these people in New York see it.
There is so much goo googaga in this city right now over the fact that the UN is meeting, Obama is here, the president of Iran is here, they may have finally a breakthrough in which they actually we're actually going to communicate again.
This is the summer this is like Hate Ashbury 1967, it's the summer of love.
And I see this as one giant terrible, terrible con.
Franklin Roosevelt being wheeled into Yalta, Neville Chamberlain running off to meet Hitler.
I mentioned earlier Robert Shaw being going into the OTB that Paul Newman and Robert Redford were running.
This is a fleecing of the United States of America is what this is.
Some of us, those of us on the right are constantly told that we're the oddballs.
We have these views that nobody else holds.
We're extreme.
The tremendous value of Russia's program, and all of the other conservative talk show hosts who came after Rush is that people know that they're not alone.
The views they hold are not extreme.
They are mainstream.
The fact that you don't hear them as much from the media doesn't mean that these views aren't valid.
I mentioned that because there's something I want to talk about here, and I said at the end of the last hour, that fillins like myself, we can hold some topics and get our shot to share them with a national audience.
This is one that I want to talk about it.
I did the topic on my own program in Milwaukee a few weeks ago.
Since then, a couple of national commentators have written about it as well.
And I want to spend a few moments here at the beginning of this hour talking about the income gap between the wealthy, the so called rich, and everybody else.
Liberals, especially Obama, have been talking about this for years.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, or some version of that story.
In defending his tax increases, he's talking about he has talked about incessantly, how the middle class is being left behind while the well off are getting farther ahead, and implying that that's because the game is rigged for them.
The knee jerk reaction of most conservatives is to say, that's not true.
Obviously the income gap is going to grow because of inflation, the numbers are higher, but the spread in actual wealth, the amount of wealth that's distributed throughout the economy, that hasn't changed.
And all these charts have come up and so on.
And our side I think has denied this notion that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class are losing ground.
Well, I think on this issue, the liberals are right about that.
I think that there is a growing gap between the affluent and the middle class.
I think the middle class is having a harder time right now than they ought to be.
So I want to spend a couple of moments on this and tell you why I think that.
We have had undeniably, if you follow the numbers, the raw numbers, a very, very mild, a very tepid economic recovery since the bottoming out after the credit markets froze up about five or six years ago.
The numbers do show indeed growth.
It's minuscule growth.
It's slow, but we're not in technically at least, a recession.
In addition to that, some things have undeniably happened.
Over the last several years, the stock market has moved forward.
We're in a five year bull market really.
And the stock market's having another very good year.
Most of the averages are up, well into the double digits in the range of twenty percent.
And this comes after several years of the stock market doing pretty well.
The housing market has rebounded.
In some parts of the country where the carnage was really bad, it hasn't picked up as much, but in most parts of the United States, housing has bounced strongly off the bottoms that were reached after the credit markets fell apart and the housing markets collapsed.
Prices are recovering.
Sales are up.
People who are in the housing market developers, they're building again.
South Florida, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, all those high rises that they stopped building, they're now all filled and they're building new ones again.
The housing market's recovered.
So you wonder how can this be?
Particularly since at other measures that we have haven't moved at all and in fact are worse.
We have this recovery, clearly the stock market's up, there's some growth, housing is recovered, but unemployment is still terrible.
It's worse than when he came into office.
The unemployment rate might not be worse, although it's close, but the number of Americans out of work has gone way up.
We're virtually at record levels of working age Americans who are no longer in the active workforce.
They've just given up.
In part, we've created enough welfare programs that some have chosen to be able to live on them, but also in part, people who have gone in and applied again and again and again and again have thrown in the towel and they just well, we're gonna try to find extended employment benefits, I'll try to live off of all of these government giveaway programs.
I'm giving up.
In addition to that, those who are working are sitting there making the same money that they were making years ago.
All of the statistics on wage growth show the same thing.
There isn't any wage growth in the United States.
Wages are stagnant, and for many people they have gone down.
Many employers have told their employees that in order for me to keep you, you're going to have to accept a pay cut.
There are people listening to me right now who are in that situation.
In addition to that, some full-time employees have been taken to part-time and are now trying to find a second job to supplement their incomes.
So for people who are underemployed or unemployed, this economy is miserable, and there has not been a recovery for them.
Every economic recovery we have, and these are terms.
A recovery is what happens after a recession.
A recession is, according to some stand some definitions, two quarters in a row of negative growth.
A recovery is when the growth isn't negative anymore.
You're showing upward growth.
We've been in this miserably slow, unenthusiastic, sluggish recovery, but a recovery.
With some elements of our economy doing very well.
The stock market, the housing market, and a few others.
Yet people are being left behind.
Who's pulled ahead?
Let's be honest.
The wealthy.
Who owns stocks?
Who owns a lot of stocks?
People who have assets.
Who owns housing?
People who at least have that asset in the first place.
By and large, the people who are participating in the housing market are people who have always owned homes.
The big beneficiaries in the housing market recovery are those developers that put up big subdivisions where they sell those homes, or they put up the high-rise apartment complexes, or they build the big rental units.
They have done very well.
Again, people with assets.
Why have they done well?
They've done well because of the economic decisions that have been made over the last several years.
This policy of the Federal Reserve, supported entirely by Obama and implemented by Bernanke, of keeping interest rates artificially low.
QE one, QE2 quantitative easing, what is it?
They're going into the bond market and buying up all of this government debt to keep interest rates artificially low by creating all of this demand for American bonds, American debt, interest rates remain low because the Federal Reserve with its printing pests is just every day coming out and saying, okay, we have this much money to create, let's go buy these bonds.
This has been stated as being done for the purpose of trying to aid the recovery.
Just within the past two weeks, Bernanke came out and said, Well, you know, we're not even gonna taper our bond buying.
The stock market rallied as a result of that.
Interest rates are going to stay low, that means stocks are priced very, very well in comparison To the lousy return you get on bonds.
So the market rallied again.
Who won when that market rallied?
Those who own stocks.
And I'm not begrudging that because I'm one of them.
I'm not rich, but I'm well off.
That's what happens when you're a radio talk show host who's very successful, but in Milwaukee for a while.
You don't become rich, but you become very well off.
That's what I am.
I'm comfortable and I own assets.
I own my own home and I own a lot of stocks.
So the stock market goes up.
That's great for me.
It's really, really great for somebody who owns millions and millions and millions in stocks.
When the housing market takes off, that's really great for a developer who's just done 16 new subdivisions.
Somebody who had assets in the first place.
Because the only thing that has grown in this miserable recovery are assets.
The value of assets, stocks, housing, land has gone up.
Wages haven't gone up.
Hiring hasn't gone up.
People's prospects of moving ahead hasn't gone off.
Do you know how miserable it's been being somebody in middle management in America right now?
Those are the jobs that are being slashed.
People are losing status in their workplace.
They're moving down, they're seeing no leverage in being able to go into the boss and ask for a pay raise.
None of that has occurred in this recovery.
So, yes, over the last several years the gap is growing.
And the rich, or at least the well off, and especially the rich, they're doing really well right now.
When the stock market keeps going up 20%, who do you think the big winners are?
True, those in the middle class who have some stocks, but the huge winners are people who have tens of millions of dollars in the market.
They've done great.
So why is this?
Why have we had this gap that I think some on our side have wrongly denied?
That's not true.
The rich aren't getting richer.
Obama's just using that as an excuse to raise taxes.
No, it is true.
He may be using it as an excuse to raise taxes, but it is undeniably true.
You know why it's true?
Because of him.
It's his policies that have caused this.
He's the guy responsible for the rich getting richer.
He and Bernanke are the ones that have pursued this flawed policy of selling off our future by flooding the market with all of these cheap dollars to be involved in quantitative easing.
QE to all this holding interest rates low, this isn't creating employment, this isn't creating job grow wage growth.
What it's doing is it's inflating the value of assets, perhaps to the point of a bubble.
Great for people who are part of the bubble, great for the people who have the assets.
This is the Obama policy.
You want to know who's responsible for the fact for the that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is losing ground.
Barack Obama.
The guy who says it's a problem is the guy who has pursued economic policies that have pretty much allowed those who have wealth to prosper under his administration while making miserable conditions for people who are trying to get ahead.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced, nothing against him personally, because I think he's a great American, that Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate for the Republican Party in 2012.
That tape that came out in which he was prattling about the forty-seven percent, that was devastating.
Obama keeps saying he cares about the middle class.
The poor believes he cares about them.
The poor believe he cares about them.
But it's his policies that are holding those groups down.
Now I mentioned in the first segment this hour that the loose money policy of the Fed has been a boon to those who hold assets, while doing nothing for those who don't, who depend largely on the income from their job and having a job in the first place.
Now let's look at what the Obama policies have done for them.
Is there a bigger job killer imaginable than Obamacare?
Obamacare as written punishes companies on the basis of how many employees they have.
If they have more than fifty, they're in it.
Do you know how many are trying to stay under 50?
If you work more than 30 hours, you are mandated coverage.
Employers are taking their employment below a thirty.
And even for those that are in the 150 or 200, every additional employee is now a much greater cost than they were before.
If you wanted to finally get unemployment to improve, repeal Obamacare.
If we drop the thing, if Obama himself got up to now and said, you know what, I reconsidered it isn't a good idea after all.
Employment would take off.
There wouldn't be this artificial hold on employment.
Instead, Obamacare tells every employer in America that that employee has to produce way more than they did in the past because they now cost so much.
His war on coal.
There are going to be no new coal power plants in the United States.
He's made it clear that utilities are never going to get them through the regulatory process.
Coal plants are being mothballed.
You want to find an all American middle class industry?
Virtually all of our coal comes from the United States.
These are middle class good paying jobs.
What a sellout trumpka of the AFL CIO is.
You know where he came from?
He came from the United Mine Workers Union.
Yet he sat by as Obama has trashed this American energy source.
And it isn't just the mining of the coal.
The two largest coal mining manufacturers, manufacturers of equipment for coal mining, are based here in the United States.
They both happen to be in my area, Milwaukee.
Caterpillar's Mining Division, formerly called Busyrus, enjoy global big subsidiary PH.
They are huge manufacturers of mining equipment.
Both are scaling back dramatically because of his war on coal.
His opposition to drilling here in the United States.
He doesn't want to have any more offshore drilling, and he's made it very hard to get new permits for drilling, not only for oil, but even for natural gas, which is a primarily clean energy source.
He's against all of that.
He's opposed to the Keystone Pipeline.
How many construction jobs would be created by that?
He's opposed to getting oil from Canada and into the United States.
The only way you can get oil from Canada and into the United States is if Americans are working on that project.
On and on it goes.
His embrace of trial lawyers, creating all of these costs for business, Who gets a business in trouble?
Their employees.
Is it any wonder that so many companies are offsourcing so much of their stuff to foreign countries where their employees aren't having to put up with the constant lawsuits that are created when an employee makes a mistake?
All of this loose credit has been wonderful for people that are moving money around on paper.
It hasn't done anything for the real economy.
The real economy is people in the United States going to work either making something or selling it.
He doesn't want us to make anything.
His constant worrying about the carbon footprint and his embrace of anything alternative has merely resulted in him subsidizing companies that never were able to create long-term employment because they didn't have a product for which there was a long-term market.
But people that are actually involved in getting their hands dirty and making something, or going out and selling things, he's done nothing for them.
He's made those people a liability.
Workers a liability.
Why?
If he's the guy who wants to help the middle class get ahead, if he wants poor people to get jobs, as he keeps saying, if he thinks the rich are so greedy, why are his policies like this?
Here's the answer.
He can't even do his class warfare right.
He's incompetent.
He really does want to redistribute.
That's why he creates the big tax increases on the wealthy.
He is a redistributionist.
He is a socialist at heart.
He is somebody who believes that we should all make the same amount of money.
But he can't even do that right.
In his attempt to prop up the economy so he can get re-elected and help Democrats get re-elected, all he does is prop up the asset class, those who have wealth, those who have means, those who have investments that can go up.
He doesn't create any jobs because in the end, while he plays this class warfare stuff, he so despises people who own business?
He is so anti-entrepreneurial.
That's where this nonsense like you didn't build that come from.
He doesn't like it when people invest their own money and make money.
He simply doesn't like it, but that's how people get jobs.
That's how wages grow.
Most people get employed at smaller or startup businesses.
That's where economic growth occurs, and he has had a war on that.
So while all this class warfare is played by him, maybe some of the people who are being left behind ought to take a look at the policies that are keeping them behind, and then ask themselves why the president of the United States is keeping interest rates artificially low just to help out all of the bankers on Wall Street, the rich and financiers and the big developers.
He's been the best president you could find if you're a wealthy person, and he has been miserable for the middle class and even worse for those who are poor.
It's his fault.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
I spent the first half hour of this hour talking about my contention that it's undeniable that during the Obama era, that the gap between the well off and the not so well off and the people in the middle has grown.
I implore those on the right to stop arguing against that.
And instead realize that it has happened, and he's the one that he, Obama is the one that's responsible for it.
Part of the problem in buying into the argument is that it sounds like you're then buying into his redistributionism, that somehow that this can be corrected through tax policy.
Well, the truth is the truth, and the poor have been left behind by Barack Obama.
Their savior, their salvation.
What has he done to help low income people get jobs?
Nothing.
What has he done for the middle class to help them not only get jobs but to grow in their workplace?
Absolutely nothing.
In the meantime, Bernanke just will not stop his bond buying.
The printing press of federal money, and that's what it is.
Every day they simply decide how much money do we have and how many bonds should we buy?
Talk about artificial, talk about manipulating.
Find me five low income people that have been helped by that.
How does QE two help some guy with four kids, two of whom are college age, when his boss is telling me, you know, we got to scale back and I'm gonna throw you into the Obamacare exchange?
He's to blame for all of this.
Part of the problem with the Republican message has been that there isn't an attempt to reach out and communicate with the middle class.
Even last year's Republican convention, in which they correctly brought up a lot of entrepreneurs and talked about how people built their businesses and had the American dream work for them.
Some of that fell flat with people who think that starting their own business is either something that isn't for them, they don't feel as though they have the money to do it, the wherewithal to do it, they don't have the want to take the risk in their lives.
It was a celebration of all of those business owners.
They didn't make the connection between the creation of those jobs and all of the people who work for those entrepreneurs and are now getting ahead, or learning that business and maybe then taking the next step towards starting a business.
Every one of us in the private sector work for someone.
He's had this war on business owners, but he's been very friendly toward the holders of assets.
And when I say he, don't think for a second that the Bernanke Federal Reserve policy isn't the policy of President Obama.
Just as the next chair of the Fed, be it Janet Yellen or someone else is going to be someone handpicked by Obama to follow through on the policies of Barack Obama.
He is responsible for this.
And conservatives, not so much conservatives, Republicans, I believe, need to do a better job of communicating to the middle class why the Republican vision isn't just less government, isn't just getting the government out of our lives, but also promoting policies that help all of us get ahead.
Everybody wants to know what's in it for me.
Well, there's been nothing in it for the guy who said that he was going to represent them.
Obama came in with all of this optimism.
He inspired so many people.
But his policies have been so Anti-capitalistic, that people who need capitalism to work for them have seen it not work.
How does that guy, who's underemployed or unemployed, get a job if Obama is is waging this war against the person who would create the job and then puts in place economic policies that say if you create this job, you've got to cover this person with health insurance, and it's way more expensive than it used to be because I have Obamacare.
That's the problem.
The long-term winning of the argument between the social tinkerers, the socialists, the income redistributors, and conservatives, is making it clear that an anti-capitalist war on business is bad for middle Americans.
In the meantime, all of his East Coast buddies, his hedge fund managers, the bankers, they're all surviving just fine with our microscopically low interest rates that have artificially inflated all of these assets, and by the way, they are artificially inflated.
The stock market at some point will come down.
Once the bond market gets to reality, the bond market itself is probably going to face very, very difficult times when interest rates get to the point that they would be at were it not for all of this outside bond buying.
I'm just saying.
Got this one for you.
The Metropolitan Opera had its season debut last night.
That was in New York as well.
No, I wasn't there.
You guys there?
You go to the opening of the Met, the staff was not there.
As to the lights dimmed for the Metropolitan Opera's Russian themed opening night gala on Monday evening, the first solo voice that rang out in the house was not of a tenor or a soprano, but of a protester criticizing the recent anti-gay laws signed by President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Putin, end your war on Russian gays, a man shouted from the vest, then they hushed him up.
You know, Putin's got to think about this.
He's going to fight Obama for that next Nobel Peace Prize.
He's becoming kind of the hero of the lefties, but this anti-gay thing they have over there...
This isn't good for him now that he has this new image.
Let's go to the phones 1 800 282 2882 is the phone number in Maryland somewhere.
Donna, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Hi, Donna.
Uh from the uh socialist Republic of Maryland, that is.
Um I just wanted to say I was going to talk about the stock market when you were going through the uh through the uh your thoughts there on the economy.
Uh the unemployment, those are false numbers.
We all know that.
Well, it's worse.
The numbers are false in that they're worse than they than the numbers indicate, right?
Because they don't count people who aren't seeking work, right?
Yeah, and and uh the stock market, okay.
Uh house of cards.
That stock market is going to crash and it's gonna crash hard.
Well, all bubbles do, yeah.
And uh I saw what was coming on those mortgage uh and the and the government was pushing us to do those mortgages.
I'm not saying that's the one.
Well, let's go back to your point of Donna, let's go back to your point about the stock market.
You you said that the market is is going to fall apart.
Well, when bubbles are created, they end badly, which is what happened with the housing market.
But in the interim, the people who are in it are doing quite well, and they also know that they probably can escape once he stops doing this artificial pumping it up with all this bond buying that's going on.
The market fundamentals are worse than the market actually is, and the reason for that is some comp thank you for the call, Donna, some companies have been able to improve their bottom line through cost cutting, but there isn't a lot other than maybe some tech companies and some energy companies, there isn't a lot of actual growth in revenue and earnings.
There's been an ability to reduce your expenses and improve your margins by all this cutting of employees, but there hasn't been as much growth.
The thing that's really driving the stock market is people again, people who have assets, who has assets, the more you have, the wealthier you are.
They're looking for some place to put their money in and they see which way the government is directing them.
When the government is making yields on bonds almost zero, it makes stocks look attractive by comparison.
When mortgage rates are taken down to the ridiculously low levels that we've seen of the last few years, it's forced money into the housing market.
But if you don't have the money to go into those markets, You're not going to benefit from this.
None of this has translated to the real life economy of real life Americans.
That's the point I make.
This has been a policy choice of Obama to try to reward the holders of assets while doing nothing to encourage the entrepreneurialism from which comes real.
I want to talk about the e-cigarettes.
Do I have the permission of the staff to talk about the e-cigarettes?
E-cigarettes are a great thing.
USA Today editorial over the weekend.
E-cigarettes threaten to undo years of gains against smoking.
As I say, when you're a guest host, you're indulged the ability to talk about a few of the things that you want to talk about.
I'm going to take one segment to tell you that the people who are trying to ban the e-cigarettes are literally pushing to keep people on this awful path of smoking themselves to an early grave.
I'm Mark Bellingham for Rush Limblock.
Can I have another hour?
I don't think it works that way when you're doing network radio.
Common to your all the affiliates.
Keep AIB running for four hours.
Mark Bellingham for Rush.
I would be remiss if I ended my one day of guest hosting without addressing this topic.
USA Today over the weekend ran an editorial strongly critical of the so-called e-cigarettes.
These are these cigarettes, they're fake cigarettes.
They've got nicotine in them, but otherwise the person who is smoking isn't really smoking, they're merely blowing out water vapor.
The USA Today editorial says that we are actually making the smoking problem worse by creating even more nicotine addicts.
And that e-cigarettes need to be restricted, regulated, and perhaps banned.
This is so terribly wrong.
I'm not a cigarette smoker.
I smoke cigars.
Although, in an attempt to preserve my voice, I fought off the temptation to go to my cigar smoking store down the street from EIB headquarters and screw up my voice so that I wouldn't be able to do a good program today, so I didn't have my fix, which I usually have when I come into New York.
I'm a cigarette smoker.
I'm a cigar smoker, not a cigarette smoker.
However, I have seen what has happened to people who get hooked on cigarettes.
They all say it's so miserably hard to quit, they go through this pathetic thing of they quit for five days, they go crazy, they start overeating, they start smoking again.
And we've all seen people die way too young and have a miserable quality of life because they're hooked on these things.
You see some 17-year-old kid smoking a cigarette and your your heart just starts breaking.
Do you not understand what you are doing?
For so many people, they've tried everything.
Hypnosis, psychology, just try making their lives miserable by quitting and getting the shakes.
Some use these nicotine patches, others chew the gum.
Nothing works.
I know because they've told me this, and I've done the topic on my program in Milwaukee.
There are people who have smoked cigarettes for decades, who started in on these e-cigarettes, they get their nicotine fix, and they don't feel the need to smoke a cigarette anymore.
All they're getting is the nicotine.
Nicotine is an odd substance.
It doesn't really have that many bad health effects, in fact, virtually none, but it is addictive.
It doesn't change your behavior all that much.
It doesn't seem to cause any kind of lung cancer or heart disease, but you become hooked on it.
So they're getting their nicotine fix, but they're not getting the tar, they're not getting the smoke, they're not destroying their lungs, they're not destroying their heart, and they're not blowing any secondhand smoke around.
What is the harm?
Why would we want to take this away from them?
What's the difference between the so-called e-cigarette and the nicotine gum?
There isn't any.
For a lot of smokers, the nicotine gun doesn't do the same, doesn't have the same trick because their body isn't thinking that it's smoking.
The e-cigarettes feel like a cigarette, and by blowing out the vapor, they create the impression of a cigarette.
A lot of people have been able to use this technology, use this product to improve the quality of their lives.
And for a major newspaper to come out and say don't do it.
For so many of these states that are placing restrictions saying don't do it, for workplaces saying you can't smoke in the workplace and that includes e-cigarettes.
It's cruel.
This is the salvation for many people.
What's the downside?
Well, you're creating a nicotine addict.
If they only ever smoke the e-cigarette, so what?
Secondly, a kid who's gonna mess around with an e-cigarette probably would be going to a regular cigarette anyway.
We come up with a product here created by the private sector that actually helps some people get off of these miserable cigarettes that create so many problems in our society.
If this thing had been funded by some government research grant, if Obama's FDA came up with it or one of his government funded research research labs came up with this product that makes it seem like you're smoking a cigarette but you're not and save the quality of all they give them the Nobel Prize for Medicine for heaven's sakes.
But because this came out of the private sector, this somehow bothers people.
Here's the other thing that drives them.
I think they think that these people are beating the system.
All right, we banned cigarette smoking, but they're still smoking.
I know it isn't smoke, but they're still smoking.
You see somebody smoking one of those e-cigarettes, you resent the fact that they're still getting their fix.
Because one of the things that you wanted to accomplish when you banned cigarette smoking is you wanted to stop them from getting their pleasure.
This isn't just over nannying.
This is stepping in and restricting people's access to something that may save their lives.
If our goal in getting people off an addiction to something is to change their behavior so that they're not taking the harmful substance anymore, how can you possibly begrudge that?
Are they perfect?
Of course they're not perfect.
Something, well, I don't like the look of that vapor.
It makes me think it's it's not smoke.
Get over it.
This policy that you're seeing in many states, now backed up by a major newspaper, of fighting a product that was developed by the good old American private sector, that is improving the quality of people's lives, it's really shameful when you consider what the implications of cigarette addiction really are.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush.
To my knowledge, that handshake between Obama and Rahani of Iran still hasn't occurred.
Thought it would happen while I was on the program and I could describe describe this unbelievably historical moment.
Can't do that, can't spend one minute telling you about a story from my own community in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee Public School System obviously has all sorts of problems, and the inner city of Milwaukee has problems of crime, violence, and poverty.
Same as every other big city in the United States.
There is, however, a thriving private school run by the Lutherans called Saint Marcus School.
It's an elementary school.
Parents attend under our school choice program in Wisconsin with a school voucher.
Voucher is given to the parents, they send their kids to the private school.
They have a blind random draw as to who gets in.
Because the kids are doing so well, wear uniforms, well behaved, tremendous discipline, academic achievement is great, ninety percent go on, and graduate from high school, much higher than those in the public school system.
Parents are fighting to get their kids in.
The school is well over capacity.
Nearby there is an abandoned empty school building owned by the Milwaukee Public School System.
This private school St. Marcus wants to buy that empty school.
The public school system will not sell it to them.
They resent the fact that this private religious school is actually seeing children thrive.
They resent the fact that those parents want to send their kids to a school that works.
Yet they're the ones that lecture we on the right about compassion.
Who really does care?
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