All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 30, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:20
November 30, 2015, Monday, Hour #2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I hope everybody had a nice Thanksgiving weekend.
Although Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving anymore, it's merely like the day before Black Friday.
That's when all the shopping's supposed to begin.
They actually say the Black Friday sales were doubt there were more sales online than in retail stores on Black Friday.
I think that's significant, but I'm not sure why.
Anyway, in the first hour of the program today, we talked about several things, including this climate change conference and how the nations of the world are rallying now.
All the leaders leaders are there, rallying to deal with this terrible, terrible threat at the same time that there's this almost apathy from the left and from our own leadership about the threat of jihad from Islamist terrorists.
I talked about the speech codes that exist on American college campuses and some of the almost loony overreactions.
They fired the made the president of the University of Missouri resign because there was racism on campus.
He wasn't doing anything racist, but somehow he wasn't doing enough to stop people from being racists.
You have people that are flexing their muscles to try to enforce speech codes to stop people from speaking in the very places that you would want speech to occur the most, and it's not just limited to college campus.
It's occurring in our own society, conservative talk show hosts now the planned parenthood killings over the weekend.
People are being told to tone down their rhetoric.
Quinton Tarantino's running around talking about police officers being murderers.
Nobody's making him tone down his rhetoric.
It's only people on the right that are told they have to tone anything down.
Bad things are used as an excuse to make us shut up.
Anyway, I want to talk about one of the many demands that are being made by one of the many groups that are out there agitating on American campuses because this is one that actually is getting some pushback from the left.
On my show in Milwaukee, I always talk about using the tactics of the left against them because they can't take it, they can't handle it.
Try to silence them on something.
I think you're seeing an example of it here.
Anyway, at Princeton University in New Jersey, one of the demands of some African American student activists is they want to take the name of former President Woodrow Wilson off of some building or some institute or something there.
Wilson was tied in to Princeton.
And they cite Wilson's history of racism.
This is actually getting some pushback from the left, and they're not pushing back on any of the other campus speech codes.
Well, there's well, look, whether he was or he wasn't, you can't erase history.
Wilson was the president of the United States, he was here.
You can't pretend he didn't exist, and he did all of these wonderful things.
I think this is something that we on the right need to be open-minded about.
In the same way that I criticize the left for not being receptive to any ideas and feeling the need to silence everyone.
Just because a demand is made by a bunch of left-wing agitators doesn't mean that it ought not be listened to.
Because in this case, there might be something here.
Woodrow Wilson was a racist.
And he used the power of the federal government to enforce racism.
You can make a strong argument that in the 50 or 60 years after the Civil War, America was starting to have some sort of reconciliation, a coming together.
We were still a segregated nation, but the relationship between whites and blacks in America, late 1800s, early 1900s, it was getting better.
We were a country in which half the states had slaves.
We had a war over states' rights and slavery.
And it evolved into a society that was becoming a melting pot.
Our attitudes toward immigration then, when we had an orderly immigration process, was during this period, late 1800s, early 1900s, that Ellis Island was overwhelmed, the immigrants were coming from Europe.
Blacks in America were being assimilated into a larger society.
It was the government of Wildrow Wilson, In the name of progressivism, he was the father of the whole thing that really enforced segregation.
We need to have strong black schools.
Yeah, black schools.
The government itself, he made sure that the military remained segregated.
Many of the institutional agencies enforced segregation.
The reading of history here is kind of enlightening.
It's a pretty good subject for debate.
The actual legacy of Woodrow Wilson.
But the left doesn't want to hear this because he's one of their heroes.
Woodrow Wilson, not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Woodrow Wilson was the guy that started us on this path toward progressivism.
He was a big government guy.
He believed in a large federal government with all of these programs.
And I'll contend that that was the beginning of this doom that we have of this massive federal budget deficit, a government that is just overwhelming.
It started with Wilson.
And for that reason, he's admired by the left.
Maybe we ought to take his name off of a few buildings at Princeton.
Maybe he ought to be characterized as a racist.
I'm not suggesting that we censor the existence of Woodrow Wilson, and I'm not even saying that I want to endorse the demands of the people that are agitating at Princeton.
But it's very very interesting to see what happens when the people that are out there pushing for speech codes and claiming just about everything is racist, go after a liberal sacred cow.
You think our side squeals.
Look at them.
In fact, this issue, the role of Wilson, is exactly the kind of debate we're supposed to have on college campuses.
Some people believe that Wilson was a racist and was a to quote Donald Trump, bad guy.
It's a bad guy.
Others believe that Woodrow Wilson is a hero.
Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that universities are supposed to explore?
That you're supposed to be able to make an argument for and against, throw ideas out and debate peacefully, without hate and without animosity toward the person on the other side.
That's what we're supposed to do.
It's how you find truth.
It's what real inquiry actually is.
So let's have that debate.
But let's not have this business of silencing everyone and saying that you can't talk, saying you have to create a campus safe zone because some weenie little sophomore feels threatened by having heard something that he or she can't handle.
How are we going to fight Jihad if we can't handle a comment being made by somebody in a fraternity?
Anyway, the phone number here is 1-800-282-2882.
Let's go to Milford, Michigan and Mark.
Mark, you're on the Russian Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Okay, how are you today?
I'm great, thank you.
Listen, I read a an article uh this weekend off Drudge Report, uh, and it was about uh a phenomenon that happened in an archipelago in the Bahama Islands uh apparently 100,000 years ago, at least this is what uh James Hanson,
the retired NASA engineer who was the chief global warming climate change architect, has said that these boulders in this archipelago got there by some massive catastrophic weather event that caused these huge tidal waves and dropped these boulders 300 feet above sea level on a cliff
a perfect line.
And the this and the reason that I bring this up is because there's one question that nobody asks these climate change people, and that is okay, if this happened a hundred thousand years ago when no people were on the planet, how can man be responsible for what's happening today?
And why is any change necessarily bad?
You ray you ask, of course, and you're right about this.
It is the question.
If we accept the fact that however old you think the planet is, it has always changed.
And you also accept the fact that carbon emissions are only a century and a half old, and man didn't have the ability to do anything to the planet prior to that.
Why was the climate changing and why was the planet changing before?
They don't have a good answer to that question.
Let's say c the climate is right now changing, which it is which it always has.
How do we know that it's man any more than whatever caused the phenomenon that you were describing?
They don't have a good answer for that, but as I said, their goal is to simply come to the s solution that we've got to scale back manufacturing, we've got to reduce carbon emissions, we've got to cut back on capitalism.
That's their whole goal here, and that's why they bring up climate change.
You're right about that.
With regard to the glacial, uh the glaciers that I've described.
We're told that all of these landforms and the mountains and valleys here in North America are because the glaciers were receded, and when they did, that created these ruts, and it didn't knock down some mountains and it flattened other areas.
All of that occurred.
Well, what made the glaciers recede?
It certainly wasn't man.
He wasn't around.
They don't have a good answer for that.
Thank you for the call, Mark.
To White Plains, New York and Rich, Rich you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hey Mark, thanks for taking my call.
Um in the beginning of your show today, you were being very critical of Islamic terrorism, but I recall being on this show with you uh close to a year ago, where I enumerated all the different ways Obama is catering to Muslims in this country, and I described Obama not as a Muslim, but as a Muslim sympathizer.
And afterwards you said I wouldn't use that kind of rhetoric.
So I'm asking you now, would you call Obama a Muslim sympathizer?
And if not, please tell me the more politically correct correct description you would use uh to describe Obama's favorable relationship of the Muslim community.
Are you sure it was me?
Rush has a lot of guest hosts.
And we we all get we all get blamed for what we all get blamed for what one another does does.
I just want to make sure that this was me that said what you what you said, and then it that it wasn't one of the other one of the other marks or one of the other guys that comes in here and does.
No, Mark Stein, I would remember because he's totally different, you know.
I mean, uh and uh I'm I'm I'm on ninety-nine percent sure it was your you now I remember HR was screening the calls that day, I rest his soul.
Yeah, um well then it would have been more than a year ago.
Anyway, the reason I question it is I've used that term about Obama myself.
I I have you know, there are a lot of people who argue that he is a Muslim, and I've said that there's no direct evidence of that at all.
I think that he is what he was.
He was a guy who went to a Christian church run by a racist, so I assume that what he is is a guy who is a race hustler, which I've always alleged with regard to Obama.
But I certainly think he is sympathetic to the Muslim cause, and this results in him being soft on terrorism as if the two have to be linked.
So maybe I said that and maybe I didn't, but uh I've used the term myself in describing in describing Obama.
It sounds like a loaded term, but the term sympathizer simply means that you're sympathetic to the cause, which I think he is.
So I'm not gonna deny having said it, but I might do a Hillary here on you end.
Just claim that it was a long time ago that was resolved, and at this point, what does it really matter?
Thank you for the call, Rich.
I'm Mark Belling in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling and for Rush.
I'm being praised by the staff here for the way we ended the last segment when I quoted Hillary of the at this point, what does it matter?
Uh uh think about this for a minute.
Imagine if we can simply adopt all the weasling of the Clintons for every problem that we ever have in our lives, that we can simply parse words, make stuff up, you know, that we don't have to follow any rules, do whatever you want with your emails.
Imagine if we could just all live like the Clintons.
You realize how much easier our lives would be.
We can get away with anything we want.
I mean, did you hear her comment about uh rape victims?
She said rape victims deserve to be believed.
Nobody stands there to follow up and say, does that include Juanita Broadwick?
They don't get asked those questions.
They're just they're able to like they're the ultimate firewalkers.
They just walk through fire and they're allowed to do so.
So that's my new leaf.
When I do rush now, I'm just going to emulate The Clintons in.
If I'm trapped in anything, or if a caller turns on me, I'm just going to ask, you know, WWCD.
What would Clinton do?
It could be either of them.
Anyway, let's go to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where I did go to college.
Luke, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with me, Mark Belling.
Hey, Mark.
Um, I am currently a student at UW Lacrosse, and I just wanted to quick talk about what happened.
So I don't I emailed her twice.
Um, Paula Knuton is uh lady, and she never really gave a reasoning on why she had to send those emails out because the construction site on where the Confederate flag was.
Is no one even knew about the situation other than a few people, and she wrote in the emails how there was fear in everyone's eyes about it.
Fear and angst.
I reported and said that I had fear that the First Amendment was being taken away on my campus, and she did not address that at all.
And then in the follow-up email, I said it be like she said in her emails because of privilege.
We we don't know what that's like, and we can't experience the fear that we're gonna be able to do it.
Yes, that's the other rationalization they use.
Because of white privilege, no white person can object to any speech code because no white person has the ability to understand what it's like to be a victim.
So therefore, the only people that can object to these codes, evidently, are African Americans, Latinos, members of another minority m members of another minority group.
But when they do, they're accused of being sellouts or Uncle Tom's or all of the things that marginalize them.
For those of you wondering what we're talking about here, on the first hour I mentioned a situation at the University of Wisconsin La Cross where a private contractor had a Confederate flag in a truck at a work site, and they chased the truck off the work site and they sent out this email apologizing to everyone on campus for the legitimate fear and angst that were felt.
I suspect that there isn't a single student that actually did have fear over that Confederate flag, but if they did, that's an even worse problem than the existence of the flag if we've got a society in which people are terrified of ideas and images on a college campus, that's a real problem.
First of all, we shouldn't really be terrified of anything.
We live in a world that's dangerous.
There are real problems and there are bad people.
To say that we're going to recoil in horror every time we see an example of it.
It's kind of absurd.
Thank you for the call, Luke.
With regard to those speech codes, you love to turn those questions around on the people that are implementing them.
All of the words that you can't say, does that apply to the music?
What about the hip hop lyrics that are coming out of just about every dorm window on campus?
Should a student be able to play those songs?
Should the words that can't be uttered at all, because they're hateful, also apply to entertainers, like rap artists.
Or should though or is that somehow different?
They can't really answer the question because as I say, there's no real ideology here.
There's no real desire to create safe zones.
It's all just an attempt to shut up anybody who is right of center.
To somewhere in Central Illinois, Linda, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Thank you for taking my call.
I just wanted to share it that my mom has told the story many times that when she was a student at Central Missouri State University in Warren's Burgess, Missouri, that she was told that by the year 2000, Missouri would have become a tropical paradise, and Florida would be like the Sahara Desert.
And keep in mind that this was she was told us in the summer of 1936.
Well, we do know this.
Missouri's never gonna be a paradise.
I only say that because that's where the star of the show is from.
I'm just kidding.
I as long as we're dating ourselves and going back into the Stone Ages, Linda.
The big deal when I was in college is they told us the Ice Age was coming.
I what I think it was Time Magazine.
It was one of the new ice age is coming.
Now it's the now then it became global warming, and now they have the thank you for the call.
Now they have the ultimate euphemism, climate change.
Climate change as an issue is a very strategic decision.
It means they've got everything covered.
Hurricane activity increases, climate change, hurricane activity slows, climate change, earthquakes increase, climate change, no earthquakes, climate change.
Two or three El Niños in five or seven years, climate change.
No El Niños in ten years.
Climate change.
It allows them to say anything that happens with the climate or even the weather is an example of climate change, which then gives them the authority to therefore go out and say we've got to reduce carbon emissions as if all the things that are happening in the world, that's the only possible one that could affect the climate.
Sunspots?
No, no, no, no.
Sunspots are like an explosion on the sun.
Like that doesn't have a potential of doing something to our planet.
No, no, no.
It's got to be something that man is doing.
Anyway, my name is Mark Belling, and I'm privileged to sit in today at EIB.
Yeah, but Russia's never ever really entirely gone because there is Rush 24 7.
If you join right now, you can get Russia's new golden EIB Christmas ornament free.
They gave me one.
I got myself a golden Christmas ornament.
So I get, what do they call that stuff when you go to an award show swag, I think?
Is that what it has?
I have my Rush Limbaugh swag, I have my Christmas ornament.
So you get that if you join Russia 24 7.
Uh Rushlinbaugh.com, of course, is always available for you.
As you heard, my name is Mark Belling.
I'm setting in for Rush.
I want to do a segment here about something that I've talked about quite a bit on my local program in Milwaukee.
My launching off point is going to be a comment that Marco Rubio made in the most recent Republican debate.
He got some grief for it.
But underneath the comment is some real truth.
He said, We need more welders and not as many philosophers.
You can make more money as a welder.
The point that he was making is he's talking about a very real problem in this country, and that's the skills gap.
You know, you see these guys that do the infomercials in the middle of the night about how they can make you rich and you can flip homes and that'll make you rich.
You can do this and it'll make you rich.
I don't know about making you rich, but there is still a formula for nailing the American dream.
Even if you don't have a lot of advantages in life, and you're not the smartest kid, and you don't have the best grades.
Right now, there is an extreme shortage in a lot of, and I can't speak to the entire United States, but I sure can talk about the upper Midwest where I'm from.
Companies that are looking for Rubio mentioned welders, they're almost begging for workers.
But it isn't just welding, any kind of skilled hands-on trade, plumbers, electricians, masons, all that stuff.
There's shortages in all of those fields.
If you have a specific skill, non-college related, non-degree oriented, generally a skill that associates doing some work with your hands, graftsman is another one, you're going to have five, seven, nine job offers.
One of the things that knocks a lot of people out is they can't pass the drug test.
Some companies don't want to hire you if you have a criminal record.
You take those two things out of the equation.
If you show up for your work show up for work, you're a reasonably decent enough employee.
You're a welder, you're a bricklayer, you're a stonemason, you're an electrician, plumber's apprentice.
You're going to make a fortune because nobody is going into those fields.
When I've done this topic on my show in Milwaukee, it just resonates with the people that are in this field.
I had a guy call me up.
He was about working off of memory here.
Maybe 33 years old.
He works at a construction crew.
Said, I'm the youngest guy here.
Construction is kind of a younger man's field anyway, but all the old guys are still here because they're making so much money because you need people to work on the crew.
Another fellow called me up.
He works, he does maintenance on those big refrigeration equipments that are in grocery stores.
Said he's about 60 years old.
He has as much work as he can handle.
He could work whatever he wants because there's a shortage of people that do that type of work.
He said, look, I don't know what anybody's going to do when I retire.
Nobody is going into this field.
Nobody.
So how is this happening?
How do we have an economy in which we have a higher number right now of people that are out of the workforce than at any point in American history?
They can't find jobs, and they've opted out.
The unemployment rate has gone down, but the rate of non-employment, which is different.
The people that have chosen not to work or have given up is higher than ever.
You have these people that are protesting and yelling and screaming, claiming that they ought to be paid $15 an hour to work at a fast food restaurant because they're worth that.
They'll make more than that as starting pay in any of the trades that I just mentioned.
Why don't they go and get training to do that?
I think there are several reasons for it.
First of all, the jobs that I describe, they're actually kind of hard work.
You actually have to do work and there's no glamour in it.
Secondly, we ostracize that kind of work.
You're not going to get a lot of attention at a party.
You know, when the guys all walk around, I'm a stockbroker, I'm a this, I'm a dentist, I'm a that.
Okay, I'm I'm a Mason, I'm a bricklayer.
You have no attention, there's no sexiness out of that.
Nobody's gonna go, ooh, really, you're a bricklayer.
Really, you're an electrician.
You don't get that.
You also have a lot of parents.
We live in the generation of the participation trophy.
Every kid is special, every kid is wonderful.
No parent wants to acknowledge that maybe their kid isn't going to go to a major university.
Maybe their kid's not going to be a lawyer.
Maybe their kid's not going to be a broker.
Maybe their kid isn't going to do something and get an MBA.
Maybe they're not even cut out for college.
Parents don't want to think that.
Then you have grade inflation.
You know how hard it is to get a D right now in grade school or high school?
It's almost impossible.
It's like what used to have been an F-a C. Those are the so-called dummies.
So with all the kids getting A's and B's, we delude ourselves into thinking that everybody's smart.
Then you have politicians, Obama is one of them, that talk about guaranteeing a free college education for everyone because everyone has a right to go to college as if college is always the be all and end all, and I'm not trying to dump on going to college.
If you're a smart kid and you have ambition and you've got a field that you know that you want to go into, college is still the answer for most well-educated young people.
But it's not the answer for everybody at the high school level.
The guidance counselors and the teachers, they sneeze at these blue-collar jobs.
They're always trying to direct people toward moving toward a higher education.
As a result, here's what our society has become.
We have millions of people that are drowning in student loan debt and are underemployed and can't get a job in their field.
And I don't mean $5,000 in debt, I mean like a hundred thousand.
Student loans that are taking twenty and twenty-five years to pay off.
You talk about the millennials not buying any houses, it's because they're already drowning in debt from their student loans.
The class envy that they have.
They wonder why they're not making 75 or 90 or 100,000.
You wonder why a lot of them are saying a fast food restaurant should pay $15, because that's what some college graduates are being forced to do.
Because they have these degrees, but they don't have any guarantee of employment.
We're graduating, if anything, too many people out of American colleges.
And we're not producing enough people who know how to make things, who have marketable skills.
Here's my pearl of wisdom for the day.
If you know how to do something that hardly anybody else knows how to do, you are going to make it in this country.
The whole key is to have a skill that most people don't have.
There are a zillion of another one.
Even commercial truck drivers.
There's a shortage of them.
We hear stories about immigrants having to take those jobs because you can't find enough people to drive trucks.
Again, it's a specific skill, but it's not one that you have to go to school for five or seven years to learn.
It's not one that you have to be a straight A student to do.
I had a guy call my programs talking about welding.
Welding comes up a lot.
That was the run Rubio mentioned.
He said, You can teach anybody how to weld.
You can't teach them it in five minutes.
There is some training involved, and you have to be a responsible person.
You're I mean you're working with fire for heaven's sakes, but you could train almost anyone to do it.
You have to be willing to go through the training, and you have to be willing to do it.
We talk about how our economy is changing.
I mentioned that there were more online sales than sales at physical stores on Black Friday.
The virtual world we're in, robotics, high tech.
Well, there's always going to be a need for people who make things.
We're always going to have buildings.
There's always going to be houses.
There's always going to be apartments.
There's always going to be offices.
And the tech stuff that we're talking about, just about all of it's made out of metal.
There's always going to be a need for a welder.
There's always going to be need for an electric the electronics.
Every possible kind of electrician.
Draftsman.
Anything having to do with planning.
This is a higher level of education.
Engineering.
Engineers make a fortune right now.
You graduate with an engineering degree, you can get $150,000 job right off the bat.
Why?
There aren't that many of them.
Now, some of this stuff is hard.
I mentioned engineering.
But a lot of it, a lot of it is stuff that you can train people to do.
It's at the point where you almost wonder if we're at a crisis with regard to it.
Talk to anybody who owns one of these businesses.
They say they spend as much time trying to hire workers as they do trying to get jobs.
That's a really screwed up world.
When we have the levels of unemployment that we have, yet a shortage of people to do all sorts of jobs that almost anyone can learn how to do.
I said that we have a lot of people that push people away from those fields.
We ostracize the work because it isn't glamorous, it isn't sexy.
You can do that job and eventually make 75, 90,000, 100,000.
You can get trained in that field without having a penny of student loan debt.
You can go into those fields and have the freedom to work when you want.
You can live just about anywhere you want to.
You can choose the employer you want.
If you have a boss that's a jerk, you can go somewhere else because you have a skill that hardly anybody else has.
Rubio is right.
Nobody's talking about this.
Nobody's pushing it.
You have people who have a political agenda when they talk about income inequality and they talk about raising the minimum wage.
Well, rather than focus and obsess over raising the minimum wage, how about encouraging people to go into the fields where jobs exist right now where you can make way more than the minimum wage.
Rather than running around marching and protesting, how about going to a tech school and getting a one-year certification in any one of these trades that I said, there are a lot of employers right now that are doing in-house training because they're looking for people who can do these types of jobs.
Anyway, I throw it out there.
And if anyone would like to react to it, the phone number is 1-800-282-2882.
When I've done the topic on my program in Milwaukee, I found that it's resonated with people, and it might be a more specific localized issue that this is an issue in the upper Midwest, but I get the sense that just about anywhere in this country if you have a skill that has something to do with hands-on work that you can really determine your own path in life.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I want to share something that I got from somebody who's listening this afternoon.
Hi, Mark doing a great job filling in for Rush.
Hi, Mark doing a great job filling in for Rush.
No, he is more than that.
Hi, Mark, doing a great job.
Uh I'm 48 years old, union 30 year plumber in New York City.
Graduated five beta kappa from Stonybrook, was heavily discouraged from going into trades in high school.
Got into law school, decided to go back to plumbing, which I truly love.
We have a big lack of quality, and he capitalizes quality kids coming in.
Lots of drug tattoos, nose rings, attitudes, many illegals.
A good union plumber can make a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars plus benefits, and the guy signed it.
There are just story after story after story like that out there.
I don't know how you sneeze at that level of pay.
No, the guy said that he's been in it 30 years to get to that level.
I suspect if you entered that field right now with a good attitude, you could make something relatively close to it now.
Let's go to Boynton Beach, Florida, Jack.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
How are you?
I'm great.
I have a I'm allowed to say you're doing a great job for Rush.
Yeah, you can say it about 15 times and I'll be happy.
Okay.
My son is doing exactly what happened that you're talking about.
He graduated from college, couldn't find a job in marketing, which is basically sales.
And he took a job at a cable company and uh he hated it.
He hated every minute of it.
But he did it because he had bills to pay, and he wasn't any choice, but he learned some skills, and he was able to parlay that.
He opened a business on his own, uh, fixing computers.
So he learned how to deal with the public, he learned aspects of electronics, and now it's paying off for him.
He's not selling really, but he's got a great job and he works for himself.
And he's doing something that we don't have a lot of people doing, or at least not enough people doing.
Yeah, but that glamorous to sit there and open up a computer or a phone or a tablet.
I mean, that's a whole problem.
I mean, we live in the age of the selfie.
Everybody wants to be a star.
We turn people like the Kardashians into celebrities, people who don't do people who don't do anything.
They, you know, I I without overly politicizing this, and I do think that Rubio did a service by bringing the issue up without overly politicizing it, this is an area where Obama, if he wasn't such a demagogue, could be of considerable benefit.
Look at the number of young African American males who are never going to make it in college because they ended up going to very bad public schools, fortunate if they were able to graduate.
We instead of getting up there and telling them that it's a rigged deal where they don't have any opportunity to succeed, how about encouraging them to learn one of these trades and go out and make something of your life?
The opportunity to excel still does exist.
But if you're out there just telling everybody that we live in a world in which the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor, which is largely true, and you have no chance, which is largely false, we aren't helping anyone.
There is a solution for millions and millions of Americans.
People have done these jobs as long as we've had a nation, but right now, really for the first time ever, there is a shortage of people willing to go into this type of work.
And as you mentioned it, it's not sexy, it's not glamorous.
He meets a young woman and tells her what he does for a living, she's not gonna say ooh, but he's got an opportunity for a life.
That business that he has is probably going to grow.
He's gonna end up being the guy that hires people to work for him.
He's going to have something that he can use for the rest of his life because we always are going to need people to service things.
I just think that we live in a country right now in which everybody knows what the problem is, but nobody is willing to direct people into the areas in which they can excel.
It is partly a political problem because you need to hear it from people like the president, and fortunately Rubio brought it up, but it's also societal in which we look down our nose at certain types of work, work that pays very well.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
When Rubio made that comment during the uh Republican debate, you can make more money as a welder than a philosopher.
Everybody jumped on and said, That's not true.
Well, it really is true.
They made the mistake of comparing the average salary of a philosophy professor with the average salary of a welder.
The problem is that most people who graduate with philosophy degrees don't get hired.
There's not much you can do with a philosophy degree other than be a professor.
So if you take the people who have those degrees, my guess is they do make less, but also you get a job as a welder.
That can lead to something else.
You eventually have a chance to own your own business.
You network, you connect, you move forward.
I don't care what it is, what the skill is.
If you have a skill that most people don't have, you still control your own destiny, and that's a message our young people need to hear.
▲
Export Selection