RUSH: We start in Bismarck, North Dakota, and, Mark, you’re up first. Thank you for calling, sir.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Nice to meet you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Yeah, I was just calling to make a correlation that everybody wants wealth creation over job creation. If an employee wanted job creation over wealth creation, they’d simply ask for the lowest wage possible so that every employer could create more jobs for the company.

RUSH: You know, this is an interesting point and one of the reasons that I wanted to take your call first, because I think you’re really on to something. I think you’re on to much more than maybe even you realize. Your observation is by no means insignificant. It’s very significant. Americans want wealth creation over job creation. Would you say again what you expressly mean by that.

CALLER: That every single person, when they get a job, they’re looking for the highest wage that they individually can get. They’re not trying to look for the lowest wage so the company can create the most jobs. It’s simple, natural, healthy self-interest.

RUSH: Well, that’s undeniable. Actually, I could get a little esoteric with this. There are some people who are satisfied with what they earn, but I don’t want to get off on that tangent. I’ll accept the premise, and that is that Americans want wealth creation over job creation. Which takes me to an even larger question. We talk about the job market being bad and people can’t find work and the work that they can find is not satisfying. And there’s that.

And there’s this: “Home prices fell in the first quarter to new post-crisis lows.” Home prices dropped 2%. I don’t know how these prices could drop even lower than they already have dropped in the last three years. But for people who own homes, it is their biggest investment. It’s quote, unquote, the American dream. So home values are plummeting. Many people are underwater already. They owe more than their home is worth. And yet that was what they all aspired to. The American dream encompassed many things, but home ownership was the anchor. And that was the number one wealth creating asset that people had, so they were told. And you need a good career with expansion opportunities, high wage opportunities in order to maintain a house, buy a house, make the payments on it and so forth.

All of these things, everything has gone wrong. And when you say that Americans, or people really want wealth creation over job creation, there’s no question that that’s true, but there’s a lot more than that that’s eating people. And I wonder how many people actually know what is really eating them? I wonder if they’ve dug deep enough to try to get their arms around, and get a handle on, what really is bothering them. What I mean is, everything seems out of kilter. This is just not the country we grew up in. And the future is not the future that we all believed in. But why? What is it that’s gone wrong? We’ve had people like Bill Clinton come along and say he’s gonna build the bridge to the twenty-first century. And what he meant by that was that Clinton and the Democrats, they are the modernists. We are the guys, they said, we know what the future’s gonna be, and if you sign on with us, then your future’s guaranteed. We know how to take America forward. In fact,
Obama’s slogan is “Forward.”

But in fact, Obama’s locked in the 1930s. Obama’s a New Dealer. Obama thinks the future is to go back 50 years. Obama thinks this country is a giant failure. Obama thinks this country’s never worked. And the vast majority of Democrats agree with him. Now, whether people have heard him say — and he has said it — whether people have heard him say it or whether they intuit it, they know that that’s not right. They know that our best days should not be behind us and they don’t want that to be the case, but we have a sitting president running for reelection using the slogan “Forward” who actually wants to take us back to the New Deal, to the 1930s. That’s American greatness to Obama. But nobody alive really wants that. Nobody wants to go back 50 years. Maybe culturally in some instances people would like a little bit more innocence. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, too, and generations, you know, as you get older, the younger generation just appears more radical and bunch of losers.

I think every older generation looks at the young that way, for a while. But this time people are looking at the younger generation and really thinking, “My God, they’re not prepared or equipped to do anything.” And those who are going to school are being taught a bunch of gibberish, and they’re coming out in such debt that they’re never gonna get ahead. All of these things, when you combine them, add up to an attitude of nervousness and skittishness. I think a lot of people can’t really get their arms around. It’s not just that we don’t have job creation. It’s not just that home prices are falling. It’s not just that we have all this debt. It’s what’s behind that.

It is the thinking that’s led to this that has people on edge and nervous, and maybe not being able to understand why. I think this is in large part what gave birth to the Tea Party. It is said that it’s all the spending and all the debt — and that’s true. But what it represents and what it means for the future is what really got people out of their homes and going to these town halls. People may not be able to tell you specifically what’s going wrong, but they know that the Obama way, the Democrat Party, this is just not the way we have advanced in this country. It’s not the way things got done. Who knows, could we win D-Day today, for example?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So it’s not just that people want the job market to improve; they know that things have to happen first before the job market improves. I think most people who are sensitive to this have a fear that the nation is in a real decline. It’s not a forecast decline. It’s not a warning that we will be in decline unless we do X, Y, and Z. It is that the decline has begun. Now, we have a bunch of different age-groups in this country, obviously. Seasoned citizens, for example. One reason why so many of them are finally opposed to Obama is they now understand who he is. They know his record, and they have seen it before.

They have been alive long enough to know that Obama’s way doesn’t work, that it’s 50 years old, that it did not lead and fulfill a promise that all of its advocates made 50 years ago. A lot of people are old enough to know the New Deal was not all that it was cracked up to be. And the real reason that Obama is revising his campaign, for example, throwing away white working-class voters, not attempting to get their votes, is because he knows he can’t fool them anymore. His record betrays him. His record betrays whatever lofty language is contained in his speeches, which, by the way, there isn’t much. There’s not a lot of optimism that comes out of Obama’s mouth. There’s not a lot of hope and change. There’s not a lot of inspiration. There’s not a lot of American exceptionalism taught. There’s not a lot of talk about American greatness.

What you get out of Obama is America has never worked and it’s time to change it. Well, now, they know what Obama’s change is. It’s this giant, giant welfare state. He can only sell this vision to the young, which is why nine out of ten of his speeches are on college campuses today, or other places where the audience is of a relatively similar age, young people who just haven’t been alive long enough, they don’t know enough about the history of the country to know that socialism is not the American way. They haven’t been taught, by the way, that it’s a failure. They’ve been taught just the opposite, in fact. They believe the best health care system in the world is in Cuba. They believe nonsense like this. This is what they’ve been taught. They don’t know that it’s never worked anywhere. Never. It hasn’t worked anywhere, even at the point of a gun. And eventually it requires the point of a gun to keep people in line.

Obama genuinely generally is rooted in the past. The stuff that Obama is pitching for everybody now is the stuff that the Obamas of old were pitching when Shirley Temple was the new star in Hollywood and King Kong was the big, new blockbuster. That’s how old Obama’s ideas are, and they are held by people who have a romantic notion that only they can make socialism work because only they are the ones smart enough in the history of the world to pull it off. And not enough money has been spent on it in previous attempts.

Now, people may not understand it as specifically as I’ve explained it, but they know the country’s in decline. They see the evidence — no jobs, no job future — their home values plummeting, no desire to own a house. They don’t see wealth creation. They don’t see job growth. They see us not trying to win wars. They see us looking at pullout dates. And it all adds up to a nervous tension that it’s just not right. This just isn’t America. This is not what we thought life was gonna be when we reached our current age. And when you think your country’s in decline, your view and vision of the future is going to be affected in a commensurate way.