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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I can’t let go of this budget. As I said yesterday, folks, normally the most boring thing you could ever talk about as a talk host was the annual budget submitted by the president. I mean it was death to talk about it. In this case, it’s not. This budget destroys the country, not just next year, but for the next ten. Although it’s a budget for next year, they’re required to project ten years out. Snerdley told me something interesting. I was just back in his office. And when I was out in Las Vegas last week, he was at home, we were screening calls in New York, H.R. was doing it. And he started out by saying, ‘You know, anybody who presents this budget has to be tone deaf, especially after seeing what happened last Tuesday in Massachusetts.’ I said, ‘Snerdley, he’s not tone deaf. You keep assigning traditional political values to this guy. You’re making a mistake.’ I said, ‘This guy, for whatever reason, does not like the way this country is and he thinks it ought to be remade into something different. I don’t know why. It may be ’cause he was educated by people, maybe it’s because of racial or ethnic things, but this country in his mind is guilty of a bunch of unjust and immoral things.’

And Snerdley said, ‘You know, when you were in Vegas, I was at home. Now, I’ve been here in the studio on the other side of the glass and I hear you say that, I hear you say that, but when you hear it at home or in the car on the radio, it’s jarring.’ I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘It’s jarring because you just can’t — it’s the one thing that no American ever thinks about the president is that he wants to harm the country. It’s just hard to hear that, Rush.’ I said, ‘Believe me, I know it. This is why I always preface it by recognizing that I know this. And I don’t say this lightly.’ And I don’t say this, as Candy Crowley intimated, to shock anybody. I don’t have to try to do that. I somehow have evolved the ability to do it. I’m not trying to shock anybody for the express purpose of shocking you. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t say it. The more I look at this budget it distresses me to no end. I don’t think there’s any tone deafness whatsoever.

I mean, here’s a story from MarketWatch: ‘Twenty Reasons Global Debt Time Bomb Explodes Soon — Which trigger will ignite the Great Depression II?’ The Wall Street Journal: ‘The President’s Priorities — One of the greatest spend-while-you-can documents in American history. We now know why the White House leaked word of a three-year spending freeze on a few domestic accounts before this extravaganza was released. No one would have noticed such a slushy promise amid this glacier of spending. The budget reveals that overall federal outlays will reach $3.72 trillion in fiscal 2010, and keep rising to $3.834 trillion in 2011. As a share of the economy, outlays will reach a post-World War II record of 25.4% this year.’ Twenty-five-point-four percent of GDP will be government. The only way that can happen is if you slice away at the private sector. They are robbing the private sector. They are defunding it, they are crippling it, taking over as many of the aspects of private sector market economics as they can, 25% of GDP is government, and government doesn’t produce anything. All this is transfer payments. It’s just redistribution of wealth, which Obama told Joe the Plumber, that’s what he wants to do. He wants to return the nation’s wealth to whoever the hell he thinks are its rightful owners, unions and minorities, whatever else.

Now, as recently as fiscal year 2008, federal spending was 21% of GDP, and even that was high. But, remember, we all got mad at Republicans and Bush for what we thought was out-of-control spending. Those guys were saving money compared to what Obama’s doing. Let me read for you excerpts here from Brian Riedl. He’s a guy from the Heritage Foundation. He’s got a published column today in the New York Post: ‘It’s a good thing President Obama and the Democratic Congress just agreed to raise the federal debt limit by nearly $2 trillion — they’re going to need every penny of it. And fast. Last year, Obama swept into office promising to make tough choices — and then released a budget proposing the largest debt-and-spending spree in American history. This year, he’s at it again: Over 2010-2019, his new plan boosts spending another $1.7 trillion and the deficit by $2 trillion over what he proposed last year.’ And last year was irresponsibly over the top.

‘In fact, this year’s budget shows yearly deficits as much as 49 percent larger than even last year’s bloated proposal. This spending spree will drive up both taxes and deficits to levels unseen in US history. Nor are the Obama deficits a temporary result of the recession. Despite a modest recovery, the 2010 budget deficit will be higher than the 2009 deficit. Nearly 42 cents of each dollar Washington spends will be borrowed,’ or printed. Nearly 42%. We are broke! We do not have this money. We don’t have a hundred million or $500 million to give the Taliban in hopes they’ll start collecting garbage instead of killing people. We don’t have the money. We don’t have a hundred million dollars to give to Haiti. We don’t have the money for anything. Forty-two cents of every dollar is borrowed or printed. ‘Even by 2020 — which Obama’s planners assume will be a time of peace and prosperity — annual deficits would still exceed $1 trillion.’ By 2020, this is not sustainable. This will not work. Even after all of his tax increases, trillion-dollar deficits through 2020.

‘The president who said ‘I didn’t come here to pass our problems on to the next president or the next generation — I’m here to solve them’ would, over the next decade, dump $75,000 per household in added debt into the laps of our children and grandchildren.’ Seventy-five thousand dollars, household share over the next decade, added to what it already is. ‘Obama claims it’s not his fault. In his State of the Union speech, he asserted: ‘By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription-drug program.” Now, we played that sound bite. It just infuriates me. This little guy can’t even accept responsibility. (imitating Obama) ‘It’s not my fault, Bush did it, Bush did it, you can’t make me do anything, Bush did it.’ And it’s not true.

‘Those policies were all implemented in the early 2000s.’ All these things that Bush did were in the early 2000s. ‘Yet, by 2007, the budget deficit was still only $162 billion,’ after all that Bush had done. After all that Obama cites as the big problem, still only $162 billion deficit, as of 2007. Now we’re at $1.4 trillion! Try ten times as much in two years. It ain’t Bush, my friends. ‘The trillion-dollar deficits didn’t begin until 2009 — after the recession hit. And the subsequent deficits are driven by runaway spending — mainly from Social Security, Medicare (beyond just the drug benefit), Medicaid and net interest. In fact, under current policies, nearly 90 percent of the growth in the budget deficit by 2020 comes from spending hikes already programmed in — and just over 10 percent from declines in revenues (And even that assumes all tax cuts are extended.)

‘Before the recession, Washington spent $24,000 a year per US household. Obama would hike it to $36,000 by 2020 — an inflation-adjusted $12,000-per-household expansion of government. (And does anyone think they’re getting their money’s worth?).’ Add that to the $75,000 share of our debt that every household has. ‘If spending jumps $12,000 per household, taxes must eventually rise. The president would make a large down-payment on that with a $2 trillion tax hike on all Americans.’ This is the fourth source now that says every American gets a tax increase. Reuters, Investor’s Business Daily, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And whoever looks at this honestly will conclude the same thing.

‘The president would make a large down-payment on that with a $2 trillion tax hike on all Americans. Yet that would still…’ even with a $2 trillion tax increase, folks, we can’t do this. We’re sitting around, we are watching the destruction of this country as you and I know it. Listen to this. After a $2 trillion tax increase ‘we would still leave the government running up $8.5 trillion in deficits over the decade, setting the stage for even larger and more damaging broad-based tax hikes later.’ A $2 trillion tax increase still leaves us $8.5 trillion in deficits over ten years. That’s the kind of spending that this man has authored.

‘Ominously, economists close to the White House suggest that a value-added tax (which is like a national sales tax) of 15 percent and 20 percent is eventually possible to finance the president’s spending agenda. Obama has offered a budget that does nothing to address the nation’s serious short- or long-term fiscal problems. Indeed, it makes them worse. By doubling the national debt over pre-recession levels, he’d push America toward a tipping point — where rising debt levels will become too large for global capital markets to absorb.’ Now, stop and think of that. Global capital markets could not fund our debt! ‘This could trigger a financial crisis, an interest-rate spike and gigantic tax hikes. Last year, Congress went along with most of Obama’s budget proposals — enacting a $787 billion ‘stimulus,’ raising discretionary spending by 8 percent and approving more than 10,000 earmarks. But it eventually balked at the president’s expensive cap-and-trade and health plans,’ although the health spending is still accounted for in the budget as though they’re going to get it.

So this is going to be really, really interesting here in an election year to see what these Democrats — by the way, Blanche Lincoln is now trailing by double digits in Arkansas. Republicans might win big in Illinois in November. The Democrats, they’re the ones who may have to not be tone deaf, Mr. Snerdley. Obama doesn’t care. He really doesn’t care but it’s going to be fascinating to watch what they do with this budget knowing that November is looming.

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