All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 18, 2014 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:33
November 18, 2014, Tuesday, Hour #1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 Podcast.
Greetings, my good friends, and welcome, and great to have you here as another exciting excursion into broadcast excellence is underway.
Your guiding light, your trusted servant of humanity and all who live.
Rush Limbaugh on the EIB Network.
The telephone number you want to be on the program today, 800 28282, and the email address, Ilrushbo at EIB net.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are loaded once again here with yet another Jonathan Gruber, video and audio discovery.
And this one confirms one of my earlier contentions that the purpose of Obamacare is the elimination of private sector insurance.
Gruber has been discovered to have admitted this in 2011 in Boston.
We already have Obama admitting this on tape that we played all during the presidential campaign.
He made his promise to his union buddies of the SEIU in March of 2007.
That's when he told him it might take some time to get to government-run health care because people just aren't going to put up with it overnight.
We're going to have to just slowly but surely evolve to where there isn't any more private sector insurance.
We have a giant C, I told you so, of me explaining and predicting that that's what this is all about.
And the Gruber gifts just keep on coming.
But before I get to that, I need to share something with you.
Chris Selizza at the Washington Post sometimes sends me copies of the stuff that's going to be in the paper.
And sometimes I repeat what he sent.
Sometimes I quote from his pieces, sometimes I tell you what's it, sometimes I ignore them.
But but he's uh he's a good guy, and he sends me his stuff.
And he's uh he's always been uh compared to most of the drive-by's.
He's he's been, I'll use the word fair.
So he sent me a piece today.
He says, I think this is uh be interesting to you.
Thought this might interest you.
His piece today is entitled Why Jonathan Gruber is Conservative Kathnip.
Now, now hang on, because I wrote I wrote him back this time.
Normally I respond to him on the air if I respond at all, but this time I wrote him back, and I debated.
It's not a big deal, but I thought, should I lead with this or do the Gruber audio sound bites that I just talked about, and then come back to this.
No, I'm gonna start with this because this is the Washington Post, and this piece is not about Gruber.
It's not about Obama, it's not about Obamacare, it's not about anything we've learned, it's all about conservative reaction to Gruber.
Why is Jonathan Gruber such a big deal to us?
And let me share with you some excerpts before I share with you my reply.
My reply was perfectly gentlemanly and respectful and nice.
So don't get your expectations up for any fireworks here.
You'll like it.
Saliza begins his piece.
Watch Fox News or listen to Rush Limbaugh for the last week, and you'll get a very large helping of Jonathan Gruber.
The MIT professor, whose comments about the stupidity of the American people in relation to the passage of Obamacare has reignited the political debate over the law.
Gruber is quite clearly conservative catnip, but why?
Now, what does that tell you?
This guy is writing a piece in the Washington Post about why Gruber is such a big deal to us.
And he explores it.
It ought to be, and this ought to be a no-brainer.
It ought to be automatic.
The key to understanding why Gruber has become such a cause celebre, but not in a good way for conservatives is that his comments about The Affordable Care Act confirm two things that the right has long believed about Democrats and the law.
Number one, that the law was made purposely vague in order to keep the public in the dark about it.
And number two, liberals think conservatives are stupid.
And that number two is what he folks say he believes.
Honestly, he believes that me and all the rest of us, the so-called conservative media, Fox News, are reacting to Gruber because we think that Gruber proves that liberals think we're stupid.
And we're not stupid, and this proves it, and so it's all it, in other words, as far as Siliz is concerned, this is nothing but personal for us.
The reason Gruber is so interesting to us is because he admits that liberals think conservatives are stupid.
And that's a point we've been trying to prove for what?
Years.
And then he goes on to say the first point is somewhat obvious ever since Pelosi, way back in March of 2010 said we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.
Conservatives have been convinced that Democrats didn't know what was in it, or more nefariously, Democrats knew exactly what was in it and pushed it through Congress to keep the public from finding out.
If you believe me, and that includes virtually every member of the Republican base, then you see Gruber's comments made in a panel discussion in 2013 as a smoking gun that proves you were right all along.
Breaking news, people like to believe their theories were right.
And he quotes Mark Peason in the Washington Post and goes on to quote me, saying it just confirms how stupid he thinks you are, meaning I'm talking about Obama there on yesterday's program.
So anyway, Klute concludes here by saying so it's not just that the Obama administration is trying to pull the wool over your eyes.
It's that they think you, conservative America, are too stupid to even notice.
That's a double whammy of outrage about a topic Obamacare that already had a long history of inflaming conservatives, and that's why conservatives can't get enough of Gruber.
So according to Mr. Siliza, the reason that we can't get enough of Gruber is that Gruber confirms what we've always thought, and that is that liberals think we're stupid.
So I wrote him back because I think this is really, really telling.
It's not a surprise.
It's just an opportunity to illustrate.
I wrote back and said, thanks, Chris.
You know what amazes me?
That to you, the story here is our reaction to Gruber.
The story to you doesn't seem to be Gruber.
The story to you doesn't seem to be Obama.
The story is not to you, their obvious lying and deception.
You seem uninterested in the substance and the reality and the consequences of Gruber Obama at all.
The only narrative here is conservative reaction to this.
It's flummery.
Here we all are, Chris.
We're trying to persuade as many people as possible of the flaws, deception, in fact, disaster that is Obamacare.
And then along comes Gruber and confirms and proves many of our four-year contentions.
And the story at the Washington Post is not that Gruber is confirming everything we're warning people about, but rather our reaction to Gruber.
That's unreal.
And I said quite politely, I said, Chris, you don't even have that quite right.
The reason Gruber is quote unquote catnip has nothing to do with our feelings being insulted about anything.
The fact that they think we're stupid, that's nothing to do with this.
Gruber is what it is because Gruber is proof that we are and have been right from the get-go on all this.
This is about substance.
And so Gruber offers another opportunity to persuade others, the low information crowd, for example.
None of this is personal, Chris.
None of this.
My reaction, Fox News, any other conservative, none of it's personal.
It's that Gruber has come along and given up the ghost.
Gruber's coming along and revealed the con.
We've been trying to warn people for six years about this.
And Gruber comes along and proves it.
And the only thing the drive by media is interested in is our reaction to Gruber.
You're not interested in the substance of this.
You're not interested in what the real meaning of Gruber is.
So I wanted to share that with you.
Not that any of this is a surprise to you.
But I think it's fact.
Here you have the most transformative element of the Obama administration.
The you put this together with with uh Amnesty, comprehensive immigration reform.
If you get both of those things done fully implemented, then you have succeeded in your objective of transforming this country into something it was never founded to be.
That's pretty big.
And the only aspect of any of this that interests some in the media is our reaction to it.
The substance, the literal transformation of the country, the successful implementation of the Obama administration, or objective or agenda is a whole hummer and something irrelevant.
So it shows there's there's this is uh far more than about bias or objectivity or fairness or any of that.
There's a there's a much different psychological outlook between the left and the right in this country at events that are taking place.
And the choice of catnip, because so we're being what is catnip a drug?
I don't even know what it is.
What is it?
What it you give it to cats to do what?
Mellow them out.
Oh, they go crazed over it.
Oh, okay.
So so we're going crazed here over Gruber.
Because Gruber's come along and see, we've been telling you all along they think we're stupid, and here Gruber's proving it, and we're insulted.
It's got nothing to do with this.
Anyway, so that's that.
That sets up the latest Gruber reveal, which will confirm a C, I told you so from your beloved host, El Rushboff from many moons ago, that the true objective of Obamacare is to wipe out private sector insurance, meaning that's not a place you're going to be able to go to get it at some point.
You're gonna have to go to a federal office, an exchange or whatever it is that it's called in order to get health insurance.
So that's coming up.
Sit tight, be right back after this, folks.
Don't go away.
Now, by the way, there's a there's another lesson to learn here, folks.
So here you have Chris Silizza in the Washington Post, and he's got a story today about Gruber and Obama and Obamacare.
You know, what's the story?
Why it's such a big deal to us.
He has a story explaining the conservative reaction to Why Gruber is catnip.
Now, put yourself inside the beltway.
You're a you're a Republican, you're elected Republican, and you don't want Chris Elizabeth lumping you in with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and these and these idiots who think Gruber's a big deal.
So you don't talk about Gruber either.
You're elected Republic.
You don't talk about Gruber because you don't want the Washington Post insulting you and calling you uh some catnip official.
Uh somebody just wound up in Gruber for some personal reason of some sort.
It's it's a there's an object lesson here that in some ways explains a lot.
Now, I didn't know that that Gruber, ladies and gentlemen, apparently uh what uh Gruber wrote a comic book?
Did you know that Gruber wrote a comic book?
Well, somebody found the comic book, Charles Payne on the Fox Business Network, Varney and Company today.
We were talking about about Gruber and and uh well, here, listen to the bite.
I don't know, I don't know how to explain this.
What's interesting now is that no one ever picked up that comic book that Gruber wrote.
Have you seen this thing?
He wrote it and he started it.
Have you seen some of the chapters?
First of all, 150 page comic book.
How about this one?
Selling fear instead of facts.
I mean, imagine that.
And of course, they have the evil villain was the Rush Limbaugh type character.
It's just arrogance.
So Gruber wrote a comic book, a 150-page comic book, and it has to do with uh how to get things done in Washington, I guess, and the evil villain is me.
In this comic book, I'm honored.
Okay.
Friday, have you got audio sound bite number one standing by?
You do.
And this is this is me, folks.
This sets up the latest Gruber and Obama audio.
Take you back four years.
March 5th of 2010, and this is me talking about health insurance reform and the plan to eliminate employer-based insurance.
Once a significant number of businesses have offloaded their health care benefits, and the government is now providing that insurance.
How do you stop that?
Okay, we're going to repeal this now.
The Democrats are going to be out there saying, see, we told you Republicans don't want you to have health care.
Republicans want to take your health care away.
Just like you senior citizens, Republicans want to take your social security away from you.
The cost of doing business in the United States today, as you know, is very high.
There's no economic growth.
People are being laid off.
People are not being hired.
The growth is occurring in the public sector.
In fact, for the first time, public sector employee average salaries are $7,000 a year higher than in the private sector.
$67,000 versus 60 is the average, not the mean, the average.
And this is a trend that has been ongoing for quite a while.
So any business, you go out and talk to them.
They hate the whole health care situation bugs them.
They have to provide it.
Employees expect it.
They have to provide it to get quality people, but they hate it.
The costs keep going up.
The employees are never satisfied with all of what they're getting, even though the employees are paying no tax on it.
It's a free benefit.
Companies now have to have entire departments just to deal with that aspect of running their business, which has nothing to do with running the business.
If you think a company will not choose an 8% off-the-top option payment to the government, rather than 14 to 15% that is costing them to provide benefits for their employees, you got another thing coming.
With as much pressure and stress on these people to stay open.
All of this is by design.
This was uh my attempting to explain, and it's tough to take a minute and forty-five bytes.
Half of that's irrelevant to what I was talking about.
The point was that the um government was going to offer businesses an opportunity to get out of providing health insurance for employees with a small one-time eight percent off-the-top payment to the government.
And that eight percent payment to the government in lieu of providing health insurance, the government would take over then and provide it for people who'd lose their policies at work.
And the point I was making there was that if you're a business and somebody comes along and says, hey, what you're now spending 15% on, I'm only gonna charge you eight percent, and you get to offload the whole problem of health insurance for your employees, you'll take it.
Now, remember this is four years ago, and the the long-term objective here for Obamacare is to eliminate employer-provided or employer-based insurance, and also eliminate way down the road, the private sector free enterprise insurance industry.
The objective long term is to see to it that there's only one place to go for health insurance and for medical treatment.
That's gonna be everything run by the U.S. government.
That's the long-term objective.
And it's not just Obama's, it's it's every uh authoritarian type big government Statist who's ever dreamed of running a country with an iron fist.
The health care system is the thing that you try to get control of first because it's so important to people, and that's something they can't deal without, and they'll do anything to get it, and you'll own them.
You'll make them totally dependent, and they literally will do anything not to be frozen out of medical treatment and health insurance.
So the long-term objective here is to take advantage of the fact the employers really, really increasingly don't like having to mess with all this, and the government's giving them an option to get out of it.
Still pay the government something, but maybe half of what it's costing them to insure their employees.
Okay, that sets up the newly, well, an old Obama video or audio and a new Gruber discovery.
And we'll get to all that right after our bottom of the hour, obscene profit timeouts.
Hit tight, coming right back.
Okay, I found this comic book, folks.
The um and I'm gonna be holding it up here in the digital camera in just a second.
In this comic book, Healthcare Reform, Jonathan Gruber, uh what it is, why it's necessary how it works, 150-page comic book, and in it he brags about working closely with Obama on Obamacare.
And of course, it really isn't bragging since Gruber visited the White House more than a dozen times since they began writing Obamacare back in 2009.
Here is the comic book.
This is what it looks like.
Health care reform, Jonathan Gruber.
I mean, this guy was totally into it.
He was much more than advisor.
He's out there selling it.
He's bragging about being close with Obama.
He's telling them how to sell it.
He is intimately involved with every aspect of this.
And then there's Obama yesterday or over the weekend in Brisbane, Australia, employing the limbaugh theorem saying, what?
I just found out about this.
Some some advisor nobody ever heard of running around saying things I don't even agree with.
You talk about blatant lying to people.
At any rate, so we played for you the soundbite back in March of 2010, describing for you how the regime was going to take advantage of big business and small business really not liking having to deal with providing health insurance.
Do you remember the the old CEO of General Motors, Rick Wagner?
He got the gig.
He loved cars.
He wanted to run a car company.
Finally got there, and he found out that his job as CEO was health care administration.
The biggest expense, the thing that required the vast majority of his time was dealing with the health care benefits for all of the employees.
And a lot of small businesses, you talk to them, you own them, you run them, you work for them, big businesses, medium-sized, they all resent how much it's gotten to cost.
They resent the time it takes, everything about it.
And if somebody comes along like Obama and offers them a way out of it, you know they're going to take it.
If they can get away with paying a fine for dropping it, that's only half of what their cost is, and this was what the plan was.
One of many plans in Obamacare to get as many choices for average people and their health insurance taken away from them.
The employer benefit, I mean, it's part of a job now.
Everybody expects to have health coverage.
Everybody expects to have health insurance.
It's just considered every bit as part of the job as salary is.
And if you can take that away, you can panic people.
You can take that away from them.
You can legally allow their employers to offload that.
They'll do it in a second.
And then if you're the government and you're oriented towards statism and authoritarianism, then you set yourself up, the government, as the first place and the easiest place people can go to replace the health insurance plan they had at work.
And then you own them.
Well, here's Obama.
Let's go back to March 2007.
This is a Service Employees International Union health care forum.
Obama is a presidential candidate and senator at the time.
And here is some of what he said.
My commitment is to make sure that we've got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president.
I would hope that we set up a system that allows those who can't go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort.
But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's going to be potentially some transition process there.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
I don't think we are going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
He's telling his union buddies it's going to take time.
Be patient with me.
He didn't.
But even if we do, it's going to take a long time, maybe 15 or 20 years.
Behind closed doors uh comments here.
Look, working together on this.
We're gonna we're gonna eliminate employer coverage immediately.
What that means is we're gonna institute universal government-provided coverage.
But this he knows that people aren't gonna go for it.
He couldn't go out and get elected on this is what everybody's talking.
He could not run for office and say, as part of his plan with Obamacare, to eliminate your health insurance at work.
We want to eliminate that, and we want to be the ones that provide you your health insurance.
Sayonara, he doesn't get elected.
He doesn't get elected president, he doesn't get to do Obamacare.
So he has to lie about it.
And they rely on the stupidity of the American people to believe the lie.
They rely on the stupidity of the American people to believe that they're all compassionate about this.
They rely on the stupidity of the gullibility of the American people, to accept that all they care about is people, and they have the best intentions when in fact what they're trying to do is turn this whole thing upside down so that they get total control over us.
It isn't about health care.
Health care is the mechanism to get there and to expand government in such a way that it can't be undone by future presidents, future congresses, or what have you.
And so here is Obama being truthful, and this is seven years ago, folks.
Being truthful with some very loyal donors and supporters, the SEIU.
He's winking and he's nodding.
Look, I know we want to get rid of employer coverage, but we can't do it immediately.
Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years.
Listen to this again.
We played this all during the campaign 2008, hoping it would make an impression on people, hoping it would be hurt, hoping it would awaken people out of the stupor in which they were looking at my at Obama as uh some messianic figure, blank canvas, make of him whatever they wanted to make of him.
It was there was no good on the horizon even back then, but people didn't want to see it.
Play soundbite number two again Friday, right?
My commitment is to make sure that we've got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president.
I would hope that we set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort.
But I don't think we're gonna be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately.
There's gonna be potentially some transition process.
I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.
Okay, so here we are reminding everybody what Obama said seven years ago.
Tomorrow in the drive-by media, the story will be our reaction to learning that Obama wanted to eliminate private sector insurance in 15 or 20 years.
Well, employer provided, which is pretty much the same thing.
I mean, the employer goes to private sector insurance companies to get plans, get the coverage, get the policies.
I mean, the two go hand in hand here.
If you eliminate employer provided, um where you're gonna go to become a member of a group to get your so-called group discount.
You gotta join some government exchange.
So now, Gruber, let's go forward uh four years.
We're back to 2011, Four years forward from Obama in 2007.
This is March the 9th at the Pioneer Institute's 2011 Hewitt lecture.
The budgetary impact of federal health care reform.
And here is the first of two sound bites we have from Gruber.
The Cadillac tax.
Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient, and expensive tax subsidy to employer provided health insurance.
It's a terrible policy.
Turns out politically, it's really hard to get rid of.
And the only way we could take it on was first by mislabeling it, calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than tax on people.
And we all know it's really a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.
Yeah, and of course, the only thing noteworthy here to the drive-by media is what my reaction to this is going to be.
Nothing to see here other than my reaction to it.
But what do we have?
We have once again, the primary architect of Obamacare admitting they had to lie and mischaracterize a tax that was going to be levied on you, but they couldn't tell you that, or it would never see the light of day.
The Cadillac tax.
Economists have called for 40 years to get rid of the regressive, inefficient, expensive tax subsidy to employer provided health insurance.
What is that?
The employer-provided tax sub- the subsidy is that nobody pays a tax on that.
I mentioned, I think it was either yesterday or Friday.
The government considers all money to be owned by it.
And anything you have is what government graciously determines to allow you to have after they have decided what of your activity they're going to tax.
And anything that they claim is untaxed, they think you're getting a subsidy.
You haven't earned anything.
You're getting a subsidy.
So if you have health insurance at work as a benefit, and nobody's paying tax on that, then the government, Gruber's group, looks at that as though you are being subsidized by the government.
The government gets its cut first.
The government gets its take first, no matter what, and then whatever you're left with is yours.
But in the case of employer-provided health insurance, there's no tax applied.
It's a free benefit.
There's no imputed income.
You don't have to report the value of it on your tax return.
And these guys are coming along and say, we can't do this anymore.
We're going to have to start collecting tax on these benefits.
And what Gruber is saying here, politically, this is going to be hard to do.
People have gotten these free health care benefits for years.
We can't just start taking that.
So what do we do?
Well, we mislabel it.
We call it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people.
When we all know it's really a tax on people who hold those plans.
So yet another instance and another, perhaps, for Gruber.
This is the most direct and maybe the clearest way he has admitted this fraud.
I mean, this is an in-your-face 10-amount admission of the con game that was run.
And it's still being run.
Here's the next bite.
Here is the second phase of Gruber's plan.
And the second one was to start it late, started in 2018.
But by starting it late, we're able to tie the cap for the Cadillac tax to the CPI, not to medical inflation.
What that means is a tax which starts by only taxing about the top 8% of health insurance plans, essentially amounts over the next 20 years to basically getting rid of the exclusion from employer-provided health insurance.
This was the only political way we were ever going to take on what is one of the worst public policies in America.
And every economist should celebrate this.
We took it on and got rid of it in the most expeditious way we possibly could have politically.
What he's talking about here is the fact that you get your health benefits free, that you don't pay any tax on it.
And we've got to change that.
And he found a way to do it now by fooling you into thinking you're not going to be paying the tax on it.
And economists need to be celebrating this worldwide because this is a big deal.
We're trying to figure this out.
Get rid of the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance and ultimately eliminate it.
So here it is, folks.
I mean, this is all the stuff that's going on behind the scenes.
All the lying, all the all the conning going on, in order to get some modicum of public support.
And actually, it never has had majority public support.
Some of this was necessary to get Democrat votes.
But it has been a deception from the moment of its conception.
The whole thing is a intricately woven web of deceit that very little truth can be found inside.
And they celebrate how they were able to run this con and fool you and also celebrate what their long-term objective is, which is to eliminate one of the great options that you believe you've had all your life, and that is to get health coverage, health insurance via your job.
I mean, this is all of this is despicable as it can be.
It's it's it's deceitful.
And I I don't know how people in Washington, as they learn this, perhaps have it confirmed because they knew it already, can just sit by as though it's no big deal.
Anyway, we must take a timeout, my friends.
These uh men much more straight ahead, you can guess.
Sit tight because it's coming right up.
Notice how excited Gruber sounds in these bites.
Notice how happy he is.
He's excited at the cleverness that he and he obviously thinks he alone has come up with and used in fooling the American people.
You can hear it in his voice.
You can hear how excited he is.
He can barely he's speaking so fast you can barely understand everything he's saying as he's talking to his economist buddies about how he's put the screws to everybody.
Oh, yeah, we raised taxes on him, but we told him we were taxing the insurance companies, and he fell for it.
Yes, they're rebounded.
And we had to do that, otherwise there couldn't have been a way to get that done.
Is this not great?
Every economist ought to be celebrating the way we lied to the American American.
It was so prudent.
I am so good.
Oh my god, does Obama know how lucky he is to have me?
And we go to Brisbane and Obama says, Who?
Gruber?
I never heard a guy.
Some low rent advisor.
You know, people say what they want to say, but uh none of that's true.
I just found out about this, and I'm gonna I'm out about it.
It's an amazing con.
Here is Obama in 2006 at the Brookings Institution.
He's then senator.
He's not yet, well, not publicly anyway, made up his mind to run for the presidency.
You've already drawn some of the brightest minds from uh academia and policy circles.
Uh many of them I've stolen ideas from liberally.
Uh people ranging from Robert Gordon to Austin Goolsby, John Gruber, uh, my dear friend Jim Wallace here, uh, whoa, uh whatever some.
What'd you just hear me?
He's a Brookings Institute.
He's uh talking about all these uh brilliant minds that he's stolen ideas from liberally, including John Gruber.
But let's go back, sound by six Friday, once again to early Sunday morning in Brisbane, Australia.
Obama's asked about what Gruber's running around saying, lying the American people about taxes and keeping their plan and all that when they weren't going to be able to in order to get the bill passed.
In other words, Obama's asked what what about this?
What does Gruber guy say?
No, I I did not.
Uh I just heard about this.
Yeah, I I get well briefed uh before I come out here.
Uh the the fact that some advisor who never worked on our staff uh expressed an opinion that uh I completely disagree with uh in terms of the voters is no reflection on the actual process that was run.
I've stolen liberally from Gruber.
He's a brilliant academic mind.
I've stolen liberally from Gruber.
John Gruber, oh, yeah.
Who?
Uh well, no, uh some advisor who never worked on there.
And of course, uh, ladies and gentlemen, the the story and all this uh elsewhere later today, drive by media will be our reaction here on the Rush Limbaugh program to Gruber and whatever Fox News does in reaction.
Sit tight.
Be right back.
In other news, Adrian Peterson, running back of the Minnesota Vikings, has already missed nine games this season with pay because of hitting his son with a stick.
Spanking.
Now been suspended for the rest of the year and maybe forever.
▲
Export Selection