RUSH: Let’s go back to Election Day, 11/4/08. That was the day of hope. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9625. At this moment, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering around 6580. It is down over 3,000 points. That means that just since November the 4th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost a third of its value, $3 trillion of wealth has been wiped out. Is this what you voted for? A record 31.8 million Americans receive food stamps at the latest count. That is an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession. These are government figures. Food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries and People magazine and Pop Tarts are the major US anti-hunger program forecast to cost at least $51 billion in this fiscal year ending September 30th. That’s up $10 billion from 2008. So we have 31.8 million Americans on food stamps. Is that what you voted for? The new government unemployment figure is out today, and it is 8.1%, over 600,000 jobs lost last month. ‘The nation’s unemployment rate bolted to 8.1 percent in February, the highest since late 1983, as cost-cutting employers slashed 651,000 jobs.’ Is this what you voted for?
As predicted and predictable, both these figures, 8.1 and 651,000, ‘Both figures were worse than analysts expected and the Labor Department’s report shows America’s workers being clobbered by a wave of layoffs.’ Is this what you voted for? Charles Krauthammer in his column today in the Washington Post makes the case better than I made it yesterday. As you know, the Obama administration conducted another summit yesterday, a health care summit. They had their breakout groups, and then the groups came back and reported in to President Obama. President Obama has been saying that in order to get jobs back, in order to start creating employment, we need health care reform, energy reform, and what is the third thing he says? Da-da-da-da-da-da. Well, whatever it is, it’s something irrelevant to why people are losing their jobs. People are not losing their jobs because of health care; they’re not losing their homes because of energy concerns or any of that. This is all happening because of a banking system that is in disarray, and the administration has offered no plan whatsoever. Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary, can’t even find a deputy assistant to take the job. Sanjay Gupta turned down the Surgeon General’s job. Makes me wonder what his tax problems are.
I asked the question yesterday, the soonest we’re going to get health care reform — and, by the way, the Democrats are pushing for this fall, they’d like it as soon as they can — if they get national health care, folks, the country as you and I have known it is over, but the failing health of Senator Kennedy is, as I told you way back when, the driving force here. The failing health of Senator Kennedy is already being used as an inspirational effort, or technique, to get national health care on the fast track. This is supposed to get you a job. You’re losing your job and losing your house because of health care costs. And I asked you to think, you’re expecting to be out of work until November or December, whenever they can get this done, if by then, and then all of a sudden once health care reform is done your job’s going to come back?
Krauthammer says: ‘Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the earmarks. … Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that’s a matter of scale, not principle.’ Krauthammer is accusing Obama of a brazen deception being at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan. ‘The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this: ‘Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,’ he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy–‘ even though we have our own all over the place, ‘–not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools. The ‘day of reckoning’ has arrived. And because ‘it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”
Krauthammer writes, ‘Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people. At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation,’ it goes on and on and on. ‘But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy.
‘And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis. What’s going on? ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,’ said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. ‘This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.’ Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his ‘Big Bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy. Intellectually dishonest to the core.’ Obama deceiving the American people and it’s working.
The latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll has an approval rating at 63% over the previous reporting period a week or ten days ago, at 60%. Does this puzzle you? Your economy is tanking all around you, your president is deceiving you as to why. Your president is further deceiving you as to the solutions. Yet his approval numbers go up, they slightly uptick to 63%. We are still at the stage, I told you all week long, be patient, it’s going to take a while for people to see the deception, and they might not ever. You see, Barack Obama benefits from a truism here. It is not what he accomplishes. He doesn’t have to accomplish anything to keep his poll numbers up, and this he knows. All he has to do is give speeches about what he cares about. Yesterday he cared about health care. And who doesn’t? It’s like the environmentalist wackos making you think they care about saving the planet, making you think they care about clean water and clean air. Who doesn’t? So if you oppose clean water and clean air, you must want what? Dirty water, dirty air. If you oppose Obama on health care, you must want what? People to get sick and not have any way to get well. So it’s not what he says, it’s not what he accomplishes. It’s what he says he cares about.
There’s another poll out today, I think from Rasmussen. Thirty-four percent of the American people believe that they can’t get a good job without the government being involved. Thirty-four percent believe the government is important to getting a good job. Not with the government, but outside in the private sector. But is this what you voted for? Somebody who says he cares about certain things, accomplishes nothing on them, deceives you as to the real problems, and in the process, takes no steps to fix them. Let me tell you what’s going on here. We have a banking and a credit crisis. Obama and his team had a show gathering to focus on the problem, but they have done little, if anything, to so much as start fixing it. Any leader would keep focused on fixing that mess, but that’s not the stuff that makes approval numbers rise, because there really isn’t much he can do except shift people’s attitudes about it.
So he’s moved on to health care. This is highly visible, it’s news leading, gets a great focus, plus it has the great liberal lion Teddy Kennedy pushing it. Before it’s all over it will be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care Bill. So when you have the banking and the credit problem still unfixed and with health care still unfixed, they’ll move on to another caring story: alternate energy — I don’t know; your guess is as good as mine. But whatever it is, the approval numbers will go up because it’s not what Obama accomplishes; it’s what he cares about.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There it goes, there it goes, stock market hovering down around ten or 20. Something just happened, market now down 75.72, and the administration, this is fine with them, this is perfect. They love seeing all this wealth destroyed. How do we conclude anything else when the administration tells us to hang on, we’re going to fix this economy with health care reform? Health care reform is going to get you a job in a year, and then green energy, all this alternative energy gobbledygook and education. Did you vote for this? I’ll tell you, my plate is getting full. Here I am trying to save the Republican Party, despite opposition from the Republican Party. Somebody’s going to have to save Wall Street. Somebody is going to have to mobilize all these, quote, unquote, rich Republicans to get in there. The problem is nobody knows where the bottom is. That’s not really the question.
I want to give you another way of looking at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or the NASDAQ. Everybody is focused on the bottom, where is it gonna bottom out, how bad is it gonna get? Well, the figure I see most prominently, and I have no clue, by the way, I’m no Jim Rogers, I’m no Jim Cramer, and I’m no Larry Kudlow. The figure I see bandied about is 3000, 3500. We’re at 6500 now, but I don’t think that’s the question, because it is going to bottom out at some point. My question is what’s the new top? What’s the new top going to be? We were, a year ago, at 13,000, less than a year, 13,000 and unemployment was low. Now it’s all gone. Over $3 trillion of wealth is gone. When’s that coming back? That’s what I want to know. When, if ever, is that coming back? What’s the new top? In other words, how much growth can we expect? The people who have skin in the game, in the Obama tracking poll, are still yanking out of it. I’ll have to think about this over the weekend.