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RUSH: Gail in Lakeside, Arizona, you’re on Open Line Friday. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for all you do for us.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I wanted to share quickly what I found out when I had my taxes prepared last week. The man that prepared my taxes for me cautioned me to watch out for my tax cut. He said, and you may want to adjust your withholding to take that back away, because the tax rate tables for next year when preparing taxes are not changing. So I could possibly owe my tax cut back to the government next year.

RUSH: You gotta be kidding. Not even I was aware of this trick. Say that again. They’re not changing the rates, right?

CALLER: The tax rate tables that they use when you prepare your income tax.

RUSH: Yeah, these are not tax cuts.

CALLER: Right, exactly.

RUSH: These are transfer payments. These are tax credits and all that. There’s no tax cut here. I should have been able to think of this on my own here, absolutely right. You’re getting income, you’re going to be taxed on it next year.

CALLER: Right. And we won’t be able to pay it back $13 a week.

RUSH: ‘Cause the same rates — ah, man, your tax preparer is not only pretty smart but he’s pretty forthright and honest with you on it. So what you are going to do?

CALLER: Change my withholding and take my tax cut away so I don’t have to pay it back next year. Thank you, president, for nothing.

RUSH: (laughing) It just never ends. There’s nothing real from these people. They don’t say anything they mean.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ll tell you what, they’re throwing all of their credibility overboard at the Drive-By Media, particularly the Associated Press, AP-Obama. I have to name for you the writer of this story. His name is Calvin Woodward. He is known as an Associated Press writer. Another one of these Fact Check pieces from AP. Now, remember, after the quasi-State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, which many Americans were miffed at because they thought they were going to be watching American Idol, instead they saw Obama. After that speech, AP ran a good Fact Check story pointing out how much of it was just not true. Many of the claims just weren’t true. Now they’ve done a Fact Check on the Obama budget, or they have assigned the esteemed Calvin Woodward to look at it: ‘Claims that President Barack Obama’s tax plans are an assault on small business skirt the likelihood that most job-producing small businesses wouldn’t feel that pinch at all.’ This is an out-and-out lie; it is a prevarication; it’s worse than a distortion.

‘Obama is proposing to raise taxes on households earning over $250,000 by increasing the rate on the top two tax brackets and limiting deductions, starting in 2011. Republicans and other critics, knowing they will get little mileage from defending the rich, instead are casting the plan as a tax hit on people who run industrious little companies driving job growth. That’s not likely, according to one in-depth analysis, which found that more than 95 percent of small business owners would be off the hook.’ The magical 95% number again, as in 95% of you are going to get a tax cut. Well, we just had a call, Gail in Lakeside, Arizona, and she just had her tax preparer do her 2008 income tax return, and her tax preparer warned her about the Obama tax cut that starts in April, where many of you ostensibly are going to see $13 more per week in your take-home pay. Withholding tables are being rewritten as we speak, so that when your employer gives you your first check in April you will see $13 a week additional in your net, and that reverts to $8 a week starting in January. Gail’s tax preparer told her to be very careful because this really is not a tax cut because they are not adjusting the rates.

So the 13 additional dollars that many Americans will see in their paychecks is not the result of an income tax rate reduction. It’s simply a tax credit. Even people who do not pay taxes will get this $13. She was told by her tax preparer if you take the $13 a month, that is additional income that you will be taxed on next year, in essence you’ll have to give it back, because the rates are not being lowered and that will be called income. So there is no tax cut. Now to say that 95% of small business will be off the hook in taxes is just as absurd, it’s irresponsible reporting by Mr. Calvin Woodward at the Associated Press. And it gets better. ‘Obama does not propose higher business taxes. But critics reason that owners of many small companies report business income on their personal tax returns instead of filing corporate taxes. That exposes their business’s earnings to Obama’s higher tax rates on the wealthy.’ Now, get this. This is the piece de resistance, and I hope you are a small business owner listening to this. ‘For one thing,’ writes Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press, ‘most small businesses don’t create jobs.’

Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press asserts in a press release for Barack Obama’s budget that most small businesses don’t create jobs. He says that most small businesses ‘tend to be lawyers, accountants and other professionals who earn some of their money from partnerships or otherwise organize themselves as a business entity. As well, many small businesses with employees don’t earn enough to put their owners over the threshold for the higher tax rates. Indeed, most of them — like Joe the Plumber of presidential campaign fame — would probably get Obama’s tax break for the middle class,’ which we have just learned is not a tax break. There is no tax break. They are not reducing tax rates on anybody! If they’re not reducing tax rates, how in the hell are you going to get 13 bucks additional every week in your take-home pay? It’s called a tax credit. They’re just changing the withholding tables. But next year, when you start doing your 2009 taxes, that 13 bucks a week is gonna show up as income, and you are going to have to pay taxes on it, which means you’re going to give a portion of it back because the rates are not changing.

Understand something. No income tax rate anywhere in the tax code is going down. They’re going up. Now, there’s some obscure taxes out, but most of the significant rates from capital gains to income, going up. So this is not a tax cut for 95% of the people or for 1% of the people. It’s a subsidy. It is simply the redistribution of wealth. It is nothing more than a transfer payment. But it is an out-and-out lie for Calvin Woodward in the Associated Press to assert that most small businesses don’t create jobs. The US has roughly six million businesses that employ people and 20 million businesses without employees. They are the employees. Self-employed are employees. How can you have a business with no employees? Twenty million businesses without employees is not possible, because the owner is an employee, and I’ll guarantee you there’s some people on the cash side being paid. So there are some independent contractors doing some work for these people that are not technically employees. This is just outrageous. It is irresponsible. It is another sign of the absolute degradation of the professionalism that once was journalism. Most small businesses don’t create jobs? Twenty million businesses without employees? Many truly small operations say we don’t make enough to qualify for the tax hit? They fill up their gas tanks, don’t they? Wait ’til the carbon tax hits. Wait ’til the gasoline tax increase hits.

There are tax increases throughout this budget that people are still looking for and haven’t found, in addition to the ones that have been found. Everybody’s taxes are going up under the Obama budget, everybody’s, not just the wealthy, everybody’s taxes are going up, and it’s gonna get even worse because when it is discovered that all of these new taxes do not lower the deficit or cover the costs of universal health care — and they won’t; demonstrated that yesterday — they’re going to have to go get the money somewhere else. Now, understand something, folks, every time you read anywhere, ‘Obama’s big challenge is how to pay for all this spending,’ he doesn’t care about paying for it. He wants to create the illusion that it’s being paid for because he knows that most of you have to pay for what you get. He has to create the illusion that they’re concerned about being been paid for, but if there were a genuine legitimate concern about how to pay for all it is, they won’t be doing 90% of it because we do not have the money. We can’t pay for what is being done. All we can do is print the money and hope and pray and keep our fingers crossed on inflation. We can’t pay for it.

Furthermore, there’s no intention to pay for it. Debt, chaos, upheaval, constant growth of government is the plan. It is the design here hidden behind speech after speech after speech that attempts to be inspired toward yes, we can. I’m going to tell you something else. I was thinking about this. It finally hit me. It shows you how easily we all get sucked into premises that are advanced by the left. ‘Yeah, we got a bad economy, yeah it’s not the best in the world, yeah, it’s been worse, but we got a bad economy.’ It doesn’t justify all this. Doesn’t even come near justifying what we’re doing, taking over banks, taking over the mortgage industry, taking over this industry, taking over health care. Universal education was in the budget. Everything is an emergency, the crisis has to be done. It’s not, 92% of the American people are still paying their mortgages. Ninety-two percent, 93% of Americans who want a job have a job. It’s not the Great Depression. Falling home prices, well, somebody recognizes a deal when they see it. The ChiComs are flying over here by the planeload to buy foreclosed houses in Southern California. They are. I saw the video of them getting off the bus. They’ve been hiring tour buses to go through these neighborhoods and the ChiComs get off of the bus, average ChiCom, ‘I’ll take that one, I’ll take that one, I’ll take that one,’ and they’re buying them up.

Meanwhile, we’re going (crying), ‘I can’t pay my mortgage.’ (crying). Now, understandably, if you live in this country, buying a house, the market’s unsettled — can I say something else here? When the market is unsettled and full of chaos, with the stock market erratic as it is, down 3,000 points, almost, since the immaculate election, you can understand people having trepidation about getting into the housing market, even with the seductive nature of low prices.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, I figure I found some conflict here with Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press, who wrote a Fact Check piece today asserting that small businesses do not create jobs. They create most of the jobs in this country! He asserts they create no jobs. I’m not sure. I think this first quote from Obama is from his quasi-State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. ‘I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I’ll do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that saved and still can’t get a mortgage.’ A small business that can’t pay its workers? Hey, Calvin Woodward? The president of the United States just used plural of the word ’employee’ to describe who works at small businesses.

By the way, this is sort of a variation on the straw dog argument. ‘I’ll not spend a single penny, for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive…’ What is bailing them out? You have spent gazillions of pennies? You’ve spend more pennies than we have made rewarding Wall Street executives by bailing out their firms. You see how this works? But of course, the ignorance is the most expensive commodity. I have said this. I maintain it to this day. Ignorance is our most expensive commodity in this country, ignorance on the part of many of our people. And they hear him say things like this and they say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah! You keep hammering them. You keep them off their jets, and you make sure they can’t put new bathrooms in. You do that.’

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Another Obama quote from the ‘Obama Small Business Emergency Rescue Plan.’ Did you hear that, Calvin Woodward, AP? The Obama Small Business Emergency Rescue Plan: ‘Temporary tax incentives to encourage small businesses to invest in jobs. Obama will give small businesses additional incentive to make investments and start creating jobs again by providing temporary business tax incentives through 2009. This will be accomplished in part by the extension of IRS code section 179 expense deduction to $250,000 but this expires in December 2008.’ So it’s sort of like the unemployment in the stimulus. States take the money when they run out of federal money. They’re outta money as well because the rules get changed in the state if you take the federal money. In this case, you in small business are going to get a tax deduction incentive for an additional year if you go out and hire an employee.

Now, I better plan on only having the employee for a year. I think also in this — and I’m not quite certain, but it was a part of the campaign. Remember that little $3,000 tax credit for every new employee hired? Anybody running a small business that knows what they’re doing would just laugh at that, because $3,000 tax credit to go out and hire somebody at 30, $50,000 a year plus benefits? Three thousand dollars is going to offset that? See, let me tell you what this is all about, folks. Look at me. Tell you what this is all about. None of this that he has announced is an incentive for small business to hire anybody. And if they don’t, in the 2010 campaign year, the Democrats and Obama will hit the trail saying, ‘It was small business that refused to hire people. We offer them all kinds of incentives.’ They are into demonizing capitalists. They demonize achievers. They are rabble-rousing, is what they’re doing. This is a nothing incentive, to go out and hire somebody to keep a tax deduction that’s already on the books for…an additional year?

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