RUSH: There is a way to fix this economy. There are multiple ways. There are many ways to reverse this unemployment trend. I have written about many of them in the Wall Street Journal, way back in 2009.
A lot of people know what to do to turn this around. Romney knows what to do. You know what to do. Get the government out of everybody’s way. Reduce the size. Limit its role. Go back to the founding. There are many ways to stimulate an economy. Tried and tested. They’ve been done before. There’s a track record. There’s a track record for this, too. This has been tried, what Obama’s doing has been tried all over the world, since the beginning of time. It’s never worked. Unless you have a different objective. If your intention really isn’t to create jobs, if you really don’t want to grow the economy, if you would rather transform it, if you want power to shift from people to the government, this is exactly what you would do. You take as much money out of the private sector as you can. And that’s what Obama’s done.
Let’s go back to the original stimulus. My friend sent me a note a couple days ago. If you didn’t hear it, what he said to me, was, “Rush, look, you know it and I know it. It’s simple math. It’s over. It’s only a question of time. When you get tired of spitting into the wind, call me, and let’s get together and see what we can do to protect our families from what everybody knows is coming, ’cause it’s math, it’s just math. This can’t be sustained.” His theory is that at some point the government is going to be forced to go take every dollar everybody has, some way, somehow, or as much as they can. They’re asking Bernanke to print some more money now. They’re asking Bernanke for another quantitative easing, more printing of money, third stimulus.
Whatever they’re trying ostensibly to turn the economy around isn’t working. And it won’t work. It can’t work. And that’s what my buddy is saying. No, I’m not tired of spitting into the wind. I don’t look at it that way. He’s a little bit of a fatalist. He’s retired, and when you’re retired you have more time on your hands to think about these kind of things. But regardless, he’s right about it being math if something’s not done pretty quickly. Look at the first stimulus. We were told that we’re gonna put essentially a trillion dollars into the economy, and that trillion dollars is gonna stimulate all kinds of economic activity.
The theory was that there were shovel-ready jobs out there, construction, infrastructure type jobs. You know, the old stand-bys, building roads, building bridges. I think that’s all Obama thinks happens in an economy, is you build roads and bridges. He seems to talk about it all the time. No, that didn’t happen. There weren’t any shovel-ready jobs. I mean later he’s caught joking about that. The money, in reality, was a slush fund. It was just a trillion dollars that was redistributed to Obama allies and friends, teachers, public sector unions, states run by Democrat governors to help them with their budget problems. It was never about growing the economy. But beyond that, it couldn’t have. The math.
Here’s a trillion dollars, and we’re gonna put that trillion dollars in the private sector. Now, where does the government get the trillion dollars? It doesn’t have it. We have a deficit of $1.8 trillion every year. We’re $16 trillion in debt. Where does the government theoretically get the money? Well, it has to borrow it from the ChiComs or the Japanese or print it. But regardless, folks, it’s taking that money out of the private sector and then putting it back in. There is no new stimulus. There’s no brand-new money that wasn’t there before being injected into the economy. For that trillion dollars to be injected into the economy, it first has to be taken out of the economy. It’s a wash. If anything, it ends up being a negative because that trillion dollars is taken away from private sector usage.
These businesspeople that Romney had assembled on the conference call, that’s money they can’t borrow, that’s money they can’t use to grow their business or to hire people, or to give existing employees raises. The government’s taken that money. And then magically, out of nowhere, a trillion dollars gets put into the economy. Now, theoretically, if you could find a way to put a trillion dollars that wasn’t in the economy into it, well, yeah, then maybe we could talk about it. But you can’t do that. You can only do it artificially and on paper. You can’t do it in reality. The trillion dollars has to first be taken from the economy before it can be put there because the economy is where it all comes from. And that’s what these four business owners are trying to tell these lame break journalists.
The government’s the freeloader. The government’s the free rider. The government’s sitting there doing nothing, siphoning off a percentage of what everybody else is producing. They don’t produce anything. Even these precious roads and bridges are built with money earned, created, and produced by people in the private sector economy. It is then taxed, and the government allocates it. But it doesn’t just have a trillion dollars hanging around not doing anything. “Oh, you know what, let’s put that trillion dollars in the economy.” That’s what Obama wanted everybody to believe was happening, and he succeeded because economics education is woefully inadequate in this country. So a lot of people thought, “Ohhh, we’re gonna stimulate the economy.” Well, if you could do it the way he said, give a business a trillion dollars, give ’em a billion, you’re gonna see growth, by definition. It’s math.
Well, it’s also math here. A trillion dollars in only happens after a trillion dollars comes out. Even if it’s printed, that’s debt that the private sector’s incurring in the name of government. So there was no way, it didn’t have a chance. This is why I said before he’s immaculated, “I hope he fails.” ‘Cause none of his ideas work in ways he professes to want them to work. By the way, whatever happened to Obama’s jobs council? I looked it up. The last meeting of the jobs council was in January. Remember all those study groups the first year of Obama’s regime? They’d meet in the White House, and the media, the Drive-Bys would take their cameras in there, they got all excited, and their tongues are hitting the floor (panting) everybody panting away, Obama’s having work groups. Yeah.
They had the mass group there, then they’d be subdivided into smaller subgroups, and they go over to a corner of the room, and they would meet, and they would discuss. They had brilliant people in there like Thomas “Loopy” Friedman of the New York Times and Laurence Tribe from Harvard Law. They’d go gather in a corner with some others and they’d start talking, theorizing about how to create jobs. They’d write down some of what they said on paper. At the end of the day, three hours later, they all reported back to the teacher, to Obama, and they hand in their reports, problem solved.
And Obama had a press conference at the end of the day or a press availability and said (impression), “Well, we fixed the job problem today! We had several work groups and came up with some brilliant ideas we’re gonna be working on. This, combined with the stimulus, means I think we’ve turned the corner. We’ve had our backs up against the wall, but now we’re on the way back.” Every year we’ve heard this, and it was a bunch of academics who don’t know the first thing about what they’re talking about.
They were talking amongst themselves in their little subgroups, reporting back to Obama, and everything was said to have been fixed. And then after that, they created this jobs council. And the jobs council meets. I don’t know who’s on it. Doesn’t matter. They don’t know what they’re doing, either. These are people that admire Mao Tse-tung. They admire the total control over his country that he had. They’ve said so. My only point is if you really want to create jobs, there are ways to do it.
If you really want economic growth, there are things to do that are tried and proven to work. Some are faster than others, but they work. What is widely known is that what we’ve been doing for the last 3-1/2 years has never worked. And therefore the question arises, “Well, is it really intended to?”