RUSH: John Boehner. Let’s listen to him. This was this morning in Washington on Capitol Hill. He held a press conference about the fiscal cliff. He used a chart to illustrate the amount of spending the government does compared with taxes.
BOEHNER: Republicans want to solve this problem by getting the spending line down. The president wants to pretend the spending isn’t the problem. That’s why we don’t have an agreement. The chart depicts what I’ve been saying for a long time now. Washington has a spending problem. That can’t be fixed with tax increases alone.
RUSH: Now, let me parse that, because there are two things in that statement. You might have heard only one. You might have heard Boehner say, “We have spending problem,” and about that he’s correct. But then he said, and his last words in this bite were, “Washington has a spending problem. That can’t be fixed with tax increases ALONE.” Thereby accepting the premise that there will be tax increases.
He’s accepting the proposition — the premise, the idea, the notion, the fact. We can’t fix the problem “with tax increases ALONE.” There are going to have to be spending cuts. What we need are spending cuts and tax cuts, folks. If we really want to fix this — if we really want more money to the Treasury, if we want to generate more economic growth and more jobs — you cut spending and you cut taxes.
But that’s not what Obama is about.
There’s no desire to cut governed government. There’s no desire to cut spending or entitlements. There’s none of that. So there’s no common ground here. So here’s Boehner. Let me check something real quick. The Dow Jones Industrial average is down 71 points right now. Let me read to you from Kate Gibson at MarketWatch.com. “US stocks fell Thursday after House Speaker John Boehner declared spending to be the issue preventing a deal to avert spending cuts and tax hikes from starting in the new year.
“Boehner called a news conference to detail his views on what is blocking negotiations to avoid the fiscal cliff,” and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 28 points immediately after Boehner said we have a spending problem. Every gun is aimed at us. Every time somebody articulates “the fix” — in this case, spending cuts — the market goes down and the media says, “Boehner’s causing this! Your stock portfolio is declining because Boehner went out there and stupidly talked about spending cuts.”
So we’re to believe if Boehner had gone out and agreed with tax increases and spending increases, that the market would have gone up. So you see, folks, no matter where you turn the solution to this problem is savaged. The solution to this problem is criticized, ripped, and is blamed for all the evil. That is why I say, “What’s really on Obama’s agenda is his desire to see to it that the Republicans and everything they stand for is seen as the problem.”
Low employment, high unemployment, no economic growth, real estate values plunging — whatever the economic problem is — it is because of Republicans and Boehner typified it. “He goes out there and starts talking about spending cuts, and what happens to the market? Everything these Republicans stand for is causing a problem.” That’s the message, and the Republicans, at some point, have a duty here.
That is to agree with this by virtue of letting Obama have what he wants in the fiscal cliff deal and thereby cementing the notion that it’s their fault.
That’s what Obama is aiming for.
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RUSH: Well, shazam, shazam! Lo and behold, Jay Carney, the White House spokesperson, has just admitted that I am right when I say that what the Democrats want — what Obama wants — is for Boehner and the Republicans to confess, to concede that what they believe in did cause all of our economic problems. This is the White House press briefing.
A reporter said, “At the start of negotiations, the White House welcomed Republican movement towards revenue, taxes. Can you point to something the president’s done that’s moved in the direction of Republicans? The cuts that you’ve outlined have been ones that have been in your budget. You asked for almost double what Republicans have put on the table in taxes. You have $200 billion in stimulus money. Can you point to us how that is a negotiation? Where are you compromising?”
CARNEY: In 2001 he fiercely advocated for the massive tax cuts that President Bush insisted on. Again in 2003, that went disproportionately to the wealthy, promising that they would lead to economic growth and a middle class was better off. Let me just say that while I personally am very fond of John Boehner, his record of predicting what would happen if certain policies, economic policies were instituted, is abysmal, okay?
RUSH: There you have it, folks. They’re just now admitting it. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, that’s why we’re in this mess, and it’s Boehner’s fault. He’s have to admit it. His record is “abysmal.” He predicted those tax cuts would lead to economic growth and high employment, and it didn’t happen. But it did. It did! These guys are purposely and everybody else is purposely forgetting what they lived through.
Just like everybody apparently has forgotten the absolute most robust economic recovery in the history of the world, which took place in the eighties. That economic recovery lasted 25 years, the Reagan recovery. It was an expansion of the US economy which nobody had never been seen before. The Bush tax cuts… We had 9/11 in the mix there, and another recession.
The Bush tax cuts led us to, among other things, unemployment of 4.7% for five years in a row, practically. We had a boom, folks! We were living in the middle of a boom. Unemployment was way down, jobs were plentiful, and the economy was growing. It’s just that during all that time the Democrats and the media kept lying to the American people about how we were on the verge of a recession. “We’re in a recession! Calamity and hell is just around the corner!”
But doesn’t matter. What really happened doesn’t matter. What Democrats and media say happened is all that matters. I mean, I called it. Carney is now admitting it. It’s the Bush tax cuts, which Boehner supported. Every prediction made about ’em? Nope. They caused this. That’s what we have to fix now. So we have to put those tax cuts back. We have to raise those people’s taxes ’cause look at the problems we caused! Aall the unemployment, all of this and all of that.
That’s what they’re trying to get the Republicans to agree.
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RUSH: You know, the thing is they get rid of the Bush tax cuts on the rich, and that’s gonna result in less revenue for Washington. It’s going to result in less money to redistribute. That’s the dirty little secret.
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RUSH: I want to go back, Mike, sound bite 27 and 28 because, folks, this is major. Well, it’s not that big. I’m right so often that this is just another documentation. But this is still pretty big, because — and I say this absent ego. This is not ego. But if I don’t say it, nobody else will. All of this talk, all of this jabberwocky going on Inside the Beltway about the fiscal cliff and what’s going on and what it’s really all about, everybody has missed it, and the reason they’ve missed it is because they’re looking at it through the usual template.
One of the things in the usual template is everybody in Washington, Democrat and Republican, accepts, they just believe that every president wants to reduce the debt. And that every president wants economic growth, and that every president wants to enhance his legacy with a roaring American economy. I’ve been maintaining that those don’t apply to Obama. He’s a new president, different kind of guy. We’ve not had a president like this. We’ve not had a president with these kinds of designs or aspirations on the country. Dr. Krauthammer, any number of people will say, “Does Obama really want to start a second term with a recession?” He wouldn’t care.
I’m here to tell you we’re still in one, for all intents and purposes. There is no real economic recovery going on. There’s not one Obama policy, to date, that is oriented towards economic growth, and there’s nothing he’s talking about now that is oriented toward economic growth. That’s not what’s going on here. Obama wants a legacy. You know what he wants his legacy to be? He’s the guy that fixed the fatal flaws of the founding of this country. That’s what he wants.
He can’t wait for the historians in Europe and the approved United Nations scholars to write that he is the one, Barack Obama, after 230 years, who finally corrected the fatal flaws of the founding of the United States of America, a racist nation, a nation which discriminated and enslaved its own citizens and enshrined that in its Constitution. That’s what he believes. A nation which has plundered the world’s resources for its own gain. A nation which has spread poverty around the world as a result of plundering other nations. This is what he believes. And, by the way, I’m not even trying to convince anybody of it in terms of elections. The election’s over.
None of this that I’m saying is gonna have any practical result other than the thing I’m most profoundly interested in, and that’s people being properly informed. It’s all I’ve ever cared about here. For 25 years, I’ve bought into what is now the silly notion that an informed electorate makes the best decisions to preserve the country, but our electorate’s not informed. I have not been able to overcome, and nor have any of my colleagues, we have not been able to overcome decades of corruption in the education system, from K all the way up through the academy, universities, just hasn’t been enough to overcome that corruption. You know, 15 hours a week of truth telling and instruction, economic explanation, so forth, just can’t do battle, particularly when the left has done its best for 25 years to destroy or harm my credibility with people that don’t listen to the program.
And as such we now, among the people that vote, are being governed by morons, people that are low-information and what they do know is wrong. Voters. And, I’m telling you, Barack Obama does not have the same presidential goals that everybody Inside the Beltway who analyzes politics assigns to him. Most normal presidents would be concerned about this debt. It would be unacceptable, untenable. Something would have to be done about it. And the fact the economy is sitting here just wallowing in the muck for four years, a normal president would have to do something about that, would want to. Your average, everyday American president would want prosperity for as many Americans as possible.
We’re not dealing with a president like that. We’re dealing with a president who thinks that we must endure years of pain in order fix the fatal flaws of the founding. We have a president who doesn’t believe in the things you and I believe in, in terms of where prosperity comes from and how it’s achieved. To him prosperous people today are illegitimate. The achieved, the successful, they’re the recipients, the beneficiaries of the stacked deck or rigged game, and he’s out to level the playing field. He’s out to fix it, spread the wealth around, redistribute the wealth from the people that unfairly and unjustly have it all. And that’s what his policies are about. They’re not about economic growth.
In addition to that, he is a pure thoroughbred politician who wants to wipe out all opposition. He’s a statist in that regard. He doesn’t want debate with John Boehner. He doesn’t want debate with any Republicans. He doesn’t want any political opposition to have any chance whatsoever. Rather than defeat them in the normal arena of ideas, what Obama wants is to just eliminate them. Now, he’s never gonna be able to eliminate them, but he can certainly render them so small that they’re never a factor in terms of opposition, and that’s what he’s trying to do. Therefore, to me, it’s a logical thing to assume, and it’s unmistakable, and it’s impossible not to see what he’s really after.
He believes the founding of the country was unjust and immoral. The country has been fatally flawed from the beginning. The people who have enjoyed the bounty of this country are not the ones who truly deserved it. The ones who truly deserve it were the ones who were discriminated against, who were enslaved, who were denied assess in favor of the rigged game, among a very small group of elitists, and they’re the targets now. In the process, what he wants to do is convince everybody what he believes, and that is, these Republicans and the descendants of the founders are the reason this country’s the mess it’s in, the reason you don’t have a decent job.
It’s not him. He’s trying to fix that. The reason you don’t have a decent job is because all these stupid Republicans and conservatives and these people that believe in the free market. People that believe in entrepreneurism, individual, rugged individualism, all that’s for suckers. That’s a line of pap that you’ve been sold your whole life and everybody in this country’s been sold their whole life. So what his objective is, is to get the Republicans to admit all of this. That it is their policies that have caused the economic mess that we’re in. The tax cuts from Reagan, the tax cuts from Bush, the tax cuts prior to that, conservative policy, economic policy everywhere.
Whatever policy from the days of the founding of this country that led to the current situation of inequality, the gap of income and wealth and so forth, that’s not fair, it’s not right, we gotta fix it, and he wants everybody to understand who’s responsible for it, as he wipes them out. And part and parcel, this fiscal cliff deal is his golden opportunity to get the Republicans to admit what he believes. To admit that their ideas — by the way, not just their ideas. That their implemented policies have led to this mess. He wants the Republicans to confess to it, to concede to it. He wants every American to believe it so that there’s no such thing as a politician advocating tax cuts ever again who will win.
That’s the objective. No more tax cuts. No more of this free market thinking, no more. That’s not gonna happen anymore because look what it led to. What it led to is where we are right now. Everybody’s in misery. And it’s gonna be tough for a while. He says the fix is not instant. It’s gonna be a while. It’s gonna take a while to take all that money from people. It’s gonna take a while to make sure people who have been shut out of the health care system now get it. It’s gonna take a while. Ten, 15 years for single payer health coverage. And today, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, admitted all of this. Jay Carney admitted that I, your humble little host here, am dead-on right about this.
And so we go back to the sound bites. The daily briefing. A reporter basically is asking Carney, “Look, you guys aren’t negotiating. You’re not offering any spending cuts. You’re not offering anything. Republicans have given you what you want here, a little bit of what you want there. But you’re not negotiating. What the hell is with you guys?”
CARNEY: In 2001 he fiercely advocated for the massive tax cuts that President Bush insisted on. Again in 2003, that went disproportionately to the wealthy, promising that they would lead to economic growth and a middle class that was better off. Let me just say that while I personally am very fond of John Boehner, his record of predicting what would happen if certain policies, economic policies were instituted, is abysmal, okay?
RUSH: You see? You see? There it is. Bush tax cuts, 2001, 2003, those guys all thought we’re gonna have a middle class better off, economic growth. It didn’t happen. You see, what’s happened the last four years is not relevant to the way things are today. It was the Bush years. That’s why he keeps blaming Bush, by the way. And people, by the way, do, too. A majority of people that voted for Obama blame the Bush economy for this mess. He has succeeded in making a majority of people who vote think that. Therefore, they’re admitting now — look, Boehner, he’s the problem. Boehner’s policies are the problem. We’re not gonna adopt this anymore. We’re not going for spending cuts. We’re not gonna do what they said anymore. Look where it led.
I don’t know about Obama, but Jay Carney knows he’s full of it here. Jay Carney knows this is all a bunch of crap. But he’s gotta lie for his boss. Obama, I don’t know. I think Obama knows exactly what his he’s a doing. I think he understands that capitalism is the best. He just doesn’t like it because it doesn’t take him where he wants to go, but for these guys to act like nothing they’ve done in these four years has contributed to this mess? That is just unbelievable. But that’s what they’re saying, and a majority of voters agree with them that all these last four years have been is an attempt to fix all these Republican mistakes, from Reagan on, from the founding on.
If Obama would, he’d say, “You know what? You’re right. I can’t in four years fix what went wrong for 230 years. It’s gonna take me longer than that. And there’s gonna be some pain along the way. And I’m sorry, but that’s what we’re gonna have to endure to get to where this country should have been from the beginning.” That’s what’s happening here. And Carney ‘s just admitted it. See, the objective is to get Boehner to agree 2001, 2003 tax cuts, all those promises, nope, didn’t happen, dead wrong. In fact, just the opposite happened. And then Carney, he wasn’t finished, he said this.
CARNEY: Because after 1993, after that budget plan was passed, we saw record economic growth. We saw record job creation. We saw the middle class strengthed and made more secure, and we saw vast amounts of wealth created in this country. In the aftermath of those two massive tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that President Bush authored and then Congressman Boehner advocated, we saw stagnation for the middle class. We saw anemic economic growth, and then the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, not to mention surpluses turned into deficits.
RUSH: So there you have it. The Clinton policies of getting rid of the Reagan tax cuts, raising taxes, Clinton’s tax increases, record economic growth, record job creation, middle class strengthened, made more secure, vast amounts of wealth created in the Clinton years, once we abandoned Reaganism. And then we went back to it and we had those tax cuts, and here we are again, and Carney said (imitation), “We’re just not gonna do it anymore. We’re not gonna try it their way. Their way doesn’t work. Their way destroys this country. Why, we even had a surplus and they destroyed that, Bush destroyed the Clinton surplus. And now this recession is worse than the Great Depression.” He also makes that point. Don’t doubt me on this, folks. This is dead straight exactly what is happening. And what we have for you next is what they want from Boehner. This is what they want from Boehner.
(playing of spoof)