RUSH: Over 11 million Americans are drawing unemployment benefits, yet Obama says we have turned the corner, 162,000 new jobs created, a third of them are temporary census workers, not very many of them are in the private sector. Obama says we have turned the corner. He said we turned the corner last year. He said that we’ve come back from the brink last year. Tim Geithner said, nah, some of these jobs are gone forever. I think we ought to get used to nine-and-a-half to 10% unemployment for at least a couple years. Obama says we have turned the corner.
Greetings, my friends. Telephone number is 800-282-2882, if you want to be on the Open Line Friday. For those of you new to the program, Monday through Thursday we only talk about what I want to talk about. You need to look at me as a benevolent dictator, and it’s my show, I only talk about things I care about Monday through Thursday ’cause if I talk about things I don’t care about, I’ll sound bored because I will be bored, and then you won’t listen because you’ll be bored and I don’t want to be bored but on Friday I take the risk of being bored, if you talk about something I don’t care about, you can, and I will do my best to make it as though I do care go. 800-282-2882 is the number.
By the way, there is a quote that I want to share with you. It is mistakenly attributed to Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson did not say this. It was actually John Basil Barnhill in 1914 in a piece entitled ‘Indictment of Socialism No. 3.’ It doesn’t detract from its truth, but it’s widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson. He didn’t say it, John Basil Barnhill did. And the quote is this: ‘Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.’ And that’s where we are. The people fear the government right now, 16,500 new IRS agents to enforce whatever the hell is in this health care bill that we do not yet know.
Anyway, the Heritage Foundation Morning Bell today is just terrific. ‘Welcome to the Obama Dependency Economy. Today the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing that the nation’s unemployment is 9.7% –‘ yet they added 162,000 jobs, ‘– for the third month in a row. While the jobs report does indicate that 162,000 net jobs were created in March, almost 50,000 of those jobs were temporary government Census jobs that do not reflect any real economic progress.’ And those census people don’t get health care benefits, either. They’re temp. ‘In total, the US economy has now lost a total of 3.8 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his $862 billion stimulus plan. We are 8.1 million jobs short of the 138.6 million he promised the American people.’ Eleven million Americans are now receiving unemployment compensation. Obama is now aping FDR, prosperity just around the corner. Yep, we’ve turned the corner.
‘It is good to see the American economy finally recovering again. It demonstrates the resilience of the American entrepreneur in the face of a punishing job-killing agenda from Washington.’ And make no mistake, the agenda of this regime is to kill jobs. Now, I remember telling each and every one of you earlier this year and late last year, at some point the economy is going to rebound because we’re Americans and we’re not just gonna sit here and take it. We’re not going to sit here and just say, ‘Oh, woe is us.’ At some point it’s going to turn around in spite of the regime. And if that’s happening now, then more power to the American people.
‘And don’t fall for any White House claims that this belated recovery is due to the stimulus. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) admitted last month, its analysis of the stimulus’ job creating record was simply ‘essentially repeating the same exercise’ as the initial projections. In other words, the CBO numbers on the stimulus don’t take any actual new real world data into account.’ So it’s meaningless. Christina Romer, who is chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors prior to joining the Obama administration, wrote paper after paper after paper saying government stimulus does not create jobs, it can’t. Monetary policy cannot create jobs. Government really cannot manage an economy. We know this. All government can do is screw it up! The best thing government can do is get out of people’s way. That’s what limited government is all about. But if you work with the actual data that we have now — employment, unemployment, the stimulus package — an economist at George Mason University has come up with this. Her name is Veronique de Rugy.
‘One: No statistical correlation between unemployment and how the $862 billion was spent.’ There is none. ‘Two: Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones,’ and an average for the jobs that were created during the past year. And there were some. Each one cost $286,000. If you allocate the stimulus that was spent versus the jobs created, we spent $286,000 per job created. That’s a bad investment. ‘President Obama’s future agenda is full bad investments. His recently released budget would raise taxes on all Americans by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade; borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010; and double the publicly held national debt to more than $18 trillion. This is simply unsustainable.’
This is why the American people are vitriolic. This is why I am troublesome. Our country is being overthrown from within. We are watching it. This regime is governing against the will of the people. What happened to the 95,000 new jobs every month we were promised? What happened to that? What happened to the unemployment rate never getting above 8%? You ought to see the projection. I’ve got a chart here, can’t show it to you on the Dittocam, but you might have seen it elsewhere. It’s a chart that the administration, the regime put out, what the unemployment rate would be without the stimulus, what the unemployment rate would be with the stimulus, and what the real unemployment rate is. The real unemployment rate is sky-high, much higher than either of the two previous categories. They have just been totally wrong about everything they projected, and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt when I say ‘wrong.’ I think they knew exactly what was going to happen because they wanted it to happen.
The thing the president needs to understand is that it’s not I, El Rushbo, who is troublesome. It is the facts that are troublesome. I just happen to be the vessel reporting the facts, and that’s why I’m troublesome. Facts are the enemy of liberals, big-time enemy of liberals, facts, because facts destroy liberalism each and every time they are applied. Thomas Edsall writing in The Atlantic: ‘Net annual interest on the debt will more than triple during the next ten years, according to the CBO, shooting from $207 billion in 2010, to $723 billion in 2020, more than doubling as a share of GDP, from 1.4 percent to 3.2 percent.’ That’s the debt service. That’s the interest. The interest payment on the debt, 3.2% of GDP, unsustainable, unheard of. President Obama says we’ve turned the corner on the economy.
‘One of the strongest dependency-creating special interests, government unions, reached a key tipping this year. As Heritage’s own James Sherk was the first to document, government union workers now out number those in the private sector. Edsall explains what this means for the American people: ‘The consequences of this shift are profound,’ more government union workers than private sector union workers. ‘A majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on tax dollars,’ for their compensation. A majority of the American labor movement now directly dependent on tax dollars.
‘In terms of political orientation, these workers can now be described as tax consumers as well as tax payers. For these workers, a tax increase may result in a slightly smaller paycheck but, more importantly, the hike means more money is available to pay for raises and new benefits,’ for government workers. They don’t produce anything. Government workers produce nothing. They are bureaucrats. Not to slight them, I mean they’re people, they need jobs, but this is not the kind of economic growth that anybody wants to see, because it’s not producing anything. It is not expanding the private sector for average Americans to seek employment and to fulfill their dreams. Now, as Heritage points out, ‘We do not have to subject ourselves to chronically high unemployment and an ever-increasing government workforce. As bad as the media makes this recession seem, job losses were actually far worse in the 2001 recession.’ If you want to compare job creation, Bush after 9/11 and that recession versus job creation here with this regime? The Bush job creation vastly outperforms this regime, and they were coming off 9/11.
‘The difference this time around is that the private sector has not created new jobs to replace the lost ones as fast as it did the last time around,’ in 2001, because we did not have an administration in 2001 that was incessantly growing government. We had an administration in 2001 that wanted the private sector economy to recover. Tax cuts were the order of the day. Employment came back, the economy came back, we ended up at 4.7 unemployment, the media telling us we were in a recession, or trying to tell us that we were about to be in a recession. The media tried to get you believing there was a recession for the last two years of the Bush administration. They lie to this day telling you the recession began in 2007. It didn’t. It started in 2008. It has been exacerbated by the Obama regime. ‘Reduced hiring is particularly acute among small businesses: they account for 36% of the net job losses in this recession.’
In 2001, small business accounted for 12% of net job losses. ‘What small businesses need to start hiring is less government intervention in the economy, not more.’ And as Christina Romer has written, government stimulus does not work. This is before she went to work for the regime.