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April 28, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:58
April 28, 2016, Thursday, Hour #2
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Greetings and welcome back, folks.
It is so great to have you here.
Rush Limbaugh, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have doing that which I was born to do.
Our telephone number, if you want to be on the program's 800 282-2882, the email address El Rushbow at EIBNet.com.
When you talk about, I'm gonna I'm gonna give a stab at this, and I'm not gonna get nearly as deep and detailed as you really need to go.
I'm gonna keep this on a surface level and still try to make my point in trying to keep American jobs in America corporations open and manufacturing in America.
There are so many reasons why this began to change.
It's not just due to trade deals, but they are a factor.
There's no question they are, but it's not just due to that.
You can't you can't talk about this without discussing the voluminous, punitive regulations that are on businesses from the federal governments to the state governments to local governments.
Sometimes as much as 25% or more of the cost of a product is nothing more than regulations, environmental and otherwise, that have been slapped on corporations and business practices that are not even with the force of law.
They've just come from out-of-control regulatory agencies.
There's another factor that you have to consider when talking about this, and that is unions and how they price themselves.
And when you start talking about unions, you then talk about something that is really key and fundamental to this.
And that is profit.
And profit is the result of being able to sell something for more than the total cost in manufacturing it, distributing it, marketing it, advertising it.
You name it, if you can't turn a profit on it, then you will not stay in business.
Not in the kind of economy we have, not in a country like this.
You can't, in fact, you can't do it anywhere.
You can't prop up non-profitable businesses, Venezuela tribe.
Socialism is so inept.
They've got oil at the wazoo, and they still can't run a country.
But I distract myself there.
When you talk about unions, and when you talk about uh regulation, and when you talk about profit, there is one key ingredient here that you cannot ignore, and that is the retail price of whatever product that we're talking about here.
And that price for whatever product we're talking about here has to be something that people can afford.
This is what's gone wrong with health care.
It is precisely by and by the way, on healthcare later on the program, I have come across what I think is conclusive proof that the whole Obamacare initiative is a scam designed to fail and to get us to government-run single payer.
I think I can prove it, even beyond what I already have been able to do since 2010.
So if you have to if if if you have a price, a lot of factors go into price.
Profit, the ability of your customer base to pay for it to afford it, your ability to market and advertise and distribute, and then you're you've got your competitors who are all not in America, and whose costs for the other things that you face may not be the same, they may be less.
This is, folks, this is why markets work.
And any time people try to get in the middle of this and artificially tamper with and massage markets to make them more fair or to do the you end up screwing up everything.
If people would just leave them alone, and I don't mean unregulated.
Nobody's talking About being unreasonable here.
But we live in a country where the Democrat Party has succeeded in generation after generation, believing that corporations and companies and people that make things are the enemy of average Americans.
Corporations want to kill their customers, for example.
They want to poison their customers.
Corporations want dirty air.
They want dirty water.
They want cars and trucks that explode while their customers are driving them.
They want their customers to get cancer from bad drugs.
It's obscene what the Democrat Party has done.
The Democrat Party has successfully, to their benefit, created this relationship where your average American Democrat voter thinks that everything in the commercial marketplace is his enemy.
That's how the Democrats get to control them.
That's how the Democrats get to regulate them because they get public support.
That's how the Democrats get away with running around punishing all these different companies.
Take your pick of whichever company you're talking about.
It's not, it's not as simple, in other words, as going to Ford or Carrier and saying, and even pleading with them.
I mean, you can strong arm them, you can try to persuade them, you can beg them.
Look, please, for the good of America, please stay here.
And they will tell you, we've tried.
We've tried, and then they'll tell you all the reasons why they cannot manufacture in America at a price that will allow them to stay in business.
And then the consumer will hear that and think they're being lied to and think the corporation just wants to soak them and just wants to cheat them, because that's what the Democrat Party has for a hundred years succeeded in making the average American think of the average American business, large or small.
Average American business does not exist to provide employment for a community.
It does not exist to provide health care for its employees.
That's not the purpose of a business.
It's not the purpose of a company.
It's not to support charitable endeavors in the community.
It's nothing of the sort.
It's a very narrow list of requirements for a business to succeed and stay in business.
And all the rest of that ends up being political attachments or PR attachments or goodwill attachments, and sometimes competitive attachments.
Sometimes in a in a different market where employees are tough to come by, companies have to compete by offering better benefits packages than other companies do.
But if left alone, the market would take care of this.
But those days are long gone.
You see the surveys, millennials now think socialism's the answer to everything.
Capitalism is rotten, they hate it because that's what they've been taught.
Millennials of this generation, uh, 20 years ago, the 30-year-olds of that generation thought the same thing.
That capitalism sucks.
It's unfair.
You know why?
Because there's winners and losers, and that's just not right.
Yep, everybody should win or nobody should.
And it's not fair that some do better than others.
It's not fair that some have more than others.
It's not fair that we have winners, and certainly not fair that we have losers.
It's just humiliating.
And if a government can come in and persuade everybody, we're going to take care of the losers, we're going to soften the blow, make sure nobody loses.
Yay, yay.
So that all minorities get taken care of and all the disadvantages get taken care of, and all and you end up with mass mediocrity.
And it ends up being celebrated.
And it ends up being hailed as great.
And you end up with people who think their country has seen its better days.
None of this was necessary.
None of this need happen.
It's all happened because government's gotten missed in the middle of it.
And the proof of it is Obamacare and health care.
There's not, there's very little in health care that the average American can afford to pay out of his own pocket.
We did a morning update yesterday or today.
Was it market watch that did the survey on the 400 bucks?
Market watch went and did a survey, and they asked people.
It's the update for today.
I record these things in advance, of course, because I have things to do after the program.
I'm not going to come in here at 5 a.m. do these things live.
So, yeah, but it runs today.
But here's the point of it.
They asked people what they would do if they had an emergency that required 400 to deal with.
Whatever it was.
Medical automobile repair house payment, you need 400 bucks.
It was shocking.
What was it in the 70 percentiles of people could not come up with it?
That's 47, that's not 70, 47%.
We bounced off the Mitt Romney 47.
47% of people said they would have to sell something to come up with $400 to deal with an unexpected expenditure.
Now stop and think about that for a minute.
That's that's more than living paycheck to paycheck.
That's or worse, that's you know, there's no savings account backing anybody up.
There certainly isn't any retirement there.
And that is why everybody has been slowly conditioned to accept everything being subsidized.
Because there's no way they can health care is the great example.
There's not there's hardly any aspect of health care that you as an individual can afford to pay for yourself.
And there are reasons why.
But take an unregulated, relatively unregulated industry and ask yourself the same thing.
Let's say uh my favorite comparison here, I'm sorry if you've heard it before, is the hotel business.
Nobody would even think the hotel business being subsidized.
Nobody would even demand it.
Because you don't need a hotel to survive.
But health care is a right.
Yes.
And by the way, here's a new one for you if you haven't figured it out.
According to the millennials of today, the 60s radicals of the 60s, and way too many people today, if it's a right, it means the government has to pay for it, too.
And never ever has that been the case.
Never was a right something paid for by the federal government.
But that's what it's become, thanks to our good friends, the left and the Democrats and the Liberals.
So if you have to spend the night in a hotel, there's gonna be one within a 10-mile radius of wherever you are that you will be able to afford.
Not true with medical care.
There's hardly any of it you can't afford.
You haven't been able to afford it for years.
Why?
Because it's so regulated, the government's been so involved in it with so many demands, insurance, this.
When you, when you when commodities and products and services are priced with no concern for the ability of the consumer to pay it, you have lost control, there is no market, and nothing in it is fair or will ever make sense, and the people benefiting from it are few and all at the top.
So back now to our corporation, let's say the XYZ widget company.
XY's XYZ widget company makes their widgets and they've got to sell them in the United States at $10.
And that's based on selling so many, by the way.
And if they don't make a profit, they're in heap big do-do doo.
Well, they take a look at what it's going to cost to manufacture the what if it costs $9.50 to make it in America and $1.75 to make it in Mexico, and they've got competitors in Mexico, they've got competitors in China, they got competitors in Vietnam.
But what if the American widget company we're talking about can only make a profit, can only stay in business if they have to charge $15 for their widget in the United States.
But down the road, you can get China's widget for $10.
Vietnam's for eight.
You can get somebody else's for seven or whatever, maybe different qualities.
But the American-made widget company just can't sell it for that price because it's union payroll requires a minimum of $15 now, whatever it is, whatever the requirements that have been plowed on that business.
My point is there are market reasons why this stuff happens.
And it is businesses reacting to regulations and mandates and government pressures that have been placed on.
And I'm not denying that there's some greed in the court in the on part of some corporations.
I'm not nobody's clean and pure as the wind driven snow at any of this.
But I'm telling you, one of the primary guilty parties in all of this that escapes total blame all the time is your buddies in Washington, D.C. Both parties, the regulatory agencies, the massive federal government, whoever benefits from having corporate crony relationships with people that run these corporations,
of all the people that get blamed for whatever economic mess we're in, the government always, the president, if he's a Democrat always manages to escape having any blame assigned to him whatsoever.
There's another thing, too.
If you're going to stay in business, you're going to have a business in America, and it's a business where you manufacture a product, and you have employees.
Well, you have to have another consideration.
Your employees have to be able to afford it too.
Everybody, depending on your market, the people you're you're marketing, whatever your product, whatever their income range, they've got to be able to afford it.
You have to be able to pay your employees enough that they can live and maybe buy your product.
That's a it's a measuring yardstick.
And this all breaks down with the introduction of international competition and a whole lot of factors.
And the only way sometimes some of these corporations can be made to stay is if somebody, somebody, federal government subsidizes them and makes up for the profit that they cannot earn on their own.
Now, one of the things Trump says he's going to do, I've read extensively his plan, uh, is if he fails in convincing, say Carrier or Nabisco or Ford to stay in America, and if they do indeed go to Mexico, like carrier, he says, fine, I'm going to slap a tariff on every air conditioner you ship into this country, and you're going to pay through the nose for leaving.
Except carrier won't pay diddly squat.
Because corporations don't pay taxes.
What would happen with that tariff?
Carrier would put that tariff somewhere in the price of that air conditioner.
They would add a little bit of it the wholesale level.
They would add a little bit of that tariff at the retail level.
They would take it a little maybe out of their marketing budget, whatever, but they would not pay the tariff when all is.
They might write the check to the government, but the money to pay it is going to come from the people at the end of the line, which is the consumer.
And if the tariff makes the product too expensive and the consumer can't buy them, then there aren't going to be carrier air conditioners in America, and there isn't going to be any tariff, and there isn't going to be any money raised, and there isn't going to be any punishment, and nobody's going to have a carrier air conditioner.
And we will be back.
Look, folks, there are exceptions to everything.
Like Reagan.
Reagan placed a tariff on a Japanese to save Harley Davidson, and it worked.
But he only did it once.
Now, I don't I didn't mean to be able to explain everything, answer every question in that little monologue.
The primary point that I wanted to get across is that the loss of American manufacturing jobs is not exclusively due to the fact that corporations are mean, evil, rotten.
Because after all, corporations are not people, doesn't the left tell us that?
How can a corporation be mean and rotten and have rotten people if they're not people?
But when markets are interfered with, and some are subsidized, some businesses, some have close crony arrangements with government, other companies in the same business are not allowed to.
You have unequal competition.
It's massively complicated here.
And nobody, I I'm not opposed to saving American jobs.
I was not defending any of it.
I'm trying to explain how it happens and to give you an idea how intricately woven it is complicated.
It's not just that American corporations are evil.
Now, I'll tell you this.
Having said that, it used to be that most American industry, big business particularly, was devoted to free markets, and that's not the case anymore.
They have they have uh they have figured out that it's much easier to compete against their competitors if they can sidle up to government when their competitors can't.
So the idea that big business is a bunch of free market conservative Republicans cutthroat guy, that's not the case anymore.
Liberalism, Democrat Party politics corrupts practically everything it seeks to dominate and control.
Because by definition, a Democrat Party in liberalism is not a hands-off affair.
They don't trust you to do anything.
They want to control virtually everything you do for one reason, their own power and securing votes, and they will make anybody they have to an enemy.
And they will create adversarial relationships with voters and companies if they can in order to get people voting for them.
That's where this ultimately is going to get fixed down the road, if you ask me.
We are back, El Rushbow at half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.
Now, here is what Mr. Trump has said.
We're going to get back to your phone calls here in just a second.
And coming up, I think I have found conclusive proof that Obamacare is a scam designed to fail.
I can prove it very easily.
Can't wait to get to it, too.
Designed to fail to create, facilitate single-payer government-run health care, and it'll end up being rationing, it'll be worse than it is now.
But the Democrats will run it, and they'll have more control over your daily life than they have ever dreamed of.
And we are only a few short years away from this being realized.
And something else I want to touch on today.
I uh I was watching Carl Rove on the Fox News channel today.
And I uh something struck me.
Uh Carl Rowe was being asked to explain Donald Trump's massive electoral sweep on Tuesday.
Massive.
I mean, he won every county in five states.
And he has collected more Republican votes than Romney got in all of 2012.
The turnout is through the roof.
I mean, it's out the wazoo.
And Rove started talking about how Trump can't win because of his record-high negatives.
And I immediately instinctively had a question that has arisen in my mind countless times before.
How do these two things go together?
How in the world do you have somebody over here winning five counties?
I know it's it's uh Northeastern states that most people live them are Democrats, so the Republican turnout in these states is not that big because the Republican percentage of population is not that big, but still of the universe of potential Republican votes, Trump is getting practically all of them.
I mean, five counties.
Turn out through the roof, all of these numbers, the the total votes, the uh voter enthusiasm, but he can't win because his negatives are so high.
I said, how does that work?
How in the world can somebody with negatives as high as Trump be doing what he's already doing?
I said, something doesn't make sense to me here.
Something doesn't job.
And I had to remember, okay, this is this is an establishment theory here that we're hearing.
That Trump's negatives.
In fact, Rob said Trump's negatives are higher than anybody's negatives in the history Of political polling.
Nobody's had negatives this high.
The one thing he didn't say is that Hillary Clinton is so close to him in negatives that you can barely spot the difference.
But nobody talks about her negatives being high.
But even so.
I said, how does this work?
How can you have this illustration of massive support and popularity while at the same time supposedly holding the highest negatives in the history of polling?
So I began as I am wont to do, as to figure this out myself.
I started jotting down thoughts and notes as I had them, and I'm going to touch on that before the program ends today as well.
Plus, we have your phone calls to get back to.
But I just want to share with you before we get back to the phones what Trump has said about making sure that American manufacturing jobs don't leave and how he's going to do it.
And basically, uh he said he's going to raise tariffs.
When it comes to carrier air conditioners and cars, say Ford's, uh if they're made in Mako.
He did an interview with Trump Bart.
Sorry, Breitbart.
Brighton News Daily.
And from that interview, he said, first of all, you're going to have to look to lower taxes for those who do business inside the United States.
So American corporations that stay here will be rewarded because they're going to get a tax cut from Trump.
And he said, we may very well have to charge taxes at the border.
When somebody drives a car through the border to sell in the United States or brings an air conditioner across, we may have to charge taxes at the border, i.e.
a tariff.
But he said, look, we've closed our plants, we've lost our jobs.
They're not going to build cars in Mexico and sell them in the U.S., okay?
We're not going to let that happen.
We can lower our taxes.
We're probably going to have to charge a surtax at the border.
Otherwise, we're going to lose a fortune.
And that'll help Ford and other people make a decision to buy in the United States, to build in the United States.
Because we're going to tax them to the point that it's not going to be profitable for them to leave.
If they go to Mexico and they want to make cars to sell in America, we're going to make it so cost prohibited they won't be able to sell them here, and so they won't leave.
Reuters reporting on it said Trump would tax carrier air conditioning units from moving to Mexico.
Said he would impose taxes on carrier air conditioning units manufactured in Mexico in light of the company's decision to move production from Indiana, a position in line with his strong opposition to international trade deals.
And during a CBS News debate in February, Trump said, I'm going to tell him I'm going to get consensus from Congress and we're going to tax you.
If you're going to leave, we're going to tax you.
So stay where you are in Mexico or build in the U.S. Because we are killing ourselves with trade deals that are no good for us and no good for our workers.
So in the uh debate, he even talked about working with Congress to get these tariffs imposed.
And just as an aside, I have a little interesting economic fact, factoid that I want to pass.
Because during during the break, uh Mr. Snerdley said to me, well, uh, you know, wouldn't wouldn't Trump's idea be effective?
Because I mean, if if if carrier doesn't sell air conditioners, isn't that worried about their market share?
And you know, market share is one of the most misunderstood barometers of business success.
Market share is one of the in some cases it means a lot, but in other cases it means nothing.
Let me tell you about Apple for a second.
Apple, even considering this last quarter that they just reported their financial, Apple earns.
Are you ready for this?
Over 90% of all profit from the sale of smartphones worldwide.
90% of the profit worldwide, Apple earns.
Do you know what their market share is for iPhones?
In your mind, take a wild guess what Apple's market share is.
It doesn't even hit 20%.
Worldwide market share.
They sell 230 million phones a year.
Samsung makes that many that they give away in Bangladesh and India.
Samsung manufactures 94% of all cell phones sold in the world.
They have a 94% market share, and they are losing money.
They are showing maybe a 2% profit.
So ask yourself, how can a company with 20% market share get 90% of all profits in the smartphone?
This doesn't include iPads or any other.
This is just the cell phone business.
And one of the reasons is Apple does not have a cheap version.
Apple's average selling price or retail, average retail selling price is so high.
Their margins are like 40, 45%.
They don't they don't make phones if they sell for 150 bucks.
Now you you can get a three or four-year-old phone on contract for nothing, but it's a three or four-year-old phone.
But they have carved out a specific way of doing business.
And it doesn't depend on market share.
It's totally, totally focused on profit and average seller price.
And when you tell people that, they're shocked because everybody's been conditioned with limited economic education.
They've had to believe that market share is everything.
And you can you can do anything you want with the with the with statistics.
Radio or TV ratings, you know, ratings versus profits versus market share.
You could do the same thing.
Depends on what your objective is in terms of your business objective, what you want to achieve and how you want to maximize it, what you're really trying to accomplish.
And in some people, it isn't profit.
Some people are admitted profit's not what they're pursuing.
They're pursuing hip, they're pursuing buzz on certain things.
They'll take a loss leader on it and they'll try to earn the profit somewhere else, like guiding light, but they'll lose money on Colbert just to say they've got the hippist late night show.
It's uh you talk about a spider web of intricately woven potential possibility, trying to unravel some of this stuff.
It's fun.
It's fascinating.
Anyway, I take a break here, folks.
We'll be back and get back to your calls at the same time.
So don't go away.
John in San Diego, I appreciate your patience.
You are next, sir.
Great to have you with us.
Thanks for taking my call.
I have a question on the vice president pick.
I think it's a brilliant stroke from Ted Cruz as far as you know, an outsider business person in Cardi Fiorina, and you know, how are they gonna go after her, you know?
Are they gonna like Sarah Palin's Saturday Night Live?
They're gonna break out that playbook.
And uh I had a comment on John Boehner, if I may, as far as you know what he said on um Ted Cruz as far as you know that's name calling, that's right out of second grade.
You know, if you're losing the argument, what do you do?
You start name calling, and I learned that a long time ago.
If someone's calling names, you know, they lost the argument.
That's kind of why I started listening to you, you know, back in the day.
I go, why are they calling Russia all these names back in the early 90s?
And I started listening, and I'm like, well, wait a minute.
That's all they could do.
It's just you know, it's that's actually you're you're you're right on a nobody ever takes me on on the substance.
Nobody ever says I'm wrong.
They just either get mad at the way I say it or who I happen to say it about.
Um that's that that's a good point.
That does name Calling does tend to indicate lack of anything else to say.
The Fiorina pick, uh, it's going to be categorized depending on who does the categorizing, any which way you can imagine.
It's going to be called a desperation move.
It's going to be called a brilliant move.
Uh it's it's going to be called a great tactical strategic move for California.
Uh delegate selection and winning in outright in uh California.
Uh necessary to get women because Trump's negatives with wing and women are very high.
And then you're going to have the Trump Oppo research people going out there saying, hey, wait a minute.
Do you know that this woman Carly Fiorina, we got videotape here where she just loving on Hillary Clinton?
And that'll make Carly say, well, yeah, but that was years ago.
That's that was then.
This is not now.
Um it's I mean, pick like this, it's gonna have its pros and and its cons.
Uh you've got two different strategies.
Right out in plug.
I mean, Trump, with Bobby Knight, is is capitalizing on the uh uh media slash celebrity big nature things, and Cruz is using an insider strategy of trying to actually win delegates in a procedure that nobody sees because it's not covered, because it's not sexy, it's not exciting.
Um we're gonna know here, aren't we, after Indiana?
I mean, a lot of people think they already do.
A lot of people think it's already over.
Um, but it isn't yet.
But people are acting like that to try to create that mindset with certain people.
So as far as the uh selection, I think I think she's great.
I wish she goes out and uh she has the ability to hit Hillary and hit Hillary hard with credibility.
Uh and I think she's she's fast on her feet.
She's a sharp and quick thinker.
I I uh but it is a move that usually is not made at this time.
You know, you pick a nominee.
Reagan tried it in 76 to get the nomination.
He chose Richard Schweiker, the governor of Pennsylvania.
It did not work then.
But it was a move that probably was the only one he had left.
We'll be back.
Some of the other things I hyped and promoted.
It's coming up in the rest of the program.
The rest of the program is here right after this.
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