RUSH: Robert in Huntsville, Alabama, great you called, sir. Nice to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Rush, happy Thanksgiving from a former GM employee.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Listen, the point of the call was to — you did talk about it in the last hour quite extensively, but my main concern with this deficit spending is the fact that we’re raising the ceiling so much, when are we going to see the collapse of the dollar?
RUSH: Well, I have no idea.
CALLER: What about the interest rates? You know, we saw an upsurge in those about ten years ago when we got into a big deficit problem.
RUSH: The guy that runs the International Monetary Fund, over the weekend was interviewed in some elitist paper, and he said, ‘We don’t have the money to do what our charter requires us to do.’ He said that central banks are going to have to lower interest rates to practically zero if the world has any chance of coming out of this. What I take from that is nobody knows what the hell to do. Everybody is trying to micromanage this. If they’d just get out of the way and let the market handle it, yeah, there would be a lot of pain. But there’s going to be anyway.
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely there is, and it’s better to weather this thing early on as opposed to just tank everything where we can’t rebuild it.
RUSH: This is only going to prolong it. I remember… People have forgotten, this but I tend to remember. In nineteen eighty-two, Reagan’s second year, it was a recession.
CALLER: Oh, big time.
RUSH: It was a huge recession, big recession, and I remember back then I was in Kansas City, and we were all sitting around talking about it, and the basic plan was, ‘Just let it happen.’ It’s got to happen to clean up all the things that had been made bad by Jimmy Carter and even some years previous with Nixon. And so it was. What did Reagan do amid the recession, is he cut taxes. By the time he was through, the top marginal rate went from 70% to 28% and revenues to the Treasury doubled. People put things back together because it’s the people who make the country work; it’s the people that make the economy work. So when you ask me when the dollar is going to collapse, I have no clue. I don’t even know that it is. Last I’ve seen, the dollar sort of rebounds at some of this. This deficit that we’re going to end up having, $1.4 trillion, means we’re going to have a deficit that’s over half of the annual revenue produced during the next fiscal year. In my lifetime we’ve never had that. So we are in, for me, uncharted territory. Last time we had a deficit with a percentage of the annual revenue that high was 1945, coming out of World War II. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Robert.
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RUSH: Paula in Bentonville, Arkansas. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush, from the hometown of the evil Wal-Mart.
RUSH: Yes, madam. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Rush, this is the week of Thanksgiving, and I just want you to know I’m grateful for you. You make me laugh and you make me think every day.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Rush, I want to submit to you this big agenda of Obama and the Dems. I think this Card-Check legislation, you’ve already referred to it once today. I believe that Wal-Mart is the target of that. I think they are salivating at the idea of collecting union dues and unionizing Wal-Mart all across this country.
RUSH: No question about it. But I don’t think they’re just the sole target. I think they want to get as many unions and as many small businesses as they can. They want to rebuild the unions to keep campaign donations going and votes and so forth. And, meanwhile, the Senate conducts secret votes on whether or not Lieberman should stay on the committee. By the way, I have an answer to the question, ‘Why is it that Obama’s putting all these Clinton people in his administration?’ She’s from Arkansas and that reminded me of it. The answer is: ‘When you’re a community organizer and that’s all you’ve ever done, you probably don’t meet a whole lot of people that could be cabinet secretary.’