We Can See Our Future in Europe

RUSH: One of the big stories on cable news this morning is the UK student protest over the tuition hike. ‘Tens of thousands of students marched noisily through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees, and some tried to occupy the headquarters of the governing Conservative party –‘ that, I think, is the real objective here ‘– in the largest street protest yet against the government’s sweeping austerity measures. Organizers said 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters –‘ i.e., rent-a-mobs, ‘– were demonstrating against plans to raise the cost of studying–‘ is that what you pay for, to study? No wonder I didn’t get my money’s worth in school. That’s what you pay for is to study? ‘Organizers said 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters were demonstrating against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9,000 pounds ($14,000) a year — three times the current rate.’ That’s less than five grand a year at major universities in the UK, as opposed to 20 grand a year here, or 25 at similar, comparable institutions.

‘Violence flared as a handful of people smashed windows in a high-rise that houses Conservative headquarters, as others lit a bonfire of placards outside the building. Office workers were evacuated as several dozen protesters managed to get into the lobby, chanting ‘Tories Out.” That’s what this is all about. To think that the students are protesting the university is just crazy. What they’re protesting is having to go to work someday. What they’re protesting is having to earn their way. Folks, I can’t begin to tell you, you know, I go in cycles. Some days I think it’s all lost and it’s hopeless, and other days I think we got a chance to reverse it. I see stuff like this, 50 thousand people basically protesting so they can run around and be given freebies the rest of their lives. That’s what this is all about. All these budget cuts, austerity cuts, nobody wants to pay their own way, nobody, and it’s something that is increasing in this country and the reason nobody wants to pay their own way in Europe is because they haven’t had to. They’ve had all these socialist democracies and they’re going bankrupt. Ireland is the latest, worse than Greece. We’re next.

We had this story the other day that the nations of the world borrow $10.2 trillion, that’s how much is owed. Most budgets barely pay the service, the cost of the debt. Nothing’s real. Nothing has been real. It’s all been built on phoniness. Sometimes it literally boggles my mind. In California, what’s the number of unemployment benefits? Forty million a day to pay unemployment compensation benefits, for people not to work. More and more people expect to be supported by the government. And people who don’t expect that, people who do want to make their own way, people who do want to assume these responsibilities are the ones being said to be hard-hearted, cold-hearted, have no compassion or what have you. It makes me mad. I see a bunch of long hard maggot-infested dope smoking students, a bunch of ingrates who have had everything given to them all their life, protesting for everything to be given to them the rest of their lives. ‘But Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, you’re mischaracterizing this. They are protesting the rising costs of tuition. It’s going to be three times what it normally is.’ I understand that. But things cost money. The reason they’re going up three times is because they haven’t been charging what it actually costs in real terms up ’til now. It’s only when everybody’s running out of money that they start getting a response.

You know what ought to happen in California? I have an idea for California, and it goes against everything I have ever uttered, it goes against every philosophy I have. But California is simply feeding off of the rest of us. I never got to that story in the Wall Street Journal last week, comparing California to Lindsay Lohan, constantly in and out of rehab, not being fixed. It was a funny piece. We just need to raise everybody’s taxes in California, because that’s what’s gonna happen to us to bail ’em out. Just raise everybody’s taxes. Make them pay for what’s happening out there. I am being dead serious about this. These are the people voting for this kind of government, the liberals are voting for this kind of irresponsibility, this waste, this fraud, make them pay for it. Make ’em pay for it. Make ’em pay for the kind of government they want. ‘But, Rush, but, Rush, it’s never worked.’ That’s my point. It never has worked. We have never cut spending in government, have we? We’ve always increased spending and we’ve always raised taxes.

We’ve done everything to try to get out of this economic malaise but what will work. We know what will work. It has worked every time it’s tried: Reducing marginal tax rates. Remember the call we had from the economist yesterday from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I got a lot of e-mails from people loved that call. She focused on the fact that the Fed and other financial institutions are focusing on lending. They want banks to lend money to small businesses and so forth to create economic activity. There’s one thing missing from that equation. It’s called demand. Nobody wants to borrow any money because they don’t have any customers. You can’t grow a business without sales, be it of your product or of your service. So you can talk all day long about, ‘My God, these banks are holding onto money. They’re making money rather than investing it and putting it into circulation to be loaning it.’ Well, there’s no desire to borrow it. Go talk to anybody in the business community. There’s no demand for business. There’s no demand for products and services.

There are exceptions, of course, but before you can start talking about lending money and putting it in circulation, there has to be a demand side in the equation, there isn’t any. And you can’t just automatically create it. You can’t say, ‘Okay, credit’s easy, Mr. Small Businessman, go ahead and borrow.’ He’s gonna say, ‘For what? Why am I gonna borrow money? Why do I want to go in debt? I’m not gonna have any chance to pay it back. What’s the point? There’s no demand for my product. There’s no demand for my service. That’s why I’m not hiring people. There’s no demand for what I’m doing,’ because people increasingly are losing their jobs. So the one thing that we know works, we will never do because of this regime. This regime diametrically opposed the marginal tax rate cuts, particularly on the producers and job creators because they’re the targets of this regime.

Ask yourself a simple question, folks. If you’ve had trouble getting your arms around my belief that all this is being done purposefully, ask yourself a simple question: why would anybody work so hard to become president of a country they hate? Why would anybody work so hard to become president of a country — if ‘hate’ is too strong a word, a country they don’t like — why would anybody do that? When you answer that question, everything that’s happened in the last two years become clearer. Somebody wants to become president of a country they don’t like, it’s obviously to change it, and what do they not like about it? The way it was founded. And that’s where we are. And every time something happens in Europe, we are seeing our future. Every time something happens in Venezuela, we see our future.

Now, this Quantitative Easing number 2. We’ve already tried this. We’ve tried increased government spending. We have tried raising taxes. We’ve tried all of these phony, artificial, related to no reality moves and measures before, and they don’t work. So what are we doing? We’re doubling down on them. The thing that will work, marginal tax rates, even if they’re not much, even if you just say they’re coming, one of the things that was part and parcel of the conversation we had with the economists yesterday was there’s no confidence out there, and without confidence you’re not gonna borrow, and without demand you’re not gonna borrow, and without demand there’s not gonna be any confidence. So something has to happen to inspire confidence, to think that maybe policies will be put in place that will allow this engine of economic opportunity to start percolating again on its own, and those policies involve getting people like Obama out of the way.