RUSH: Adam in Anderson, Indiana, as we go back to the phones. Hello, sir. I’m glad you called.
CALLER: Hey, Rush. Fellow conservative and Rush Baby dittos from Indiana.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I couldn’t disagree with your last caller any more. I mean when I look at Trump, I look at this guy, I mean if this guy gets elected, I mean what are we, the Roman Empire? I mean sure we conquered in our history, you know, in ancient — 1700s or whatnot, but that’s gone and we’re a more noble nation now. And I mean when I look at his policies, I mean he wants a 25% tariff on Chinese imports? I mean what is this, Herbert Hoover again? I mean we already have inflation.
RUSH: Now, we all know what Trump is doing here. Trump’s engaging in some good old-fashioned populism. When Trump says that we went in there and we saved that country, we spent a trillion and a half dollars, that oil should be ours, he knows that there are going to be a lot of Americans who think that defines fairness. Whether it has to do with conquering or not, he thinks that’s fair. Also he has heard people berate the ChiComs. He knows that people think that we’ve lost the manufacturing base. He knows that people think everything’s made in China, the Chinese are making out like bandits, and our stuff costs too much because of everything else so let’s go get even with them. He knows that there are a lot of people who will support anybody who sounds like their main purpose is to get a fair deal for America. So it’s a foray into populism. This certainly isn’t conservatism.
CALLER: Oh, no, it’s not. I mean that’s the opposite of the free market as far as I’m concerned. And I mean one other point I wanted to say, this debt ceiling, I mean Republicans, I heard Geithner on this weekend, I mean that just reminded me of Hank Paulson in 2009. That was so similar. I mean how he said the world’s gonna collapse if we don’t bail out all these banks. But here’s the thing. There’s a third option. We do not have to default. What has happened, we just can’t sell any more Treasury bonds. We’ve reached the debt ceiling. They call it debt ceiling for a reason. We still have revenue. We just had a tax day, let’s use that money to pay the interest, pay our current bondholders and get rid of discretionary spending and let’s —
RUSH: There is — (crosstalk)
CALLER: — sound budget.
I’ve got a story here, it’s the $20 billion BP fund to handle all these people that got soaked because of the oil spill. None of the money’s been spent. Twenty billion-dollar fund barely tapped, CNN story: “The fund established to compensate Gulf Coast residents in the aftermath of last year’s massive BP oil spill said Monday it has paid out $3.8 billion so far. The Gulf Coast Claims Facility, established last August with $20 billion in seed money from BP (BP), said that most of the money is unspent.” Now, this was a shakedown. No question it was an Obama shakedown of BP. BP happily paid the shakedown money as a sort of a get out of jail free card to stop all the incessant nagging and negative PR and so forth. But obviously it didn’t need to be $20 billion large if only $3.8 billion of it has been used. So maybe, folks, the disaster wasn’t that bad. So what is the likelihood BP ends up giving Obama another slush fund? Another crisis not going to waste. So here’s $16 billion in one program not used. There’s TARP money that hasn’t been spent. In arriving at the budget deal that netted cuts of $352 million, they went and got money from previous budgets that had not been spent. There’s all kind of allocation, there are all kinds of authorizations, but the money hasn’t been spent.
So you could pay the interest on the debt, you could pay 10% of the revenues and let the other spending go to hell. Snerdley, at what point are we going to put into action our theory that the spending has to stop? (interruption) Yeah, but if there’s no limitation on it, we’re at $14 trillion now, $14.3 trillion, so we got a new budget, it’s a one year document that has a ten-year outlook, but at some point we’re gonna have to get serious here and realize that lifting the debt limit is an invitation to spending that amount of money. They’re throwing around this word “default,” and we’re not going to default. Let me take that back. There’s something else I want to say before that. Even if in the practically impossible event that we would default, that would take six to eight months. It’s not something that’s gonna happen Monday or the day after the debt ceiling is not raised. There is revenue still pouring in at the rate of $2 trillion a year. We can’t go into default. The United States is still collecting $2 trillion a year. Going into default is impossible. It’s a scare tactic.
Now, the White House is scared to death over what Standard & Poor’s did because that puts a crimp in the PR, in the spinning that they want to accompany all of their new spending. Now, look at Obama as an illustration. Obama keeps talking about wanting to go back to the Clinton tax rates. Follow me on this, now. Obama keeps talking about go back to the highest Clinton tax rates. Okay. Let’s go back to the Clinton spending levels, then. Let’s go back to the Clinton deficits back then. How about we go back to the health care of Clinton. How about we go back to the number of federal employees we had during Clinton. Was this country in trouble in the nineties? Everybody tells me that the nineties were a huge boom. All the Democrats tell me it never was bigger fat city in this country than those eight years of Clinton. Well, let’s go right back to ’em, not only his tax rates but his level of spending, his annual deficits, the national debt, whatever the health care spending was, let’s go back. How about the number of federal employees, how about the number of departments in the federal government so-called bureaucracies, number regulations.
He keeps talking about wanting to go back. He also claims he wants to go forward. Let’s go back to Clinton. Let’s just not stop at tax rates, though. You remember this, folks. How many Democrats and how many spokesmen did they send out on the cable shows? I’m thinking guys like Bob Shrum and Robert B. Reichhhh, all these clowns, they kept telling us how wonderful the nineties were. Well, let’s go back to that spending level. I’ll tell you what, let’s go back to what spending was, take the average, ’96, that’s halfway, we’ll go back to whatever we were spending in ’96, take the same health care policy in ’96, same number of bureaucracies and then account for inflation only to get us to 2011 and let’s live on that. The idea that we cannot get by without raising the debt ceiling is another one of these scare tactics that’s designed to get everybody who knows better to capitulate to crisis. Just like it was with TARP. There’s money coming in to service the debt. There may not be much money coming in to service all the new programs the Bamster wants, fine and dandy. We don’t pay for ’em. At some point we gotta get serious. You and I, I mean. If we’re talking about, if our party, if our budget makers keep talking about reducing the deficit, stopping the spending, at some point we got to. Kick the can down the road every time you raise the deficit ceiling, debt limit, whatever it is.
END TRANSCRIPT
*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.