RUSH: This is anonymous from somewhere in south Missouri. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: I am a school superintendent, and back in the fall all the schools in the state were required of course to submit reports on jobs either created or preserved by stimulus money. And when we submitted that report, I very truthfully entered zero because we hadn’t hired anyone specifically because of that money and we had no intentions of laying anyone off if we hadn’t received money.
RUSH: How much money did you get?
CALLER: It’s hard to say exactly because the State of Missouri incorporated some stimulus money into basically replacing school funding, so —
RUSH: Yeah, let me jump in here because I mentioned this yesterday. Stimulus money went to states, and then the states could use it however they wished. They could pay down their own state deficits, budget deficits, do anything with it they wanted. In this case they gave some amount to a local school district and then the district here as represented by the superintendent had to report how many jobs were saved or created with the stimulus money that you got. Okay, so continue the story.
CALLER: We submitted the report and entered zero that we had not created or preserved any jobs ’cause we had no intention of laying anyone off or anything. And we received a notice a day or two later after submitting the report that we weren’t allowed to submit zero, that we had to —
RUSH: Who was telling you this?
CALLER: This came from Jefferson City.
RUSH: Jeff City, capital of Missouri, so the state capital, governor, some bureaucracy there said you can’t report zero.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: So you had to lie, you basically had to lie, you had to say you’ve created or saved X-number of jobs, you had to plug some numbers in there?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: What did you do?
CALLER: We plugged numbers in.
RUSH: You lied?
CALLER: Well, you could put it that way I guess.
RUSH: It wasn’t your intention, I’m not being accusatory here. You were forced to lie in order to get the money?
CALLER: The money had come as part of our regular formula, a formula that the state uses to provide —
RUSH: Okay, even better, even better. So they just took stimulus money and gave it to school districts so they could free up spending somewhere else in the budget that they wanted to use. Hardly shovel-ready jobs, hardly based on employment. What numbers did you plug in? I’ve got 25 seconds.
CALLER: I don’t remember exactly. It was back in the fall. We used I think maybe 10 or 15, a small number. But it kind of flew all over me that I was not allowed to report zero.
RUSH: Interesting. I appreciate your call, Mr. Anonymous. Not allowed to report zero, not allowed to report the truth. Had to report 10 or 15. If it happened once, what are the odds it happened all over the place?