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Feb. 18, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:46
February 18, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #2
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Yeah, I want you to have somebody's 18, 19, and 20 standing by too.
It's Obama talking about his global warming initiatives here on new fuel standards and so forth, which are not going to mean a hill of beans to anybody except consumers who will eventually be forced to buy stuff that they don't want.
Greetings, folks.
Great to have you.
El Rushbo behind the Golden EIB microphone.
Broadcast Excellence.
Yours at 800-282-2882.
Email address, Elrushbow at EIBnet.com.
So I think it's a UK.
Let me click on it real quick.
Is it the Guardian?
Let me see.
Yeah, it's a left-wing rag in the UK.
And they've got a story up, you know what?
Maybe it's time to join the preppers, the people getting ready for world destruction because of global warming.
Maybe, maybe it's time to join the preppers.
And they've got a piece on how to survive climate change apocalypse.
And they talk about the snow and they talk about the rain and all of it that they've had in the UK this year and last year.
And they talk about how much colder it is than usual.
And they say, oh, man, see, this proves it.
Which just goes to illustrate something else that I always have said and believed.
And that is that everybody's historical perspective begins with the day they were born.
It is amazing.
It's a function of human nature.
Everybody, not everybody, so many people think that the worst times of all times are when they were alive.
The end times, the worst times.
Very few people actually believe that it's better than it's ever been when they're alive.
But a lot of people can be made to believe that it's never been worse.
So here you have these Nunderheads with a couple of bad winters, and all of a sudden, it's never been this bad in the entire history of the world.
They don't stop to think of ice ages where there wasn't any place for them to live where they live now because it was all covered with ice.
It really boggles the mind.
And so now they've got this story on, you know what?
There's a climate change apocalypse coming, and it's time to get on board here because we've got to do whatever we can to survive.
And then they cite all the cold weather in the UK and here.
But here's the thing about it.
In Philadelphia, this is the third snowiest winter on record.
Third, not first, not worst.
Third, there have been two winters with much more snow than this one, and yet this one.
Because this one's happening when people are alive.
Oh, my God, it's horrible.
It's bad.
It's the apocalypse.
Oh, no, it's global warming.
Oh, no, we're going to die.
This happens to be the second snowiest February in New York City on record.
Not the first, the second.
There has been a worse winter for snowfall in New York than this year.
Not tied to global warming.
And by the way, this is only since records have been kept, which is what, 100 years?
Which is a speck of dust on the timeline of Earth.
Drudge has a story, epic epidemic of potholes.
And there have never been more potholes than there are today.
Global warming.
How does anybody really know that?
What does it mean anyway?
Idaho families walk 19 miles after getting strained.
Nobody's ever had to walk 19 miles.
You people have ever heard of the Donner Party?
They ate each other as they died in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
And their diary, when it was discovered, the only thing about the weather that was written was it was an unusually harsh winter.
Unusually, there wasn't any big wringing of hands and worries.
It's just an unusually harsh winter.
And some of the Donner Party didn't make it.
The others had to resort to cannibalism, stay alive.
That's how bad it was.
And nobody was talking about global warming or climate change back then.
And nobody talks about those instances now.
No, it's all based on what's happening now.
I have a simple question.
I mean, these are just the things I think.
Look, the reason I know this is a hoax, I don't even need East Anglia to know it's a hoax.
All I know is who's behind it?
The worldwide left, Socialist International.
People who want to control people's lives, have high taxes, and big government are behind it.
That's all you need to know to know that it's a hoax, that it's made up, that it is a vehicle to achieve something else.
That's all I need to know.
But I don't stop there.
I try to permeate all of this nonsense with logic.
Simple question like this: Here we are on February 18th of 2014.
Last year, it was February 18th of 2013.
Next year, it's going to be February 18th, 2015.
How do we know that the weather, the climate, as it is today, is the norm?
How do we know that?
Don't we kind of have to know what the norm is before we can really start talking about whether or not there is significant change in it?
You notice everybody, everybody who believes this nonsense believes that things happening today are the norm, and therefore any deviation means there's something dramatic going on.
But how do we know that the norm didn't happen in the 1910s?
How do we know that whatever was going on climate-wise in the 1920s isn't the norm?
How do we know what the norm is?
We don't know what the norm is.
In fact, is there a norm?
The claim it's always changing.
And the bottom line is that every living organism has to adapt to it decade by decade, generation by generation, year by year.
But what is the norm?
Where is this assumption that the last 20 years, let's say, I first started hearing what the modern era this is, I say in 1980.
So this is 2014.
So how many years, 34 years?
34 years have gone by, and 34 years ago we were told for the first time we only had 20 years.
Then Ted Danson came along in 1988 and said we've only got 10 years to save the oceans.
Al Gore has said twice we've only got 10 years.
We're still running our gore countdown on rushlimbaugh.com.
10 years to destruction, 10 years to the end of man.
These people make these outrageous claims.
But how do we know that what's happening in the climate and the weather right now is the norm?
How do we know, for example, that a lot of snow in New York and Philadelphia and Boston isn't the norm?
There's no way we can know this.
We don't have records for the entire length of time the earth has been spinning on its axis.
We don't know what the norm is.
All we do is adapt.
That's what we are able to do better than any other living organism.
I haven't seen a dolphin build a hospital.
I once told a guy that on the radio once.
He said, well, Rush, they don't have hands.
I said, oh, if they had hands, they'd be building hospitals.
Damn right they would.
They just don't.
We have hands and they don't.
He wouldn't accept that we are smarter than dolphins.
We're just luckier by evolutionary design.
But if you can't tell me that this is the norm or that 20 years ago was the norm or take any time, you can't tell me what the norm is, then you can't tell me what the abnormal is.
And by the way, if it's gone up one degree Celsius in 100 years, who the hell is going to notice?
Maybe some plants, the equatorial regions.
Who the hell knows?
But that's not going to cause sea level to rise 15 feet and flood and end New York City.
So much common sense is just simply absent.
A bunch of gobbledygook scientific rigamarole that's presented as an esoteric, brilliant intellectual scientific analysis is put forth to explain all this, but it can be pierced with simple common sense.
With one question.
How do we know that the last 20 years is what's normal on Earth?
Who can tell us what that is?
And by the way, doesn't it snow in February?
And doesn't it get cold February?
That's normal.
It gets hot in July and August.
At least in our hemisphere it does.
What's abnormal about this?
Okay, we've had a lot of rain.
Yep, we've had droughts too.
We got a drought in California, man-made, by the way, not global warming.
We got floods and all that in Europe.
How do we know that the weather gods aren't mad at what the Europeans are doing with their immigration policy?
I mean, that's as much sense as the global warming people are making.
I'll just chalk up.
The weather gods are ticked off.
For some reason, they're flooding people.
Prove me wrong.
Because the global warming people cannot prove they're right.
And the smart ones don't even try.
The smart ones say we're not sure.
Oh, we can't take the risk.
We've got to assume we're right and start preparing.
That's the smart thing to do.
Oh, yeah, okay, it makes sense.
What are you going to do?
Well, I've got to raise taxes.
We need another government agency or two with the UN in charge.
Oh, I see.
So the solution to the climate behaving in threatening ways is more government.
You got it, Limbaugh.
You got it.
Now you understand.
Okay, cool.
Now then I know what it's really all about, and climate has nothing to do with it.
I know I spend a lot of time on this.
It might bore you.
Folks, to me, this is one of these fundamental things that if more people could be led to this to understand, we're going to have to at some point, if we're going to beat this back, we are going to have to find ways to poke holes in as much of liberalism, and particularly with young skulls full of mushrooms we can.
Because they sign up with this stuff unquestioningly.
And you know how it works.
They guilt people into, okay, you have been destroying the planet.
You didn't know it.
You didn't know it.
You're driving a big car.
You know, a lot of barbecues outside.
You keep your thermostat at 72.
didn't know it, but you are really causing a lot of CO2, and that's creating a greenhouse effect, and that's warming the planet.
But you can make amends.
Oh, yeah, how?
Well, you go out and buy this piece of junk that we call an advanced mechanism car, and then you agree to pay higher taxes, and then you agree to keep your thermodynamics.
Basically, what you must agree to do is stop participating in progress.
You must simplify your lifestyle.
You must stop wasting things.
You must stop consuming.
You must turn more of your life over to government.
And when you do that, working together, we can save the planet.
Now, that's a seductive message to a bunch of young people.
Oh, no, they don't simplify their life.
Al Gore's still flying around with his big carbon footprint.
Obama's flying around on 2747s.
Well, he's playing on golf courses in the middle of a drought in California that are soaking up water and so forth to stay green.
He's out.
Oh, there are hypocrisies left and right with these people.
But they are allowed because they have good intentions.
They are allowed to be exempted from the rules of life that they design for everybody else because they are the leaders attempting to save everybody.
And they have to fly around and spread the world.
Word.
And they have to fly around and make their movies that are informing people.
And they have to be able to go play golf and meet people in the drought areas.
So they're always going to be excused.
The elites on the left will always find a way to be excused from even being blamed for their role in climate destruction.
Doing everything that they're criticizing others for doing, but they get a pass.
Take a break.
I'm going to get to your phone calls when we get back here, folks.
Sit tight.
Much more straight ahead here on the EIB network.
Time to go to the phones, as I promised.
And we're going to start in Boone, North Carolina.
This is John.
Thank you for waiting.
And welcome to the program.
Greetings, Rush.
It's been 18 years since I last talked to you.
And I've been listening ever since.
I wanted to call today because you mentioned it's the fifth year of fifth anniversary of the stimulus package.
That's right.
And we still suffer high employment, low consumer confidence, excessive fiscal or monetary easing by the Fed.
And I'm of the opinion that five years ago, the stimulus should have been a lot larger than it was.
I think we'd be in better shape now.
Well, how much?
How bigger should it have been?
Well, I don't know.
The stimulus was what, $750 billion?
Well, it actually added up to about $870 billion.
And then by the time if you add what it did and change the baseline and the rest of the budget, it's a safe figure to use.
It ended up costing a trillion dollars.
Okay, I'll buy that.
But if you want to stick with $850, if you want to be more precise, I mean, that would be probably a more accurate number in terms of the actual outlay.
Fair enough.
When I think about that and then also look at how our projected debt is declining as a percentage of GDP, matter of fact, declining at a record pace, it appears to me that the fiscal part, the Congress's part, the President's part, has been operating counter to any stimulus that we put in five years ago.
Did I hear you correctly that the projected debt is declining as a percentage of GDP at a record pace?
We could debate about what the projection is, whether you want to go out five years or ten years or even look at the past three years.
But the fact of the matter is, is that our budget deficit as a percentage of our GDP is declining and very dramatically.
It is?
Yes.
Well, if the deficit were declining and if the percentage of debt related to GDP were declining, we would be in rapid economic growth, and we aren't.
We aren't.
But that's ancillary.
I want to go back.
You think we didn't spend enough on the stimulus?
I buy into it.
So how much more should we have spent?
And where should we have spent it?
Do you know what we did spend the stimulus on?
Well, we didn't have enough shovel-ready projects ready back then.
I believe Obama's mistake was turning it over just to the Democrats in the Congress to design a stimulus.
The stimulus had very few Republican votes.
Right.
And so that it was a mixed bag, earmarks that weren't called earmarks.
Well, the number, the percentage of the actual outlay that went to shovel-ready jobs was 10%.
Yep.
The other 90% went to unions, union workers, state, federal even, but mostly state union workers, and projects they were into.
But there were no roads rebuilt or bridges or schools.
And there were plenty of shovel-ready projects.
And the number of shovel-ready projects have increased.
There's a whole bunch of shovels that we need.
And problem is, where would you get the money to do this stimulus?
Let's say you haven't answered me, but I'm just going to assume you think it should have been twice as big.
Agree or not?
I agree it should have been larger, twice as big or twice as big.
So we should have stimulated with $2 trillion.
Where was the money going to come from?
I think it should have been coming from borrowing since we've had essentially zero interest rates on the borrowing.
It would have allowed us to spend a lot more money on our capital infrastructure at essentially free borrowing cost.
Well, but see, the more the federal government borrows, then the less capital there is in the private sector.
But there's plenty of capital in the private sector.
There's trillions of dollars out there sloshing around.
It just isn't being invested.
Or it's being invested in third-world bricks where now they're pulling back because they're afraid of crashes there.
The money went to the financiers around the world.
We are investing in third-world bricks.
No, the financiers are.
Who?
Which financiers?
You mean like Henry Kravis?
The up and rising countries that are now suffering dramatically from a capital point of view with their stock markets and currencies falling dramatically.
Think of Turkey.
Think of Argentina.
Think of really the risk in Russia.
Well, I know.
Well, you know, the P ⁇ E ratio with the outstanding debt that is measured against cash outlays in Argentina is a disaster.
And you're absolutely right about that.
There's no question about it.
How would you have spent the stimulus money differently?
I wouldn't have spent it.
I wouldn't have done a stimulus.
I would have cut taxes.
I would have encouraged private sector production.
I would have allowed people to go, I would have told people, go to town, start creating, start producing, start working, start raising production rates.
I'm going to lower your taxes.
You're going to keep more of what you're going to earn.
And then I would get out of the way and let the country recover.
All right.
Now, folks, let me just.
The comments that I made to our last caller about Argentina when I was agreeing with him, I made it up.
I don't even know what I said.
I was just speaking in kind to the guy.
I was throwing out terms that don't even go together.
There is no PE ratio with the cash outflow measured against the inflow of what's happening with the outflows in the markets of Argentina.
I made it up.
To illustrate a point, the percentage, isn't it interesting?
When Ronald Reagan was president, George W. Bush, all they talked about was the actual numbers.
The deficits, 300 billion, 300 trillion, whatever.
Now all of a sudden, when it's Obama, we talk about the percentage of debt compared to GDP.
Gobblity gook.
The share of debt, percentage-wise of GDP, is not plummeting rapidly.
It's absurd.
The U.S. national debt, are you ready?
The U.S. national debt is 73% of the gross domestic product.
I don't care what the deficit is every year.
The deficit simply is an annual deficit that gets added to the national debt, which is a sum total of all deficits.
And we are not growing.
The debt is growing that we do not have GDP growth.
1%, 2%, it's nothing.
The private sector is shrinking.
It's being torn apart.
The private sector is being taken over by the Obama regime.
20% of it gone.
They now took health care away.
We're in the process of it.
20% of the U.S. economy just been transferred to Obama.
The U.S. national debt is about 73% of gross domestic product.
This from the CBO last Tuesday.
73% of the GDP is the national debt.
The percentage of debt is higher than any point since World War II.
Twice the percentage it was at the end of 2007.
The percentage of debt is not going down.
It's skyrocketing.
And precisely because of taking on new debt like the stimulus, for which we got zilch.
But it was not possible to get anything but zilch from the stimulus.
The only way, I'm going to explain this again.
It's not hard, and I don't mean to sound condescending.
It's just frustrating.
They take simple stuff and they make it so complicated that people can't understand it.
So they don't try and they just, I don't want to hear about it.
I don't want to hear about it.
Oh, I know it's bad.
If we had a trillion dollars somewhere that we didn't have to pay for, that we didn't have to take from somewhere else, if we had a trillion dollars laying around that we could put in a syringe and inject it into the economy, then that would definitely be a stimulus.
But there's a problem.
We don't have a trillion dollars anywhere.
We are in debt.
$17 trillion.
Even if we borrow a trillion dollars, even if it is at 0%, that the long-term interest rates are not 0%.
We can't borrow money and not pay it back.
We're not going to be able to borrow money from anybody at zero.
You think the ChiComs are going to lend us a trillion dollars?
Say, just pay us back a trillion dollars 20 years.
What kind of nonsense is this?
There's no free money as such.
There was no way to stimulate the U.S. economy.
Because essentially, if we're going to put a trillion dollars into it, we have to find that trillion.
And it isn't laying around idly.
It's somewhere.
Essentially, what we did is we took a trillion dollars from the U.S. economy and put it back in and said we are stimulating, but we didn't.
We didn't change it.
We didn't grow the economy a penny.
In fact, the stimulus shrank the economy because it artificially pumped money into places that otherwise would not have had it, union jobs and so forth.
We were lied to left and right about what the money was for.
It was not to rebuild infrastructure.
It never was for that.
It was a money laundering scheme to end up, you know, some of the money of the Democrat Party, others to guarantee union jobs.
And it expanded the baseline of the U.S. budget so that every budget from there on after expanded by about half a trillion dollars.
It's the way the baseline budgeting works.
There was no free money out there that wasn't being used.
The only way, folks, you can stimulate something is if you've got free money not being used.
And if you are at $100,000 a year and you are in debt and somebody comes along and says, here's $75,000, and it doesn't cost you anything.
There's no tax, there's no borrowing, that would be a huge stimulus for you.
There's no question.
But that doesn't happen, does it?
When's the last time somebody gave you 50 grand?
Well, it doesn't happen with countries either.
If you wanted to go borrow $50,000, you would not be stimulating your overall economic circumstance.
Now, you might be able to go out and buy a bigger house or a new car or whatever, but you're still faced with paying that back, and it's going to cost you much more than in what amount you borrowed.
It's just, this Keynesian stuff is smoke and mirrors.
Just, it doesn't work.
So this guy calls, and he's obviously been reading Paul Krugman and Thomas Lupe Friedman.
And they're the ones running around saying, you know what, Obama goofed.
He should have done what FDR did.
He should have doubled that stimulus.
He didn't do enough.
If that stimulus had been $2 trillion, we would be worse off than we are now.
There would not be any genuine, sustained new economic activity.
It's like Clinton's 10,000 cops program or whatever the number was.
Clinton got into trouble, so he devised this program.
The federal government was going to pay for new cops to be hired in local communities.
100,000 cops program.
It was an offshoot of midnight basketball.
Remember that?
Midnight basketball to keep the drug guys off the streets.
So they just did their drug stuff in the daytime, played basketball at midnight, didn't change a thing other than sleep patterns.
100,000 cops program.
And the federal government paid local communities whatever it took to hire two or three new policemen for the first year.
Then the second year, the local communities had to kick in 30% of the new cop salary.
Third year, 60%.
And by year four, the federal government was out of program, and the local communities had to pay for the cops or the cops were gone.
And what happened?
After three or four years, the cops were laid off before that because the local communities couldn't afford it in the first place.
There was no stimulus.
There was an artificial rearranging of assets brought on by the 100,000 cops program.
But it was not genuine.
The money behind it was not produced by genuine economic activity.
And the government, picking and choosing who gets money and where it comes from, is not genuine economic activity.
It is artificial.
It's picking winners and losers.
And there's no substance behind it.
And there was no substance to this stimulus.
It never had a prayer.
The fact is, and the real fraud is, that most of the people behind it knew exactly what I just told you, that it wouldn't work.
It was nothing more than a political play.
Here we're coming out of a manufactured three-year recession.
Then the financial crisis hits, and that was real, for all intents and purposes.
So Obama comes, you know, I'm going to save it.
I'm going to pump a trillion dollars on a stimulus, roads and bridges.
We're going, yay, yay.
He cares.
It didn't matter if they ever saw a penny of it.
Obama cared.
Bush didn't.
Obama's trying to fix things.
Obama likes this.
Obama loves.
He's trying to fix this.
And Obama go out and do his town hall meeting and say, hey, bro, when are you going to build my new kitchen?
Obama said, see my assistant when we're all finished here.
And that's what people thought Obama was or was going to do, that he had a stash.
There is no stash, folks.
There isn't a dollar.
We don't have a single dollar sitting around not being used that we can use to pump up other economic activity.
It just, this Keynesian stuff, it's never worked.
It does not work.
Now, for those of you shouting, New Deal, New Deal, New Deal, New Deal didn't work.
The New Deal exacerbated the recovery from 1929.
The New Deal delayed the recovery for the exact reasons I'm giving you.
It was all artificial.
And the purpose of the New Deal was to cement Democrat Party power in perpetuity.
Santa Claus, paying people not to work, whatever you want to call it.
That's what the New Deal was.
It was World War II that finally brought us out of the Great Depression.
There was not the New Deal.
And there's not one arrow in Obama's quiver that can change this economy the way he's using it.
All he's doing is adding to the debt, shrinking the private sector, slowing down whatever economic activity remains in the private sector.
There isn't any growth.
There isn't any exuberance.
There isn't any excitement.
There isn't anybody feeling up and positive about anything.
Everybody's still scared to death, not knowing really yet how healthcare is going to shake out.
They don't really know yet when what's going to get implemented and for how long.
They don't yet know how they're going to be taxed or punished or what have you.
College students coming out of college can't find a job.
They've got all this debt.
They don't know what to do.
There isn't any unified sense of national purpose in any of our economic activity.
There is an absolute total malaise out there.
And it wouldn't have mattered if Obama's stimulus had been $2 trillion.
It wouldn't have mattered because it was artificial.
It was money that didn't exist.
There isn't any money hanging around we're not using that can be thrown at economic activity and actually cause it to grow.
Not possible.
You can't do it in your personal life.
Governments can't do it.
Nations can't do it.
Ask Greece.
Ask these clowns over the European Union.
That's what they've been trying for what?
30 years.
And they're a collective joke.
So, Rush, what would you do?
What would you do?
Look at we've got a blueprint.
We've got a blueprint that both parties are scared to death of and want to erase from your memory and pretend that it never happened.
And the blueprint is Ronald Reagan.
We were coming out of exactly where we are now.
Jimmy Carter, this is Jimmy Carter's second term.
We're actually in a little worse shape now.
The misery index for Carter was higher.
But Jimmy Carter was a doddering, bumbling fool.
This guy that's president now is doing this on purpose.
That's the difference.
I mean, and he's on a mission.
Jimmy Carter wasn't just doing this standard, ordinary, everyday liberalism, taking his orders from Zubignyp Jashinsky to talk to David Rockefeller and a tri-ladder old bunch, and they're going around doing their business.
I'm just kidding about the latter part.
I'm sorry, I can't help myself, but there's a blueprint here.
You lower tax rates, you free up capital, you leave it in the private sector, and you come up with policies are going to grow the pie.
You want more people working.
That leads to more tax revenue for government coffers.
You want to lower people's tax rates, inspiring them to work harder to earn more money.
It works.
There's a blueprint for this.
And it led to two 49-state landslide victories for Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
And they still try to distance themselves from it.
I need to take a phone call here, folks.
We got Isaac on the phone.
This is now Isaac is 12 years old.
He's from East Wenatchee.
What?
Washington.
And he was on hold yesterday.
High score is 49, 48.
I'm not going to let you play anymore.
You're going to beat my score.
Say, Isaac, are you there?
Someone's high score is 491,560.
Whatever he's talking about, he's right.
Isaac, are you there?
Isaac!
Isaac!
Yeah.
Isaac, it's Rush.
Are you there?
Yeah.
You know, we interrupted your family conversation.
I was just telling people that you called yesterday, but you didn't get on the air.
And your parents let you stay home from school today just so you could try to call back and appear on the program, right?
And here you are.
You've got great parents, Isaac.
You've got parents with great priorities.
Absolutely right.
How are you?
Good.
Good, sir.
Well, that's great to hear.
What else is going on?
Well, I was actually kind of angry when I came home from school knowing that, well, no, thinking that Christopher Columbus was evil, money, greedy, Native American killing person, which was a total lie.
That's what they taught you?
Yeah, in my school.
And you were mad?
It took my parents probably about an hour on the computer to tell me that he wasn't that he was actually.
Now, when you came home mad, were you mad at Christopher Columbus or were you mad at the teachers for telling you things that weren't true?
I was not at Christopher Columbus.
See, that's how it works, folks.
You came home mad because you thought Christopher Columbus was this evil guy who came and killed people.
Yep.
Native American people.
He killed them and he took what they had and he established his own place and to heck with them.
He killed them.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
And your parents told you that that was not true.
Yep.
They said he was a hero.
Well, he was a courageous man.
I mean, everybody back then thought the world was flat, and if you sailed too far, you'd fall off the edge.
Yep.
Well, have you read, have you read Rush Revere and The Brave Pilgrims?
Yep, and you know who's my favorite character?
Rush Revere.
Rush Revere is your favorite?
Oh, he's going to be so ecstatic to hear that because most people like the horse.
Most people like Liberty.
Yep, but I like Rush Revere more.
No, he's cool.
I got to tell you, you're very, very smart, Isaac.
Now, Isaac, hang on, because I'm going to send you some stuff.
I'm going to send you an audio copy.
And we've got the second book that comes out on March 11th, but I've got to hit the break.
We'll be back here in just a second.
Don't go away.
Fastest three hours in media, folks.
We've only got one more to go for the busy broadcast day today.
And we'll get right to that after we take an obscene profit time out here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
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