RUSH: Folks, you know, Open Line Friday’s kind of loosey-goosey sometimes, and a lot of us are fatigued at the end of the week, looking for lightheartedness. But this is some serious stuff, and it confirms every instinct that every person alive in this country knows. There isn’t any economic growth. There’s government growth, but there isn’t any private sector growth. There’s no growth in jobs: 120,000 jobs were created last month, according to the news from yesterday. It’s just pathetic. It is why Obama is running around making things up about the “War on Women” and now the student loan interest rate doubling. Which, by the way, Boehner, the Republicans are gonna vote today on a bill to make sure that the interest rate does not double in July.

And remember again that’s a Democrat law, 2007, the Democrats ran both the House and the Senate, that’s when they took over the House. They won the elections in 2006. Pelosi was Speaker, and the Democrats, looking forward to 2012 being an election year, they thought that Hillary was gonna be president, 2007. They thought they’d successfully demonized all Republicans with the never-ending assaults on George W. Bush. So they were confident they were gonna have a Democrat in the White House in 2012; they were gonna win in 2008.

So they started playing a political game with the student loan interest rate, and they essentially cut the student loan interest rate in half and then wrote legislation that would restore it in July of 2012, knowing full well people wouldn’t remember five years ago that it would just appear as though the student loan interest rate was doubling, which that’s exactly what it’s gonna look like. And guess who’s running the House? The Republicans. And so the point was, it was an insurance policy. The Democrats, like the Soviets, they’re always looking a hundred years down the road, not just to tomorrow. So they put in place this scheme where the student loan interest rate would appear to double when all it was doing was being restored to what it had always been. And all the better if the Republicans ran the House.

Now, if the Republicans were not running the House, if the Democrats were still in charge, then of course they would pass legislation canceling the increase. It wouldn’t be an issue; nobody would know anything about it; it would just be same old low interest rate. But the Republicans running the House, it’s scheduled now because of Democrat legislation to restore to what it was, which is gonna appear to be doubled in July. So the Republicans are readying legislation to prevent that from happening. It will be very interesting to see how the Democrats in the Senate vote on this, and the Democrats in the House as well.

So all this is being used by Obama to divert attention from what is a destroyed US economy. I don’t know how else to describe it. We’re living in an era where the president of the United States and his party have launched an all-out assault on the United States private sector economy. They’ve been pretty successful. They have not failed. Not from their perspective. GDP growth revised down to — well, not revised down, at 2.2%.

Our buddy Jim Pethokoukis writing at the American Enterprise blog: “With six months to go until Election Day, time just ran out for Team Obama to run any sort of plausible ‘Morning in America’ reelection campaign. And itÂ’s not just that the US economy grew at a subpar 2.2% annual rate in the first quarter, according to the Commerce Department.
ItÂ’s that this may be about as good as it gets for the economy this year. Most analysts have been looking for the second quarter to be no better — if not worse — than the first.”

Now, Obama’s budget that he just announced in February predicted three-point-something percent growth, I believe. And Pethokoukis makes a point. He says: “The GDP report also shows the Obama administration needs to rejigger its economic forecasting models, which keep predicting a boom is right around the corner.” And here are some recent Obama regime economic forecasts. “In August of 2009, the White House — after having a half year to view the economy and its $800 billion stimulus response — predicted that GDP would rise 4.3% in 2011, followed by 4.3% growth in 2012 and 2013, too. And 2014? Another year of 4.0% growth.” This is what they said the stimulus would do. The stimulus happens in February of 2009. In August — they had a half year — stimulus is in force for a half year, then they issued their forecasts. And they credited the stimulus. Yep, this stimulus is gonna bail everybody out, get to 4.3% economic growth. We are at 2.2, half of what Obama forecast in 2009.

“In its 2010 forecast, the White House said it was looking for 3.5% GDP growth in 2012, followed by 4.4% in 2013, 4.3% in 2014.” Again, we are at 2.2% economic growth. “In its 2011 forecast, the White House predicted 3.1% growth in 2011, 4.0% in 2012 and 4.5% in 2013, 4.2% in 2014. In its most recent forecast, the White House predicted 3.0% growth this year and next, and then back to 4.0% after that.” Every one of Obama administration forecasts has been way wrong. They have been predicting that a boom is right around the corner. They make their predictions after such things as the stimulus or other Obama legislation, like the American Jobs Act, or the health care bill. Then they come out with their forecasts, “This is gonna cause a boom,” and all it’s doing is destroying the US economy.

Again, for those of you new to the program, what was the stimulus? The stimulus was $800 billion spending, right? Well, where did they get it? One of three ways: You print it, you borrow it or you tax it. But in either of those ways, the money comes from the private sector, except when you print it. Well, even then it’s gonna have an impact on the private sector. The point is, government doesn’t have any money, folks, until it takes it from someplace or prints it. The government does not create wealth. The government redistributes wealth, destroys wealth, but it does not create wealth. So you have this $800 billion stimulus. Highly touted, Obama and the Democrats, this is save the day. This is gonna save our economy. This is gonna fix all the bad stuff that George W. Bush did. So they’re gonna put $800 billion into the economy, they told us. They didn’t even do that. The money went to unions. The money went to state employees. The money went to state governments.

The money did not go to shovel-ready projects. The money did not go to rebuilding roads, schools, and bridges. And, by the way, speaking of that, the point I made yesterday, look at the kind of jobs Obama was thinking of creating with that stimulus. Ditch digging. The vision that Obama and the Democrats have of work in this country is a hundred years old. Assembly line jobs, union jobs. It’s a hundred years old, 50 years old. There’s nothing high-tech, new, forward-thinking about the kind of work they envision.

Anyway, follow me on this. Eight hundred billion that they want you to think that’s coming from someplace but it’s gonna end up in the private sector, but where did they get the $800 billion? They got it from the exact place they’re putting it. There was no stimulus, by definition, in mathematics, whatever. The $800 billion that Obama supposedly injected in the private sector had to be taken from the private sector first. It was a wash, a net zero. There was no new money. All there was was redistribution of money. One of the biggest scams ever run. Everybody that’s not aware of this, “Wow, man, this is good,” but notice that it didn’t work. All these economic forecasts for economic growth, wrong by half, wrong by factors of two, it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. It never had a chance to work because it’s impossible. It was word games. And so we end up with the economy growing in 2011 at 1.7%, after forecasting 4.5%. Look at the ChiCom economy. The Mexican economy is growing at about 4%, folks.