RUSH: Remember we ended the program yesterday with a story about a journalist professor, journalism professor now teaching at the journalism school at the University of Georgia. He’s a former reporter or journalist or something, and he wrote this piece in the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, and he said the mainstream press, the Drive-Bys, have gotta start regulating blogs and talk radio and some of these other newfangled YouTubes, New Media, because it’s unregulated and it’s uncensored, and it’s not edited and it’s irresponsible and it’s not news, and the people doing it are not journalists. I’m sitting here stunned how this guy can literally claim that the Drive-Bys are fraud-free and abuse free, with Dan Rather, with blowing up trucks on Dateline NBC that otherwise wouldn’t blow up, with setting people up to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a crazy charge. I give you another illustration of the fraud and the abuse that they are still passing on. These alleged professional journalists. They still pass on the fraud. They still pass on abusing the truth. How many times can they ignore truth and reality and hard data?
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RUSH: Let’s see, Doug in Greenville, South Carolina, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
CALLER: Well, Merry Christmas, Rush.
RUSH: Same to you, sir.
RUSH: Exactly. We do talk about this, but it’s like a lot of things. We don’t talk about it enough. Like I was thinking last week: We need to recycle the whole concept of ‘it’s your money’ when we’re talking about taxes, because the roots of liberalism are very deep. The tentacles of liberalism are very, very tangled and woven in a web of deceit that’s strangling the people of this country, and even though government fails at most everything it does domestically, people still look to it as the final authority, as good and just and the place where health care should be taken care of and the place where all these grievances should be addressed and adjudicated. What he’s responding to is something here in the first hour. I was talking about journalistic fraud perpetuating myths, journalistic malpractice. Before the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% of wage earners in this country paid 37% of the whole income tax bite. After the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% now pay 39%. Their percentage bite’s gone up two points. Before the Bush tax cuts, the top 5% of wage earners in America paid 56% of all taxes. After the Bush tax cuts, the top 5% now pay 60%. Yet the Democrats continue to run around and say, ‘The rich are getting tax breaks, and the poor are not, and the middle class isn’t,’ and it’s bogus.
The percentage of income taxes paid by the top one and top 5% have gone up dramatically in both categories, after the Bush tax cuts. The reason for this is easy. You can’t look at this stuff as a zero-sum game. There’s dynamics. You lower taxes, and all kinds of great things happen. New jobs are created; more productivity occurs. More wealth is created. People do get richer. They move up in tax brackets, and so there are more people in those brackets, and you are raising more money for the Treasury and the government at large, which everybody thinks is the point, which it isn’t. As far as the liberals are concerned, it’s control. Now, the sub-S business, subchapter S, sole proprietors are allowed to file their business return on their personal income tax return, and that means they’re paying the personal tax rate on a business — and those are people, small businesses, are (it’s a cliche, but it’s true) the backbone of America. Small business hires vastly more than big corporations, and they end up being targets — and not just of taxes. They end up being targets of overzealous regulatory agencies and others who want to penalize them, and punish them for their success. It’s a vicious cycle. The successful are always going to be targets of liberals and Democrats.
RUSH: Bob in Houston, you are next up on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Merry Christmas from Houston.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Couple of quick points, one on the story about the sports cars. I’m proud to say my wife admires me for driving a 450-horsepower sports car that gets 12 miles per gallon.
RUSH: (laughing) What kind of car is that?
CALLER: It’s an Audi RS6.
RUSH: Audi, did you say RS6? And it’s $450,000?
CALLER: No 450 horsepower.
RUSH: It’s 450 horsepower. I’m having so many audio problems here today. I apologize to you. Everything is sounding very muffled today and I’m trying to fix it so I apologize. A $450,000 Audi. I’d never heard that.
CALLER: Anyway, my point that I called on was getting back to the top 1% of the taxpayers. You mentioned that it was a 2% increase. That’s an increase in their share. If you have a fixed revenue coming into the Treasury, then that would be actually a 5% increase in the dollars they’re paying, and we’ve all acknowledged that the revenues to the Treasury have increased. I don’t know what the numbers are, but let’s say 10%, then the the top 1% are really paying, you know, somewhere around 15% more dollars to the Treasury.
RUSH: Oh, there’s no question. Yeah, we’re just dealing in percentages, but that’s a good point. You’re absolutely right.