RUSH: To the phones we go, Edwardsville, Illinois. Ted, it’s great to have you. You’re first today. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Mega dittos from Illinois. You’re my biggest hero. I am a younger guy, and I basically was just wondering if everything is ever gonna get better again, or is it pretty much what I’ve got to look forward to, I guess, for my adult life.
RUSH: Tim, let me tell you something. Things are gonna get better. This is the United States of America and the people who live here are still Americans. And we are seeing now there’s a 30% disconnect between the American people and Obama. His approval numbers are plummeting. It’s been 18 months. Nothing he’s doing is working. There is a continually increasing lack of confidence and faith in Obama and his policies. The American people are not the people to just sit around and let this kind of thing happen to them. At some point — and we may have reached it — there will be a tipping point. People are not going to sit idly by and consign their children and grandchildren to lives of debt bondage, debt slavery, where they’re basically working to pay off debt that is not even theirs. People aren’t going to put up with it.
This is the United States of America. People are not going to put up with the notion that we’re not going to lead the world in anything ever again. They’re not going to put up with talk that says, ‘Eight million jobs lost? Yep, we’re never going to be able to recreate ’em.’ Americans are not going to sit there and be satisfied with the notion, ‘The border is too big. We can’t close it.’ This is the country put a man on the moon. This is the country that led the world in liberty and freedom and creating economic prosperity, medical advances to improve life expectancy. The American people have great expectations. This administration does not. They preside and want to preside over a country in decline. The American people don’t want decline. The American people want growth! The American people don’t want whirlybird cars and windmills in the backyard. They want automobiles that they always have wanted. Powerful. They want air-conditioning and heat when they want it. They know it’s plentiful. They don’t want a government that’s going to stand in the way and prevent them from having this. At some point, it starts in November, there is going to be a message sent, ‘Hey, Mr. Obama?’ and, ‘Hey, Democrat Party? You ain’t us. You are not the America that we want to be,’ and that’s going to start that way. So don’t give up. It’s going to be people like… Ted, you’re 21 did you say?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Well, your future is bright because you’re an American, but it’s gonna take you being involved. It may be a little harder for you than it was for people in the past. There’s no question that this bunch has put obstacles in your way. But, Ted, here’s the best thing I could tell you to back up what I’m saying: While all of this economic misery is being reported — and while a lot of it is real, and while there’s a lot of unemployment and a lot of growing and people are running out of unemployment benefits — you look around this country and you also see people improving their lot in life, don’t you?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Not everybody is selling their house, not everybody is selling the car, not everybody is taking kids out of school. There are people who are prospering. They either know how to in circumstances like this or they’re simply possessed of the American spirit. The point is that it’s going to be people like that and you and others emulating them who are in the private sector who are precisely going to be the ones to save this country, in spite of this administration. You don’t want to grow up in a nation in decline, do you?
CALLER: No, sir.
RUSH: You don’t want to be told that there’s not going to be a job for you down the road, do you?
CALLER: Nope.
RUSH: All right. So if the people leading you tell you there’s not going to be a job, you’re not going to sit there and take it. At some point, Ted, you’re going to go out there and do something about it yourself — and at some point the entire nation’s going to do that.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: We are not gonna sit idly by and elite bunch of Marxists turn us into Venezuela or Greece.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: We are the people of the United States of America, and we’re not going to permit it to happen. It’s that simple.
CALLER: All right! Thank you.
RUSH: Don’t give up, Ted. Follow me. I’ll tell you when it’s time to give up and panic —
CALLER: All right.
RUSH: — and you’ll know that when I move to New Zealand. And I’m nowhere close to it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And we stick with the phones. El Rushbo on the cutting edge of societal evolution. Our last caller, I’ll bet you have a friend who got a job last month. That is, if you have 23,000 friends. You have 23,000 friends, one of them probably got a job. My point is that each of you know or know of somebody who’s doing okay in this economy. Meaning, it can be done. Don’t be one of those sitting idly by and just taking whatever this administration doles out. I know it’s easier said than done and being entrepreneurial is not everybody’s bag, but everybody has some creativity, everybody has something unique about them, many things that are unique about them. But what we all as Americans have in common are expectations of growth and greatness and opportunity for ourselves and our country. We know that we’re all not going to achieve greatness, but we all have the opportunity, and we’re not going to sit idly by and let a bunch of theoretician Marxists who have spent all of their time organizing or in the classroom destroy what we’ve always known and what we built. It isn’t going to happen. Trust me on this.
Here is Ruggles from Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina. Ruggles, great to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Great to talk to you. You’re one of my heroes.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I’m in the landscape business down here in North Carolina, and for the past two years, really the past 14 months, we have been dying down here. Like you just said, there are people that are making some money in this business, but it’s few and far between. I went from 2007 grossing over million and a half down to this past year, 2009, at $77,000 in my business. I’ve laid almost everybody. I’ve got four people left out of 20. And just two weeks ago my wife, working for a company for 22 years, gets laid off. Where in the world does anybody in their right mind see that this government, or this Obama administration, is doing anything right?
RUSH: The only people that do, Ruggles, are the people who aren’t working.
CALLER: True. That’s very true.
RUSH: And, sadly, that’s an increasing number of people.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: I maintain that these kind of circumstances happening to you, at some point you’re going to have a breaking point, and you may have reached it now. I can hear the frustration, the disgust in your voice. At some point you’re gonna be Howard Beale in the movie Network, ‘I’m not gonna take this anymore!’ and you’re going to stop depending on all of these wizards of smart to create circumstances where you can prosper again. Now, your landscaping business, you’ve gone from grossing a million and a half to $77,000, did I hear that right?
CALLER: Yes, sir, I was $77,000 last year. And I don’t even think I’m gonna —
RUSH: You own the company?
CALLER: Yes, sir. I’ve been in business 30 years down here.
RUSH: Now, what is the reason — and it may seem obvious to you, but I want to know what they’re telling you. What’s the reason your clients are canceling their service with you?
CALLER: Well, I’m in the new home market, and the new home starts have just — nothing down here.
RUSH: All right. So you do landscaping for new homes. Have you thought about — maybe you do — expanding into landscaping for existing homes and people still living in their house? I mean people still need landscaping done.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, we do that, but there’s still people that have got money. There was a period of time there the past four or five months, seemed like there was more calls than usual, but most people, after they get a price and they start thinking about it, they go, ‘Yeah, I think I better hold onto this money.’
RUSH: You know what you need to tell ’em? Well, here’s what you need to tell ’em, and I’m sure you probably do because you know this.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: People who spend a lot of money on landscaping do it for a host of reasons. One is they like it.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: They like nice manicured lawns and bushes, shrubs, flowers, weeds, whatever. The other reason they do it is to maintain the value of the property.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And one of your sales pitches ought to be, look, no matter what the circumstances are people want to protect their primary asset. Now, the home, that’s another problem area, a lot of people are underwater in their homes but you gotta find the people who aren’t who want to maintain the value of their asset because someday they’re going to sell it, they want to flip it at some point. And landscaping is key — trust me, I know what I’m talking about here.
CALLER: Yes. You do.
RUSH: But, you know, you know this. You’re not gonna get any relief of any kind from any legislation coming from the Democrat Party today, none — unless you decide to quit working and go on unemployment, then they’ll be your best friends.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, that’s the only way because I know some of my own friends that have tried to get help on their homes, I know three right off the top of my head that have lost their homes to foreclosure and they went and tried to do everything the Obama administration said to do to get relief, it did not work.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, I maintain what I said to you at the outset of the phone call. These are the things that are happening to people that as Americans they never thought would happen again. They were told, ‘We’re never going to have another Great Depression. We got systems in place. It isn’t going to happen.’ And all we have is an administration that revels in these failures because they get to point fingers of blame, in many cases fictional blame, at their enemies, and their enemies are to be found in the private sector. Their enemies are self-reliant, self-sufficient, self-thinking people. And at some point, if you haven’t reached it yet, Ruggles, you’re not going to put up with it anymore and you’re certainly not going to wait around for a bunch of politicians to make it right. Because you’re going to realize, it is that crowd, the political class that has screwed it up. The sooner more and more people realize that depending on anything from these people — and I know that you can’t get ’em out of your lives because you gotta go through them for permits, permissions, state, local, city level, doesn’t matter. It just makes the challenge even harder and greater, and when you succeed even more rewarding.
Tom in Chicago. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it is great to hear you. I’ll tell you, I listen to you every day. You hit a point with me, Rush, years ago, you used to have segments where people called in with their inspiring stories of success, and I love that. You know, years and years ago, I still own the same business, but I was really struggling, sitting on the couch. I actually talked to you. This was about ten years ago, and you told me to just keep moving forward, keep working hard. I did. You know, I got off the couch and every day I lived my life, you know, in a forward fashion. I tell my kids, my oldest son who is in college with football, ‘You know, when you get knocked down, what do you do? You get up! You just keep moving forward, every day, no matter what. Somebody puts a roadblock around you, you go around it, you go over it.’
RUSH: Yeah, because somebody’s going to do that every day.
CALLER: Oh, sure, every day.
RUSH: And it may not even be the government. It may be some creep in the office that doesn’t want you to get anywhere.
CALLER: Rush, my whole life I’ve never been on unemployment. I’ve been unemployed, but I’ve never been afraid to work. I’ve worked at restaurant jobs making four dollars an hour, or back in the seventies, $1.85 an hour.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I owned a house when I didn’t have any income, but I was not afraid to go out and work. We need to tell people, yes, it’s bad, but you know what? If you keep moving forward, keep positive, stay optimistic —
RUSH: I love it.
CALLER: — network with friends.
RUSH: Exactly right. Tom, thanks much. For Ruggles, I got an idea, Ruggles the landscaper, Ruggles, here’s what you do. Go to the banks where you live. They own a lot of houses now. Go to banks and pitch them on low-cost deals to keep the landscaping at the foreclosed properties they own up to par, make the bank your client. They own the houses now. It’s the way it is.
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RUSH: It’s true, the banks are spending billions of dollars on landscaping on these foreclosed properties. They gotta keep ’em up. They don’t want to own ’em forever and they’re not going to be able to sell ’em if they look like rattraps. So if you’re in the landscaping business, the banks in your neighborhood probably own a lot of the houses, probably make some bulk deals with you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Chrissy in Toledo, you’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I just got a couple things here. I’ve seen firsthand now for sure how the Democrats and liberals don’t want us to succeed and do better in our lives. Right now I’m a registered nurse, I went back to school for my BSN and now I’m going back to school again to become a doctor. And I get so much grief that I’ve actually stopped telling people what I’m going back to school for, just telling them that, ‘I’m just going back for my master’s degree, nursing,’ and those who do support me are —
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait a minute. Hold it a second. Why are you getting grief?
CALLER: I don’t know. They just want to stay where they’re at and not better improve their own lives.
RUSH: Oh. Oh. You mean your peers, your coworkers, your friends?
CALLER: Yeah, coworkers and what not.
RUSH: Oh, I get it.
CALLER: And those that do support me are actually other physicians, but they’re scared and other medical care providers are scared that they’ll fall into one of Obama’s like socialism programs that he’s trying to pass where the cardiologist or the family practice doctors or the anesthesiologist will get paid kind of like one flat rate across the board.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, look, at least you’re trying to improve yourself. That’s the upshot of this, right?
CALLER: Right. But, meanwhile, I’m already 37 years old, so being that I’m not a single mom, or fresh out of high school (audio dropout) extra funding that I qualify for. So I was thinking of you guys, and a number of years ago somebody had to have a bake sale to be able to afford —
RUSH: Oh, yeah. A guy named Dan. He was stealing my newsletter and making copies of it, and I said, ‘Come on, man.’ He called here and said he couldn’t afford a subscription because his wife wouldn’t let him.
CALLER: Right, I remember that.
RUSH: I said, ‘Do a bake sale, raise the money because bake sales are popular.’ Is that what you’re thinking of doing?
CALLER: Yeah, I need to come up with like $200,000 for tuition. So I think I might have to do a bake sale.
RUSH: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand how this works. You don’t need $200,000 for tuition. You need a $200,000 loan. Now, the student loan program has been taken over by the Obama administration — I got a story somewhere here in the stack, I maybe have it for tomorrow.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: But there’s a story about how a lot of people, if they are preferred borrowers, are really never going to have to pay it back. That’s one of the reasons why Obama’s taken over the program. He’s taken the $75 billion student loan program out of the private sector and people are going to be able to borrow money in the program from the federal government to go to school and if you’re preferred they’re probably never going to make you pay it back. So what you have to figure out here, Chrissy, is what are you going to have to do to qualify for a loan that will be forgiven? Well, it won’t be forgiven. You may not have to pay it back financially, but you have to promise to vote for Obama or Democrats, because it will be on those terms that these loans are forgiven.
CALLER: Interesting.
RUSH: Folks, I’m not making this up, this is how they are going to determine who gets an education. Why take over the student loan program? To put yourself in charge of who gets in. And when you put yourself in charge of who gets in, then you’re going to have criteria for who gets in. You’re going to want your people in there getting liberal educations, be they doctor educations, medical or what have you. So you gotta learn to game the system. My audience is not going to like me saying this, but the reality is what it is. It’s like crony capitalism, in your case crony studentism.
CALLER: Hmm, yes.
RUSH: The deal is the regime runs the student loan program. You need 200 grand to go to med school, all right?
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: The way it works is you gotta figure out how to get the money so you don’t have to pay it back.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Because there are people going to be able to do that. I’m not making this up. Now, you can say, ‘I’m going to be virtuous. I’m not going to borrow money that I don’t intend to pay back.’ Well, fine and dandy, that’s cool, but you’ve got a regime that fully expects to loan somebody money and not have them pay it back. They will own them in some other way.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: In the meantime, Chrissy, something else I heard you say, and this is one of my biggest pet peeves. Don’t worry what other people say or think about you! Just forget it! That’s the biggest shackle and ball and chain you can put around yourself, is to be concerned about what a bunch of people that don’t even matter to you think. Forget them!