RUSH: Dallas and Janet, you’re next. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos from Dallas.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: My mother-in-law turned me on to you about 15 years ago, and I’m the proud mother of two Rush babies.
RUSH: Congratulations! (applauding) Congratulations. We love hearing this kind of stuff.
CALLER: They’re college educated, they come from a wealthy family, and they’re both joining the military. Imagine that.
RUSH: Now, wait. Did you say they come from a wealthy family?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You are wealthy.
CALLER: Well, we are now that we’re 54. We weren’t wealthy until we hit about 45.
RUSH: Yeah, they don’t let you make any money in this country ’til you are 40. That’s —
CALLER: No. No, they don’t.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Hold it just a second here, Janet. You deserve special recognition here.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: You just had the guts to admit that you’re wealthy.
CALLER: I’m proud of it.
RUSH: And you don’t sound… You’re not making excuses for it. You’re not apologizing for it. Kudos to you. Most wealthy people do not… They wouldn’t do what you just did. They’d start making excuses or they just wouldn’t even mention it at all.
CALLER: Well, we’ve worked very hard for what we have, and I’m proud of it.
RUSH: You ought to be. Congratulations.
CALLER: We have a small business, and I don’t think people understand how this tax hike will trickle down to all areas of the economy. We have three people in our office. We hired the third person when Bush gave us our tax cuts, and I got to come home. I had been working for free. If this takes place, we’re going to have to let one of the people go.
RUSH: Why?
CALLER: Because we can’t afford to pay $18 an hour that we’re paying. Now, we can hire people to do their job for $10 an hour. Does that make sense? But because we got a tax break years ago, we were able to hire more people.
RUSH: And why did you want to hire more people? Why didn’t you just put the money in your back pocket?
CALLER: This way I got to come home. I had been there working for free.
RUSH: But it was also a way to expand the business, right? I mean, if you’ve got more people to work, you have more work that needs to be done.
CALLER: No, we don’t need any more employees. We have more than enough.
RUSH: Now, but I mean back then. We’re going back to 2001 and 2003 when the tax cuts kicked in.
CALLER: Right. Right. That just put more money in our pocket, which allowed us to hire another person to do my job.
RUSH: So you finally got to go home?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: What did you do when you got home? Because the kids… Were they gone yet?
CALLER: No, no, no. The kids were still there.
RUSH: Ohhhh. Okay.
CALLER: I’m a school teacher, and I strongly believed in stay-at-home moms. So I really didn’t want to be where I was. So I came home and got to be with the kids. Now they’re gone and they’re in college.
RUSH: Now what are you doing at home?
CALLER: I still work at the office but —
RUSH: Oh, you went back to the office.
CALLER: Yes, I’m still there part-time, but I’m at home more. Okay, here’s my other point.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: We’ve been discussing what we’re going to do if this tax cut happens, because I knew it was going to take place. We’ve been discussing it for weeks.
RUSH: You mean the tax increase?
CALLER: Yes, yes. We’re going to have to put our house on the market. We don’t really need it anymore, not this large because the kids are gone — and what I’m afraid is going to happen is if everybody does this, there’s going to be a glut on the market, and the real estate prices are really going to go down. Now, in Dallas, the market is still really good, so we’re thinking, ‘We better go ahead and sell it now while the market’s good, because if this happens, it’s going to crash.’
RUSH: You know, this is an excellent point. Folks, what you’re hearing here is a woman who’s making plans based on the worst-case scenario that her government might take, action that it might take, and you can’t just afford to sit around and hope that this doesn’t happen. So you’re going to have to take actions that you’d really rather not take. You don’t want to take them. You’re being forced to alter your life because of a coming massive tax increase that you don’t really know is going to come, but you can’t afford to sit by and wait and get caught up short if it does. I want to make this prediction to you, too, folks. Let’s say this tax increase happens, and let’s say, by hook or by crook, they get it passed in 2010. That’s when the tax cuts that we are currently living with — 2001, 2003 — expire. So you couple the expiration of the tax cuts (that’s a new tax increase), then you tack on Hillary Clinton’s new tax increase, which is not Rangel’s; it’s Hillary Clinton’s. You’re looking at skyrocketing marginal rates, but you watch what happens at the end of 2010. All of the left-wing, corporate big shot donors who get their massive year-end bonuses are going to take as much of that bonus or sell as much of their stock options or whatever, in the final months of 2010, before the increases go into effect in 2011. Remember Eisner did that. He dumped something like $292 million in income one month before the Clinton retroactive tax increase went into effect — and after all your taxes go up, they’ll still be coming at you to pay for everybody else’s health care, folks.