RUSH: Here’s Brian in Corpus Christi, Texas. Welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush?
RUSH: Very good, sir. Thanks very, very much.
CALLER: All right man, I was just calling ’cause I wondered how you get to the conclusion that by cutting taxes that it isn’t like a loft to our government because X-amount of tax would bring in that much income, whenever you cut the tax you cut the income, don’t you?
RUSH: Well, only if you presume that the money belongs to Washington first. I don’t presume that. I presume that the money I make belongs to me first. I don’t think —
CALLER: I understand how it belongs to you first, yeah, but we do owe, you know, X-amount according to the Constitution and how much we gotta pay in taxes. If you cut that rate the government loses that amount of money, doesn’t it?
RUSH: The Constitution’s got nothing to do with how much we pay in taxes.
CALLER: Nothing to do with it?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: All right. Okay, another question. Sorry about that. I got a question. Our gas right now in Corpus Christi is about $3.75 a gallon, and I remember back when Bush was president and gas was this high, a barrel of oil was selling for like $140. I don’t understand why a barrel of oil is going for like $105 today, and our gas is still $3.75. Why is that?
RUSH: Speculators.
CALLER: Speculators. I mean it’s like $30 difference on a barrel —
RUSH: Speculators. Well, the speculation price versus the raw goods price differential is much different this time around.
CALLER: Hmm.
RUSH: The guy that sets the gasoline price could just be taking advantage now, because everybody’s been told gasoline prices are gonna be going up and so the guy that controls gas prices might have just said, “Okay, well, let’s raise ’em ’cause people are expecting that to happen.” I want to go back to this notion, sir, we may have already lost you, but I hope not. I don’t mean on the phone, I mean the way you think. This notion, you’ve given me a challenge here. You’ve given me a real challenge, like one I gave my dad, he told me, when I was seven or eight years old. You’re giving me a real challenge here to try to explain to people the fallacy in the claim that unpaid-for tax cuts is a legitimate economic entry item or premise. Unpaid-for tax cuts. See, to me, instinctively, that is communist talk. But if it’s not instinctively communist or socialist or collectivelist to talk to you, I have to find a way to explain it to you so you’ll understand it. And that’s going to be a bit of a challenge. It’s not gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a challenge to do it convincingly, persuasively, because you’re looking at it from the standpoint of government needs X-amount of dollars to run, and you’re not making any judgment on it. I do.
I think half the money it takes is unnecessary and invalid and fallaciously spent. It’s unnecessary. I don’t think it takes $3.7 trillion to run this government. That’s making it even more intricate, which I shouldn’t be doing at this stage of the explanation, but I’m just trying to describe for you my position on this. See, I believe that all wealth is created by individuals working, you and I in what’s called the private sector. Without us the government would have nothing, and yet the presumption is that we have what we have because government allows us to keep a certain percentage of what we make. If we’ve gotten to the point where a majority of people in this country think that it’s more important for government to have what it wants with no concern for the consequences — in other words, try it this way. They raise your taxes, and you say, “I can’t afford any more. I mean you’re taking disposable income away from me. You’re taking money that I need to buy food.” We’re talking needs here, not wants. Well, how come the same doesn’t apply for government? How come every tax cut the government has to pay for it? Why can’t they do with less now and then? Why does a tax cut have to be paid for?
It’s that kind of thinking that gets us $14 trillion as a national debt. Unpaid-for tax cuts? The old notion that we should not cut taxes unless somehow we can replace that revenue? Why can’t government do with less? We know how many programs are redundant on child health, school nutrition, all of this. I mean it would boggle your mind the amount of money that’s triple and quadruple spent on the same projects. The purpose here is to deemphasize the relevance and importance of you as an individual. You are to be subordinate to the government. The government’s needs are to take total precedence over yours. That’s not America. And the notion that they can never do with less, but that we have to on every whim they describe, why, it offends my sensibilities.
So when I hear some Marxist president start talking about the reason we have a $14 trillion debt or the reason we have a $1.9 trillion deficit is because of unpaid-for tax cuts to millionaires? No. That’s not why we have a deficit. We have a deficit because of irresponsible spending on the part of people who work in Washington and they spend that money for a host of reasons, the least of which is your prosperity. They’re spending money to buy votes. They’re spending money to make people dependent. They are enforcing poverty on people. They are breaking up families under the pretense of compassion and concern and hoping to help people. They are destroying people’s dignity by taking away the option of dreams and work and achievement and success. They are exploiting a natural tendency of some people to be lazy and shiftless and sit out there and do nothing but collect a check.
Quite simply, sir, the Democrat Party is using people, exploiting people for one reason, and it has nothing to do with having a desire that those people have a happy life. It’s all about making sure those people have barely enough to get by and that all they’ve got comes from government, and that they know that the government providing it to ’em is the Democrat Party. Ergo, votes, year in, year out. I say after 50 years of this ultimate failure which destroys elements of the country and our people, it’s time to try it a different way and to deemphasize the role of government in everybody’s life. Why should your government stand in the way of your becoming prosperous? Why should the government be an obstacle to your prosperity? Why should we have a government that looks at your achievement as something to be punished by you having to pay higher taxes? It’s not fair that you’re not paying more. Why? Where did it get written in the great annals of humanity that the greatness of a country is defined by how many people it has barely getting by being provided for by government, because that equals compassion. Where did that get started?
Your president today basically defined the greatness of America as that. We didn’t become great country ’til we started redistributing wealth. Whatever you want to call the program, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, AFDC, WIC, Pell grants, I don’t care, it’s all redistribution, it’s all it is. I’m sorry, but that’s not defined our greatness and it never will define greatness. That’s been tried around the world, sir. It’s been tried in Cuba. Is anything great down there? Tried in Soviet Union, Russia. Is anything great over there? ChiComs. The greatness that’s occurring in the ChiCom circumstance happens to be to the extent that they are going capitalist in order to have any kind of a growing economy. I mean the Obama way has been tried. For as long as there have been human beings, who used to be monkeys walking the earth, it’s been tried, and has never worked. Well, that was my concession to the Darwinists in the audience.
But it doesn’t work and this theory that government’s in trouble because of unpaid-for tax cuts is part of the recipe of that failure. And that is that the number one thing in a nation’s existence is its government. It’s not. Certainly not the way this nation was founded. You know what you need to do, you need to go to online Constitution forum that’s el freebo that the Hillsdale people are putting on on April 16th, because the Constitution doesn’t say anything about taxes. Well, there’s an amendment in there that deals with some, but tax rates, that’s all the US House of Representatives, tax bills originate there. In fact, there wasn’t an income tax until the 13th Amendment. That’s where it is. And the original income tax, sir, what was it? I’m gonna ballpark this, 1% on the top 1%. I mean it was tiny. It was minuscule. Anyway, I’m glad you called. I relish these opportunities.
The question I asked my dad was a religious question. I asked him how he was so certain that there was a heaven. And I’m seven or eight years old. Now, he had satisfied it himself. My father was a lawyer, but he was also, for all intents and purposes, a scholar of the Bible. And he was deep thinker about it. The concept of eternal life was something that captivated him and he was always searching for ways to convince people with humanly logic, above and beyond just having faith in the Bible, he was always searching for something that would convince him, sort of like Pascal’s wager, although this was not his, but Blaise Pascal, the brilliant eighteenth century philosopher. Pascal’s wager basically was, hey, if the Bible says there is an eternal life if you’re a believer, it makes sense to believe. If there is no afterlife and you die you’re not gonna know the difference, but if there is an afterlife and you don’t believe you’ll find out because you’re gonna be in hell, so safe bet is to believe.
He taught Sunday school, he occasionally did sermons and so forth, so I asked him how he knew, how he was so confident, and he told me this story not when I was seven or eight, he told me later on when I was old enough to be able to understand it, and his answer was, “Well, son, you know, I believe in creation. I believe in a loving God.” He went through all that. Gotta make a short version of it ’cause of time. He said, “I just don’t believe a loving God would create beings who could conceive of, plan for, and imagine and have faith in such places if it weren’t true. It would be the ultimate cruelty of a loving God.”
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