CALLER: Hi. Hi, Rush, how you doing?
RUSH: Fine, Sir. Thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Rush, I just want to tell you I’m a little bit nervous, I’m a little bit angry, but I tried getting through yesterday about you talking about the economy and everything, and I’m just really, really upset. I guess you could say I’m a Rush Baby, pretty much through high school. I started my own business, and you’ve been there, but I just don’t think — the education on this program has stopped, and I really think that either you don’t know, which I don’t think that you don’t know, being a student of William Buckley, or you’re lying to your listeners about what’s really happening in the economy. And I just don’t think that you’re being very honest. I think that your audience can handle it. I think you can tell them the truth about what’s really going on.
RUSH: Well, this is interesting. Can you hold on through a commercial break here?
CALLER: Yes, Sir.
RUSH: Would you be willing, after the commercial break, to pretend to be host, pretend to be me, and you tell ’em what’s really going on with the economy?
CALLER: Are you sure?
RUSH: Damn right. I want to hear what you’d say.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’m not a Darwinist. I don’t close out people who disagree. Yeah, hang on, we’ll be right back and you can tell the American people what I refuse to tell them.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We go back to the phones now, Gale in Slidell, Louisiana, claims that I am not telling the audience the truth of the American economy, and I want you to do it.
CALLER: Okay. Well, you took a call from some liberal yesterday, and you were giving examples of how the stock market’s going up, jobs are increasing. Well, that’s all happening because we are manufacturing here, and we’ve got a wonderful product, and we are exporting that product to really maximum potential. That product is called the U.S. federal note. We are pumping it out so fast, the intervals of which we’re pumping it out is — is — is — it’s gone ballistic. And the whole problem now is, nobody’s buying it, nobody’s buying that note anymore, and we just keep pumping out more to keep the system alive. And what you have is — I have no doubt that the stock market will go up to 20,000, 50,000, because they’re pumping so much money supply into the system.
RUSH: Oh, I see what you’re saying. So the truth about the economy is that we’re inflating the dollar out the wazoo, and we’re all headed for real problems down the road, and all this is being done to paper over the general weakness of our economy, born of our massive debt?
CALLER: Yes, Sir.
RUSH: And this is going to result in what?
CALLER: Paper going to its actual value if — well, all paper currency–
RUSH: No, no, no, no, no. Tell me in terms of people out there listening, what’s gonna happen to people?
CALLER: The dollar is going to go to a value of zero.
RUSH: But what’s that gonna mean to people who live in this country, what’s it going to mean to them? Gonna lose their jobs, gonna lose their houses, is it a Great Depression? What’s coming?
CALLER: No, no, no. The depression was recessionary. We’ve actually prevented that. We haven’t really been in a recession since the Great Depression. We prevented that. Because the American people can’t handle having a few people out of jobs, the natural course of capitalism wasn’t allowed to happen. Government got involved. In order to fund all these entitlement programs, they just printed money out of thin air, huge supplies of it, and now it’s increasing at a level, I don’t think people can fathom. I mean, I think people, really, when they go to the grocery store they think they’re paying high now, the proper valuation of dollars, if you compare it to say around 1977, well, they’re going to be looking at hundred-dollar milk. I mean, if you take how many dollars we had then, compared to what we have now, the whole problem is these foreigners aren’t taking our dollar anymore, they don’t really want our dollar. You look at Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, he does not want to start taking the dollar anymore.
RUSH: That’s political, that’s political, and it’s political with the Iranians demanding that the oil, that petroleum stop being transacted in dollars around the world as well.
CALLER: Rush, their coffers are stuffed, they can’t even shut their coffers, and it’s all filled with U.S. IOUs. It’s filled. At some point, now, you think that — I heard you say this yesterday, ‘Well, they all depend on us.’ They’re already starting to wean off of us, Rush, and because you’re not telling people, I’m really scared because if you look at history–
RUSH: What am I supposed to tell ’em? You still haven’t told ’em what’s going to happen to them. You said hundred-dollar milk, what else? You’re talking World War II Germany, World War I Germany?
CALLER: Exactly, exactly.
RUSH: That’s what you think is going happen? I’ll bet you a wheelbarrow of dollars it doesn’t happen. But if it does, guess who’s borrowing all this money? Guess who’s paying for all these programs? I talk about this all the time. Liberalism. This is what 50 years of liberalism and The New Deal has spawned. I don’t accept that your circumstances are as dire as you say. It depends on who you talk to about this. If you go talk to — and I’ve done this — if you go talk to people who work on Wall Street, all they care about is what’s happening on Wall Street. All they care about is the next two to three years, and they are in panic. They are literally panicked, and they don’t care about any other issue. We could merge with Red China and they wouldn’t care as long as somebody does something about what’s happening on Wall Street with these banks. If you go to the farmers and the people who are getting ripped over the coals now on ethanol, you know what the farmers will tell you? The farmers will say, ‘Screw you. You people have been spoiled for all these years with cheap food in America. Cheap food is not a right; it’s a luxury.’ If you go to people who work at Wal-Mart and so forth, you’re going to hear a different version of what’s going on in the economy.
Now, I stand by what I said yesterday. We had a call from Lynn, and it was a crying shame to listen to her talk. She’s been impacted, she’s been affected by all these years of doom and gloom being bombarded at her, by media and her Democrat Party and so forth. And it runs the risk of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, all these people thinking doom and gloom about things. It’s maddening how many people in this country want it to fail, how many people in this country think we deserve to be kicked in the pants because we’ve been so unfair to the rest of the world around the world. What I know, you can talk about the dollar, and I know that the dollar is falling against currencies and so forth. This, too, is cyclical, and it will come back. It always does. The dirty little secret is that the rest of the world can’t do without us. The rest of the world goes as we go. Take a look, if you want to look at the stock market or any which way manner or form. You think we’ve got problems, take a look India, take a look China. We are advancing, their economic situation is improving. There’s no question about it. But that is giving them all kinds of problems, and that’s creating stresses on our economy on the demand side. This is what happens when more and more people in the world have economic growth and have access to it.
I once told a story here, I forget the numbers. I’d have to go back and look at this. The number of people in the world, out of the roughly six billion on the planet that don’t have electricity, is striking. It’s like three and a half billion don’t have electricity, maybe more. And if they ever got it, do you realize the pressure on energy sources and prices that would be? We face all kinds of stresses and so forth, but we always come out of them. I have a little chart here, since we’re talking about this, again, this is from the Heritage Foundation and it’s based on the Office of Management and Budget numbers. This is the percentage increase in federal spending in nominal dollars, 2001 through 2005. Inflation in those five years is up 12%, that’s prices up 12%. Science, space, and technology up 21%, transportation, 24% — all these are government spenders. Unemployment benefits, 26%. General government, 32%. Income security programs, 39%. Health care, 42%. Community development, 71%. This is how much prices have risen in these categories from 2001 to 2005. Housing and commerce, 86%. International affairs, 94%. Education, 99%.
So the economy at large, independent of the government, prices went up 12% 2001 through 2005. The government’s out of control. I don’t care whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, there is a liberal orthodoxy that is in charge of government and spending, whether they’re printing it, whether they’re borrowing it or what have you, they’re out buying votes, they are expanding the size of government. Everything here that Gale just said in his paranoia about debt and the falling dollar and one-hundred-dollar milk down the road, everything that he just said can be tied to the whole concept of liberalism. Liberalism has brought us to this point. I don’t accept his one-hundred-dollar price of milk. At some point milk’s going to be a hundred bucks. You and I won’t be alive, and it will probably be pretty similar to whatever the value of gallon of milk is today. But it is important I think for people to understand that attitude, optimism, engaging and understanding how important everybody is to the economy here, instead of sitting around and waiting to be affected by things, go make something. ‘Well, easy for you to say.’ I know it’s easy to say.
It’s always harder to do action than it is to speak. There’s nothing new about that. But while you’re sitting around waiting for somebody else to take action, somebody is in the process of taking action. And while that’s happening, while this economy is going south in everybody’s mind, how come it is that a lot of people happen to be prospering? Most people are paying their mortgages. Most people say their personal finances are fine, 81% of the country. It’s just that they think everybody else is about to go south.