RUSH: All right, folks, this North Dakota business. I want to tie that to Scott Walker. After Scott Walker successfully turned back the recall, we have Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mitch Daniels of Indiana and a number of other governors saying, “Hey, look at this! We need to take some lessons here from Scott Walker. You other Republican governors, Mitt Romney, you got some things to learn here.” True! All true. But why is what’s going on in North Dakota not also being touted as something to learn from? You know, in this story — and I zoomed through it pretty quickly.
In this story where the residents tomorrow are gonna vote (according to polls) to turn down the chance to get rid of their property taxes, did you hear me say that sales tax revenue is up 83% or 86%? The story is all about how North Dakota is flush with money. Now, granted, they’ve discovered a bunch of oil. There’s a boom there, and there’s fracking going on. But so what? Why is that not a lesson for any other state? Why are we not being told that that should be emulated?
In the old pre-Obama America, people would be making a beeline for North Dakota to figure out how to do that in their state. This governor up there, Dalrymple, would be guest number one at Republican governors’ meetings describing how it’s done. How do you…? In other words, if you can raise sales tax revenue 86%, you have solved a lot of state fiscal problems. And they did it, of course, without raising the sales tax rate. There’s just all kinds of new economic activity going on.
There’s a whole lot of commerce going on out there, and it’s being taxed at existing rates. And the revenue that it’s creating is climbing. It’s just the same effect as lowering tax rates creates more jobs, more taxpayers, more tax revenue. Works every time it’s tried. Obama hates it, doesn’t want it, because that grows the private sector. He doesn’t want to grow the private sector. He doesn’t like the private sector. So why aren’t we looking to North Dakota for inspiration elsewhere?
Well, one of the reasons is we have a president who wants to shut North Dakota down if he had his way. But forget that. We know that. We have great lessons to be learned there. How do you increase sales tax revenue? How do you increase tax revenue without raising taxes? Raising taxes depresses the amount of revenue that’s collected, actually. There’s a whole lot of capitalism going on in that state. There’s a whole lot of private sector entrepreneurism. There’s a whole lot of getting’ rich going on in that state. And that state could provide a lesson for a whole lot of states, just like the Scott Walker lessons are gonna be repeated state by state.
I want to go back to me, on this program last Wednesday.
RUSH ARCHIVE: The unions going down the tubes yesterday, that’s the lesson. Every Republican governor ought to now have a spine of steel, and Walker… Even TIME Magazine made this point: Walker did it by what? Not compromising! He didn’t compromise one time with anybody on the left. He stood fast on everything he believed. Yeah, he got 38% of union households. He didn’t compromise. The Republican establishment technique, the Republican establishment handbook to reach across the aisle and compromise to get the independents? Scott Walker said, “(Raspberry) to that,” and he wins by seven points. … Walker did not compromise one thing. Every Republican governor in this country now ought to have a spine of steel. The Republican establishment should have learned something major.
RUSH: Let’s go to Sunday morning, Fox News Sunday. Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana. Chris Wallace said, “Is this some sort of watershed that we’re seeing right now? Are voters across the country giving state and local officials the green light to go after, or at least curtail, public unions?”
DANIELS: You know, there’s a reason that defenders of labor from Franklin Roosevelt, to George Meany, to many others always said that unionism had no place in the public sector; that it was a necessary freedom in the private sector, but that it was a bad idea in government.
WALLACE: Are you saying that you would like to see no public worker unions?
DANIELS: I think, really, government works better without them.
RUSH: Hear, hear!
And all it took was one election.
Nothing against Mitch Daniels, and I don’t know that what I’m gonna say is true, but would he have said that had this recall not happened? Now, obviously he wouldn’ta said it if Walker had lost. But my point is: If the fight hadn’t occurred, if somebody hadn’t paved the way, would this line of thinking even be articulated? You think there’s anybody out there in Republican circles with guts enough to say (in a vacuum), “We gotta get rid of these state employees’ unions. They’re killing us.”
Now, once Scott Walker beats ’em back, it’s, “Katie, bar the door!” Now we can all join the chorus. Now we can all join the club. This is exactly what I predicted was gonna happen: Newfound spines of steel. And it wasn’t just Mitch Daniels. Let’s move forward to Chris Christie. This is the Conservative Political Action Conference in Illinois. It’s near Chicago — in Rosemont, actually — and here’s a portion of his remarks.
CHRISTIE: It is an outrage to have the President of the United States stand up and say to hardworking governors, Republicans and Democrats around this country, that state and local government hiring is moving in the wrong direction and we’re to blame because the economy’s not growing. He’s the one who put forward an ineffective, wasteful stimulus plan that did nothing to help this economy. He’s the one who saddled us with all these federal rules and regulations that don’t allow governors to have the freedom to do what we really want. And then he has the audacity to stand up this morning and say that it’s the nation’s governors and the nation’s mayors who are driving our economy down by not hiring enough people for government work?
RUSH: Well, there you have it. So Chris Christie is now suddenly out of the “Obama’s Just a Nice Guy in Over His Head” School. He’s gotten out of that and is now taking Obama on. He’s not just saying, “Oh, he’s well-intentioned. He’s a nice guy.” Now the gloves are off. Exactly as I knew would happen. And there will be other governors joining this parade. There will be other Republican governors joining this parade. Scott Walker’s gonna be… Well, he’s already a hero. He’s gonna become an even larger one.
But the left (you can read it; you can hear it), they are worried that the entire institution of state-municipal union workers is going down the tubes. And Wisconsin, again, is the test tube for this. One of the least-commented-on things about the entire recall in Wisconsin is one of the reforms was that Governor Walker left it up to union members to join a union or not. Prior to his reform, the state withheld union dues as they withheld all other taxes from a union member’s paycheck.
After the reform was the union member could say, “I don’t want my union dues withheld. I’ll be in charge of whether I pay dues or not,” and 60,000 of them decided they weren’t gonna pay dues anymore. And that is the number by which the union shrank: 60,000. So Obama, the left, the Democrats, are in panic mode. And that’s another reason why Obama and Axelrod all weekend are running around saying that private sector growth equals hiring more cops and more teachers and more firefighters.
Because those are the people, those are the jobs that are not gonna be unionized. And Mitch Daniels had it right, too. FDR, George Meany, big labor guys, way back in ’30s, said, “We don’t want government workers unionized. It pits groups of citizens against one another. It’s not right. It’s not gonna have a happy ending,” and they were both right. Now, on that score, FDR didn’t know what he was talking about according to modern day liberal Democrats. Everything else he did, he was God. But on this one, of course, no. You know, it’s selective idolatry and admiration for FDR.
So they’re on the ropes. And I’m just trying to little correlation there between that and what’s happening in North Dakota with this oil boom. It’s an economic boom, and it’s oil. And North Dakota is not the only place in this country where there’s a lot of oil that could be brought to the surface via fracking. There’s a lot in Pennsylvania. There’s a lot in Montana. There’s a lot in Utah. It’s all over the Northern Shelf, as it were. (interruption) Well, I don’t know if you can frack in the ocean, but Obama doesn’t want you fracking anywhere.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so the oil fracking in North Dakota, the way the libs are playing this, all kinds of headlines. The MSNBC website: “Oil Boom Brings Wealth and Waste in North Dakota,” and they went out and found a guy who thinks there’s more pollution on his little plot of land because they’re getting oil there. It’s a focus on how the state’s being polluted horribly. It’s an effort to get people opposed to the boom that’s happening in North Dakota. It’s like Scott Walker. After the Scott Walker recall debacle for the Democrats, what is the Democrat headline, what’s the media headline? “Romney is Going to Cut Public Sector Jobs.” That’s the way they’re trying to instill fear. Yeah, Romney’s gonna cut public sector jobs.
Now, the Democrat National Committee strategery this week is to attack Romney because he might cut government jobs. And they think this is a good tactic for their side? Even after the vote in Wisconsin, the Democrats think that it is a winning argument to say we need to expand government and hire more government workers? They are so on the wrong side of history, it’s not even funny how they’re missing this. The Scott Walker recall was supported by people all over this country, including in Wisconsin, obviously, and the message was clear, and the Democrats are out warning that that’s what Romney wants to do nationwide, and they think that they are helping themselves. And now the spokeskid, Jay Carney’s out blaming the news media for taking Obama’s comments about the private sector out of context. I tell you, these people are so out of context and out of touch, this bad week last week, it’s continuing. It’s gonna end up being a bad two weeks if they’re not careful.