RUSH: Fort Collins, Colorado. Hi, Chuck. You’re up first on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, thank you, Rush. I have a question: If we can’t service the debt on $14 trillion, how we gonna service the debt on $16 trillion?

RUSH: Well, we can service the debt. How can the country sustain all of this spending, is what you mean — and we can’t. Now, when you talk about servicing the debt, this is crucially important because servicing the debt is what we have to do to avoid defaulting. We can do that. We can pay the bonds as they come due, we can pay them as they roll over. We’ve got the income to do that. Now, we don’t have the money to fund Social Security and Medicare, Obamacare, or practically everything else we’re doing, but that’s not technically/legally considered part of the debt. But we can’t sustain this spending much at 16 or 14. We can’t. We’ve reached the brink now.

CALLER: But their argument is we can’t pay our bills when we have $14 trillion and so we have to raise the debt ceiling, but we can’t pay it at 14, we can’t pay it at 16.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: So there’s something wrong with that logic.

RUSH: Well, not only that, they’re telling us we must raise taxes. We’ve gotta raise taxes $3 trillion dollars or $1 trillion or $2 trillion. We gotta raise taxes — and even after we do that we’re not gonna be able to service the debt, or what you mean by when you say service the debt. Here’s another way of looking at this. Here’s Obama. If Obama were honest he would say, “I did not spend my first two years solving the crisis because I spent that time creating it.” What Obama wants you to believe is that he hasn’t been president the last 2-1/2 years. He was there, but it was so bad — what he inherited from George W. Bush was so bad — that he valiantly fought it! Oh, my God, the tough decisions he made? The challenging steps he took?

Oh! He didn’t know how bad it was. Nobody told him the truth. It was worse than anybody ever imagined, so it’s gonna take a lot longer. The truth of the matter is Obama didn’t spend the first two, 2-1/2 years of his regime solving this crisis, folks, because he spent that time creating it. There’s an honest question for you: If we raise taxes, does that mean we’re not spending too much? It doesn’t, does it? My point is: What does raising taxes have to do with the debt ceiling? What does raising taxes have to do with this crisis? Nothing! If we even double the taxes we’re paying, does that mean we’re not spending too much? All of a sudden, if we raise taxes, we can keep spending?

Is that what they want us to believe? Is that really what they want you to believe? Are you really ready to commit to that in the name of compromise? You’ll go along with a tax increase because that somehow means all of a sudden we’re not spending too much? Don’t fall for that. This is a full-fledged, 130% spending problem. We don’t have a tax revenue problem, because we can’t raise taxes enough to fix this. We can’t. We could confiscate all the wealth in this country over $200,000 (you can only do that one time, by the way) and we don’t even make a dent in what we owe. So that’s not an option. The honest answer is we are spending too much even if we triple taxes on everybody.

More tax money is not gonna solve it. In fact, it’s not even gonna be applied to whatever is owed. It’s just going to be redistributed in order to make everybody poorer.