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Jan. 30, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:38
January 30, 2015, Friday, Hour #2
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There's a name that I forgot when Mitt Romney's talking about somebody that's not in the national scene has yet to take the message nationally, and that would be Dr. Carson, Dr. Ben Carson.
I don't know that Romney had him in mind, but he fits the description that Romney gave, who he hopes emerges as the Republican nominee.
It's Friday, folks, and that means...
And couldn't he have been Senator Rubio?
My conventional wisdom was that if Jeb Bush got in, that Rubio would not.
Because they're both from Florida, and they would split the Florida donor base.
But Rubio didn't appear to get that memo.
Rubio appears to be in it.
A lot of great conservatives, a lot of guys of great conservative potential in the Republican primary field.
And the establishment is going to be gunning for all of them.
And they're going to do what they always try to do.
They're going to try to split the conservative primary vote just like they did last time and end up with their chosen mainstream moderate sort of rhino-type nominee.
Great to have you with us, folks.
Fastest Week in Media here on the EIB network.
Rush Limbaugh 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
And since it's Friday, Open Line Friday, we open it up to callers in the sense that whatever you wish to talk about, feel free.
It may not sound much different on Friday from other days, but that's just because the callers haven't taken advantage of the opportunity I'm giving them.
They don't have to talk about politics.
The fact they want to, fine and dandy, but they're not restricted to that or the usual things we discuss Monday through Thursday.
That's what the deal on Open Line Friday is.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for this, for the wealth gap.
I'd rather refer to it as the distribution of wealth, because that does happen.
The question is, how are you going to do it?
You're going to let the market do it.
You're going to let somebody like Obama, who thinks the market's unfair, do it in the name of government.
And that's socialism.
And if it gets worse, it's communism.
Now, that method has never worked.
Government distributing wealth has never created a growing economy.
By definition, it can't.
Because for government to distribute the wealth, government has to first take it.
And once government takes the wealth, it's gone.
Government can't create wealth.
Government can only rearrange it, most often destroy it.
But nevertheless, we're talking about the distribution of the wealth or the distribution of the economic output, the distribution of money in the country.
And it's an age-old argument.
And if you look at doing it in a way that's fair, then the socialists are going to win.
If you believe that it's got to be fair, however you wish to define fair, then government has to be the agent doing it.
Because the socialists will tell you that the market isn't fair, that capitalism isn't fair.
In their world, fairness is.
Pretty much everybody has the same.
You have some few on the upper end, which would be them, the socialist leaders.
And then you'd have everybody else.
Capitalism, of course, how much you end up with depends on you more than anybody else.
And that's why the socialists claim it's unfair.
Well, not everybody's capable of providing safe for themselves.
It isn't fair that some should be smarter.
It isn't fair that some should be better.
Is it fair that some should have more talent?
And so to deal with that momentous unfairness, we elect people like Obama to make it fair.
And all they do, despite even if they do have good intentions, which I reject anyway, but even if they do, they box it up because it's not possible.
You simply cannot have a fair and equitable distribution of wealth handled by a central command and control authority or government because they first have to take the wealth.
And once they take it, you don't have it.
I mean, they have to take yours, right?
They have to take everybody's wealth.
How does that promote the distribution of wealth with government taking it?
And then how do they give it back?
How do they distribute it?
Food stamps?
Yeah, man.
Welfare?
Yeah, man.
That's really going to help, isn't it?
Child education programs?
Yeah.
Head start programs.
Yeah, that's really going to contribute to the national wealth.
It doesn't.
But it satisfies people who think things ought to be fair.
On the other hand, it's capitalism.
And you know how it works.
It's the old saw about the American dream.
You get out of it what you put into it.
But sometimes not always, because you're dealing with sharks and thieves.
And the way the liberals look at it is capitalism is inherently unfair because everybody in it is a thief.
Everybody that succeeds is a crook.
Everybody that succeeds is mean-spirited.
They don't share.
And that's how they have sought to diminish it over the course of the years.
Okay, so given all that, there is no question the income gap.
This is even according to the New York Times, the income gap has increased four times faster under Obama than under Bush.
The gap between the rich and poor, however you want to describe this, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, the 1%, that gap has grown.
And the reason is that the wealthy have gotten wealthier.
Now, the wealthy always will get wealthier, except on those occasions when they lose everything, because sometimes the wealthy are entrepreneurs.
They make big bets.
They take great risks.
Sometimes they lose everything.
People move in and out of income levels all the time.
The wealthy are not always wealthy.
The poor are not always poor, except when Democrats run the show.
The middle class is not always middle class.
That's always been what America has been about.
And that's what Obama and people like him think is unfair.
So under Obama, wealth concentrated in the hands of the wealthy has increased four times faster than under George W. Bush.
Okay, now how do you account for that?
I mean, here's Obama who talks about redistributing the wealth and doing it fairly and doing it with compassion and making sure the rich don't get more than their fair share, taking things away from the rich by raising their taxes.
And we're going to do everything we can for the middle class.
We're going to elevate that.
How in the hell does it happen then that under this great socialist, the wealthy get wealthier and the middle class stagnate four times faster than under George W. Bush?
How does it happen?
Well, there's one glaring example right in front of our faces.
Quantitative easing.
And you can trace this back to TARP.
You can trace this back to 2008 and the so-called financial crisis, where if we didn't bail out banks and General Motors and what have you in 24 hours, then the world economy was going to crumble and nobody was going to have anything.
So we had TARP and we had a couple of other things that we did.
We had government bailing out businesses and TARP doing this, that, and the other thing.
And part and parcel, an offshoot of that was called quantitative easing combined with low interest rates.
The Federal Reserve decided that they were going to pump money into the equities market, i.e. the stock market.
And quantitative easing is what that was called.
It's basically printing money.
What did they do with that money?
Well, it all went to the stock market.
Why did it go to the stock market?
Well, because the people who had the power to print it, that's where they are.
If you had the printing press that prints dollars and you had total control over where the dollars you printed went, why not give them to yourself?
Which is essentially what's happened here.
The stock market in the middle of an absolutely foundering economy has grown by leaps and bounds in ways nobody has ever seen before.
In the midst of a purely, totally stagnant economy, over here is Wall Street, and they have just gone gangbusters.
And if you're there, if you own stocks, you are sitting pretty.
You are in fat city.
And if you've owned stocks for the last six, seven years, you are in fat city.
Folks, it's just, it stands to reason.
You print a bunch of money and you put it in the stock market and the stock market grows.
And the people in the stock market happen to be the people in the stock market.
Who are they?
It's more and more what are called average Americans.
I mean, you may have a 401k and it might be invested in the stock market, stock here, stock there, but not to the tune we're talking about.
This is the primary reason that it's happened.
There are a couple of others too.
It's not the sole reason, but it is.
I mean, the Fed, they say it's independent, and they say it's not tied to any government, government official, executive branch, or what have you, but it clearly is.
The Federal Reserve has sought it necessary to preserve the Obama presidency.
And the way they've done that is to make sure that single market segment's doing great guns while everybody else is stagnating.
And the people in the stock market, they have, I mean, the numbers tell the tale.
They have gotten wealthier and wealthier and wealthier, but it's not because of any genius.
It's not because of brilliant investing.
It's not because they've got smart people that know which stocks to pick and which stocks to avoid.
It's that the stock market has been flooded with dollars that have been printed under the term of quantitative easing.
It's, I think, the numbers $3.5 trillion now has been thrown into the stock market since quantitative easing began.
Well, it stands to reason.
Whoever's in the stock market, and that's the wealthy are there, the 1%, they're all there to one degree or another.
Stands to reason.
You throw money in the stock market where people are.
The things they're invested in grow.
It's just, that's how it's happened.
That's totally artificial.
That's not capitalism.
Capitalism hasn't put all that money in the market.
The stock market hasn't grown because overwhelming numbers of millions of Americans have decided to put their money there.
And I'm talking about a majority of the middle class.
The Federal Reserve has put the money there.
There are other reasons, too, for the increasing gap.
And much of which this is not counted as part of the poor's income, but welfare benefits for food, for housing, for medical care, and social services like subsidized daycare.
Those are not counted in the census income distribution figures.
But the amount of welfare, in other words, the amount of money that a government pays people not to work is also going to contribute to the wealth gap.
Well, how can that be?
Russia, my if you're giving people this, well, first place, the money we're giving them isn't counted as income.
So the wealth gap doesn't have that number tabulated.
But it's more sinister than that.
The more money we give people who aren't working, the less work they're going to do.
And that means the less productivity they are engaging in.
And that means the less wealth income they're going to be creating for themselves in the first place.
So if you've got over here the stock market and the Fed pumping $3.5 trillion in there in the course of six years, and over here you've got an increasing number of people who are not working, just waiting on the government to send a check for whatever, what the hell do you think is going to happen when people are not working and when they're not producing and when they're not creating wealth by producing an income for themselves, how in the world can the income gap close?
It can only grow, particularly when you know that all these welfare benefits are not counted as income to the recipients.
So there are clearly a number of factors, but it is not capitalism.
It isn't that the system is unfair and that somebody is unfairly, that a bunch of cheats and liars and frauds.
I mean, all that's happening, but that's happening because of big government.
That's happening because of massive government and government-related agencies determining where the money goes.
Not economic activity, not merit, not entrepreneurism.
Now, clearly, there are people who are doing well outside the Federal Reserve, outside the stock market.
But this gap that they keep wailing and moaning about is, in terms of it being related to capitalism, it's not.
Capitalism, there's nothing in capitalism that says print a bunch of money and buy stocks or equity with it.
That's something that big government socialists and autocrats do when they have the power and authority over the money supply.
Now, why did they do it?
Why pump the money to the stock market?
Well, they'd already created the idea that we're going to lose the world economy if we didn't bail out X, Y, and Z.
We also had a stagnant economy over here that was just in horrible shape.
And yet the regime needed some sort of evidence that the economic policies were indeed working.
And so, look at Wall Street, man.
Look at the stock market.
Man, it's going great guns.
Why?
There must be a lot of confidence in the economy.
Look at all the investment going on in the stock market.
Wow, this Obama economy is percolate.
No, it was all artificial.
They printed the money to create the growth while artificially keeping interest rates low for a whole hoster.
And that didn't help people on fixed incomes.
My only point with, because people are going to argue with me, and I guarantee you, from now to the weekend, you're going to, well, there goes Limbaugh talking about things he doesn't really know about.
You're going to hear all that.
But my point to you here is the socialists, the big government types, use this gap between the rich and the poor and the concentration of wealth growing in the 1%, and they're going to blame capitalism for it now.
All I want you to know is you may disagree with my analysis of quantitative easing and all that money printed going to the stock market, but whatever.
Do not fall for the idea that capitalism is to blame for this because it isn't.
If anything, big government autocratic control over the money supply, socialist whatever is in control of this, and that's why this gap exists.
Plus, all of the people, vastly, increasingly growing numbers of people on welfare.
And I got to take a break.
Be right back.
Back to the phones open line Friday.
This is Paul in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania.
Great to have you, sir.
Welcome to Program.
Hi.
Mega Dittos, and thank you for taking my call.
You bet, sir.
It's exciting to talk to you.
Thank you for your service for Matt Drudge.
You're my good two guys.
Anyway, I'm going to get right to the point.
I've been a big fan of Scott Walker's ever since he has been through the wilderness.
And he was through the wilderness.
I like him a lot.
And he stands up.
He stood up when they were crawling in the State House windows.
He stood up when he didn't have any help from Governor Christie with any money getting re-elected.
He did it three times.
Anyway, I want you to look in your crystal ball.
And if my guy gets to be the nominee, which I hope he does with everyone that's in it now, would it be wise of him to choose one of these beautiful, smart, young conservative ladies in the Congress or in the Senate?
So talented.
And don't know who the Democratic nominee is going to be, but we probably can guess.
Are you asking me if I think he should pick a woman to be his running mate?
That's the question.
Right.
Okay.
Well, would that be wise?
I've got an answer for that.
We've run out of time here, Paul.
Your compliments to me took so much time, and I let you go with them because, of course, it's Open Line Friday.
I'll answer it after the break.
Okay, back now to Paul in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania's question.
It took him a while to get there because he was in such a state of awe, having gotten through and actually was speaking to me.
And he even admitted this.
I mean, you could hear it.
He barely could speak.
He was so nervous, so thrilled, so excited.
It happens all the time.
His basic question was: if Scott Walker, who is his guy, gets the nomination, should Walker pick one of the beautiful, young, talented, ready-to-go women in the Republican Party and the House or Senate somewhere as the vice presidential nominee?
Look, If he picks a woman, just pick a woman.
No, I hope that's not the reason.
That's the kind of stuff that's got to come to a screeching halt.
Now, there may be, no, rush, rush, a perfect opportunity.
You got to have a balanced ticket.
You got to show the feminists that there's no war on women.
You're not going to do that.
Whoever, unless Walker picks Hillary Clinton to be his nominee, unless Walker picks a pro-choice Republican woman, whoever he picks is going to get savaged and destroyed.
Does the name Sarah Palin ring a bell?
Does the name Michelle Bachman ring a bell?
I could give you any number of really qualified Republican women who the media and the Democrat Party has set out to destroy simply because they're conservative.
You know, this is going to be a serious tipping point in our country right now.
And if you're going to pick a nominee, vice presidential nominee, to hopefully pick off some Democrat votes or to limit the criticism of the media, that's not going to happen.
Pick somebody who can campaign well.
Pick somebody who can get votes.
Pick somebody who can speak and articulate conservatism.
Pick somebody who believes it.
Pick somebody who makes the nominee look like he's doing the right things.
Don't pick somebody that's going to undercut the nominee.
Don't pick somebody that's at variance or disagrees with the nominee on some key issues just to satisfy a particular constituency that's more likely identified with the Democrat Party.
That's the wrong thing to do.
Identity politics, zip it.
Gender politics, zip it.
We're looking for the best people.
We as conservatives see this country is populated by people, not certain skin color people, not certain gender people, not certain gender orientation people, but people.
It is people who comprise this country.
We want leaders who are best able and best qualified to motivate and inspire all the people in this country and be right on issues, policy, and what have you.
Because it's going to take more than one election if we're to succeed.
But we're getting way ahead of ourselves here.
But I don't mind the question because there's an opportunity to lay out here what's actually important.
Now, the Republican establishment, that's something they would do.
Maybe, okay, let's say you nominate a guy who's, I don't know, I don't want to even run down a list of issues.
But if you pick a nominee who doesn't agree on all the issues the nominee does just to show open-mindedness and tolerance, you're going to lose.
You cannot win.
The Republicans cannot win this election if their voters stay home.
It just isn't going to happen.
The Republican Party needs to understand the way it's going to win.
And the best way, and maybe the only way it's going to win, is if they turn out their own voters first.
If they don't do that, the rest of it's all academic.
And no, of course I'm not opposed to a hottie being picked on a ticket.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
I'm not opposed to a woman being picked.
If a woman's the best candidate, do it, then, but the point of picking a woman or picking an African-American or picking an Hispanic just because they're that, that's the wrong way to go.
And that's essentially what he was asking.
Right?
Okay.
Here's Rose in Williamstown, West Virginia.
Great to have you on the EIB network.
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you for having me.
First of all, I want to say I'm a licensed practical nurse.
I got my degree in the 80s and then went back and got my business degree as a non-traditional student 10 years ago, and I'm 58 years old.
And I want to say kudos to you for finally somebody shouting from the rooftops about quantitative easing affect everybody's income.
I have been waiting and waiting for it finally for the S to hit the fan.
And every time the Fed says, no, we're not going to raise interest rates.
No, we're not going to raise interest rates.
I can remember the 80s when the interest rates were so awful and the economy was awful too.
More so.
So thank you very much.
Well, you're more than welcome.
To me, it's common sense.
And I don't even, I can't recall what even got me thinking about this.
It was one night at home this week, and I've been pondering a lot of things.
And I read something or saw something.
I don't remember what it was that was the spark.
But it was something that really ticked me off about some liberal explanation for the wealth gap and why the rich keep getting richer and it was all because of capitalism.
And blew a stack sitting there.
And something just hit me.
Well, what the hell do you expect to happen when we're printing $3.5 trillion, whatever, over the course of six years and pumping it to one place?
And that place happens to be going gangbusters.
Therefore, the people at that place are going.
It seems common sense to me.
And then to have all that blamed on capitalism is what set me off.
So, Rose, I'm glad that it made sense to you.
Bill Gates is worried about artificial intelligence, too.
Elon Musk of Tesla is worried about artificial intelligence.
And so is Stephen Hawking.
Now, these are three pretty smart guys.
They're reputedly geniuses.
And they are all worried about artificial intelligence.
I call these guys the wizards of smart.
Microsoft's co-founder joins a list of science and industry notables, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking and internet innovator Elon Musk in calling out the potential threat from machines that can think for themselves.
Bill Gates shared his thoughts on artificial intelligence on Wednesday in a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread.
It's a Q ⁇ A session conducted live on the Reddit site.
Obama's been there, Tim Berners-Lee, who is the World Wide Web founder, not Al Gore.
And Gates said, yeah, I'm in the camp that's concerned about super intelligence.
First, he said the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent.
Now, that should be positive if we manage it well.
But a few decades after that, though, the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.
And they're worried the machines are going to become smarter than we are, but they're not going to have any humanity about them.
Therefore, no compassion and no temperance, no understanding.
And we're going to lose to the machines.
And frankly, I just, all these guys are dead serious about this.
And as you know, I don't like to pepper you too much with what I see and encounter in my hobby time perusing tech blogs.
And I encounter all this.
All it takes is a Stephen Hawking or a Gates or a Musk talking about it and the little tech wannabes just glom onto it and they join the circus.
Well, I don't know what the machines, the AI machines that these guys are worried about.
I don't know what they're going to do.
I don't know how they're going to end up being smarter than we are, but they have the fear.
That's not my point.
I mean, they admit that this is decades down the road.
So why are they, I mean, they're not even going to be alive when this manifests itself.
So what are they wringing their hands over?
They're just trying to sound smart and they're trying to sound concerned and so forth.
But the problem for me is that these guys are self-proclaimed and culturally society acclaimed geniuses.
So that when they say something, everybody snaps to and listens and doesn't question them.
They just accept what these guys say because everybody admits that they're way smarter than I am.
Oh my God, they must know what they're talking about.
Instead of computers and instead of machines, I would be really happy if these geniuses would start thinking about artificial compassion instead of artificial intelligence, artificial government instead of artificial intelligence.
And by artificial compassion, I mean liberalism.
I mean out of control, big government liberalism.
When compassion is forced upon us, for example, when we are under penalty of law, forced to buy health insurance policies that we cannot afford, that covers ailments we may never suffer, such as maternity for men, and doesn't provide the doctors that we want or need.
When we can't use our doctor, we can't use the same medical procedures we've always used.
When regulations, artificial compassion hurt the entire economy, where are these guys there?
Where are they on this?
I mean, there are so many things to worry about before we get to artificial intelligence.
And if these guys weighed in on them, it would matter.
If these guys would finally speak out about big government and how it is destructive and how it prevents the creation of wealth and how it segregates people and does keep people in the same economic quintile all of their lives, then it might matter what they think.
It might matter what they say.
When doctors are forced to work for limited wages determined by the government, artificial compassion.
Yeah, we're going to get even with the doctors because they've been making too much money off the sick as it is.
Artificial compassion is eventually going to lead us.
And I've heard it already articulated, folks, by some in the media on blogs, left-wing websites and so forth, starting to ask the question, why should anybody profit from making the sick healthy?
Why should the richest people in our society be those who make the sick well?
Shouldn't that be something done for charitable purposes?
And so there is, and attacks on doctors are part and parcel of Obamacare.
Remember when Obama got this whole Obamacare rolling?
He went out there and started accusing nameless doctors of doing unnecessary surgeries purely for profit.
Tonsillectomies that weren't necessary.
Cutting off limbs that weren't necessary just because the surgery is expensive and the doctor makes a lot of money.
Why aren't these guys concerned about demagoguery like that, or what I call artificial compassion?
Look at this.
Millions to owe Obamacare tax penalty.
This is from CNN.
Were you uninsured in 2014?
Well, if so, it's time to pay the piper.
Some 3 million to 6 million Americans are going to have to pay an Obamacare tax penalty for not having health insurance last year, according to Treasury officials.
This is from last Wednesday.
It's the first time they have given estimates for how many people are going to be subject to a fine.
Wait just a minute.
See, this is, we were told for years that anywhere from 30 to 40 million Americans didn't have health insurance, right?
And that's why we had to do this in the first place.
Remember all those rolling numbers of the uninsured and what an unfair society we had, an unfair health care system we had, a discriminatory, unfair country, because look at how many are uninsured.
And it was 30, 40, sometimes 50.
Now, Obamacare supposedly provides insurance for 7 to 10 million people, many of whom already had insurance.
And now we find out that the numbers are actually 3 to 6 million who don't have insurance, who are going to have to pay a fine.
This is exactly the kind of crap that I'm told.
We've all been sold a bill of artificial compassion.
It's a much bigger threat than artificial intelligence ever will be.
And back to the phones where you go.
James in Reston, Virginia, you are on Open Line Friday.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
I don't worry about artificial intelligence.
I worry about genuine stupidity.
Well, yes, absolutely.
I will believe in artificial intelligence.
Stupidity or ignorance.
Exactly right.
I will believe in artificial intelligence.
When a machine whinges, it's being worked too hard and doesn't get enough vacation days or pay.
Yes.
This is regarding your earlier discussion of quantitative easing.
Yes.
The division between the rich and the poor is that the poor have their wealth in cash and the rich have their wealth in things.
Quantitative easing, you're sucking value out of cash.
You're sucking value out of the currency or doing debt monetization.
And they're sucking the value out of the cash and putting it into things, therefore transferring wealth from the poor to the wealthy.
Okay, keep going.
On top of that, something like two-fifths or three-fifths of dollars, U.S. dollars, are not held by Americans.
So this is also, in fact, a tax on everyone else in the entire world.
Now, the U.N. wants to be able to tax the United States to pay their things.
Well, in fact, the United States is taxing the entire world in order to pay for things that Americans want.
And this is also sucking the dollars out of the poor who have the cash as the U.S. reserve currency in the various poor countries around the world.
Are you suggesting that we continue this, that we raise taxes on the poor?
Is that what you mean?
No, I'm suggesting we go back to the Constitution, which says the government isn't supposed to be allowed to do this.
That the currency should be actual money, which is precious metal, and not fiat currency principles.
Oh, you mean like return to the gold standard?
Well, that's what the Constitution says we're supposed to have been doing.
True.
But here again, the notion of the Federal Reserve actually has some merit if you have an economy that grows fairly rapidly.
But the Federal Reserve was originally established to keep the value of the currency stable, and it hasn't been doing that.
It's been assigned all these other tasks like, oh, what was the thing?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Wait a second.
It has not been assigned tasks.
It assigned them itself.
It's a classic example of absolute power corrupting absolutely.
They were put in charge of the money.
What would the average human being do with it?
It's a big pile of money.
I'm going to take it.
I'm going to use it the way I want to.
Anyway, I get your point, but that isn't going to happen.
So we've got to have some other alternative of fixing this.
And maybe it should, but I don't ever see going back to gold standard.
I don't know where the time's going, but it's going.
Fast as three hours in media.
Another hour in the can into the ether for posterity.
But another big, exciting one right around the corner.
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