TODD: If you hear the mockingbird media refer to this bill, this attempt of Biden, this budget as “an infrastructure plan,” it’s not. That would be like referring to (laughing) a Big Mac as cheese. “What’d you have for lunch?” “Cheese.” It’s worse than the percentage. It’s more than half of this doesn’t have anything to do with infrastructure and it’s $2 trillion price tag, or more. But what’s in it is a complete and utter shell game. Let me give you one bullet point.

Legal Insurrection has a great article about this. This plan calls for $85 billion to modernize existing transit systems and help agencies expand to meet retired demand. So let’s keep track of this. You live in Dubuque, Iowa. Your bus is gonna get federal money taken from Dubuque, Iowa, with a rake — a percentage of that — taken by federal workers for the pleasure of counting it and collecting it and spending it, and then sending you some back but with a bunch of rules attached to it.

It is a shell game. Furthermore, did you notice during the covid flu… Well, I mean we still have the flu around. But during the height of the Democrats’ medically useless, deadly, politically advantageous lockdowns, that the buses kept running. Want to know why? I talked to an expert about transits on this guy named Mark Harmsworth from Washington state. When the wheels are rolling, the bus people are getting paid federal monies.

So when no one was going to work, the buses kept rolling because they kept soaking up money from us. There’s this: There is going to be a bunch of money to cap wells. The plan has $16 billion toward hundreds of thousands of jobs plugging oil and gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hard rock, and uranium mines. Okay.

What about the money that we could spend actually getting access to the oil under our own land? Of course, that’s verboten, absolutely verboten. Joe Biden’s dementia read from Barack Obama’s teleprompter an indictment of the wealth of the very people his party has made 30% more wealthy with their covid lockdowns.

BIDEN: (echo) Even before the crisis we’re now facing, those at the very top in America were doing very well, which is fine. They were doing great. But everyone else was falling behind. The pandemic only made the divisions so much worse and more obvious. Millions of Americans lost their jobs last year while the wealthiest 1% of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion. Just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become. It wasn’t always this way.

TODD: So let’s speak of distortions. The pandemic did none of that. None of it. The medically useless, deadly, selective, politically advantageous lockdowns did that. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth went up. Jeff Bezos’ wealth went up. Bill Gates’ wealth went up. Jack Dorsey’s wealth went up. Big Business soaked it in during this period of time. And he speaks of unfairness as, to this day, you have small business owners being crushed for daring to open their businesses.

Speaking of unfairness, some illegal immigrants are getting up to $27,000 to not work in a country where it is illegal for them to work. New York so-called lawmakers want to give billions of dollars to former inmates and illegal immigrants. When you speak of unfairness in infrastructure, a 14-foot wall — infrastructure — was where two coyotes, human smugglers, dropped two toddlers from a 14-foot fence into the United States, mocking us and potentially killing these kids — and it’s on video.

But Biden’s got that under control. His dementia’s perfectly in control of that. Now, just as the fake environmentalists give China a total pass for their carbon output, the mockingbirds give Mexico a pass for the role in flooding America with illegal immigrants as Rush says.

RUSH: I’m sure that most of you know this, but the way asylum works, in a legal sense, if you’re say, from El Salvador or Guatemala and you want to flee and seek political asylum elsewhere, guess what? The law says you must apply in the first country you reach after fleeing your own.

Well, that’s Mexico. But Mexico has been acting as a pass-through. Mexico has not been stopping the people or the caravans. Mexico has been facilitating their trek northward. And so when they get to the United States, then they seek asylum, and the other loophole for that is that once you seek asylum, it’s different than coming in and being an illegal immigrant.

When you seek asylum, well, that’s when you get detained and that’s when you get separated from your family, and that’s when you get released after time with an order to come back and have your asylum request processed in court. But guess what happens? They never come back. They just disappear into the framework of the country.

It’s a scam! It has been a scam, and it’s been a scam, allowed to be a scam because nobody’s had the guts to enforce the law. And they said, “Well, we can’t, Rush, because we can’t track every one of these people. Once, you know, we detain them and they leave and don’t come back for their hearing, what are we supposed to do?”

Well, it would seem to me maybe the solution is to not let ’em in and apply in the first place because that’s first step of the illegality here.

TODD: Opportunity to take the information we learn from Rush’s enduring wisdom in today’s headlines show the video: Show the kids being dropped 14 feet into this country. And we’re empowering this. Show this. Team EIB just sent this to me. This is from September of last year. I was just talking about the bus scam. In Fairfax County, Virginia, they wanted to keep paying school bus drivers even though schools were online.

You’ve seen it in your community, the buses keep rolling, the wheels keep rolling. That’s federal money, and it’s an utter scam taking out of your pocket during a lockdown. They’re going to retrofit homes for green energy. They intend to spend billions of dollars on this. Do the people want them retrofitted? Are we going to pretend that solar is sustainable in this retrofitting? We’re going to install charging stations for cars around the country.

Is there enough energy for this?

Elon Musk says there’s not enough energy, electrical energy for any of this. Lastly, why us? Why are we paying for that, not the car companies? The liberals pretend to hate Big Business, until it’s installing their donors in our pocketbooks. And lastly, with all of this, highways are federal infrastructure. Federal buildings are federal infrastructure. None of this, none of the rest of this has anything to do with federal infrastructure. It is pay-to-play walking-around-money time. Share that with any of your leftist friends who still are not a member of the full leftist cult.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: I’m fond of this metaphor. I don’t know how helpful it is for you. It’s really helpful for me. There is a reason that tennis is scored the way that it is, you know, with the 15-love, et cetera. The design was that so that us little people could watch the game but not understand the scoring, so that we couldn’t do it ourselves. It was a way that the royals designed the game to be able to enjoy the game without having it sullied by the little people.

So a lot of what goes on in how our economics are reported through the mockingbirds, it contains a lot of this sort of theory, and they try to mystify things. So our economy’s all very complicated, and it allows them to say things like, “Offshoring is just a political thing.” Let’s see if I can break this down, the Trump tax cuts compared to the tax increases being contemplated by Biden’s $3 trillion infrastructure plan.

He’s looking at increasing corporate tax rates, et cetera. Let’s see if I can explain this super simply. It had been cheaper for companies to hire a whole bunch of tax attorneys and tax lawyers to offshore them out of the country than to work here. It was cheaper. Trump changed that. It was cheaper to stay home. That’s a very simple explanation of corporate tax cuts. There’s a competitive world.

Now, there’s forces that don’t want it to be competitive. We could talk about that later. They want one corporate tax rate everywhere so that all companies are sort of captive. Then there’s this aspect of it. Washington, D.C., has a business model. It’s a great business model. If they want more money, they take more money. It’s really clever.

And it has happened that investing in lobbying in Washington, D.C. — in order to hamstring your competition or get yourself special breaks, special regulatory breaks — is more profitable than research and development. So you have young, talented lawyers and such living in D.C. to do that and companies paying for that rather than research and development on our own shores. There’s your corporate tax rate. There’s your regulation.

That’s how this really relates to companies who care about profit, because so many of them are following the woke path that it’s not even their main concern anymore. So that’s the basic math that the mockingbird media pretend to not know. Rush went far deeper than that into the mass delusion of the forefathers of the mockingbird media that tax cuts meant instant loss of government revenue.

RUSH: Folks, we’ve been there before. We’ve been there, done this. It’s just that the media and the Democrats since the 1980s have been doing their best to rewrite history. That they have been able to make people forget what happened or change their minds about what happened.

I was gonna say it’s one of the frustrating things. People lived it. You would think, after living through such a robust period of economic advancement, that people would remember it. But you know what the problem is? They associated it with Reagan and not policies. And so the Democrats had no problem destroying the policy. Reagan was not around anymore, so they didn’t have to really bash Reagan, although they do and did. But Reagan remained overwhelmingly popular. So they continued to bash supply-side.

And all during this period of time — you may remember this, Sam Donaldson was famous for this. He was a commentator on This Week with David Brinkley. And he kept talking about, because of the Reagan tax cuts, we’re gonna have a huge credit card bill to pay. We’re borrowing all this money. This isn’t real growth. And the American people are gonna have a come-to-Jesus meeting very soon down the road because none of this is real. But it was.

Look, successful tax reform, the implementation of thoroughbred conservative ideology that works every time it’s tried is the biggest threat known to the left and the Democrat Party because it proves, not with theory and not with words, it proves with real life, it proves with action that it works.

And its contrast with socialism is obvious. Socialism is a gigantic failure. Communism, ditto. So they have to destroy it. They have to revise history. They have to mischaracterize it. And they’ve been doing so since the eighties. And the way they have been dealing with this tax cut legislation is identical to what they have been saying about the Reagan tax cuts since they were passed and implemented.

“Tax cut for the rich. Don’t care about the little guy. Big corporations don’t need any more money. Big corporations kill their customers, ruin their businesses, destroy the planet. Big corporations are not people. Big corporations and the rich do not share their money,” and they disparage trickle-down, when in fact trickle-down is exactly what economic commerce is.

Trickle-down is exactly what economic growth is. And here comes the American left and the Democrat Party working in unison to destroy the entire concept. And to enough brain-dead low-information voters, the constant reputation, and we’re talking decades, works. And then there’s another factor. It’s so successful that future Republican presidents were afraid to re-implement it. The closest we got to Reagan-era or like Reagan-era tax cuts was George W. Bush in the first term in office 2001-2005, or 2004.

We had serious tax cuts and they tried to destroy those the same way. And I want to go back to 2018, 238 Democrats — the number floats. I mean, it’s a hundred in the Senate, and in the House and so forth, it may be more than 238. But the point is there is not a single Democrat that voted for this. There is, therefore, not a single Democrat who will be able to run for election or reelection next year by clinging to this. They will not be able to take any credit. They don’t have any fingerprints on it. It will be true, and it will be easy for every Republican to prepare campaign ads against every Democrat seeking office that they voted against prosperity.

They voted against you keeping more of your own money. They voted against you getting a raise. They voted against 4% economic growth and all of the good that entails. They voted against cheap energy. They voted against oil and gas exploration that would bring down the cost of energy for the consumer. They voted against everything that leads to economic prosperity, economic security, and economic freedom. And it’s on this basis that they somehow believe they are gonna sweep the House in 2018.

TODD: What are they voting for? What are they trying to design into our system? They’re trying to design into our system 51% of us getting regular monies from the government — well, from the rest of us. When 51% can take money from 49% just for the simple pass-through in Washington, D.C., we have a structural problem in how our voting occurs. Yet their pressuring Biden to put regular so-called stimulus payments into the mailboxes of Americans. That’s how far this has progressed. So when does this stop being our life’s energy? Let’s explore that we continue.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: Back in the day when radio stations started to be built around the Maha, there was this super talk radio format that was created and a bunch of people involved in that. I knew a couple of them. A guy named Brian Jennings, who’s still alive, and a guy who’s passed on named Peter Weissbach. Peter was a radio host in Seattle, and this was this phenomena that Rush and you and Team EIB created that entire radio stations were built around this program.

Peter Weissbach said something that has always stuck with me, and this is a way that I hope that we can get the information we get on this show and take it from potential power into real power, which is to start referring to our bank accounts and our 401(k)s as our life’s energy. Now, we have souls, and we have treasures that we store up in heaven, and that, I hope, would be a focus — or the focus — on earth.

The monies in our bank accounts are the result of our life energy, if we work. If not, then they’re the results of other people’s life’s energy. Democrats don’t view any money as legitimate unless they get a chance to tap into it, to tap into our life’s energy. Now, the mayor of Realville as regards this phenomenon that central planners were actually stunned like turkeys drowning in the rain when lower tax rates did what we know they can do; they created more government revenue.

RUSH: In 1981, when Ronaldus Magnus took office, the top marginal rate, folks, was 90%! Now, nobody ever paid it, but it was there. They had all kinds of shelters and deductions. You paid 90% on the last dollars you earned, but nobody ever reported those dollars. It was complicated. It was hodgepodge. Also the talk of “tax loopholes.” Conservative don’t speak of “tax loopholes.” There’s no such thing as a tax loophole. There are tax provisions. There are tax laws. When you start throwing around the term “tax loophole,” you’re trying to make people think that people are escaping the tax code, that they’re finding a way around the tax code, that they’re able to break the law!

That’s not what tax “loopholes” are. There aren’t any such things. There may be unintended consequences. The tax writers enact a bill that doesn’t account for certain activity that happens as a result, that happens because they fail to dynamically score these things at the CBO or the Joint Committee on Taxation. As I said, the greatest example is when they cut the capital gains rate in the Bush tax cut in the early 2000s. They had no idea why all the money was flowing into the Treasury. They cut the capital gains rate practically in half!

What that meant was that people were selling stocks instead of rolling them over or donating them to charity. People were selling appreciated stock. If you get to keep 85? out of every $1 you earn, you’ll sell the stock and you’ll reinvest it and buy more. That started happening. People started paying the capital gains rate instead of avoiding it. It caused all kinds of new money to flow to the Treasury that these eggheads who are the supposed experts never counted on, and I think this bill has all kinds of possibilities in it like that.

But the personal rate reduction… By the time Reagan left office in 1988, the top marginal rate was down to 30%, from 90% to 30%. Since then, since the late eighties, the tax rates have basically been from 10% to 12% to 15% to 24% to 28% to 30%, and then they jumped up to 39.6% to 35%, 29%, something like that. The corporate rate, however, stayed at its inexplicably stupid figure: 35%. So the personal rate reductions have happened long ago, and they’re happening again here.

But there isn’t that much room to reduce them, because they have been reduced so much over the past 20 or 30 years. The corporate rate has remained ridiculously high, and I’m just gonna tell you: When the corporate tax rate is reduced from 35 to 21%… You’ve heard the old adage that corporations don’t pay taxes; you do? And you know what that means, right? It means whatever a corporation’s tax bill is, they amortize it by building into the price of every product or service enough to cover what their tax payments are. So at the end of the day, they don’t pay ’em.

I mean, they file returns and they send checks to Washington, but it’s not a net loss for them. So what happens if you lower a corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%? You open up all kinds of possibilities. What happens when you have a 7% or 8% repatriation rate? Like Apple has $190 billion overseas, and the amount of money other corporations have added to that (which is doing us no good over there), if they’re allowed to bring it all back or a portion of it back and only pay 8%, what are they gonna do?

They’re gonna bring it back, and what happens to it? Well, here now we’re up against what the brainwashing of the American people on corporations has led people to believe, and this is really a crime. I know that there are bad actors. There are bad actors as individuals. There are bad actors as small businessmen. There are sports athletes that are cheaters. I mean, every group of people has its renegade malcontents in it, and corporate CEOs and corporate executives are no different.

The difference is that the left has done their best to convince everybody that every American industry made up of the corporations within it is out to harm them, to screw them, to the cheat them — or even kill them in the cases of the pharmaceutical industry and other places. And so there are many people who believe that corporations don’t do a single damn thing that’s any good, that all they do is deny people health care. “They deny people their civil rights. They deny people vacation time! They deny people personal time to go to the vet with the sick cat. They deny people this, and they do not have any tolerance or patience whatsoever — and they just fire you, and they don’t pay people enough!”

This is what people have been led to believe because the left has been pounding this kind of thing for decades. The liberal Democrat enemies list is topped by industries. Big Auto. Big Pharmaceutical. Big Box Retail. Big Oil. Big Tobacco. They are hated and despised. But in truth, all they are is groups of people, and many of them are traded publicly and so have fiduciary responsibilities to show a profit. Corporations are not in business to provide people health insurance.

They’re not in business to provide people jobs. Those things are necessary when competing for employees, but that’s not why people go into business. You think Steve Jobs said, “You know, I want to create the Macintosh, and I want to set the computer world on fire, because I want people to have corporate health care insurance”? Do you think that’s why he did it? Do you think Henry Ford automated the automobile assembly line because he wanted his people to have health care? No.

But once you make a decision to go into business, and then once you start hiring people, it takes competition to get the best people, and if the going rate is a health care plan and this or that, then you offer it. But if corporations paying 35% now see a reduced rate to 21%, what happens? Well, the negative reaction is, “They keep the money, Rush! They’re gonna get all that money and they’re gonna keep it! They’re gonna keep gouging us like the cable companies do and the cellular companies.

“They’re not gonna cut our prices! They’re gonna continue to deny us service, and they’re gonna continue to deny us health care and they’re just gonna keep the money! They’re gonna get richer and richer.” Is that what they’re gonna do, or are they gonna become more competitive? Are they going to be able to offer better employment packages, better pricing packages for the products and services they sell? This whole notion that, “I don’t like the corporate side because, you know, it never proves that the corporations getting a tax cut benefits the little guy.”

Who hires the little guy? Who manufactures things and makes ’em available for purchase for the little guy? Who is in competition with other businesses for the little guy’s business? So if a corporate tax cut results in greater job opportunities, if it results in corporations lowering prices in order to expand their customer base… Because remember this tax cut’s gonna give everybody more money. Everybody’s gonna have a little bit more disposable income. They’re gonna have more money to spend.

Corporations do like separating people from their money. And, of course, the left hates that too. The left calls that “donations” and “funding.” Corporations call it “sales” and “profits.” But it’s the same thing. Everybody is out to get your money, and you’re out to get anybody else’s money you can, however you can. You’re out to get the corporation’s money, people you work for, small businesses. It’s all the same. And if there’s more money, significantly more money circulating in the U.S. economy, then there theoretically is more of it for you to get a share of. It’s all good!

TODD: And a suggestion: When you’re talking to your kids about your business, your small business — the money it allows you to save — refer to it as your life’s energy. It’s a different way to think about it that I think will make it more precious to your children.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: Warren from Gonzales, Texas, right outside San Antonio, as I recall. Welcome to Rush’s program. Todd Herman, your guide host. Hi, Warren. What’s on your mind this morning?

CALLER: Oh. Hey, I was just thinking back to the first time I ever heard Rush. That was back when he was in Sacramento. God, what’s that been? More than 30 years ago.

TODD: Yes.

CALLER: I first heard him and I’m like, “Who is this bombastic, egotistical guy? What is this guy doing?” I’d listen for like five minutes and get something he said and turn the radio off, and I’d come back to it ’cause I was killing a bunch of bugs driving up and down I-5 at the time. And the more I listened, it’s like, “Well, this kind of makes sense, but what is this ‘half my brain tied behind by back’ stuff, ‘just to make it fair’? Who is this guy?”

TODD: Yeah.

CALLER: And one day, he had something on economics, a whole segment with all of that stuff. I remember listening to all of those things over the course of time, and I went, “Oh, wow. This guy really does know what he’s talking about.” I have a degree in economics, and it was all this stuff that I had learned. You know, the lowering of the tax rates and everything and what that does with the inflow of money to the Treasury and corporations not paying taxes — and they don’t. My brother and I used to argue a bunch of times. He, unfortunately, was a commie pinko subversive.

TODD: (laughing)

CALLER: But he never could get him to understand what happens with that.

TODD: Yeah.

CALLER: I said, “You know, Stephen, it’s real simple. The corporations pass the cost on. They find a way to reduce their costs, which usually sacrifices jobs, or they go you have to business if they can’t do either of the first two.” And I said, “That’s just the economic reality of how that works.” So he had me hooked from that point on, and it’s just a shame that we can’t hear him live anymore. But, as a matter of fact, some of those things, I remember hearing them like they were yesterday.

TODD: Absolutely. And I think what’s so cool, Warren, is the way it compares to today’s news. We just heard Rush explain taxes by explaining what happens with lower tax rates, what’s going to happen if the plan that Joe Biden’s dementia read off Barack Obama’s teleprompter comes true. And that’s what I find, you know, so amazing about the work that Team EIB does. Warren, thank you so much for the call. Be careful. Sounds like you’re killing bugs with your windshield again.