TODD: One of the ways that the Big Government has been allowed to metastasize is, of course, by hiding itself. It’s a weird thing, but, I mean, it’s hiding right in the open. The job reports that’s come out that everybody — everybody who has one finger touching reality — knew would be the case when (under cover of the covid) they started handing out money and bonuses that equal more than people were earning when they’re working.

It is literally the most common of common sense. It is literally the easiest form of human psychology that exists. I can employ effort and get less or I can employ no effort and get more. You… I mean, I think people should work, and I also understand that I could look at it this way and see someone saying, “Why?” Government hides itself in a lot of ways.

One of them is you want to see the United States flip in a positive way? Stop hiding the withholding tax. All these governors… There’s a good-number bunch of them. Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis are doing great work. Guys? Governors? Want an idea? Paycheck transparency act in your state. It works like this.

You will say to employers in their state that they will, in fact, show people what they’re paying in income tax by giving them a check for the full amount that’s not cashable. “Here’s what you would have earned where it not taken by the government.” But if you do that, red states would become redder and maybe people would move there. Actual conservatives would move there.

You know, we all remember… In terms of the government handouts and the safety net becoming a high-end hammock, we all remember Rush warned us about this all the way back in 2008.

RUSH: Now, let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s take a single mother of two living in Pennsylvania who goes out and, because some community organizer has lobbied Congress to make home mortgages available to people that can’t afford them, our fictional character in Pennsylvania, single mother of two, goes out and gets a house that she really can’t afford.

But because it’s the American dream and the members of Congress have mandated that this happen, the woman is secured for a loan, and all of a sudden the rate goes up, and then it’s a problem because she can’t pay for it. She can’t afford the monthly without maybe doing without food or driving less and maybe she’s gotta pay for daycare because she has to go to work, she’s got daycare, she’s got a job.

So she looks to the government because the government roped her into buying the house, told her it was cool and hunky-dory, she thinks. But the rest of us were not involved in her decision. This to me is the key. I don’t know this woman in Pennsylvania, and I don’t know what she did. I don’t know the circumstances, and yet the woman — and this is going to sound harsh, but, folks, it’s a problem, we’re going to have to get a handle on this.

It’s all around us, what this is leading to, the credit crunch, the mortgage crunch, entities that supposedly have assets backing their worth that don’t have those assets, we got Chuck You Schumer out there starting runs on banks, stock markets going up and down, the gasoline price, the oil price, a lot of people are very much on the edge here. And many of them are just like the rest of us are, they’re prisoners to these cycles.

But in the case of our fictional character in Pennsylvania, I had nothing to do, nor did you, with the decisions that she made. And unless you and I are involved in the decisions that everybody else makes, which is not possible, then we can’t know whether the decisions they’ve made are wise or unwise. Now, multiply that by millions of families. In this country, we spend $3.1 trillion a year. This is not a safety net.

This is a hammock, $3.1 trillion. Most of us cannot put our arms around that. Most of us have no concept of how much that is, but it’s enough that we’re not talking about government creating a safety net. We’re talking about a massive government that is involved in all things and wants to be involved in even more, $3.1 trillion is not chump change.

It has become a hammock. The consequence is regulations and taxes are in fact harming more and more families, making them poorer and making it more difficult for them to succeed. This much we know for sure, this is what happens when government gets in your way.

The list of examples is endless, from the family that goes out and buys a plot of ground and finds out later on that there’s some sacred grouse on it and they can’t do anything with it. Who says? The government, some regulation, the kangaroo rat in Bakersfield, California, farmer had to get rid of his farm. Wetlands, the whole assault on private property rights, is just one example.

TODD: So Rush’s point about all of these examples and my point about Big Government being effective at hiding right in the open, if the governors of these states wanted to start this paycheck transparency program, every employer in the state has to tell people what their gross pay would have been minus government, and you could push that into other states or privatize that and let people see what has been taken because most people never know.