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June 30, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
June 30, 2015, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of The Rush 24-7 podcast.
So I'm thinking last night I'm talking to Catherine and we're talking about uh potential, potential, future.
Rush revere time travel adventures with exceptional Americans books.
What do we do when we write about the Civil War?
Do we even write about the Civil War?
Will our book get banned?
No, no, we were just we were laughing about.
Actually, we're laughing, and we got kind of sobered by it, but it is something to consider, just amazing out there.
I hope, ladies and gentlemen, you were here yesterday, and I hope you remember something that I said as as we go forward here, and as you just sit back and watch the news and watch things, you are going to see exactly what I mentioned yesterday.
You're you're you're you're gonna see a lot on the part of people who are winning, such as at the Supreme Court or throughout these culture war battles that we are having.
You're going to see if you pay attention that the people winning get increasingly angrier with each victory, and you see them get meaner and bolder, and uh it it's it's an amazing thing to behold.
And if you pay attention to it, I mean I've I've got examples of it uh today, just I'm not gonna share them with you because I it's not worth the time, but you ought to see some of the stuff I'm finding on tech blogs and other things I read, populated and controlled by the left.
I mean, it is just there isn't a sense of celebration about it.
I guess there maybe there is, but it's just anger.
It's this pent-up rage and anger, and and there's there's no enjoyment of any of these victories, there's just continued rage about what they need to do next.
You watch, you just pay attention, you'll see what I'm talking about.
And I think it's important because it's what's fueling a lot of this.
Anyway, great to have you here, folks.
Rushlin bought 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program, the email address, L Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
Ladies and gentlemen, the unemployment rate, what is the latest uh reported unemployment?
5.5%, is that what it is, or 5.3, 5.6.
I mean it's it's in that neighborhood, right?
I don't know what the exact number is.
Now, not that this matters to anything anymore.
I mean, the truth increasingly is irrelevant.
The truth is increasingly meaningless.
In fact, there isn't any truth.
In way too much of the country, there is certainly no objective truth.
Anyway, I have had, as you know, if you listen regularly, I've had a lot of doubt about the accuracy of an unemployment rate of 5.5% when at the same time.
We have 92, 93 million Americans not in the workforce.
It just hasn't made sense to me.
Now, as you know, there are on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government releases the unemployment numbers every month, and there are different categories.
And the U, letter U-3, is what gets reported.
That's the 5.5% now, whatever it is, 5.4, 5.6, that's the U3 number.
The U3 number, and by the way, it's increasingly obvious that all of this is bogus and meaningless now as well.
But the U3 number only attempts to count people who are out of work and looking for a job.
People who have been out of work beyond the total length of time that they get unemployment benefits, which is what is that what is that up to now?
99 weeks?
It's even longer than that.
99 weeks.
So if if if if you're looking for a job and getting your unemployment benefits up to 90, they count you in U3.
But if you stop looking for a job at any point, you've been out of work two weeks, stop looking, you don't get counted.
In the U6 or in the U3 number, if you've been working Out of work for three years and stop looking, then you don't get counted as unemployed.
I don't know how they find out who is looking for a job and who isn't.
Because this is largely guesswork.
There is a very small interview sample that they take, and then they project nationwide results from this small, relatively small sample.
The U6 number is much closer to accurate.
The U6, U-6 isn't it never gets reported.
You have to look at uh websites dedicated to economics to find out what that number is.
The drive-by media never reports it.
So 99.9% of the people celebrating Supreme Court rulings last week do not know what the U6 unemployment rate is.
That number is reported to be around 11 or 12%.
And that number includes people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job or aren't for whatever reason looking for work.
And so it is said to be a more accurate number, but that has not even worked for me.
I mean, just a simple math.
92, 93 million Americans, and from there, I say, okay, how many adult Americans are there in our country?
To put that 93 million in proper perspective, 93 million Americans not working, and my always added caveat, they are all eating.
I find that to be one of the most relevant aspects of that number, and it just it goes over people's heads as though it doesn't matter.
But if you can eat and have a phone and a big screen or whatever and not have to work, I mean, what are you more than likely to do if you are a recent graduate or product of the American education system?
You're going to opt for the path of least resistance.
Particularly now you add to that what has happened to employment with Obamacare, and that is 30 hours a week is now considered full time, not 40.
I mean, folks, the bottom line here is that just observing numbers and just casually absorbing them, not even running them, not calculating, just absorbing them.
It cannot be that we have an unemployment rate of 5.5% or even 12.2%.
The number of people working is way down.
The number of hours worked is way down because of Obamacare, because the economy, and because you can you can maybe talk about trade deals too if you want, throw it all in.
I don't care.
Bottom line is there's much less productivity in this economy, and then you add to that how much of the economy has been usurped by the federal government, the economy, the private sector, where everybody actually tries to get their piece of the pie, That's shrinking.
My gut feeling has been we are in a dire economic crisis.
Circumstance, far, far worse than anybody know.
Well, you might be saying, what's this got to do with anything?
Well, that's why I urge you to always hang in there and be tough.
Last night a friend of mine sent me a link to a blog that is hosted and written by David Snockman.
David Stockman, a former budget director for Rinaldus Magnus, until for some reason he was taken to the woodshed and fight.
Oh, I know what it was.
He disavowed supply side, which was his own creation.
Anyway, Stockman has run a bunch of numbers and has been able to put all of this in context and has concluded that the actual unemployment rate in the United States of America is not 5.5%, and it's not 12.5% or 13%, is 42.9%.
And let me share with you a little bit of how he gets there.
It's a long blog post.
I can't, I'm not even going to try to summarize most of it.
I'm just going to get to the meat of it as it relates to this.
But it's an all-out assault on Keynesian economics and the Federal Reserve and the damage that both have done and continue to do to the U.S. economy.
But here's the focal point on unemployment.
In fact, he writes the Census Bureau survey takers and the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers crunchers haven't the foggiest idea as to what the real world's potential labor force computes to how much of it is deployed on any given day, month or quarter.
That's economic speak for.
They don't have any idea how many people are working.
The world's potential labor force, meaning how many people in the world have an opportunity to hold a job and go to work at it.
Nobody knows they have no way to compute it.
And how much of that force is deployed, that's just that's that's military lingo for how many people getting up and going to work every day.
So accordingly, he writes, printing money and pegging interest rates in pursuit of full employment, which is the essence of the Yellen version, she's the chairman of Fed.
The essence of the Yellen version of monetary central planning is completely nonsensical, and it's political, by the way.
Getting an unemployment rate, 5.5%.
You know what?
Statistically full employment.
This is why this doesn't make any sense.
Traditionally, statistically full uh employment has been 4.7%.
Everybody involved in economics, from the government on down has agreed that if at any time the U.S. unemployment rate is 4.7%, then we have our economy is roaring.
We got people working and working overtime, and it's as near to full employment as it's possible to get.
Well, I'm telling you, if that's true about 4.7, there's no way we're at 5.5.
I mean, this is just my gut reaction to all this.
This is why this is fascinating.
Now, Stockman is ripping into the money supply people and Obama because they're pegging everything they're doing.
They're printing money, giving it to the stock market, pegging interest rates at near zero in pursuit of full employment.
That is for Obama's legacy.
They want Obama to be able to leave office claiming that his stimulus worked and that everything else he did economically, Obamacare brought back a defunct economy that he inherited.
And key to creating that perception is the unemployment rate, and that's why it's been creeping down from well, what did it get as high as eight some point, anyway, down to down to five and a half percent.
Now, likewise, the Fed the Federal Reserve's current soft target of 5.2% on the U3 unemployment rates downright ridiculous, he says.
When in the year 2015, you have 93 million adults not in the labor force, of which only half are retired and receiving social security, and you have a U3 computational method that counts as employed anybody who works only a few hours per week, and what you have in the resulting fraction is noise, pure and simple.
The U3 unemployment rate as a proxy for full employment does not even make it as a primitive grade school economics project.
And here are the numbers that I wondered about.
At present, there are 210 million adult Americans between 16 and 68.
That is the workforce.
16 to 68 is the is the age boundaries where you find the American, the potential American workforce.
And between 16 and 68, 210 million Americans, and 93 million, 40% of them are not working.
Now that's that's a probably a much better way of expressing employment, unemployment, and the real strength performance or lack of of the U.S. economy.
But here is where they get into weeds by Computing a bunch of things that I it's gonna be hard to follow because you're not reading it, but I'll do my best.
If you have 210 million Americans between 16 and 68, plausible measure the potential workforce, what that amounts to is 420 billion potential labor hours.
So you have 420 billion hours that people could work in a standard 40-hour week with all the vacations and the standard benefits thrown in.
That's that's the number of labor hours potential.
That's if you accept the convention that all adults are at least theoretically capable of holding a full-time job, which is 2,000 hours a year.
That's the calculation.
You're 2,000 hours a year your full-time.
And also capable of pulling their share of society's need for production and work effort.
Now, by contrast, during 2014, only 240 billion hours were actually supplied to the U.S. economy, and that is actual government numbers.
That's BLS.
So the workforce is defined as ages 16 to 68, a total of 420 billion potential labor hours, which equals great productivity if that happens.
Last year, only 240 billion hours were actually supplied to the U.S. economy.
Just a little over half what's possible.
Technically, therefore, there were a 180 billion unemployed labor hours.
That is how Stockman has arrived at an unemployment rate of 42.9%.
He's actually computing the number of hours possible to be worked at what they say is full employment, and then calculates the number of people and the number of hours actually worked.
43%.
Caveats, yeah, we have to allow for non-working wives We have to allow for students and the disabled and early retirees and coupon clippers and all.
And we have drifters, grifters, welfare cheats, bums, and people between jobs enrolled in training programs on sabbaticals and much else.
But here's the thing.
There are dozens of reasons for 180 billion unemployed labor hours.
But whether the Fed is monetizing $80 billion of public debt per month or not, and whether the money market interest rate is 10 basis points or 35 basis points, doesn't even make the top 25 reasons for unutilized adult labor.
What actually drives our current 43% unemployment rate is global economic forces of cheap labor and new productive capacity throughout dozens of domestic policy and cultural factors that influence the decision to work or not.
It's called liberalism.
It's called socialism.
It's creating sloth.
It's creating more and more people that don't have to work, and they're not.
And there's all this productivity left.
For lack of a better way, languishing on the factory floor.
Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey announced that he's running for president today.
I think it gets us up to 16 announced Republicans.
And he gave a uh fairly average 20, 25-minute long stem winder.
We have just a couple of sound bites I want to play for you.
He was in Livingston, New Jersey at Livingston Hascruel.
He said he traveled around the country, and he keeps hearing all these people tell him that Americans are angry.
But he said he traveled around the country.
He hadn't found anybody angry.
He's found a lot of anxiety out there, he says, but he hasn't found anybody that's angry.
Because Americans don't get angry.
And you know why Americans don't get angry?
Because Americans want to compromise.
Yeah, here we go.
First of two sound bites.
Both parties, both parties have failed our country.
Both parties have stood in the corner and held their breath and waited to get their own way.
Both parties have led us to believe that in America, a country that was built on compromise, that somehow now compromise is a dirty word.
If Washington and Adams and Jefferson believed compromise is a dirty word, we'd still be under the crown of England.
So here we go.
American people are not mad.
They're anxious and they want compromise.
They want people working together.
How many of you believe liberals and Democrats are failing?
Governor Christie said here that both parties have failed our country.
Both parties have stood in a corner and held their breath like children and waited to get their own way.
Did the Democrats strike you as standing in the corner?
Pouting because they don't get their own way.
Are they really thinking that they have failed?
That's what the Democrats now.
When you look at what's happening in Washington, is it really paralyzed?
Is nothing really getting done in Washington?
Is that how many of you think that?
We'll be back.
There's one more bite.
Don't go away.
I know what Governor Christie is trying to say here, and I know the message that he's trying to impart, but I have to tell you that maybe we should send him some of the Rush Revere books.
Because I if if if our ancestors had compromised, we might still be ruled by England.
Now what Governor Christie's talking about is when we sat down after we had not compromised and kicked England's butt.
And we sat down to write the declaration, well, write the Constitution and other things.
That's when we compromised.
That's when Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Franklin and all the rest of the boys, and they were boys back then.
Well, men, males.
Gee, look at how guarded and protective you have to get even anyway.
That's when he's talking about the fact that they compromised.
But they didn't compromise.
They tried compromise, by the way, with the king.
They tried.
I mean, the king demanded that the colonists house and feed British soldiers.
There were any number.
They've they tried compromising on taxes until they couldn't take it anymore, so they dumped a T in the harbor.
There wasn't, I mean, the compromise didn't work.
And it led to the Declaration of Independence and then the wall for independence.
But Governor Christie's talking about when we became a country and started resolving the differences that we had with each other.
That's when we compromise.
And you know what one of those compromises was?
Dare I go there, dare I go there.
Mr. Snerdley, dare I answer my own question.
You know what one of the compromises was?
Even before.
Even before that, one of the compromises was with the Southern states, which at the time were run by the Democrat Party.
There wasn't a Republican party till Abraham Lincoln came along and said he wanted to end slavery and preserve the Union.
The Democrats wanted slavery.
The Southern states, the Southern colonies demanded that there would be no admonition or abolition of slavery in the Constitution.
While the others realized, if you read any John Adams, you know that the many, many of the early founders just detested slavery at the time they're putting the Constitution together because they are writing documents based on human liberty and all men created equal, declaration of independence, so forth.
They knew slavery, they it couldn't, it couldn't, the country could not abide.
The country could not be what they envisioned it to be.
And yet, to get the Southern states to go along with the revolution, they had to compromise.
So you could say, dare I answer my own question, Mr. Snerdley.
You could say that slavery was a part of the founding of America because of compromise.
And I would be right.
Of course I'm right.
I am always right.
It was compromise that gave us a nation founded with certain states permitted to keep slaves.
Okay.
I'm not trying to stir anything up here, folks.
I'm just pointing out what I know.
I know what Governor Christie's trying to do, and I I know that many Republicans still think that all the people in America don't want anything but compromise.
That's what they want.
They want cooperation, bipartisanship.
This has become almost almost a mantra in the in the Republican Party.
As though these guys sit there and they meditate all the time and compromise.
Compromise instead of oom.
OM is their is their mantra.
Let's let's play these two sound bites.
Let's play the first one again.
Play them both back to back in context here.
Here's the first.
This is from Governor Christie's presidential announcement this morning.
Both parties, both parties have failed our country.
Both parties have stood in the corner and held their breath and waited to get their own way.
Both parties have led us to believe that in America, a country that was built on compromise, that somehow now compromise is a dirty word.
If Washington and Adams and Jefferson believed compromise is a dirty word, we'd still be under the crown of England.
A crowd going to the.
The crowd had a delayed reaction to that, not sure what to do.
They're a pro-Christi crowd, not sure they agreed with that, but they knew as a pro-Christi crowd, they'd better erupt.
So they thought about it for a couple split seconds and did so.
Probably used up the leap second that we're going to have.
By the way, speaking of that, we are adding a leap second.
You know why?
We're doing this at 1159.59.
We're doing it universal time, which would be 5 p.m.
American time, 5 p.m.
Eastern.
I didn't mean to say that Eastern Time Zone's American and the rest aren't.
I just, it was a football.
Look at look at this.
I didn't mean to insult those of you in the Western time zones as not being American.
EDT, 5 p.m. today, they're gonna add a leap second.
Now the last time this had to happen was I think 2000.
I might get the year wrong, but it was not that long ago.
2010, 2012, and when it happened, I think Qantas Airways had 50 planes delayed.
It screwed up a bunch of websites went down with just adding a second.
The reason I have to add the second is because the Earth is not rotating on its axis quite as fast.
Well, obesity is one of the problems.
Um no question.
Climate change, global warming, uh the CO2 is just weighting the atmosphere down.
It's a burden the Earth is having trouble carrying.
Oh, speaking of that, we now I'm not gonna be able to win with you.
Those of you that love the Pope, but but one of the lead advisors going to the Pope's conference on climate change is an Occupy Wall Street founder, who is one of the most radical extreme leftists.
I've got the details coming up.
Anyway, they're gonna they're gonna add Google even went down two or three years ago when this happened for a little while.
It screws everything up.
It was a miniature version of what they all thought was gonna happen to Y2K.
So it's not gonna, it's not gonna become uh 12.0, or it's not gonna become 00.00.00 when they think it is.
They have to add another second in there.
And what Google is gonna do, rather than wait until the actual moment of truth to do it, they're gonna add a couple of split seconds during the course of the day today when you won't even notice it, and your computer system won't notice it.
But be on the lookout around 5 p.m.
Eastern, that's when they're gonna add the split second to coordinated universal time bunch, which is what coordinates every clock on every computer.
We'll see what happens.
And any rate.
So Governor Christie is saying here that the Washington and Adams and Jefferson believed compromise, a dirty word, we'd still be under the crown of England.
No.
We would still be under the crown of England if we had compromised With the Crown.
Well, we might not still be well, we wouldn't have become the United States of America when we did, if we had compromised with the king.
And we tried, by the way.
We tried compromising and it didn't work.
The king continued to take advantage, abuse, imprison.
He was a monarch.
He was a dictator.
Raise taxes, all this stuff.
Boston Tea Party, you know the drill.
We tried compromise.
It didn't work.
So we had to compromise with the Southern states, which compromise created a nation which had slave states in it.
Slave states that were run by the Democrat Party.
Here's the next Christie soundbite.
When I stand up on a stage like this in front of all of you, there is one thing you will know for sure.
I mean what I say, and I say what I mean, and that's what America needs right now.
I've proven that you can stand up and fight the most powerful special interests this state has to have and stand up and stop them, but at the same time reach across the aisle to our friends in the Democratic Party and say, if you have a good idea, I'm willing to work with you because that's what our country needs.
It's just painful.
Greetings, welcome back, Rushlin Baum meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day.
What just happened with the Obama pan Pacific trade giveaway thing?
What just happened there?
I mean, didn't the Republicans compromise almost totally and make that happen?
The Republicans gave that to them, but the Republicans, they did more than compromise, they provided the jet fuel for it.
Is that the kind of thing that he's talking about?
I mean, that's compromise.
Democrats wanted no part of Obama's trade deal, but the Republicans, they didn't compromise with the Democrats in Congress or in the House Senate, they compromised with the President.
I guess that's okay.
And I guess there's just there's not enough of that going on out there, folks.
And if we had more of that going on out there, why things would be better.
Look, I know where this comes from.
This this is this is now it's obvious.
This is part of the Northeastern moderate liberal Republican handbook.
There obviously is one.
And if if if that describes you, you have to have as one of your lead comments that you are willing to compromise.
You are willing to work with the Democrats.
If they've got a good idea, you'll listen to them.
Now there has to be a reason for this.
As silly as it is, there has to be a reason, and I think I have a pretty good bead on what it is.
I think that this is the Republicans' way.
It's a flailing attempt to disabuse people of the public image Republicans have, which is that they are racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe, mean-spirited, intractable, uncompromising, domineering, dominating, whatever negative character traits you can come up with.
The Republicans believe that that is how they are perceived by people that do not vote Republican.
And so it's obvious that it's uh considered necessary to get votes from people who are not Republican if they're going to win.
And so this incessant Christie's not the only one.
I mean, Romney vomited this kind of stuff.
Jeb Bush is famous for it.
I mean, they're all out there.
The Northeastern Republican handbook Republicans are all promising they're going to compromise.
So they are accepting a premise.
They're not mean-spirited, they're not extremists, they're not racist, they're not bigots, they're not homophobes, they're none of that, but they are accepting the premise that they are, because that's what they think the voters believe, and so they're trying to counter it with this.
And they've been trying to do this for 20 years.
Or 15, 10 years, whatever the number of years they've been trying it.
And it I don't know that it works.
I mentioned long ago, I mean, folks, the prediction I made Or an observation I made back in the 90s.
And you might even say it was an accusation.
I have tried to inform people that the Democrat Party, the left, they don't even waste time anymore articulating policy differences with us.
They do not debate us.
This is patently obvious.
They don't debate us on policy ideas.
They don't want to go anywhere near that.
They will not win in a sincere, honest up and down debate on policy.
What they do instead is rely on the default smear.
The default smear that Republicans are at their core, mean, which is a big one.
Racist, another big one, sexist, bigoted, and homophobic.
This is the Democrat modus operandi.
The Democrats do not win by defeating us in policy arena debates.
The Democrats win by character assassination that is facilitated by their willing accomplices in the media.
So that, and here we're seeing evidence of it again.
Governor Christie, first thing he does is try to disabuse people watching his speech that he is not what they think he is.
And how does he try to disabuse them?
By promising he'll compromise.
By promising he will work with the other side, that both parties have failed.
That's not to be interpreted as a criticism of the Democrats.
What Governor Christie is hoping people hear is that he too thinks his party sucks.
And in that way, trying to build a bridge of commonality with people he wants to vote for him.
It would be like you telling somebody you're going to marry, yeah, my parents suck.
I know they suck.
But don't worry about it.
We'll fix it after we get married.
I know you don't like my parents, and I don't like them either.
I know you don't like my grandmother, and I don't like her either.
And I know you don't like my uncle, and I don't like him either.
I know my family's a bunch of creeps.
As a way of winning approval.
But it doesn't, it doesn't work because this branding, if you will, whatever you want to call it, is really deep, and it succeeds, and the Republicans haven't fought back against any of it.
And I don't think what Governor Christie's doing is considered fighting back.
He's acknowledging it tacitly so, as does everybody who says what he's saying here, and they're attempting to gain favor with people by a wink and a yeah, I know we got some real wackos on our side.
He doesn't say that.
But when you say that both parties have failed, both parties have stood in the corner, both parties here, both parties have led us to believe in America, both parties, but I'm willing to compromise.
This whole strategy of the left is played out time and time again, and especially under Obama.
Everybody on the Republican side is accused of – I'm accused of being hyperbolic and all the other things as well – The poisoning of the brand of the Republican Party is the plan.
The facts be damned.
They do not and will not debate us on policy, they cannot win.
So therefore the South is racist.
Christians are bigots and homophobes, Republican men are sexist and mean predators and violent.
We are bitter clingers, we are religious fanatics who are just as dangerous as ISIS, just as dangerous as Al Qaeda.
But liberalism, the Democrats, they're blameless because they're all of the wonderful things.
They're compassionate, they're friendly, they're not mean, they're very nice, and they're able to relate and understand the life you are living and how bad it is, and the Democrats are willing to try to relate to you and help you make it Better.
We haven't really gone to war with the left.
This is we have here Republican Party hasn't.
George W. Bush didn't defend himself or his party for eight years.
The last two Republican candidates for president did not defend themselves or their party this way.
This premise has been accepted for way too long, and promising to compromise, just it's not, I fear not goodwill.
Our buddies at Campus Reform did a fascinating little video test.
And I can't I can't play you the audio of the video.
I'll tell you about it.
I'll do a much better descriptive job than playing just the audio of it.
But it it it dovetails exactly what I'm talking about here: Republican versus Democrat branding.
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