RUSH: Poor old Obama, this dog thing, people are not letting the dog thing go. It’s got to be tough. You know, there may be something cosmic about this, too, because Obama’s name spelled backwards is ‘dog.’
Greetings, welcome, Rush Limbaugh, EIB Network, 800-282-2882.
‘God.’ Obama’s name spelled backwards is ‘dog.’
I mean, it has to hurt out there to be talked about like a dog when you’re used to being talked about like a god. So now he’s out there in Ohio today. He selected John Boehner as his villain. I guess he got tired of using me. Didn’t work. Now he’s going to try Boehner. Boehner’s proposed a two-year freeze on tax rates and a return to spending levels of 2008 in exchange for Obama making him the villain. (laughing) Poor old Barry. Well, poor old us actually; Barry is actually doing pretty well given what he set out to do.
Before we get into the serious news, I got an e-mail yesterday from a friend of mine in Hawaii. ‘Rush, could you go a day without mentioning Obama?’ Now, I’ve already blown it today if I set out to do that. ‘It’s depressing enough. You have to constantly talk about Obama.’ It became a challenge, could we do a program today, a full three-hour program without talking about Obama. I mean obviously we could, but would it make any sense to do this? It would be interesting. (interruption) Well, I know, yeah. They said the same thing back during Clinton: ‘Could you do a whole show without talking about Clinton?’ I was thinking about it. Obama has permeated so much of life that it would be a challenge. We’ll look into it. You never know.
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RUSH: We didn’t get to it yesterday, but Peter Orszag, the first director of Office of Management and Budget, had a column in the New York Times in which he just ran for the hills from Obama on extending the Bush tax cuts. He’s in favor of extending them for two years for everybody, and Obama was asked about it — or Gibbs was asked about it. We have the sound bites coming up. The White House is clearly on the defensive here. He threw Obama overboard, threw Obama under the bus. Now, Orszag was the guy credited by Harry Reid as being the man responsible for finally putting together the budget numbers of Obamacare that made it all work out. He’s gone. He’s out of there. Christina Romer is gone and out of there, and it’s obvious these people value their reputations. They do. And they are wanting away from this administration. The greatest indication that we could have that we are headed for a doom, disaster architect and authored by Obama is the fact these people are running for the hills and going public about how they disagree with what Obama is doing. They don’t want their names and reputations tied to it.
You know, people want to know my NFL predictions, who’s going to be in the Super Bowl. I don’t look at the season that way normally. Picking a Super Bowl winner, well, the two teams in the Super Bowl in August or September is not something that I generally have engaged in because there’s no way anybody can possibly know. And I’m a literalist. I told you, I live in Literalville, which gets me in a lot of trouble with most people who don’t live in Literalville. You ought to try to talk to people who don’t live in Literalville when you live in Literalville. You know, most people don’t mean half of what they say. But if you live in Literalville you believe what people say and you act on it. Half of them don’t remember what they said. The other half don’t believe what they said — and, when reminded of it, deny it. Meanwhile, I act on it.
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RUSH: Orszag, by the way, resigned on June 21st, which was the first day of the Summer of Recovery, and it was Obama okaying up to $10 billion in loans Brazil to drill for oil. Now, Mexico, import-export bank, we gave them a billion dollars to drill for oil. Mexico’s one of the largest oil exporters in the world, and that company, Pemex, is one of the world’s largest petrochemical corporations. So it’s clear they need all the help they can get from the US taxpayer.
Now, even Democrats are starting to get nervous about this. There was some allusion to this yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, and a couple of days before — even on — Labor Day, on Monday, when Obama first floated this notion of a $50 billion stimulus. Ah, they don’t call it stimulus. It’s ‘infrastructure.’ The infrastructure building: schools, roads, runways. All this stuff that was supposed to be done with the first stimulus plan. We all know this is just another sop to the unions. But there were stories. Drudge had a headline (paraphrase): ‘Democrats Not on Board With This New Spending.’ This is from TheHill.com: ‘Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) broke with President Obama [today], saying he would not support any additional stimulus spending. Bennet, who was endorsed by the president in Colorado but is facing…’ This is the guy who said he would not have Obama show up to campaign for him! ”I will not support additional spending in a second stimulus package,’ Bennet said in a statement. The statement is a sharp pivot for Bennet,’ it says here, ‘who voted for the initial $787 billion stimulus plan backed by Obama in February of 2009. The freshman senator sounded more like a Republican than a Democrat on Wednesday, calling for any new spending to be funded through unspent stimulus dollars.’
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RUSH: This morning on Scarborough’s show on MessNBC, David Axelrod appeared. And of course they were talking about Orszag and his suggestion to keep the Bush tax cuts, including for the rich, for the next two years. The question: ‘I take you back to what Barack Obama said during the campaign. He was asked a question about raising taxes even for people making over $250,000 during the campaign. And he said if the economic downturn continued, of course he would consider not raising taxes because it might hurt the economy. Obviously real unemployment’s, what, 14, 15% right now? Wouldn’t that suggest that maybe you do what Peter Orszag suggested and wait a year or two before you allow those taxes to go up?’
AXELROD: Well, Joe, you should read Peter’s column more closely because what he said was his preference would be that we move forward with a middle-class tax cut —
SCARBOROUGH: Right.
AXELROD: — because the middle class and not the upper income tax cut, because the middle — because the middle class is the people in our economy, that 97% are people that have been really hit hard in the last ten years, they’re the ones who will spend the money and get our economy moving. He’s very conscious of the deficits and he understands that a $700,000 billion dollar bill to do the other 3% —
SCARBOROUGH: Right.
AXELROD: — is something we can’t afford, but what Peter said is we may have to do that in order pass the legislation. He was giving us legislative advice, not economic advice.
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah.
RUSH: Oh, this is a huge spin because that’s not what Orszag was doing in any way, shape, manner, or form. Now, this notion that only the middle class and their spending will drive an economy, we had the story for you yesterday that we got back from the archives. The AP, or maybe it was Reuters, were all concerned that the rich had stopped spending and that threatened the recovery. The rich had stopped spending. Now, obviously what they’re doing here, they’re playing the old class warfare game, and they’re playing the numbers game. Obviously there are far more people in the middle class than there are, quote, unquote, ‘the rich;’ here defined as people making over $250,000 a year. So this is Axelrod and the boys and Obama, which is what the Democrats have always done, simply shotgun at that large group of people playing off the resentment they supposedly have for the rich.
I’m wondering. Right now in this economic climate, with unemployment as high as it is with foreclosures — I mean the absolute destruction of the economic circumstance, particularly the American private sector — I think the American middle class is a little bit more sophisticated than the average Democrat may think these days. I don’t think that there is nearly the resentment for the rich continuing at the current tax rates that the Democrats would like everybody to believe that there is. Now, here’s an Orszag quote: ‘Ideally, only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high income tax cuts, too, and that would still be worth it.’ But how many employees make over $250,000 a year? How many employers, in fact, make over $200,000 a year? Do 90% of employers make over $200,000 a year? Isn’t this supposed to be about creating and saving jobs? No! That’s what Obama wants you to think, but this is still about punishment. This is still about punishing achievement. This is about destroying the opportunity to acquire wealth, which is what this administration’s all about. And that’s what they’re playing on.
So Orszag’s gone off the reservation and they have to send Axelrod out to try to spin this, doing his best to cover up why Orszag left. But Orszag just couldn’t keep lying about the budget anymore. He does care about his economic reputation, going to be around long after Obama’s gone. So Mike Barnicle jumped in with this, said, ‘If all of these component parts of the president’s economic program as he has started and he will continue today to address — if they’re so critical, so important to the economic health of the middle class — why didn’t you do them a year ago or this spring?’
AXELROD: Well, actually, Mike, you know, we passed $300 billion in tax cuts that were for that same 97%. That was one of the first things that we did that was opposed by, uh, the Republicans in the, uh, in the Congress, but, uh, we’ve been on this from the very beginning. The president ran promising, uh, a make-work-pay tax cut. He delivered, uh, on that promise. But we can’t, uh, we can’t now, uh, turn our back on the middle class in the middle of this, uh, very difficult economic time.
RUSH: We can’t turn our back on the middle class? My God, you have savaged the middle class. The middle class is in the Obama administration’s crosshairs. Who is it that’s suffering in all this? Who is it that’s really hurting in this economic downturn? It’s not the rich. It’s the middle class when people can’t find jobs. It’s the way it always is. The Democrats always claim their policies are for ‘the little guy,’ and by the time their policies are enacted, guess who it is that pays the price for Democrat liberal policies? It’s the little guy. Who is it that’s unemployed at 14 to 15% or higher in this country? And he’s running around here talking about how we can’t turn our back on the middle class in the middle of this very difficult — I thought, in fact, that we had recovered, the Summer of Recovery.
I thought we’d come back from the brink. I thought all this was being taken care of. Now there’s an acknowledgement that we’re still in the tank and we can’t turn our back on the middle class and somehow extending tax cuts for every American including people who make over $250,000 is turning our backs on the middle class? Next question from Maria Bartiromo: ‘Let me ask the question that so many people have been asking in relation to the president’s plans to spend $50 billion on new infrastructure. Where is the money that was targeted toward infrastructure in the stimulus spending? What was that, almost $200 billion, did that actually go to work?’
AXELROD: It absolutely did, and tens of thousands of projects across this country. All over America there’s work going on right now and it will be ongoing, uh, for the rest of this year and into next with rebuilding, uh, this country and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve, uh, even the Congressional Budget Office nonpartisan has said that we, uh, are responsible for three to three and a half million people working today who wouldn’t have been working.
RUSH: I mean that’s just absolute drivel. It’s bogus. They haven’t created three and a half million jobs or saved three and a half million jobs. Look, folks, go to any of the formerly great cities in the United States that have been run year after year, decade after decade by Democrats and see what condition those cities are in. You will see what socialism does to the middle class. You will see what liberalism does to the middle class. It destroys the middle class. The things Mr. Axelrod believes in, the things that President Obama believes in destroys the middle class. It leaves only the very rich and the very poor, and the very poor become a larger and larger number. The very rich do not increase their numbers, but the very poor do, and the middle class ceases to exist.
When you’re talking about Detroit, for example, or talking about bulldozing houses. Do you think they’re bulldozing houses of the rich there? Do you think they’re getting even with the rich in Detroit? Hell, no, if anybody’s being gotten even with, it’s the middle class. It’s the middle class that gets destroyed with unfettered, unchecked Democrat policy, liberalism, socialism, whatever you wish to call it. Orszag knows this. Christina Romer, even though she’s never been outside academia, knows this. They can all see where this is going. Bennet in Colorado, they all see where this is headed. Most of the Democrats running for reelection in November, they see where this is headed and they don’t want their names on it anymore. But it’s too late for that. Because none of this that has been done in any way, shape, manner, or form would anybody say are Republican, and certainly not conservative ideas.
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RUSH: We go to Pittsburgh and Barry. I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How you doing?
RUSH: Very well, sir.
CALLER: Hey, I had to call. I’ve had it with the misconception from the administration about taxing the rich versus small businesses. I just wanted to make a quick comment.
RUSH: Sure.
CALLER: What most people don’t understand is most small businesses are S corporations.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: That’s what 90% of us are. At the end of the year, the money left in the bank is not the company’s money. That shows up as the owner’s money and it’s taxed as the owner’s money. In other words, it’s taxed as an individual. Well, I don’t want that money. I want to leave it in the bank for my company, you know, we need to at least keep two or three months’ worth of money in there for payroll in case something happens, so on and so forth, and the thing is, you cannot say that’s the company’s money, it shows up at the end of the year as the private individual’s money, the owner’s money.
RUSH: That’s right, because as a sub-S you file your business return on your personal return.
CALLER: Absolutely right. And the thing that, again, most people don’t understand is $250,000, they’re talking about anybody that makes over that, well, just real quick, you can do the math real quick, if your payroll is 70 or $75,000, plus the rest of your overhead, plus your operating costs and you gotta keep three months in there just to be safe, most businesses should do that, they don’t want to live payday to payday in case something happens, and they go with the higher tax rate just like your taxed as an individual. What we would like is for them to lower the tax rate for the money that we leave in the bank as the business’s money.
RUSH: Now, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I thought Obama’s going to propose some big small business tax incentive for you. You’re not happy with that?
CALLER: Absolutely not.
RUSH: I don’t even know what it is. Do you know what it is?
CALLER: Well, I heard a couple things. Oh, and this just keeps getting better. The R&D he’s talking about.
RUSH: Yeah, R&D. Whoop-de-doo.
CALLER: Yeah. I design equipment. And get this. I have to hire a consultant to do a deduction for R&D, which, whenever I told them how much I was going to spend on R&D, they said, ‘That’s not even worth it.’ I can account for every penny that I spend on R&D yet I cannot do a deduction, I gotta go to a consultant to show me how to do it and that’s gonna cost me at least seven to $10,000. Now, again doing the math, that’s not even worth it at the end of the day. It’s just unbelievable what they’re not telling you about small businesses and this taxation. It’s just unbelievable to me.
RUSH: Obama is relying on the same premise that you started your call with, and that is most people don’t know. Most people don’t understand sub-S, most people don’t understand the intricacies of it, how you file your taxes and how the business is run. Only a small portion of Americans do, and Obama’s counting on that ignorance. Obama is playing off the fact that seven to $10,000, you’ve got that times ten in the bank. You’re a business. Obama believes you’re sitting on money like you never believe you’re sitting on, and you won’t spend it because you’re greedy. So he’s trying to incentivize you into spending the money. It’s just like the figure of $250,000 per couple is being rich. Stop and think of that: $250,000 per couple. Average that out, $125,000 a person, that equals rich. You say, ‘Well, how do they come to that?’ They pick a number with the fewest number of people above it, the greatest number of people below it. What they know is, the vast majority of Americans do not make $250,000, so when they hear that only people who make more than that’s taxes are going up, they don’t care. In fact, they’re even for it. Nobody in this administration has run a small business. Nobody in this administration has made a payroll. But even that misses the point. Obama’s objective is not to grow small business. If Obama’s objective was to grow small business he would not have done one policy item that he’s done. It’s that simple.
Hammonton, New Jersey, and Dan, I’m glad you’re there. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Rush, how are you, sir?
RUSH: Very well. Thank you.
CALLER: Great. I’m a first-time caller. I’ve been listening to you since 1992.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: When I first started listening to you it took me two minutes, I was hooked for life. Anyway, my comment is about your show that you want to do, Obama, without mentioning his name. And a while back you did a history show — sorry, I’m a little out of breath, I was running — a history show kind of like talking about how the country was made, the Constitution and how the juries work, the Supreme Court —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and all the legislation, how it comes about and how it works. And maybe you could do something like that because that was very insightful and I really enjoyed that show.
RUSH: How long ago did I do that, do you remember?
CALLER: I think you had Gramm on as a guest, so —
RUSH: Gramm?
CALLER: Let me think. It’s going back about —
RUSH: Who Gramm? I don’t have guests. Who are you talking about?
CALLER: Well, you were talking to somebody from Congress. I remember him being on — I’m sorry —
RUSH: Anyway, your memory is that we did a show without mentioning a president’s name for three hours?
CALLER: Right, that’s the idea for your show. Without mentioning, you could do what you did before where you talk about the making of the country and how the courts work, what they were made for and how laws get passed and everything, to give people an idea how things work. It was great, and it really was insightful. I guess I’m going back about ten years. I believe it’s ten years.
RUSH: All right. Well, I forgot. I’m always looking forward. That’s why I have staff to tell me what I said yesterday because I don’t even remember. (interruption) Phil Gramm was on? Anyway, I appreciate the call out there, Dan, very much.