RUSH: This is an anniversary, and I want to take you back three years ago, February 17th, 2009. Barack Obama had been in office barely a month, not even a month, was getting close, but less than four weeks, and he announced the stimulus, the Porkulus bill. And just as we have been doing all week, going back to our archives, playing for you sound bites of me on this program predicting what was going to happen and having it illustrated that I was right the on money, I want to do it again. I want to take you back to this program February 17th, 2009, the day of the Porkulus, I want you to listen. You heard it back then, but this is to jog your memory as to what I said was in store for us because of this bill.
RUSH ARCHIVE: I’m an eternal optimist, which is why it would be a mistake to say that the stimulus bill’s gonna wipe us out. What is more proper to say is that we now have elected a president and we have a Congress made up of extreme radical leftists, and they’re gonna take aim at capitalism. And it’s gonna be an epic battle. Will they be able to fundamentally transform this nation into what would have officially technically be called a socialist nation? The stimulus bill by itself is going to do tremendous damage down the road. The question is will it do damage immediately. Is this stimulus bill large enough to overcome the capitalist entrepreneurial tendencies of Americans. This thing is gonna get signed in one hour. If we don’t see unemployment drop in two months, we can say it didn’t work, and we’re gonna proclaim it loudly that it didn’t work. If we don’t see a bunch of new schools being built; if we don’t see a bunch of roads and bridges being repaired, above what’s already happening, we’re gonna say, “Hey, this isn’t working.” Because I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen, when the economy rebounds, for whatever reason, and it will not be the stimulus package, but we have a totally in the tank sycophantic, they’re gonna die of anal poisoning someday media that cannot wait to credit Barack Obama for any — the smallest little economic uptick. The fix is in, folks. The fix is in to make this guy the most successful, the most rapidly successful president ever.
RUSH: And they tried. They did everything they could. That stimulus bill was portrayed as the single greatest piece of legislation to come down the pike since the New Deal. Well, it’s three years into it, and we know it was an abject failure from our standpoint. From his, it was a total success. It was a resounding success. Yesterday, in Washington, there was a budget committee hearing, House of Representatives passed Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget for fiscal year 2012. Paul Ryan’s budget seeks to drastically limit government spending next year and in years to follow, but the vote on the measure, which, by the way, imposed $5.8 trillion in spending cuts over the next ten years, $5.8 trillion in real spending cuts came after a clear sign that at least half of the Republican caucus supports even tougher spending cuts.
Now, try to imagine the media explosion if a Bush official made the following statement. At this committee hearing, Little Timmy, the tax cheat, Tim Geithner showed up, and he said Obama’s a failure. (paraphrasing) “We have no plan for reducing the deficit.” He admitted it, up front, boldly. He said, “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to our long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
That’s what the Treasury secretary said to a congressional committee yesterday. Funny, shocking. After three years the regime tells us they have no solution to the deficit. Not only, folks, do they have no solution, they have no intention, no desire. They’re gonna spend and spend and spend and, if he’s reelected, he’s going to spend and spend and spend.
He wants to go down in the history books as the guy who finally cut the United States down to size, the guy who finally showed the United States what it has been like for the rest of the world because of the United States. If he’s added $5 trillion in these three years, he’ll add another $5 trillion in the next two years if he’s reelected, and then guess what? When we get to 2017, 2018, whoever is elected then will have to deal with this. At that point, will it all be academic and too late? By that time, if the Supreme Court finds the health care bill constitutional, we’re gonna be living in such a drastically different country anyway, will it matter? We’re already heading down the pike where the number of people working is reduced.
I got a very scathing and angry e-mail yesterday from a subscriber to my Rush 24/7 website. The guy said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You keep saying that they’ve reduced jobs. It’s not that they reduced jobs, you keep missing it. What’s happening is people are losing jobs.” Let me try this again. They are simply eliminating jobs from the universe of available jobs. They just, in December alone, they just erased 1.2 million jobs. They just said there are that many less jobs to get. Businesses have closed, however you want to imagine that being defined. Those jobs are gone. Fini. They’re not waiting to be filled; they’re gone. Just 1.2 million of them. This is the labor force participation rate. And the only reason this unemployment rate is in the 8% region is because they have reduced the number of jobs against which they are comparing the number of people looking and the number of people who have stopped looking, the total number of people out of work for whatever reason.
If the same number of jobs were available today as there were when Obama took office, and that’s about two million plus, the unemployment rate would be close to nine and a half percent. Gallup says the real unemployment rate actually is 9%. The CBO has said we’re going to be facing 8% unemployment throughout until the year 2014. That’s, again, with jimmied numbers, I guarantee you. But here comes Tim Geithner: “We’re not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to our long-term problem. What we do know is we don’t like yours.”
They have no intention of dealing with this. Unemployment is higher today than when the stimulus bill was signed three years ago. When the stimulus bill was signed, unemployment was 7.2%, but something people forget, if you go back and look starting in November of 2008 after the election you will see the number of people applying for unemployment benefits shoots up over 400,000. It actually started with the election of Obama. With the election of Obama, small businesses began to downsize. They knew what was coming. The people with skin in the game, i.e., people who are putting money to work, investing capital, they knew what was in store, at least in a broad-based way. Unemployment actually started skyrocketing upon Obama’s election, but when the stimulus was signed, it was 7.2%. Now it’s 8.3, down from a high of nearly 10%.
I don’t know how anybody can look back over these past three years… it’s like a couple days ago, maybe it was yesterday, I said, “Is Obama ever going to get blamed for anything?” Is anything going on in the economy ever going to be said to relate to anything he’s done? As far as he’s concerned and the media is concerned, no. This is all the result of Bush. Still today, it’s all the result of Bush. He hasn’t done anything. It’s just now that the economy, in their estimation, is starting to kick back in, it’s finally working.
It was so bad, it was worse than we knew, and now our policies are finally starting to take hold. The reason he’s not touting the stimulus is because nobody wants another one. The stimulus, go out and poll it, and you’ll find it negatively polls. He’s not campaigning on anything to do with the economy. Oh, he’s out there trying to get people psyched up about it, but this whole campaign right now is based on contraception, another lie, misrepresentation, based on social issues.
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