RUSH: Frank, Wheatfield, New York, welcome to the EIB Network, sir, great to have you here.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. I appreciate you taking the call, and I have to tell you it’s a great honor to speak with you because you’re a true patriot.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: On Monday I have some concerns about this new health care bill and the taxes so I spent two hours on the phone with the IRS. I’m a small-time landlord and my income is considered investment income, and my question to them was, how much will the Medicare tax be, when will it be implemented, and I also wanted to know was it going to be on the net or the gross because I do pay a substantial amount in property taxes.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: After speaking with three people over two hours, they didn’t know, and the last woman I spoke with said if anybody should know it would be me and I don’t have anything on it. So at that point in time I took a ride in to Niagara Falls and went to Louise Slaughter’s office. I was very polite, asked them the same two questions. They looked at me and said, ‘You’re the second person this morning that’s asked that. We don’t know. We’re in touch with the Congressional Budget Office. We’re trying to figure it out.’
RUSH: Well, the Congressional Research Service has looked into this and they’ve divulged and discovered such things as the members of Congress forgot to insure themselves. They wrote themselves out of their own Cadillac health care plans. I think it’s over 2000 pages, it’s not surprising to me — is it to you? — that nobody’s read this thing yet?
CALLER: Well, my response to them was, I said, ‘The reason I came in here is because Louise Slaughter,’ which I didn’t vote for ‘is such a proponent of the bill, I figured that if anybody knows, she would.’ And they were dumbfounded.
RUSH: You’re not surprised, though, right?
CALLER: No, but my response to them was, ‘I want to know how much I have to raise the rents in order to cover it because I can’t afford it.’
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And they didn’t like to hear that.
RUSH: Here’s the dirty little secret. The dirty little secret is this thing is going to get modified and altered and changed so many times that we’re never going to have a bead on it. It’s gotta get to the point when you have this many pages of legislation, it’s likely that every one of us is going to be violating this law inadvertently numbers of times a year.
CALLER: So how do you prepare for something like this?
RUSH: Well, go on the limited knowledge that we have. We know that 2014 is when most of the bad stuff kicks in. The Medicare tax kicks in before that, and it’s 2.9 to 3.8 on investment, and you’re right, I don’t know if that’s net or gross.
CALLER: Well, they didn’t know, either.
RUSH: It probably hadn’t been defined yet.
CALLER: Well, how can you write a law and not define anything —
RUSH: Come on, come on, come on.
CALLER: — and not understand it?
RUSH: We’re talking Democrats.
CALLER: I understand that completely.
RUSH: I mean, staffers wrote this thing. The SEIU unions wrote this thing. This thing has been in Henry Waxman’s drawer for years. This has been a dream. You ever wonder, Obama announces health care and in a matter of a few weeks they had this behemoth of 2,000 pages in the House and 3,000 pages in the Senate? They didn’t just start writing this thing last year. This has been one of their dreams, wet dreams, for I don’t know how long, and they’ve had is it stuff written down and gathering moss, dust and so forth in drawers waiting for this nirvana moment.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We had a landlord call here last hour saying he had called the IRS and spent two hours with them. He had gone to Louise Slaughter’s office because she led the committee fighting for the health care bill. He said, ‘I want to know when these Medicare taxes on investment are going to start. I need to know if it’s going to be on the gross or if it’s going to be on the net because all of my income is investment income,’ and nobody could tell him! After two hours with a member of Congress, two hours with IRS people, even the IRS person said, ‘Well, the one person here that should know this is me, and I don’t know it. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’
Get this story. This is from the Investor’s Business Daily: ‘Wednesday,’ two days ago, ‘Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon introduced a motion to freeze rents, solely, he claims, because he cares about ‘fairness.’ ‘According to him, ‘a one-year hold on increases in rent (will) help our working families, and give the council time to consider longer-term fixes to ensure fairness in our rent control ordinance.’ … Alarcon’s plan, which sounds wonderful…’ Oh yeah, doesn’t it? Yeah, Los Angeles! Los Angeles City Council. So what about the landlords? They’re going to lose their incentive to stay in business. You freeze rents? They’re supposed to lose money? But this is ‘fairness.’ This is the left’s definition of fairness.