RUSH: Here’s Roger in Jacksonville, Florida. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: You bet, sir.
CALLER: I want to thank you for your website, because I teach economics, and I like the information you have there available of what’s really happening in the economy so I can counter some of these liberal students that are coming up with different attitudes. And also the information on who pays the taxes, because I do a whole lesson on taxes, and it fits right in with who really pays the taxes.
RUSH: You know what? There’s a service you can do to these students, liberal or otherwise, when you’re teaching about taxes.
CALLER: Yeah?
RUSH: I’ll tell you what it is. We are reaching that point, as you can see from that chart that is posted every day at the bottom of my website on who’s really paying taxes in this country, and we are dangerously close to a point of no return for tax reform of any kind, and that is this. When fewer than 50% of income earners are contributing to the federal tax bite, when less than half of us are paying taxes, you can forget about any reform. It ain’t going to happen. When the taxpayers become the minority, we’re never going to reform the system significantly, it isn’t going to happen. Because nobody is going to listen to the, quote, unquote, wealthy complain and whine about it. And the people that get off the tax rolls, the federal income tax I’m talking about now, the people who end up not the being charged any federal income tax are going to oppose any effort that might re-spread the burden around.
We’re getting dangerously close to where a smaller number of people than ever before will be paying taxes and that’s going to keep happening. That number will get smaller and smaller as the tax bite per taxpayer will increase. Somebody has to pay the burden. You know, 5% are carrying the other 95% in the cart, and that 5% is going to become even smaller. That’s something these people need to think about. The problem you’re going to run into in teaching this to liberals is that, “Well, that’s fair. That’s fair. I think only 10% of the people, the rich ought to pay all the taxes.” That’s when you got to start trying to get through to the skulls full of mush about the seriousness of economics. Mike in Tallahassee. Welcome to the program, sir.
CALLER: Rush, it’s an absolute honor and privilege to speak with you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I’m a 24-year-old graduate from Florida State University, Phi Beta Kappa, all that stuff, and my comment for the program was, when I left high school, fully confirmed social, liberal, relativistic, anything-goes sort of mentality, and at Florida State I was a philosophy major, and I just wanted to let you or any concerned parents or individuals out there know that these liberal professors are the best thing going for the conservative movement that we have right now. The more and more that I heard them speak through my freshman year, my sophomore year, junior year, the more and more it pushed me to become a full blooded conservative.
RUSH: Why? If they were saying things that you pretty much already thought, why did it push you over here to the bright side?
CALLER: Well, when these people are your role models, you start to question a lot of stuff. You look at the train wreck which is their lives. The way that they’re presenting issues, if you’ve got one ounce of critical thought, you start to see halfway through the semester that this guy is a quack job. You start to do your own research, look through history, you know, look through the Constitution, read the fathers of this nation —
RUSH: Let me ask you this. Did any of them sound so unbelievably whacked out that you just couldn’t imagine being on their side?
CALLER: I’ll tell you, the turning point was embedded in their underlying view, really was atheist. That was the motivating force I think in a lot of their disagreement with the conservative movement.
RUSH: Oh, no question.
CALLER: And particularly with you, Rush, you’d be surprised how many times your name gets brought up in a class on ethics, a class on religion, a class on —
RUSH: I’m not surprised. Nothing surprises me when my name is brought up. Nothing at all. I’m a threat. I’m a threat to their safely constructed cocoon of a perverted world view. A lot of conservatives are. I appreciate the call out there, Mike. We gotta go.
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