The Bailouts Were a Bunch of BS

RUSH: Palm Coast, Florida. Emmett, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: How you doing, Rush?

RUSH: Never better, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Yeah. I recently wrote you the letter called Middle American, and one of the things I didn’t get quite to get to on that was, everyone’s so concerned about this bailout and all — and these companies made bad decisions and poor decisions that we bailed ’em out on. What would have happened if we just let it go? I mean, there’s a doomsday theory that all America would have just crumbled beneath everything if we hadn’t have jumped in and paid our taxes to get these guys out of trouble.

RUSH: That is an excellent question. Now, which bailout are you… There have been, what? Four of note. Which one specifically? Are you talking about GM? Are you talking about GM and Chrysler? Are you talking about banks? Are you talking about TARP? Which one are you specifically referring to here?

CALLER: Well, to get specific, we’ll do the GM bailout. I mean, they made poor choices on financing the wrong people and people who aren’t ready to finance, so in my way of thinking…

CALLER: Okay, here’s the thing on that. In a normal capitalist economic system, if they can’t make it they file Chapter 11. Which they shoulda done in the first place. How many billions did we throw at both companies to save ’em. It didn’t work and they both end up going modified Chapter 11, written and dominated by Obama? And now Obama controls them, which is what he was after from the start. And I know that Bush was the guy that actually started the first bailout of GM, but Obama during the transition called Bush and urged him to do it. And Obama was trying to play hide-and-seek during the transition but he was in on this. He wanted Bush to do it. Bush was, I think, just trying to be cooperative — he’s a class guy — with the incoming chief of state.

The TARP bailout, that was a ruse from the get-go. We have since learned… Look at what we were told about that. We were told if we didn’t do the TARP bailout that the country would cease to exist and the country would default and we would all be essentially penniless in 24 hours! That’s how they sold that. Remember Hank Paulson was running around with Ben Bernanke? We’ve bailed out all these banks and all it’s done is led to government control of the banks. Remember the original purpose of the TARP bailout was to get credit going again so people could borrow? It still hasn’t happened. It still hasn’t happened! The whole thing, the whole thing was a ruse, folks. I don’t know what the purpose is.

I mean, you could speculate and say this was about Wall Street being made whole with your taxpayer dollars. It was about Paulson trying to take care of his buddies so they didn’t lose their homes in the Hamptons. But we know it wasn’t about saving the economy. It wasn’t about saving the country. We’ve done far more than TARP now. Obama has spent — over ten years, if he doesn’t spend another dime — $12 trillion! Money we don’t have. What we’ve done in response to whatever financial crisis there was, was compound the crisis by a multiple of ten if we’d have just left it alone. If things are that bad and if things are running irresponsibly, people are running business irresponsibly, it happens in small business to people all the time.

It doesn’t work. They have to shut down. But somehow when it’s large and so forth… We wanted to save it, right? The theory was we wanted to save the banks, save Wall Street, get credit going again. What’s happened? What’s happened is that Obama’s now setting payment, compensation schedules for people on Wall Street — and he’s talking about doing it in businesses that have nothing to do or have not even taken any bailout money. This whole thing was a ruse and a scam from day one. People, one of our great problems in the United States, people will trade their liberty for security. Even though the natural yearning of the human spirit, as created, is to be free, security is a big competitor to liberty. That’s why they are able to sell this health care crap. That’s why they’re able to sell the bailouts.

Because it was about security and about people not ‘getting hurt’ and about people not losing their jobs and people not losing this or that. We just can’t stand after all of this self-esteem education that we’ve been pummeling our kids with for 35 or 40 years and all this stupid, rotten conflict resolution stuff. We can’t have any pain — and we’ve got more pain ahead of us than you can possibly imagine because of the steps taken to eliminate pain at the moment. And we still have a lot of pain! It’s 9.4% unemployed. We’ve got a lot of pain. Look at the latest numbers here. ‘The value of loans held by the 21 largest institutions getting support from the government $700 billion bailout fund fell,’ the value of the loans fell ‘in April, the fifth decline in six months. The bottom line is that more than 9% of all mortgages are at least 30 days late now. People in 9% are 30 days late behind payment.’ None of this was supposed to happen! We were supposed to fix this.

And remember the people who were in trouble? They were supposed to even go to an Obama website and stay in their house without being foreclosed. None of it’s happened, every bit was a lie! The stimulus was a lie. The stimulus package. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma has found ‘Repairs for rural bridges, an under-highway safe crossing for turtles and efforts to protect the sage grouse population are among 100 projects a [he] pointed to Monday as questionable federal stimulus’ money. Stimulus money was supposed to get you a job! It was supposed to put people back to work. Instead, we passed stimulus and have 9.4% unemployment. ‘The list by Senator Coburn includes projects others would identify as ideal for creating jobs and benefiting generations of Americans.’ Skateboard parks? I mean, would not be ideal. Skateboard parks, streetscrapes, upgrades of park facilities, bike trails, parking garages? That’s what’s being built with stimulus money. Stimulus money was to stimulate the economy.