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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I got a couple notes from a friend last night that have caused me, ladies and gentlemen, to do some serious recalculating, and I’m not sure just where I fall in on this now. A guy, friend of mine in Kansas City was out to dinner, and he overheard two people at the table next to him just praising Obama to the hilt, on the basis, ‘You know, it’s good we finally have somebody in the White House doing something about this,’ meaning the economy. My friend was a little incredulous because they appeared to not care what it was that he was doing, just that he was doing something. That led me to remember my oft-repeated warning to you people, that liberals are never held to account on the results of their proposals, only on their good intentions, only on how much they care. The only Democrat who has really paid a price for messing up the US economy was Jimmy Carter and even he now has been rehabilitated by the Democrat Party and the media.

Another note from another friend expressing exasperation, his kids, late teens, early twenties, in college, he has been trying to convince them for years of the fraud and the hoax that is manmade global warming. He has hit them with statistics. He has shown them things that they can read. None of it mattered. They thought, ‘Ah, dad, come on,’ they’d rolled their eyes. ‘You don’t understand how serious things are.’ What has changed their minds is this cold winter. His kids now think Algore is an idiot because they have had a horrible winter. It’s been bad. They’re mad. They don’t understand how anybody can say global warming is going on out there when it’s as cold as they can ever remember in their lives. So he concludes to me that the actual experience of something has far more persuasive power than does making an argument. And I said, ‘Well, you know, sometimes arguments are not just about winning arguments. If you have good connection, do you have a good connection with your kids?’ ‘Well, my connection with my kids is as good anybody else’s kids. You know, they’re past the rebellion stage but they still haven’t realized I’m the smartest guy in the family yet, they think they are.’ That got me to start thinking of something else.

We have the stimulus package out there, and theoretically, practically, it’s a disaster, it is an absolute disaster, but telling people that is not going to change anybody’s minds. They’re going to have to see evidence that it didn’t work. Now, here’s the thing. The US economy is a very powerful thing. The US economy, you would have to say, is larger than — what was this, $789 billion? The US economy is larger than that. Perhaps one of the reasons for the speed and haste in getting the stimulus bill passed was because common sense tells you that at some point the US economy is going to recover. It is. There’s too much ingenuity. This bill is not enough to stop all the ingenuity. This bill is not large enough to totally socialize the country. The stock market is in bad, bad shape, down 270 today on fears of bank nationalization. Zbigniew Brzezinski is out there talking about food riots between rich and poor if something doesn’t happen. Everybody is still trying to make the case it’s going to be horrible, rotten, and so forth, but the reality is the US economy may in fact rebound. What if it rebounds next year, late this year, next year, guess who’s going to get the credit? The stimulus package will have had nothing to do with it. The stimulus package, if anything, will actually retard this. The real danger of the stimulus package of course is — and, by the way, I mentioned this to you some weeks ago. What Obama really wants is to raise taxes. He has not been able to do that because of the status of the economy.

So the economy is going to rebound at some point, the United States economy. It always does. We rebounded from the Depression. We rebounded from the recessions of the late seventies, early eighties. We rebounded from the recession in the sixties. We got out of Great Depression. These things happen. It will come back. The real long-term effects of this are going to be profound because when it comes back, then the focus is going to be on all the deficits and that’s when Obama will come and raise everybody’s taxes, like two or three years from now, sooner if he can get away with it, at which time the real structural damage that Obama’s doing to the economy will start to take place. So these are precarious times. I sit here and I make no bones about the fact that I hope Obama’s plans fail, and I hope they fail in a way that’s noticeable. It’s the only way this kind of disaster is going to be rejected. But the economy is bigger than this right now. (interruption) I have to define the failure, Mr. Snerdley? Why do I have to define the failure? What’s so hard to understand about the — (interruption) hm-hm. Hm-hm. Snerdley’s yelling at me here that I have to define failure because if I don’t, nobody else will. You mean the failure of the policies? Okay, what does failure of the Obama economic plan mean?

See, you could go two ways on this. The failure of the economic plan would result in the economy boomeranging because the plan didn’t work. That’s one definition of failure. It fails to do what it says it’s going to do, review the US economy, create gazillions of new jobs. That’s one definition of failure. If that doesn’t work — ’cause you’ve been telling me, you know, I go into your office every top-of-the-hour break, ‘People are going to figure this out, man, and it’s going to come back. After a while, people that voted for this guy, they’re not going to see their jobs come back, they’re not going to see prosperity come back,’ and I’ve been warning you that the average Obama voter, even in the case of Democrat politician — especially this guy — remember, the Great Society, it was a failure. The war on poverty was a failure. Ten trillion we’ve spent. It’s a failure, and yet the people that came up with the plan are lauded to this day as great, compassionate, concerned Americans, not because it succeeded or failed, but because they cared, because of their intentions. Well, Obama’s intentions, nobody’s going to ever question what his intentions are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Elliott in Yorba Linda, California, hi, and welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’ve been trying to get this point across for weeks. Obama — and this shows his naivete about economics. Obama may be trying to control the US economy, but you can’t control the global economy. And here’s why I think this is going to be even worse than people think. When the global economy recovers, capital is going to look for its best and highest use. Why would anybody invest capital in the United States if it’s perceived that our growth is going to be slower than the rest of the world’s —

RUSH: I think it’s —

CALLER: — like China and India.

RUSH: Well, China and India, those are just two nations in the global economy.

CALLER: That’s correct.

RUSH: I think we’re going to recover faster than the global economy does.

CALLER: Well, the other point I wanted to put across was that a lot of these US companies get more than 50% of their business from overseas. I’m very concerned that if the US economy is laboring under taxes and debt, that you’re not going to see these big companies really care as much about United States. They’ll open factories, more factories overseas and they’ll sell their stuff in other countries.

RUSH: Well, I guess that’s possible, but that all hinges on your theory that the world economy will rebound faster than ours. I still think we drive the world economy, and I think when we start recovering, that will pull the world around with it but it’s going to take us recovering before the world comes around.

CALLER: Well, we’ll see. Europe used to be the driver of the world economy.

RUSH: Yeah, but they haven’t in who knows how long. They gave up their empire.

CALLER: Yeah, and we gotta be careful. We just gotta be careful. We gotta keep the capitalist system going.

RUSH: I agree. The capitalist system is sort of ingrained in us. You know, one of the things that I’ve always pointed out — and I’m an eternal optimist, which is why, you know, it would be a mistake to say that the stimulus bill is gonna wipe us out. What is more properly to say is that we now have elected a president and we have a Congress, made up of extreme radical leftists, and they’re going to take aim at capitalism, and it’s going to be an epic battle. Will they be able to fundamentally transform this nation into what would officially technically be called a socialist nation? I was watching Fox this morning. I have not seen the story they were using.

Yeah, I was watching it and reading closed-captioning, but the slug line or the Chyron, the graphic at the bottom of the screen said that experts now say US is officially a socialist nation as compared with how much government owns businesses in nations we already recognize as socialist. We are nationalizing banks and there are more and more people coming out suggesting we should nationalize banks. Obama has destroyed welfare reform in this stimulus package. We’ve got the architecture and the infrastructure put in place for national health care. This stimulus bill, by itself, is going to do tremendous damage down the road. The question is: Will it do damage immediately? Is this stimulus bill large enough to overcome the capitalist entrepreneurial tendencies of Americans?

Look, this has always been the case. At some point during this economic down cycle, people are going to be fed up with being in a downtown and they’re going to take things and matters into their own hands and they’re going to start new businesses. They’re going to do this, deal with prevailing conditions and they’re going to get sick and tired of having a rotten economy with no job prospects. They’re going to take matters into their own hands. This is going to cause a recovery of sorts. It’s always happened this way. Even when taxes are increased on the rich, you’ll find most people just working all that much harder to try to make that much more money so that they don’t have a net loss due to the tax increases that have happened. There are varying degrees of industriousness among people New York Times country.

One of the troubling things is that this stimulus bill is going to — via welfare reform, getting rid of it — create more welfare cases. It’s going to create more dependents. Wait ’til we get back to amnesty and legalizing all the illegals in this country to register them as Democrats. There is a race. There is a race here to beat capitalism. The question is: Can capitalism overcome this based on these gazillions of individuals in this country that you don’t know and I don’t know? They’re faceless, they’re nameless, but they’re the people that make this country work. They’re just not going to sit back and watch their futures go to hell. They’re gonna take matters into their own hands, try to do something about it. The point is: Will they be taxed to death down the road in order to support all of the deficits combined with inflation that are being created by this one piece of stimulus?

Then we haven’t even gotten to TARP 2, which is going to be a trillion dollars, the nationalization of the banks — and we haven’t even gotten to Stimulus 2, which is going to happen, and one of the reasons it’s going to happen… Look, we’ve got things that we can measure here right off the bat. This thing is going to get signed in one hour. If we don’t see unemployment drop in two months, we can say it didn’t work and we’re gonna proclaim it loudly that it didn’t work. If we don’t see a bunch of new schools being built, if we don’t see a bunch of roads and bridges being repaired above what’s already happening, we’re going to say, ‘Hey, this isn’t working,’ because I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. When the economy rebounds for whatever reason — and it will not be the stimulus package — we have a totally-in-the-tank, sycophantic, they’re-going-to-die-of-anal-poisoning-someday media that cannot wait to credit Barack Obama for any, the smallest little economic uptick.

If, for example, this Caterpillar guy (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens) within, say, three weeks of the stimulus being passing… Remember, he’s on Obama’s economic advisory team in the White House. Let’s say a month from today, Caterpillar announces they’re going to rehire a thousand people. Do you realize what the news is going to look like that day? Because what’s the story now? The story is, Obama went out and said, ‘The Caterpillar guy, CEO told me if the stimulus is passed, we’re gonna start hiring people.’ The next day the Caterpillar CEO said, ‘Ah, not quite sure. I think we’re still facing layoffs. It’s going to be a little while before we can start hiring back.’ Okay. So that’s where we are. What if in a month Caterpillar starts hiring people? I think you should look for bigger headlines in the New York Times and on VE Day.

The headlines will be bigger on the first economic report that’s an up-tick, than they were for when we won in World War II. The fix is in, folks. The fix is in to make this guy the most successful, the most rapidly successful president ever — and that’s why if unemployment in two months is still going up, this is a failure. If you don’t see new schools, if you don’t see any roads being repaired, bridges, ba-da ba-da ba-da ba-da, then we’re going to proclaim it a failure. ‘But, Rush. But, Rush! Obama says it’s gonna take a while.’ They’re saying all kinds of things. I’m not going to react to what they say. They’re saying it’s going to be a long time. I think they’re just lowering expectations. I think one of the reasons they really hustled to put this through is that they know at some point the economy’s going to recover. They want to be able to give the stimulus package, and thus Obama, credit for it. That was one of the real reasons for haste. In addition to getting a bunch of pure garbage in this bill passed into law before anybody could see it.

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