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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: This debt commission report, Irksome Bowles, Alan Simpson, forget it. It’s worthless. The premise is totally corrupt. Don’t get caught up in debating any of the minutia or the aspects of this thing. It’s a setup; it is a trap. All it does is cement the notion of expanded government spending ad infinitum. I’ll give you a couple of reasons why I’m saying this but I’m not gonna waste my time like I see ’em doing on the news networks dissecting this stuff. There’s nothing bold about it. There’s nothing revolutionary about it. It’s a trick.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The unions are beside themselves. The unions cannot believe what’s happening. Because the ratio in this deficit commission report, the ratio of spending cuts to tax increases is 75 to 25. That alone makes me think the whole thing’s a trap. Seventy-five percent of the ‘savings’ are spending cuts. Twenty-five percent of the revenue changes are tax increases. Well, Pelosi’s looking at that, Durbin is looking at that, and they say, ‘Whoa, there is no way!’ The unions are going bonkers. Our guys are kinda getting sucked in here on the Republican side. ‘There’s… Well, you know, you have to look at it. There’s some potential here, maybe some things to work with.’

The dirty little secret about this is that what it does is establish as a premise the notion of gigantic government. Right after the break, I’m gonna explain this to you. There was a great post at Ricochet.com, which is a new blog out there by Peter Robinson, and there’s a post by a guy named Steve Manacek, who has analyzed this and has come up with some absolutely scary analysis. Well, it’s not analysis. He has found scary admissions in this thing such as the level of government spending expressed as a percentage of GDP. It’s skyrocketing under this proposal. So all this talk about spending cuts, it’s smoke and mirrors. Anyway, if Obama has blinked he can be made to blink again. If we stand firm.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: From Politico… This is not good. I mean, you’ve got Richard Trumka out there, union thug leader, pronouncing the details of the deficit proposal as ‘unconscionable.’ Working Americans are taking it on the chin here, getting the shaft. The unions don’t like it, Dick Durbin doesn’t like it, they’re ‘tax cuts for the rich,’ and now this from Politico: ‘President Barack Obama failed to reach agreement on two international deals to help spur the U.S. …’

Now, just this morning I read that Obama was close to just taking over that G20. He was having his way with those members, and he was gonna make sure that jobs were created for the American people by virtue of his command of the issues and his leadership capability — and now all of a sudden he’s a nonentity, from Politico. And they’ve got an inside track to this bunch. ‘President Obama failed to reach agreement on two international deals to help spur the U.S. economy, unexpected setbacks on an Asia trip that was supposed to emphasize Obama’s stature abroad and change the subject from last week’s electoral drubbing.’ Emphasize his stature abroad? He doesn’t have any!

You people in the Drive-Bys tried to create this notion, this image, this aura of stature. How…? Would you explain to me how it is that these worldwide leaders at the G20 are gonna think a guy arriving two days after having his party wiped out in midterm elections has any stature. I don’t follow the logic. What are these guys over there supposed to say? Lula in Brazil, the South Korean guy, what are they supposed to say? ‘Oh, my gosh! Make way, here comes The Messiah. Here comes Obama. He just got creamed in the midterm elections, but make way for Obama. I don’t know if we have the ability to even be in the same room.’ Who are we kidding here? The Democrats in this country, Democrats in the Senate know they elected a mistake. They know they’ve got something untenable in the White House.

Look, there’s even more in this in the Stack of Stuff coming up. There’s even more. We’re talking about this on MSNBC. I gave you the low down on this on Monday. People are still talking about the debacle that Obama is for the Democrat Party. This notion he’s gonna have stature over there in the G20? ‘Obama was unable to achieve a free trade agreement with South Korea.’ South Korea! ‘Vowing to keep talking to get a better deal for US automakers.’ What does he need South Korea for? Have you heard the big news? GE has said there are gonna be 25,000 Volts — big whoop — 12,000 of them in the first phase. This is all about trying to get the IPO price up. So General Electric is gonna buy cars.

You people that work for GE who get a company car, aren’t you excited? Pretty soon you’re gonna be driving a Volt. It gets 40 miles to the charge. (laughs) I’m trying to be nice here. So Obama was unable to achieve a free trade agreement with South Korea, and after meeting with the leaders of Germany and the ChiComs, ‘he continued to meet resistance from the two countries about reducing their trade surpluses with the US to give a boost to American manufacturing, putting the best face on a compromise that only calls for the goal of lowering them.’ One of the things I think that we’re all messed up on here is when we look at our economy and these guys in charge of fixing it are missing the one key, most important element. Everybody’s focusing on exports.

‘We got a trade imbalance with the ChiComs. They’re exporting to us and we gotta figure out a way to export to them.’ No! We gotta figure out a way to create American customers, period, for anything. You can sit around and you can print all the money you want. You can do QE2, QE3, you can go up to QE15. You can do all the magic wands you want. Until you create consumer demand for anything in this country, you can whistle Dixie about having export parity with the ChiComs. Back in June, by the way… You may have forgotten this. Back in June Obama was the only G20 leader who refused to pledge to cut their government deficits by half. So here you have General Electric buying 25,000 Volts and the ChiComs are buying stock in General Motors.

And we’re running around printing money and we got a deficit commission panel, which essentially is establishing the notion of an ever larger government. Let me get to that right now. I’ve teased you with this. This is Steve Manacek, ‘What am I missing?’ This is yesterday a post at Ricochet.com. ‘The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has released its co-chair’s proposal.’ By the way, the membership didn’t even know they were gonna do it. The other commissioners had no idea that Irksome Bowles and Alan Simpson Babe were gonna release this thing. Durbin, by the way, Dick Durbin, is one of the commissioners. And he was fit to be tied. He didn’t know they were gonna do this.

‘A lot of introductory verbiage could have come straight from the mouth of Ronald Reagan. Cut and invest to promote economic growth, cut spending we simply can’t afford wherever we find it, reform and simplify the tax code, broaden the base, lower rates, bring down the deficit.’ I shared all this with you yesterday, and so on. ‘There are pages and pages of more or less specific proposals, some more pleasing to conservatives, others to liberals. But here’s what I don’t get about the initial reactions,’ Mr. Manacek writes. ‘Putting aside all the minutia and all the detail the crux of the proposal comes down to two points: Capping federal government expenditures at 22% of GDP and capping revenues at 21% of GDP.

‘Each of these represents a big problem. The first is on the spending side. Except for the anomalous stimulus bailout recession years of 2009 and 2011, federal government expenditures haven’t reached 21% of GDP since the collapse of the Soviet Union,’ and Mr. Manacek writes here, ‘Except for the anomalous stimulus bailout recession years 2009 and 2011.’ The whole point — if you want to really know the dirty little secret (I know I overuse that phrase) — the truth about the stimulus package was to increase the baseline on which future budgets are built. In two years, they increased the baseline around 20%, maybe even more. He’s out there saying, ‘shovel-ready jobs,’ and then he said there aren’t any shovel-ready jobs. It was never about jobs as we know.

There weren’t any jobs that were created. We continued to lose jobs. It was rhetoric. Jobs created, jobs saved? This was about massively increasing the budget for all time. That’s what the stimulus bill was, to up the baseline. Now, those of you have been regular listeners since the early nineties know all about baseline budgeting. We spent a week explaining it to you. The baseline is simply the amount every year that every budget item is based on, whether the item is overfunded or underfunded, it doesn’t matter. So when Mr. Manacek writes here, ‘Except for the anomalous stimulus bailout recession years of 2009 and 2011, federal government expenditures have not reached 21% of GDP since the collapse of the Soviet Union.’

But they did with the stimulus. Permanently. The stimulus raised the baseline, and so now this debt commission comes up and says, ‘We’re gonna cap federal government expenditures at 22%.’ But the problem is we’ve never spent 22% of GDP. Since World War II. Spending only competed 21% of GDP during the Reagan-Bush military buildup of the eighties and nineties. For virtually all of the Clinton and George W. Bush years and during all the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon years, federal spending ranged between 18 and 20% of GDP’, and this deficit report caps it at 22%. It raises the baseline exactly what the stimulus was.

This thing is a blueprint for the expansion of government and codifying it as law, at 22%, when we’ve never spent that, up until Obama shows up. That’s one side of this. ‘The more important problem is on the revenue side. According to OMB figures, federal revenues have never reached 21% of GDP. That’s what they are targeted to be in this initial report that came out yesterday. In fact, only in Bill Clinton’s final year in office and during World War II did revenues even exceed 20% of GDP. During the whole time from 1960 to 2008, federal tax revenues almost always fell between 17 and 19% of GDP, only occasionally rising above 19%, chiefly in Clinton’s second term or below 17%, George W. Bush’s first term.’

Look, there’s a lot of numbers here. The bottom line is federal spending has never been as high as what this deficit commission report suggests, and federal taxes have never been as high as what this deficit commission report suggests. This is a trick, and it’s got all the Reagan language in there and it’s got all the stuff that sucks our side into saying, ‘Ohh, yeah, we’ll look at this.’ You got the left not liking it because they don’t like the ratio of 75% spending cuts and 25% tax cuts, but there isn’t any cutting! It’s just like every year of the federal budget: There’s nothing being cut here. Taxes, spending, zilch. It’s all going up to unprecedented levels in our history and that’s the truth about this.

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RUSH: One more reason to totally ignore the commissioner’s report yesterday on the deficit reduction panel report. They don’t even mention getting rid of health care, and if you are serious about reducing government, if you’re serious about tackling our debt, you gotta repeal it. You cannot have any element of it. They don’t even talk about it. It’s just baseless. Well, it isn’t baseless. It’s dangerous what this report does ’cause it’s a trick. It’s sucking our guys in, ‘Oh, wow, look, Reagan language in there, broadening the base, oh, yeah, I kinda dig the lower rates in there, I really do, love the spending to tax cut ratio.’ Take your cue from the left. They hate it. They hate it, and they’re stupid. If they understood what this thing actually proposed they’d be out there trying to get it passed today.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let’s move on to Alan Simpson Babe. By the way, people are asking, ‘What are you calling him Alan Simpson Babe for?’ Because he calls me Rush Babe. When he was named to this commission, he said, ‘I know Rush Babe isn’t gonna like it. Rush Babe’s got a problem with me.’ I never have had a problem with Senator Simpson. He’s from Wyoming, a great state. He calls me Rush Babe so I’m calling him Alan Simpson Babe. Yesterday on Capitol Hill, the bipartisan debt commission press conference, this is Alan Simpson.

SIMPSON: We have harpooned every whale in the ocean, and some of the minnows, and no one has ever done that before. I feel like we ought to be in a witness protection program when this is over, so look us up.

RUSH: Yeah, well, the truth of the matter is, if you look at this, I don’t want to be redundant here, but this is a boondoggle, folks, it’s a mistake, it’s a trick. This thing locks in levels of federal spending and taxation. It’s not gonna get adopted, either. This is not going to be adopted in its form. I don’t know what they’re doing, trial ballooning it or what. But the thing that these two guys presented yesterday locks in federal spending at levels that we’ve never reached other than during anomalies, and federal tax levels that we’ve never had. Forget everything else you know about it. The report yesterday locks in the concept of an ever-expanding government. It does not change one premise. It does not suggest reforming, repealing, getting rid of health care. Now, if you’re in part of a deficit reduction panel and you don’t even talk about the health care bill, you are not serious. This thing locks in the Nanny State. This thing locks in socialism. Here’s Anthony Weiner last night on PMSNBC. ‘Anybody gonna like this plan? Anybody?’

WEINER: What’s infuriating, putting aside the content, never mind it’s not a plan to reduce the deficit, so much (as) a plan to reduce seniors and reduce just about anyone else. This is very bad.

RUSH: Well, okay, so reduce seniors. That’s what health care’s gonna do, Mr. Weiner. Health care is gonna reduce seniors, and reduce just about everything else. By the way, here’s another thing, just to show you that this thing is not serious and it isn’t going to fly. You know, every year the Congress does a budget, president submits his version, and the budget includes things that happen five years out, ten years out. But have you ever noticed those things are never locked in? They can’t be. The budget is for one year and the next year’s Congress redoes it, to hell with what it said. The only reason these Bush tax cuts survived is because they happened during reconciliation, and that’s why they sunset. It’s a whole different matter. The retirement age for Social Security goes up to 69 in 2050? I’m sorry. Does anybody think that the people and a Congress in 2050 are gonna live with what the yokels in 2010 wrote? Would we sit here and live with what the yokels in 1970 wrote for us? In large part we are on the entitlement side, but look at where it’s got us. They’re not gonna put up with it. You can’t come up with a plan that’s gonna lock the country in 50 years down the road and people not even born yet, affected by it, not change it and put up with it.

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