RUSH: To St. Joe, Michigan, and Bill. Thanks for waiting, sir.
CALLER: Hi there, Rush. Mega dittos. We could have an instant stimulus package if we let it be known that we’re going to start drilling for oil, the oil futures would fall like a rock and people would have enough money to spend and we wouldn’t be sending it over to our enemies. What do you think of that idea?
RUSH: Well, I went through a lot of this yesterday. I must have spent about 20 minutes on this yesterday, the five myths of foreign oil dependence and so forth. But, as far as the stimulus is concerned, I went through a whole list of things. Yes, including, if you really want to stimulate the economy, get the federal government to suspend gasoline taxes. Do you know what percentage of the per-gallon price you pay are taxes? Try 50 cents by the time you get federal, state, and local. If you really want to stimulate the economy, you want to do it now, there are all kinds of things. We ought to be drilling for our own oil for many reasons, security reasons, the fact that we depend on foreign sources, many of our oil comes from Canada and Mexico. We’re not primarily dependent on the Saudis, contrary to what everybody thinks. But beyond that, as I said brilliantly and eloquently in this monologue, we’re a growth economy. We lead the world, and conservation is not going to lead to growth. Conservation is fine in and of itself. We need — and we’ve got plenty of — our own oil in a number of places. The very people demanding that we stop being dependent are the very people preventing us from getting our own sources out of the ground.