RUSH: Open Line Friday, El Rushbo, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair. Dennis in Plano, Texas, you’re next.
CALLER: Rush, good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, I just wanted to say in light of what you were talking about earlier about the ruling class — By the way, I’m now a Luke Russert fan. I had never heard that. That’s wonderful. I’m glad to know there’s a member of the mainstream media who really is willing to ask questions. But I read an article from the Providence Journal a while back written by a lady name Froma Harrop. I suppose you probably know who she is —
RUSH: The Providence Journal, Froma Harrop?
CALLER: Yeah, she writes not just in the Providence Journal. But she wrote an article and she epitomized the ruling class attitude. She started out by talking about how all the conservatives were just ignorant and uneducated and so on. But she made a statement that I thought was very interesting. She said that anyone who believed that the George Bush tax cuts did not result in a reduction in revenue was guilty of what she called, and I quote, ‘absolute ignorance.’ Well, Rush, I’m just a country boy, but I have a computer in my house and I don’t have to rely on college professors or politicians to give me facts and figures, I can look it up myself. I got this thing called a ‘search engine.’ So I went online and I looked it up, and I found a website — found several websites, really — that talk about this.
One of them that was the most concise was a place called Census.gov, and it showed the outlays, the budget receipts and outlays between 1960 and 2009. And it’s fascinating, Rush, that Froma Harrop, apparently — I don’t know what her education is, but it certainly wasn’t economics, or even fifth grade math. But you’ll notice when you look at 2002 when Bush tax cuts were enacted and you move up the line, that the only reduction was in 2003, slightly. But the Bush tax cuts really didn’t take effect until then anyway. But they went up, receipts to the government went up in ’04. And by ’05 the receipts to the federal government from income taxes were higher than it was in 2000, which is the peak of the dot-com bubble. Well, I don’t understand, Rush. This makes it so easy for people like us just to find out what the facts are, and it’s amazing that they don’t seem to really care very much about things like facts, figures, logic. It’s an arrogance that is beyond belief to me. I guess they feel like they’re appealing to people who would never bother to go out and look these things up. They would just take us their word for what they say.
RUSH: The easiest way to understand this — and some people say, ‘Rush, people are not going to believe you. It’s gotta be more complicated than that,’ but it really isn’t — is liberals lie. She is a liberal. She is lying. She is a member of the so-called press. She does fake news.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: She lies. Now, it may also be that she is stupid.
CALLER: (laughs)
RUSH: It may also be that she genuinely doesn’t know. It may entirely be that this woman lives in a zero-sum game world where if somebody loses a job, somebody got a job. If somebody got canned, then somebody got hired. That if you lost a dollar, somebody got a dollar. She may have been educated that way. But we all know this. You go to the Reagan years. Reagan reduced tax rates from 70% to 28%, and the revenue to the Treasury doubled from about 500 billion to almost a trillion dollars over eight years. The capital gains reduction to 15% caused more revenue to roll into the Treasury during Bush… I can remember newspaper stories about how shocked government officials were at the large amount of revenue pouring in, despite the fact capital gains had been reduced. Now, journalists are people who could not hack an education major in college. This is who they are. So the easiest way to understand it is, they have their worldview. Their worldview is: High taxes, punishing the rich, make things fair. It raises revenue, which is able then to be redistributed to the poor. She may genuinely have been raised that way and educated and never questioned it, and believed it, because to her in a zero-sum game world it makes sense. So she’s either dead wrong, dead stupid, or lying. One of the three.
CALLER: I don’t think they care, Rush, whether it’s ignorance or lying. To them it doesn’t seem to matter. This got my interest up and so I started looking back even further and of course you mentioned this before about the John Kennedy tax cuts which also increased revenue, but probably the most telling was the recession of 1920. I don’t know whether you’ve mentioned this or not but I read this article, it was absolutely amazing to me the conditions in 1920 were very similar to 1929. Warren Harding cut the top tax rate to 25%, cut federal spending by 50%, and within five years, the unemployment rate was 1.8%. I was just amazed. Apparently, we don’t want to confuse ourselves with facts and figures in history.
RUSH: No we don’t because the agenda is the important thing.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: But here’s something else that we can cite to illustrate the folly, the stupidity, the ignorance, or the lies. What did you say her name is? What’s her first name, Froma?
CALLER: F-r-o-m-a. Froma Harrop. I don’t know where that came from but that’s her name.
RUSH: Froma Harrop. In recent days the ruling class nomenclatura’s apparatchiks, fake journalists, have been reporting that numerous Democrats would like to rethink ending the Bush tax cuts. Now, remember we’ve been told for the last year and a half (well, actually 2-1/2 years when you count the 2008 campaign) that the reason we are in the dire economic straits that we’re in is because of the Bush tax cuts, and Obama and Biden say, ‘We can’t go back! These are the guys, we gave ’em the keys to the car, they drove it in the ditch. We’re not going back. Those Bush tax cuts created all these problems.’ Now all of a sudden when it’s reelection time, a bunch of Democrats say, ‘You know what? It may be too soon to end these tax cuts. We may not want to take that much revenue out of the economy right now.’ So when it comes to things that are really important to them like getting reelected, then they will go with the flow and go with the truth. Now, when these Democrats say, ‘Maybe it’s a mistake to end the Bush tax cuts in January,’ they are admitting that they know that tax cuts increase economic activity. Which ought to be all anyone knows, or should need to know, that these people are just a bunch of lying bags.
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RUSH: Hey, get this, now. Ben Bernanke yesterday said in congressional testimony, ‘We need more stimulus out there. We gotta have more stimulus.’ ‘The Fed chairman today said that extending some of the Bush tax cuts set to expire would help strengthen a US economy still in need of stimulus.’ So tax cuts would equal stimulus. How long has Ben…? Will he even get home this afternoon?
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RUSH: Folks, this is not insignificant here. ‘Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said extending at least some of the tax cuts set to expire this year would help strengthen a U.S. economy still in need of stimulus and urged offsetting the move with increased revenue or lower spending.’ Ben, you idiot! Extending the tax cuts would increase revenue! You know how these guys in the ruling class speak. (imitating Bernanke) ‘In the short term I would believe that we ought to maintain a reasonable degree of fiscal support, stimulus for the economy.’ For those of you in Rio Linda, I can’t translate it. Bernanke said, ‘There are many ways to do that. [Tax cuts] is one way [to do that].’ And so now we ask, will Ben Bernanke get home this afternoon safely? He says, ‘In the longer term, I think we need to be taking steps to reassure the American people and the markets that our fiscal situation is going to be well controlled.’
I know what’s going on here. I think Bernanke is trying to make up for the remarks that he made back on Wednesday when he said the economy faced unusually uncertain prospects. Do you remember when he said that? Yeah, the prospects are unusually uncertain. That’s not what the regime wants to hear. The regime’s out there congratulating itself today. I think one of the reasons Obama went out there to congratulate himself today on his economic recovery is because Bernanke was out there on Wednesday talking about the unusually uncertain prospects. That caused the DJI, the Dow Jones Industrial to dip 110 points. Reuters on July 21st: ‘The market sold off because unfortunately there is no remedy provided in Bernanke’s commentary to the rising threat of deflation, the excess capacity in the economy and the malfunctioning of the credit system.’
So it sounds like Bernanke’s decided he had — (laughing) — better the hell come up with a solution that would please the markets, which, the market’s up 107 today, so it’s almost picked up what he lost. And how does he do it? How did he get the market up 107? Tax cuts! Bernanke starts talking about tax cuts and the market goes up. It’s exactly what happens here. So if guys like Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, are talking about tax cuts, and Obama’s out there congratulating himself on the economic recovery, these Democrats must really be getting desperate about holding onto their jobs. He’s got Democrats talking about extending the Bush tax cuts now, Bernanke says the tax cuts equal stimulus? Larry Summers’ office, Obama’s in there right now with Christina Romer and they got a picture of Bernanke on a dart board, and they are throwing darts. This is the last thing in the world — folks, this is momentous. I know many of you think that I’m taking it too seriously that there are no coincidences, it’s all coordinated. Be very, very careful in doubting me here.
We have had the president of the United States for two and a half years blame these tax cuts for putting us where we are economically. The president of the United States has said we need stimulus equaling government spending. If we hadn’t done his stimulus, his government spending, why, that’s created or saved three and a half million jobs. Why, why, we’d be a Third World country if Obama hadn’t done that. We can’t go back. We can’t go back to the policies that got us — and here’s Bernanke this week saying we gotta continue those policies. Tax cuts. So George W. Bush is still stimulating the economy that Obama is trying to ruin, which means, if not for Bush, we would really be in the tank. This is not insignificant here. Obama and Biden, Summer of Recovery, and here’s the Fed chairman, ‘unusually uncertain prospects.’ The market plunges and Bernanke today says, ‘The tax cuts, yeah, good stimulus, we gotta think about that, yeah, may not want to sunset those tax cuts.’ Obama is out there going, ‘Ah, damn it, damn it. I’m being undermined no matter where I go.’ So he has to go out there and join the chorus now, saying we’re coming back, the economy, go out and applaud himself today.