RUSH: Obama announced, by the way, this big deal coming up tomorrow night, is going to announce his tax increases, and folks, the wrong way to talk about this is Obama is going to raise taxes on the wealthy. That is the wrong way to talk about this, because what’s going to happen is that the Bush tax cuts are going to be allowed to ‘perspire’ in 2011, and that will move the current top marginal rate from 35 up to 39.6, effectively 40%, and this is on incomes over $250,000 a year. This is a massive, in the midst of a recession, tax increase on small business. It is not a tax on the wealthy. I mean it is, but it’s gonna hit far many more small business people than it’s going to hit the wealthy. And, by the way, these are the people that are going to do the hiring once the recession ends and we start coming back. But will the unemployed want to go back to work? Because I go back to the Boston Globe: ‘For Now, Laid Off and Loving It.’
You want to hear some details from this story? ‘A few days after David Adler’s wife decided to leave her law firm in December, he was laid off from his job designing software at Brightcove. It was shocking. And scary. Until it wasn’t. Adler has quickly learned to appreciate some aspects of his unexpected unemployment.’ Would you have ever seen this story just one year ago? Well, we didn’t see this story during the Bush years. ‘The 42-year-old spends his days doting on his 6-month-old daughter, visiting museums with his family, and preparing for a possible exhibit of his photos at a local coffee shop in Dedham. Living off savings, unemployment, and severance packages, Adler knows he has to get a job eventually,’ aw, it’s too bad, isn’t it, ‘and has started the search. But for now, he’s cherishing every moment. ‘It’s our first child and I love watching her grow,’ Adler said. ‘And it’s nice to have time off and get in touch with my old hobbies.’
‘As the ranks of the nation’s unemployed grows, more Americans are facing the reality of life without work. Despite the grim task of making ends meet (firing the nanny, bailing on Whole Foods, applying for unemployment), there is a newly forming society of people who are making the best of being laid off. They are rediscovering hobbies. They are greeting kids at the school bus. They are remembering what daylight actually looks like.’ (laughing) Yes. These are the people to whom we’re extending benefits. Who do you think is going to pay for all these people to sit around and get in touch with their hobbies, go post their photographs at some coffee shop where you can’t see the photographs because of the acrid smell of the doobies. And the massive layoffs by companies nationwide — nearly 600,000 jobs were lost last month — has helped remove the stigma and shame of being unemployed, according to John A. Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement firm. ‘There’s less of a ‘why aren’t you working attitude’ that is giving people some extra space.’
‘John Stephen Dwyer so far isn’t missing his job or former office overlooking Chinatown. The 41-year-old Boston native was laid off in November from his $40,000-a-year job as education coordinator for the Clinical Research Graduate Program of Tufts University Sackler School of Biomedical Sciences.’ Can I go through that again? The guy makes, or made, $40,000 a year as education coordinator. What is an education coordinator? Now, I know what a vision control coordinator is. A vision control coordinator is a window washer. I don’t know what an education coordinator is. But anyway, he had that job for the clinical research graduate program of Tufts University’s Sackler School of Biomedical Scientists, and ‘he hasn’t seriously started looking for new work yet.’ Douglas T. Hall, a professor at the Boston University School of Management, ‘It’s the success syndrome. You work hard, you do well. It’s very satisfying and that gets you more involved to start working even harder. It’s a success spiral that people get into. And sometimes it takes some extreme experience to get out of that spiral.’
When did my success spiral begin? My success spiral began I’d have to say in 1984 when I moved to Sacramento, and I have been in that success spiral, and the last thing I want to do is get out of it. (interruption) Hm-hm? Well, no, you go to the success spiral, but then when there’s interruption in the success spiral, like when you get canned, then that’s when you start posting your pictures at the local coffee shop, go out there take pictures, travel around, visit museums, read National Geographic, look at pictures of places you’ll never visit either in person or in real life. Take the model train, put it in the basement, play around with the six-year-old, clean up the puke and the pabulum, all these things that you don’t get to do, experience what daylight looks like, the sun, because you don’t get to do that. Yes, laid off and loving it.
Now, this is media cover for what’s happening. There are so many people unemployed there’s no stigma attached to it. So, anyway, the small business people who hire the newly happy unemployed are going to be soaked with a 40% tax — most small businesses file on their personal income tax return. Most of them are Subchapter S corporations, and they file on their personal return, their new rate will be in a couple years, 2011 or so will be 40%, smack-dab in the middle of a recession. This is disastrous, but don’t call it a tax increase on the rich. It’s not that. Small businesses of $250 grand and larger are not rich people. They’re going to pay the brunt. And once again, what this all adds up to is you’ve got a worldview of a bunch of people in this administration with a chip on their shoulder who look at the people who they think are rich, they think those people are rich because they have been unfair, they have stolen or they’ve taken more of their share from the economic pie, that’s why there are poor people and so the chip on the shoulder is going to lead us now to level the playing field by spreading as much misery equally as possible.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To the phones. This is Pam in Boston. Thank you for waiting. You’re up first.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, madam.
CALLER: I was glad to hear you bring national attention to that Boston Globe article.
RUSH: Isn’t that an amazing story?
CALLER: Listen, I turned to my husband. I said, ‘If this was Bush, and these two professionals lost their jobs, we would be denying… You would see the kid in diapers. We would be denying them the chance to send their child to an exclusive private school. It would just be terrible.’
RUSH: Oh, the sob stories would have been worse than that.
CALLER: Yeah. Unreal.
RUSH: But you’re absolutely right. Oh, it would have been horrible.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: What if the kid gets sick?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Yeah, instead we get these… Folks, if you missed it, the Boston Globe has a story on Boston-area professionals.
CALLER: Front page.
RUSH: It’s on the front page, the benefits of being unemployed.
CALLER: Yes. And they’re going to the museum and enjoying their family, and my husband turned to me and said, ‘Back in the day, when you asked for unemployment, you could not draw unless you proved to them that you were actively looking for another job. This guy’s telling the world, he’s going to museum, and loving his current utopia of not having to go to work.’ It’s just mind-blowing.
RUSH: What it is is two things. It’s the media trying to give cover —
CALLER: Mmm-hmm. Oh, yes.
RUSH: — for Obama, and, you know, Obama’s got this big thing tomorrow night, and I guarantee you somehow, some way he’s going to lay all this off on George W. Bush tomorrow night.
CALLER: Not even a question.
RUSH: Yep. And so the media is giving him cover here on the unemployment story. There’s also an attempt here to motivate and inspire the other unemployed reading this to do this same stuff and be happy.
CALLER: Exactly. And he’s even extended the benefits. So he’s just writing his ticket for 2012 because all you have to do is sit home. We’re going to take care of your mortgage. You can not have a job. We’ll send you a check. Who isn’t going to sign up to vote for this guy?
RUSH: Well, at some point, Pam, there’s going to be — and it’s started, you know, the pulse.
CALLER: Can we have that revolution? (laughs)
RUSH: The pulse of revolution started last week. It did, with Rick Santelli, the Chicago Tea Party —
CALLER: Yes, that was great.
RUSH: — and this mortgage business. The more stories like this get out, and when these tax increases hit —
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: I mean, the very people that these poor people at the Boston Globe story are going to have to go find a job from are be facing a massive 4% increase, up to 40% on their tax rate starting in 2011. And note that’s right after the 2010 elections. That’s why they’re going to let the Bush tax cuts expire.
CALLER: Oh, it’s a plan. There’s no question. He has a plan. And it just gets harder and harder to walk out the door, to do the right thing, to pay your mortgage, because what is the point? We can all be like Henrietta and go to the meetings and cry out, ‘Please help me!’
RUSH: Well, worry all targets. The achievers are the targets.
CALLER: Yep. If you’re responsible, you’re a sucker.
RUSH: Well, no. It’s worse than that. I really think that Obama and his community organizer people think this way.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: I think they look at let’s say an economic pie as a zero-sum game. That pie never gets bigger. That pie sometimes gets smaller, but it never, ever gets bigger, in their view. So if you have a small, relatively small number of people who are doing really well with pieces from that pie, and the others’ pieces are very much smaller, the Obama people look at the people with the big pieces of pie as doing it unfairly. It’s not right. There should be equitable equality in this, and so we’re targets. It’s not just that you’re losers; you’re targets now.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: People are gonna be told that they have to give back. It’s redistribution. Redistribution. It’s exactly what he told Joe the Plumber, except I firmly believe — and I’m not even going to coat this in something sweet sounding. I think that there is an anger and a rage on the part of Obama and his wife and their legion —
CALLER: Oh, I agree.
RUSH: — of friends —
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: — and I think there is a desire to punish the people they think have made life so tough for those who they think are suffering and have not won life’s lottery. Some of the stuff that’s being done here, everybody in the world knows from just historical example will do the opposite of what they’re promising. I think it has to be on purpose.