RUSH: We go to Des Moines, Iowa. This is Richard. Richard, welcome to the EIB Network. It’s your turn.
CALLER: Hey, mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Can I thank you for something first?
RUSH: Yeah. By all means, a lot of people do.
CALLER: I gotta thank you for your sense of humor. Without it I would never have survived the Clinton years. I would have been distraught the whole time.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I was distraught, but I managed to laugh. I figured if I can laugh while distraught, everybody else could.
CALLER: Well, I laughed my head off. Anyway, being a conservative first, it kind of pains me to disagree with you about the nanny state. I’m becoming more and more in favor of it.
RUSH: Well, this ought to be good.
CALLER: Well, reason being is, with the guest that you had yesterday, and I only heard about five minutes of the show, that quoted an astronomically high percentage of Americans who want socialized health care, was like 44, 46%?
RUSH: Forty-four percent want free socialized health care. Every American should have it, not just for themselves, 44% think every American should have free socialized medicine.
CALLER: Okay. Now, based on that, knowing the principles of conservative economics, my insurance gives me a break for being a nonsmoker. So on that principle, wouldn’t it make sense what John Kerry was saying, everybody has to go to the doctor once a year.
RUSH: John Edwards said that.
CALLER: Excuse me. John Edwards. You can’t smoke; you can’t get fat; you can’t eat trans fats; you’d have to do things that will keep yourself healthy, so that you’re not such a drain on the health care economy.
RUSH: Essentially that’s just the tip of the iceberg of where this would end up.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, I understand that, but, you know, it’s starting to make sense to me that the nanny state is not just people telling you what to do, but it’s the sensible thing to do, if we end up with free health care, which I think we’re going to. I saw another nonscientific poll that quoted as high as 51% recently.
RUSH: I don’t know. I can’t figure out if you’re joking or —
CALLER: I wish I was! Rush, really I wish I was.
RUSH: You are telling me, you started out here, you built the foundation of conservative free-market economics, and you think that free national health care for everybody would work? I am assuming because all of the restrictions on us would keep us all healthy, and we would put much less strain on the health care system. Is that it?
CALLER: I’m not saying it would work. I’m saying that it makes sense to tell people from the government, if government’s going to provide our health care, just like my insurance is the third-party payer for my health care, it makes sense for them to say, ‘You can’t eat trans fats; you can’t smoke; you have to do some level of exercise.’
RUSH: Do you want that kind of restriction on your freedom? I cannot believe it.
CALLER: No, I’m not saying I want it. I’m just saying that since it looks like I think whoever we end up with as president, be they Republican or Democrat, we’re going to end up with some kind of socialized health care. But being a taxpayer —
RUSH: Not if I have anything to say about it. Why are you willing to throw in the towel on this stuff? I can’t believe what I’m hearing here.
CALLER: I will go to the voting booth and I will fight with my vote every step of the way. I do not want it, and I’m not throwing in the towel, I’m just scared to death it’s actually going to happen.
RUSH: But then you don’t honestly think it’s going to work, you think they’re going to achieve it; you think they’ll pull this off?
CALLER: I think they’ll pull it off, exactly.
RUSH: That’s a different thing than you telling me it’s going to work.
CALLER: No, no, I don’t think it’s going to work.
RUSH: Because there’s no such thing as free. There’s no such thing as free. I don’t know who people expect to pay for this. The French? The United Nations? The new government of Myanmar that we have just put sanctions on? Who is going to pay for this? Look, you’ve given me a springboard here, a transition. I need somebody to do some research here. I need to find out as quickly as we can, the US birth rate. How many babies are born in this country every year? I don’t care, legal, illegal, I need to know how many babies are born every year in this country. I need to multiply that number times 5,000, as in dollars, because Mrs. Clinton said today that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 baby bond from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home. She made the suggestion during a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus. She said, ‘I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time so that when that young person turns 18, if they have finished high school, they’ll be able to access it to go to college, maybe they’ll be able to make that down payment on their first home.’ She didn’t offer any estimate of the total cost or how she would pay for it. We know how she’ll pay for it: raise taxes on the rich. This is about the tenth time that she is now going to raise taxes on the rich, which means there’s not going to be money to pay for this.
Now, can I take you back to Social Security reform for just a second? Remember Social Security reform? The Democrats opposed it mightily because they didn’t want any portion of somebody’s Social Security contribution to the government being managed in an account that would, quote, unquote, grow independent of where the money was in the Social Security system. They demagogue this, and they said, ‘We can’t do that, why, if the stock market plunges, why, there are people who could be wiped out, and look at all the management fees, this is just a sop to Wall Street. The Bush administration is trying to make their rich buddies richer.’ Of course, it was all smoke and mirrors. Democrats don’t want to give up any control of Social Security. But, now, here comes Mrs. Clinton, here’s just one observation, here comes Mrs. Clinton who wants to hand out five grand to every baby born in America so that it will be invested somewhere and it will grow and it will have X-number of dollars in it by the time they need to go to college. You talk about creating dependency from the cradle to the grave.
Now, George McGovern tried this, he proposed this in 1972, and I have to consult this to be sure, but I think McGovern was proposing to give every citizen $1,000 back in 1972. Now, back then, he was the laughingstock for doing this. He was laughed off the presidential candidate stage. He ended up losing in a massive landslide loss to Richard Nixon. Now, today, when you have 44% of the American people claiming in a poll that they think every American ought to have free health care, why, you’re looking at a much different culture today. You’re looking at a culture that thinks the government should do this kind of thing. So the Democrats are on the march, Mrs. Clinton is on the march, not masking anything. This is what government’s there to do, is to take care, to pay for you, to make sure that you don’t have any rough spots in your life. And the deal is you end up voting for Democrats for the rest of your life. And, frankly, you’re going to have to if you buy into this scheme because you’re not ever going to learn how to take care of yourself. You’re going to think the government is there for your health care; the government’s there for your retirement; the government is there for your education; the government is there for your first home; the government’s there for pretty much everything.
Okay, so we’ve found out that there are approximately four million births in the United States every year. So you multiply that number times 5,000 and that’s what this would cost. Ah, you can run the numbers on that if you have a calculator at home or on your iPhone. I can’t take time to do it here behind the Golden EIB Microphone ’til I go to a commercial break, but this is Mrs. Clinton’s proposal: $5,000 per baby, every baby born in America. That’s her idea. She made the proposal today before the Congressional Black Caucus. We’ll see what kind of reaction this gets. I’m telling you, it’s not going to be the reaction McGovern got in ’72. McGovern was laughed off the stage, but this is the McGovernization of the Democrat Party with their anti-war stance, now this kind of thing. In the meantime, more economic news. US consumer spending up 6%, incomes up 3%, according to the commerce department. Experts shocked, experts surprised, consumer confidence is also way up in the latest report in the Conference Board, stunning the experts who figured the housing-market problems would have everybody depressed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Well, the nanny state has no limits, no limits whatsoever. Once the rule of law is irrelevant (that being the Constitution), once they take care of that, what are the limits on government? There won’t be any. So let’s look at health care. Once the government steps in, it is empowered to tell you, ‘You have to see a doctor,’ and when you have to see a doctor, and what behaviors that you can and cannot engage in in order to hold onto your insurance, and they will tell you, ‘You can’t eat trans fats,’ and, ‘You can’t smoke,’ and, ‘You gotta exercise and do this and that.’ Folks, you all need to go out. You really need to go out. We are like frogs in boiling water, although it’s not boiling yet. They’ve been turning up the heat for about 25 years, 25 or 30 years, and we’re not getting hot enough yet to the point we need to jump out of this. If we don’t jump out of it, we’re going to end up stuck in this pot for the rest of our lives surrounded by this boiling water. You need to go rent the movie ‘The Lives of Others.’ It’s German. It’s closed-captioned. It’s the kind of movie the United States should be making, but we aren’t. It’s made by Germans, and it’s a portrayal and a depiction of what life was like under totalitarian socialism and communism in East Germany.
Now, it’s rated R so you don’t want to watch it with your crumb crunchers because there’s some nudity in there, but it’s really not necessary. It’s just in there to get the R, to get the attention. But it’s really, really, really good, and if you want to find out what it’s like for citizens who are afraid of their government every day, who are told where they have to live, what they can do, what their jobs are, what they’re going to be paid — if you want to know what that’s like — go get this movie and don’t sit there and say, ‘Oh, come on, Rush! It’s never going to happen.’ It may not happen in our lifetimes, but if these people like Mrs. Clinton aren’t stopped, and if they aren’t checked, we’re all frogs in this boiling cauldron of water that’s not boiling yet. In fact, it’s pretty warm. It feels pretty good right now, pretty comforting. But they keep turning up the heat and pretty soon we’re going to not realize it in time, it’s going to be too late. So if you go along with this socialized, so-called free national health care, rather than actively get involved in supporting programs and policies that will reverse the silly trend of spiraling out of control, senseless costs — rather than say, ‘I want it and I want it free…’ There’s no such thing as ‘free.’ You’re going to be paying for it one way or the other, both monetarily and a loss of freedom.
This is a serious thing, and this control over people is precisely what liberals today are all about. Why do you think they want to raise taxes? They want to raise taxes so you have less money to spend. So that you will be more easily controlled and more open to receiving some sort of government benefit. Now, the difference between private insurance and the government taking over health care is with private insurance, you voluntarily decide what kind of insurance you want or will accept for that matter. If the government runs it, you have no say and, if you don’t like it, there’s nowhere else you can go because there’s nobody else in the business. If it’s unsatisfactory service, you’re stuck. There’s nothing you can do. Great Britain is now saying natural childbirth should be by birthing pools. ‘Don’t come to the hospitals for pain medicine and don’t come for the birth. We don’t have the money,’ is what they don’t say, but that’s what they want. They want to turn birthing back 100 years in Great Britain because the health care system can’t deal with childbirths! It’s so overburdened with other medical emergencies.
By the way, this $5,000 for every baby born in America, can you imagine the kind of power trip you have to be on to make this kind of statement? Can you also imagine the flood of illegal immigration that this is going to spawn? You tell the impoverished and the poor, not just in Mexico but around the world, all they gotta do is get in here and their kid is born, five grand, start making babies! We don’t know the details of the plan. I’m sure she’ll say it doesn’t apply to illegals, but you wait. Everything applies to them now. They get health care. They get public education. They get tuition breaks when they go to college that in-state students don’t get or out-of-state students don’t get. You think that Mrs. Clinton’s going to actively keep $5,000 away from illegal immigrant babies born in this country? They are citizens born in this country. You’re a citizen, you get it. Hello the swarm that would take place if this ever happened. Of course, Mrs. Clinton likes that, because those are all future Democrat voters.