RUSH: Patrick in Reading, Pennsylvania. He\u2019s a high school senior. Great to have you here, Patrick. How are you?<\/p>\n
CALLER: I\u2019m quite well. Yourself?<\/p>\n
RUSH: Great. Thank you.<\/p>\n
CALLER: So I had a question. I\u2019m in an AP government class, and my teacher over the last couple of days has been ragging on the Trump tax plan, saying that it\u2019s going to hurt the middle class and it\u2019s only going to help “big corporations.” How do you respond to that?<\/p>\n
RUSH: Your teacher is saying that?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Yes.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/0Limbaugh-Institute.jpg\")
RUSH: Okay. What I would say to that is, first thing — I really would say this — “What\u2019s wrong with that? Corporations are not our enemy. Corporations provide products that we like, and they hire us, and corporations invest in things. Corporations are people, and they\u2019re not inherently evil, Madam Teacher. Number two: It\u2019s a matter of competition. We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world among industrialized nations at 35%.<\/p>\n
“It is why Apple has over $125 billion or $150 billion overseas not brought back to the U.S. because it would make no sense to bring that money back and tax it at 35%. Reducing the corporate tax rate will cause some of that money to be repatriated. That money will be put into the U.S. economy as Apple and other corporations bring it back.” I would start with the premise. I would tell her… See, I\u2019m not there, and you might not want to be this bold. But I would challenge her on her premise that corporations are evil, that they are the enemy of the people, and that somehow corporations “benefiting” hurts us.<\/p>\n
And then I would tell her, “Ma\u2019am, corporations don\u2019t pay taxes at the end of the day anyway. Whatever taxes they owe are built into the prices we pay. So it\u2019s possible, Madam Teacher, that prices could come down as corporate tax levels come down. The corporations might have more money to invest in growth and hiring more people. It\u2019s a win-win. But that\u2019s not gonna do anything, Patrick, if your teacher is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist who has been trained her whole life to despise and hate corporations.<\/p>\n
The left thinks pharmaceutical companies want to kill their customers. They think the oil companies want to destroy the earth with global warming, climate change. They think Big Retailers like Walmart want to kill unions. It\u2019s irrational and it\u2019s wrong, and if I were you, I would tell her, “Stop teaching us this stuff \u2019cause you\u2019re poisoning our minds with a bunch of lies.” But you probably can\u2019t do that. Hang on here, Patrick.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Okay. We\u2019re back with the advanced government studies class student. His name is Patrick, Reading, Pennsylvania, senior in high school. You didn\u2019t get a chance to react to my answer to your question, which I thought was unfair, so I wanted to give you a chance to react to it.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, thank you. My teacher actually used to lobby for a big corporation and left, quote, because she realized she was doing something evil.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Because what? Why did she leave?<\/p>\n
CALLER: She thought she was doing something evil by lobbying for this big corporation. Not sure which corporation it was but —<\/p>\n
RUSH: She thought she was doing something evil by lobbying for a corporation?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Correct. So she does definitely have a bias against corporations. I\u2019m not gonna say she\u2019s a socialist but she definitely is a Keynesian, so she teaches that as part of the AP gov course.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/RushTaxesSpending.jpg\")
RUSH: I\u2019ll guarantee you, if she has an animus toward corporations, that\u2019s part and parcel of socialists who want to control them, an independent corporation, it\u2019s one of the reasons they\u2019re constantly attacking them. But look, Patrick, I\u2019m actually glad you called me about this because this is one of my bugaboos or pet peeves. The hatred that people have of corporations is irrational, and this irrationality is driving way too much of policy.<\/p>\n
All of this stuff on net neutrality, you know, we\u2019ve only had net neutrality for two years. Prior to that, we had no meaningful, massive regulation of the internet, and it grew and expanded, and fortunes were made. You could find any opinion you wanted, no speech was infringed, any business could start and give it a shot. It was the wild west, and it was amazing. And customers had a smorgasbord of choices. Whatever they wanted, they could get it.<\/p>\n
You could learn more than you could ever learn. Everything you wanted to learn was somewhere online, if you learned how to search for it. And companies and providers started doing everything they could to put even more up there and attract even more customers. It was only the last two years of the Obama administration we had net neutrality. But today there was a bomb threat at the FCC that delayed for a while the vote on getting rid of Obama-era regulations.<\/p>\n
The last two years of the internet have not been any kind of a panacea. But these people that oppose a free and open internet, these people that want the government regulating the internet hate corporations. I read tech blogs, and these are young, little Millennials, and they have a visceral hatred for cable companies, for internet service providers. They have a hatred for anybody that charges them money. And I\u2019m not exaggerating. They literally have a hatred for it and because so much of the internet, when it started, was free. The New York Times was free. Anything you wanted was free.<\/p>\n
It was so new that people were pressured to put their content up there, but they didn\u2019t know how to monetize it. It was wonderful. And the process evened out as people learned more, and more people were getting information online, they learned how to monetize it, they tried various ways — pay walls, subscriptions for one week, one month, one year, until they got it right. And now many of them are making a lot of money with subscriptions, which irritates people.<\/p>\n
But it is the hatred and the distrust of, quote, unquote, corporations that drives much of liberal social and political policy. And it\u2019s irrational. If you look at the Democrat Party\u2019s enemies list, it\u2019s every major industry, not just individual corporations, but it\u2019s every major industry.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/LiberalismRush-Sledge-Bubble-muted.jpg\")
And they have co-opted people like your teacher into believing this pap that all of this stuff is injurious, that corporations will kill their customers unless the government regulates \u2019em. And corporations will drive their customers into poverty unless the government regulates them. It\u2019s just silly.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s typified when they say corporations are not people. When the Supreme Court legalized campaign donations from corporations, the left nearly went insane by saying, “They\u2019re not people. They shouldn\u2019t be allowed to contribute in politics. They\u2019re corporations.” Why not? They\u2019re people. They\u2019re individuals. They\u2019ve got vested interests just like anybody else does, just like any individual does. And they have shareholders and they\u2019re interested in making money and making profits and so forth. But all of that, to people like your teacher, is evil.<\/p>\n
Your teacher probably thinks that nothing should cost more than what it cost to make it, that there should be any money made with a corporation selling something to somebody. Especially if it\u2019s health care, it shouldn\u2019t be a profit. That\u2019s obscene. It\u2019s ignorant. It\u2019s the pursuit of profits that cause these people to go into business and provide these products and services in the first place. They compete with others that do it. It all works if you leave them alone.<\/p>\n
And of course there are bad actors. We have laws that deal with the bad actors when they act bad. The idea that we cannot have a functioning economy without people like Barack Obama with their hands on it regulating every day is obscene. Barack Obama has never run a business. Barack Obama doesn\u2019t know anything about health care. Neither does your teacher.<\/p>\n
But they sit there and claim that they know these people are evil and they\u2019re screwing customers and they\u2019re screwing America and they\u2019re destroying the planet and all this horrible stuff. It\u2019s just obscene. You\u2019ve hit a little sore spot with me here today, Patrick. I\u2019m sorry for yelling at you. I\u2019m not yelling at you. I just get passionate about this stuff.
\nCALLER: Understood.<\/p>\n
RUSH: What did you tell her?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Oh, I\u2019ve told her before that corporations should be considered people because it helps people to not go bankrupt. The corporations they\u2019re part of goes bankrupt. So I\u2019ve definitely —<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/RushLiesTaxes.jpg\")
RUSH: (impression) “Oh no. See, that\u2019s where you\u2019re wrong. Don\u2019t you realize the big banks want their customers to go bankrupt? The big banks want their customers not to be able to pay back the loans so they can take their houses away from \u2019em! Because these banks are evil! Yeeees, Patrick, these banks are really bad. They loan money to people, and they hope they can\u2019t pay the money back so they can take their homes away. Why, they\u2019re all a bunch of Mr. Potters from the movie It\u2019s a Wonderful Life. That\u2019s what they all are.”<\/p>\n
You know why we had the subprime mortgage crisis, Patrick? That\u2019s because the government came along and told banks that they had to lend money to people to buy homes who would never be able to afford to pay \u2019em back. That started it. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama forced American lending institutions to lend money under the concept that the American dream was being denied some people who couldn\u2019t afford it. So the administrations told the banks, “You make them affordable. You give \u2019em a loan!”<\/p>\n
The banks said, “What do we do? They can\u2019t pay us back.” So they created a bunch of phony mortgage obligation packages that they sold to other banks that didn\u2019t know what they were buying until it all backed up on everybody. People in politics have no business running anything in the private sector. None of \u2019em ever have. They\u2019re all lawyers or worse, academics who deal in theory all the time and have never had to put any of their cockamamie theories into real practice.<\/p>\n
And when they get that chance, we see what Obama did to the health care industry. The know-it-all Barack Obama, who knows better about how to run a hospital and nurses and doctors than the people who do it. And that\u2019s another presumption. They\u2019re all criminals and they\u2019re all incompetent, and only liberal Democrats know how to make all of this fair. The idea that corporations are evil is an offensive premise. I\u2019m so glad you called. I don\u2019t know that you are, but I am. I appreciate it, Patrick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CALLER: So I had a question. I'm in an AP government class, and my teacher over the last couple of days has been ragging on the Trump tax plan, saying that it's going to hurt the middle class and it's only going to help "big corporations." How do you respond to that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":258104,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n