RUSH: The Politico has a story today. I can’t get the author here because it looks like… Well, I’m not even going to try it. We’re using cheap fax machines these days at the EIB Network and the very small type does not carry across.
‘Will the Election Drive the Dow?’ (laughs) Is the election driving the Dow, is the answer! ‘Generally…’ This is a paragraph from within the story: ‘Generally, financial analysts say the stock market likes Republicans more than Democrats. And while predicting market movements is as difficult as predicting the winner of the World Series in August, some experts say the market is already anticipating an Obama win on Nov. 4 and has at least partially accounted for it.’ This is The Politico. The market is tanking because it expects an Obama victory, from experts — and get this line. ‘Joe Lieber, a political analyst at the consulting firm Washington Analysis who scrutinizes elections for his clients at hedge, mutual and pension funds, said an electoral lurch that gave the Democrats 60 seats could prompt a dramatic sell-off on Wall Street.’
What does this tell you? What in the world…? It’s already happening. I shared with you the story yesterday of a couple small businessmen I met on Tuesday. I left out one thing, by the way, that has them mortified. It’s not just Obama’s taxes. I asked these guys. I said, ‘Okay, wait a minute, now. You’re talking about having to lay people off if Obama’s elected, because of what’s going to happen to taxes,’ and they also mentioned… The name of this act is eluding me now. It’s the Employer Free Hire Act or something. Basically it is a statute that will force small business to unionize. It will force small businesses to unionize so unions can go in, unionize a business, and then walk out and shut down after having created a unionized business. These guys are terrified of this.
We’re talking small business now. The unions, as you know, their membership has been plummeting. It’s at 11 or 12% now, if that, and these small business people, they were speaking for a lot of them, are just petrified. Now, when I mentioned this story yesterday, I got some e-mail last night. ‘Hey, Rush. Hey, Rush. If these CEOs are still afraid of Obama, how come they’re going to vote for him and are contributing to him?’ We’re talking small business here, and I failed to make that plain yesterday. The large company CEOs, folks, they’re conflicted here because large company CEOs would love to off-load your health care plan that you have, if you work for a large company, to the federal government. But at the same time, they don’t like the idea the corporate tax rate is not going to be cut or may be intensified. But I asked these guys, these small business guys.
I said, ‘What about Obama’s got this great plan, this $3,000 tax credit for every new full job you hire?’ They said, this is a joke, and they told me what everybody in the business knows. If you’re going to pay somebody, rough figures, $50,000, it’s going to cost you at least 65,000 to hire ’em. Okay, so it cost you 65,000, you spend that to get a $3,000 tax credit? It’s a silly deal. Nobody would take it. It’s crazy. And then once these employers don’t take the deal if Obama actually goes through with this, then that sets up Obama being able to point the finger at them as the reason why there is no rebound in employment. ‘Well, these greedy small businessmen. We’ve offered them all kinds of incentives to hire people but they refuse to do it because they want all the money for themselves. They’re laying off workers,’ blah, blah, blah.
That’s how Obama plans to escape the rising unemployment he claims to fix during this campaign. This Politico story here today is fascinating in that experts are saying the market is tanking right now because it expects an Obama victory. It’s already anticipating that and has partially accounted for it, and if the Democrats get 60 seats in the Senate, then there’s going to be a dramatic sell-off. The Washington Post today: ‘Job Losses Accelerate, Signaling Deeper Distress — Employers are moving to aggressively cut jobs,’ I told you this yesterday, ‘and reduce costs in the face of the nation’s economic crisis, preparing for what many fear will be a long and painful recession.’ Let me redo the lead. ‘Employers are moving to aggressively cut jobs and reduce costs in the face of the nation’s economic crisis,’ comma, ‘the Obama presidency,’ period.
‘They are preparing for what they fear will be a long and painful recession,’ about four years of the Obama presidency. So in light of an Obama win, the market is tanking: ‘Job losses accelerate, signaling a deeper distress,’ and why? It’s because Obama is unrepentant about his tax increases. And when he says that he’s going to give every American, or 95% of Americans a tax cut, he’s not — and he’s on the hook for this, too. It’s welfare. He is going to take more. He’s gonna include people who don’t pay income taxes but do pay payroll taxes, Social Security taxes. He’s going to give them anywhere from a 500 to a thousand-dollar tax credit, rebate check, what have you. He’s basically going to rub the Social Security trust fund — quote, unquote, lockbox, what have you — but it’s a welfare program.
He’s going to give welfare checks to people who don’t pay income tax. Now he’s saying, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no! We’ll have a work requirement on that.’ A work requirement? Why a work requirement? I thought they already were working! I thought these were the salt-of-the-earth people. They’re ‘working families.’ I thought they already were working. What do you mean, have a work requirement, Obama? I thought these people were working and they’re getting the shaft? By all these rich Americans who are trodding on them all day long and making their lives miserable and unhappy. My opening monologue yesterday about the conversation with the two small business execs, you know what was enlightening about that to me was, we don’t get truth from the Drive-Bys.
Yet we live in a world that’s ultimately governed by reality. Propaganda couldn’t keep the Soviet Union afloat, and propaganda will not protect the media from collapse, either, at some point. The media, if this keeps up, with collapse of its own incompetence, its own immorality, its own injustice. Now, their propaganda may have a shelf life long enough to elect Obama, but it won’t change the realities that American businesses face as they prepare their budgets going forward. American business is going to look at its P&L. It’s going to look at the financial figures that dominate, govern the business. They’re not going to turn on the Nightly News which fewer and pure people are watching, and find out what the business climate. They don’t like in the world of fantasy; they don’t like in the world of propaganda. They live in the world of reality.
Here I’ve got these two guys sitting next to me on Wednesday and they’re giving me their reality, and I have never heard it reflected in the media. The media is pure propaganda, pure image, pure fantasy. Everything’s going to rosy; it’s going to be wonderful when Obama is elected. The markets right now are not panicked. You’d have to say they’re hysterical. Nobody can figure these out, these up and down swings, what’s driving all this so-called daily news on jobs or credit crunch or what have you. I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re reacting to what they perceive to be reality. They’re not to the propaganda and the fantasy of the media. I have a friend who works for another broadcast entity. They are slashing costs. They are firing and laying off people, trying to survive.
My friend’s daughter is having trouble selling yearbook ads when these are slam-dunk in any other year. People buy high school and college yearbook ads as a matter of almost philanthropy. From top to bottom, businesses are taking care of business. They are in survival mode right now. We’ve had a hurricane, and it’s been predicted, and they see the radar images. They see Hurricane Obama coming, and they’re behaving rationally. Now, that makes no sense when juxtaposed with the image that’s been painted by Obama and his media campaign staff. The financial pictures painted by socialists and Marxists have no similarity to photographs. I mean, their promises have been proven to be lies 100% of the time, and business owners understand that. Business has to deal with reality.
Obama’s campaign has been all about imagery and style. The markets will react to long-term stability, and they’ll react to instability and volatility, too. Tax cuts and spending cuts, an across-the-board freeze would stop the bleeding and allow for the slow upward build. If you cut capital gains today, if you cut the corporate tax rate, you want to see stability in the market? All you’d have to do is have somebody serious propose it, somebody that the markets think has a genuine chance of winning. Markets are looking for good news. and it’s not gonna come in a BS New York Times poll that says Obama’s up 15 points. That’s not good news! It’s not going to be good news they interpret watching The Obama Channel, DNC, MSNBC TV. They’re dealing in reality. You work for them. They’re not dealing in fantasies and propaganda. They have to make it all work or else they go out of business and then everybody at the small business is kaput.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so here’s the triple threat that responsible business people who look at the P&L, they don’t look at MSNBC, they don’t look at the New York Times poll. Well, they might look at the New York Times poll and get worried over the result, but here’s what American business senses. This is what they fear as the triple threat about to hit them: higher taxes, less free trade. Don’t forget Obama said he’s going to tear up NAFTA and try to rework it, and he’s against opening up free trade with an ally in South America or Colombia and a massive increase in union membership. Obama has not really been targeted on this. There haven’t been a whole lot of people talking about this union measure that he supports. It’s named something that’s the exact opposite of what it is. It’s called the Employer Freedom Act or something. It’s the exact opposite of that. It allows unions to go in with a secret ballot and so forth and unionize any shop that they want to try if it becomes law, so this is what they fear. This is what they are all reacting to.
Now, one more thing about the clothes, Sarah Palin. The Drive-Bys are trying to find the scandal, Sarah Palin, $150 grand, paid for, RNC. Do you realize that it’s an illegal campaign contribution for any incorporated business to give away clothes to a candidate? Six thousand dollars the average cost of a Hillary pantsuit, a little over $6,000 is over the personal limit and is thus also illegal. So what the Republicans are trying to do is say, ‘Okay, we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, we paid for it, this is the way you do things.’ To the Democrats that’s out of style, that’s out of touch, ‘You’re actually going to pay for it?’ But the thing is if this designer is right and she’s outfitting all these candidates for nothing, then they’re violating campaign laws. Not that it will matter. Nobody will do anything about it.