RUSH: The sitcom just keeps on coming. A half hour ago Timothy Geithner, well-known tax cheat, announcing the closing of loopholes, so-called loopholes on American businesses doing business overseas. Ha! Greetings, my friends. Great to have you here as we kick off a solid three hours of broadcast excellence from me, Rush Limbaugh, here at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies. The telephone number if you want to join us today, 800-282-2882. The e-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.
President Obama and Tim Geithner, the tax cheat Treasury secretary, say they want to close tax loopholes overseas. Now, this word ‘loophole’ is a loaded word. When we talk about tax loopholes, people think, ‘Ah, a way for people to cheat.’ A loophole is a law. A tax loophole is a law. You might say that a special interest or a lobby — like the mortgage interest deduction is a loophole. The mortgage interest deduction is a loophole. And someday, the government’s going to close that loophole. Every tax deduction that’s in the legal code is a loophole. This is so crucial to understand. The premise is that all money is Washington’s. That’s the premise that people like Obama start from. And then they write tax law, and they give deductions for this behavior or that activity or having this many kids or what have you. But the way they look at it is they’re bestowing munificence on you. Now they’ve over the years created a bunch of laws that give businesses some exemptions from paying taxes twice. If you pay taxes in America, even though you’re overseas, and you pay taxes to the foreign government, you get a little bit of a deduction in the United States. A loophole, a law.
It’s like Obama running down hedge funds. He expects people to hate hedge funds as much as the left has been able to convince people to hate other institutions, like when he talks about hedge funds on Friday with the Chrysler bailout, or bankruptcy and this sort of thing. Nobody’s cheating anyone here except Tim Geithner and a bunch of appointees to Obama’s cabinet. Businesses aren’t cheating. But the use of the word ‘loophole’ is designed to convey that they are. So Obama wants to close these tax loopholes overseas, he says, I mean those companies that already pay foreign income taxes should also pay US taxes. That’s basically what he’s saying here. Foreign companies here are credited, for the most part, of taxes they pay here, so Obama would hamper US companies by taxing them twice, taxing them on top of foreign taxes that they pay in the country where the company exists, or the factory or the business enterprise exists. So the question becomes how is any of that going to create jobs and improve our economy? Well, it isn’t, and it’s not designed to do that. It is clear, folks, you watch what’s happening right in front of our very eyes, and the transfer, the redistribution of wealth is well underway and they’re making no bones with it, making no excuses of it, they’re not even trying to really hide it that much. As I say, just keep in mind one thing to understand about Obama, what he’s doing is restoring the nation’s wealth to its, quote, unquote, rightful owners.