RUSH: I thought about leading with this today, but my mood was in a different place, but at some point today we’re gonna get to what’s happening with these eight Republican governors who are caving on the Medicare expansion. The latest is John Kasich in Ohio. And there are reasons for it. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, Rick Scott, Florida. Scott was perhaps one of the most vocal in opposing the Medicare expansion. The Medicare expansion is an Obamacare trick, essentially, but the reason these governors find it attractive, folks, it’s all about money and the fact that nobody has any except the federal government. Obamacare puts a lot of mandates on the states, shifts a lot of financial burden in administering health care to the states, and in one sense, Medicare.
At the beginning of Obamacare, the federal government is dangling, is offering a lot of money to help them absorb the costs of this new responsibility of administering Medicaid. And apparently it’s just impossible to turn it down, at least for these eight governors. They’re saying things like, “Well, if I don’t take the money, some other governor will, so you need to applaud me for doing the responsible thing in this state.” One governor said that. “Well, if I don’t take it some other governor will, so I deserve credit.” Every one of these governors opposed it and in fact many of these states joined in that now-famous lawsuit to stop Obamacare and to stop the Medicare expansion. The Supreme Court, in their ruling on Obamacare, ruled the Medicare expansion unconstitutional.
That was the one part of it that they basically rejected, which doesn’t apparently matter. Meaning, there is legal grounds for these governors to stand on to resist this. But they don’t have any money. Most of these states are running deficits, and they can’t print money like the federal government. They can’t really borrow it like the federal government. And the hospitals in these states are all for this because they see the arrival of this federal money as going to them, in part, to cover the expenses of people who don’t pay them. It’s all about money and the fact that nobody has any. And the real tragedy here is that the longer Obama implements his policies and the longer he comes up with new policies, the less money everybody is going to have. The only way they’re gonna have any, be they a citizen or a governor or anything, is if the federal government subsidizes them or gives them some.
That’s what’s being set up here. And it is anathema to the way this country was founded. And it’s not gonna prolong. At the end of this, you know, right now the governors are getting this money for nothing, but years down the road, the federal government is going to stop paying them, and the expenses are gonna have to be borne by them. They’re just kicking the can down the road. They’re not solving anything.
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RUSH: Here’s what the Supreme Court said involving Medicaid money. The Supreme Court ruled that it would be unconstitutional to force the states to take Medicaid money. That was the one thing that Obama couldn’t do. John Roberts caved on everything. There’s nothing constitutional about Obamacare anyway. The whole bill is unconstitutional. But it’s amazing how quickly that’s been forgotten, and I guess it makes sense. There’s nothing anybody can do about it, anyway, apparently. But you simply can’t force people to buy anything. The federal government doesn’t have that power, although they do now, thanks to John Roberts, chief justice, Supreme Court.
But in the ruling one thing they got right was that the states cannot be forced to take Obama’s Medicaid money, but like everybody else we predicted back then that the states would still take it at the end of the day, that they wouldn’t be able to resist it, and that Obama could use other ways to pressure them. You ever heard of Arizona? The state of Arizona is in President Obama’s crosshairs. Releasing illegal alien prisoners, suing them for trying to enforce existing immigration law. So these governors all know that. These governors all know they’re dealing with Hugo Chavez. And they also know they don’t have any money. Nobody in government does, save for a couple of states where there’s an oil boom. Other than that, nobody has any money.
And increasingly, more and more people don’t have any money. And when you don’t have any money, that’s all that matters, and you don’t care how you get it, and you certainly don’t care about the Constitution when it comes to getting money. When it comes to paying the bills, when it comes to buying food, you don’t care what the Constitution says. You don’t care about ideology then. And this is what Obama knows. So these states don’t have any money. They’ve been told they have to administer more and more of Medicaid, and Obama’s bribing them. Here’s $300 billion bucks off the top, at first, but after a few years… It was like the hundred thousand cops program of Clintons. The states, cities got a bunch of cops, paid for by the federal government for two or three years and after that they had to pay for it or fire the cops. It’s gonna be the same way here with this. Eventually the federal money dries up and then what do they do? They’ve created all these people expecting all of this care.
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RUSH: Everybody knows, the governors, Obama, everybody knows that we can’t afford this, but the governors are rightly worried that Obama could take the money away from ’em at any time if they oppose him too much publicly, so we’re stuck with it.
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RUSH: Folks, what would be a great way to describe where we are? I mean, as a country. Think of a great military battle where everything’s on the line, Battle of the Bulge, this is it. We’re in it, and everything — and I mentioned this last week, I think, maybe the week before. Everything Obama is doing is aimed at the midterm elections in 2014, and their target is the House of Representatives. The only thing Obama cares about and the only thing he’s ever cared about is no opposition. Eliminating any viable opposition. Barack Obama is not interested in compromise, bipartisanship, or getting along.
If I could wave a magic wand, these low-information voters, low-information people who are not — don’t misunderstand who these people are. They’re not dumb. Some of them are, but they’re low-information, they just don’t know. And what they think they know isn’t right. And that’s the real danger. These are people who think they understand it all. These are people, some are college students, college grads, they think they understand it, and it’s what they know that’s wrong. That is the problem. They have bought hook, line, and sinker that Obama is a great healer, compromiser, wants to be bipartisan. But man, it’s just those Republicans, mean, extreme Republicans, that just don’t want to give him any credit for anything, and won’t agree with him on anything, and they won’t move or compromise at all. When, in fact, the Republicans have caved more than the sinkhole up in Tampa. They never get any credit for it. But they’ve caved left and right.
The Republicans have compromised in ways that have damaged themselves with their own voters, is how much they’ve caved. So Obama continues to campaign, not govern. His name is not on any event that happens in this country that leads to problems. The Gallup poll is out, Obama’s approval number in the Gallup poll is at 47%. And that’s the lowest. Most of the approval polls have him in the low fifties, at 50 or barely above. But I don’t think Gallup poll is an outlier in terms of the other polls. But for the most part, half the country approves of the job he’s doing.
Everybody in the country disagrees with the direction the country’s going. Fifty-five to 60% of the people oppose Obama’s policies. But they don’t associate his policies with the direction of the country. That’s all the Republicans. It’s the most amazing thing. And it’s because Obama is constantly positioning himself as fighting against all that’s wrong. All that’s going wrong, be it unemployment, be it health care, housing values, no matter what it is, Obama’s trying to fix it, Obama’s trying to stop it. And in the meantime, the country’s hanging by a thread, as founded. The country as founded is hanging by a thread and it all resolves around the fact that nobody has any money. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
These governors don’t have any money. The states don’t have any money. The federal government doesn’t have any money. Well, they don’t have nearly what they spend, but that doesn’t matter. They can print it or borrow it. And as far as Obama’s concerned, as far as the Democrats are concerned, they’ve got all the money in the world. There’s no deficit as far as they’re concerned. There’s no national debt as far as they’re concerned. Doesn’t matter. He’s gonna keep spending and spending and spending because their objectives are to rip this country apart, pare it down to size and start again.
Now, let’s take a look at this no-money business. You know, it’s a vicious cycle, it’s a vicious circle why nobody has any money. You’ve got two, basically two theories on how a population or a society can be prosperous. And in the capitalist free market version of this, in a very brief sense, people grow up, they learn to be self-sufficient, their parents instill in them morality, the rule of law, concepts of right and wrong, self-reliance, rugged individualism, and being able to provide for yourself. Human beings are the one mammal which is totally incapable of helping themselves until they are quite old. Your dog, your cat, at six weeks can leave its mother, never to remember who its mother or father was and head off down the path and scavenge, convince somebody to adopt it, whatever, and it’s over. A horse is born walking.
A human being is born to socialism, in a sense. Its parents being socialist. A human being is born incapable of providing for himself. It’s impossible. And, that is usually the case with few exceptions until that human being is well into their twenties. But something has gone wrong in that. We’re no longer teaching morality. We’re no longer teaching rugged individualism. That’s selfishness now. We’re not teaching self-reliance because that equals people having more than others. That isn’t fair that some people are more talented than others and therefore have more, or accomplish more. That isn’t fair. It’s not just. People get left out that way. Not everybody ends up being prosperous.
But in capitalism and free marketry, the lowest rungs of economic achievement are far preferable to the average rung of economic status being provided for by a government. Cause in that sense you have no humanity, you have no dignity, and you have no resolve, you have no self-respect, you have no desires to do better, there’s no incentive to. So a society seeks, as a whole, a society seeks its pursuit of excellence. It ceases to try to be the best collectively and individually. This has been going on for 50 years, this vicious, vicious cycle. And as a result of an expanding government providing more benefits for people earlier and earlier in their lives, lose their job, no big deal. Here’s a minimum 99 weeks of unemployment. Here’s food stamp cards, and if you need a flat screen or a cell phone, we can handle that for you, too.
You can probably have a couple of cars, maybe even a room in your house air-conditioned. You don’t have to work. So why should you? And if you haven’t been taught, if you haven’t been raised with this sense of achievement and pursuing excellence and being the best you can be, in fact, if you’ve been raised with the idea that that’s unfair, results in inequality and lack of sameness, then you probably feel guilty or can be made to feel guilty over the fact that you’ve succeeded, or over the fact that you’ve been taught how to do well. And so it’s just a vicious cycle. More and more people ended up becoming more and more dependent. And of course politicians were there to service that need because that’s how they got votes, and that’s how they stayed in power.
It’s taken a minimum 50 years to get here, and in some instances, you might say it’s taken 230 years since the founding to get here. It’s been a slow and gradual process, and in many ways unseen. All of these things that I believe have been damaging to individuals in our country have been seen as compassion by many. So now we’re at the point where the private sector can no longer produce enough economic activity to provide opportunity for prosperity to a growing number of people because the private sector is shrinking. The money in that pie has been taken away by government. If you have kids in college today, their graduations are far different things today than 20 years ago.
The first thing you note about a graduation today is there are no jobs to be had. You might even have a college major in the mating habits of the Australian rabid bat. They’re not gonna serve at all, but you’ve got your degree. But you’ve also got maybe six figures of student loan debt that people didn’t have 20, 30 years ago. So you’re in the hole before you even get your first job. That wasn’t the case 20 or 30 years ago. When you got out of college and started working, everything you made was gravy, or close to it.
So as the private sector has shrunk and the government’s gotten bigger, and fewer and fewer people have learned about self-reliance and rugged individualism and themselves being the source of their prosperity, as fewer and fewer people have been taught this, fewer and fewer people have been raised this way… remember how we’re born. I mean, you might argue with me semantically, but in reality a kid, a child is entirely helpless. A child is totally dependent. This is why parenthood is such a crucial thing. It’s parents that wean kids off of dependency. It’s parents that tell kids, “Okay, time to get out of this house, start providing for yourself.”
I’ll tell you a little story about a friend of mine. I’m not gonna mention his name, but you would all know this man. If he ever writes a book, this story will be in his book. Two days before he turned 18, his father came to him and said, “What are you gonna do?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“No, no, where you gonna go?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re 18. You’re not living here anymore.”
This man’s alive and working today, by the way.
“You’re 18, I’m not paying for you. You’re on your own, bud. I mean, if you want to stay here you’re paying rent, but I’ve done it. That was the deal. You’re 18, you’re on your own. And your brother, same thing, two years, when he’s 18, he’s gone. What are you gonna do?”
Well, now, that’s an extreme case, but that’s what parenthood was. Parenthood was weaning kids off of dependency, teaching them how to provide for themselves, how to get educated, how to maximize ambition and desire. It was about promoting desire. It was about inspiring their kids to want to be the best, to get educated, do everything they could to have lives better than their parents had. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. More and more, you travel around the country, you look at life in this country, and you wonder how we’ve survived this long.
And so the whole notion, “Where does prosperity come from?” Government is now the safety valve. It used to be the safety valve. Now government’s the primary objective. I don’t think people cognizantly grow up and say, “Boy, I can’t wait ’til I’m 21 so I can get on government benefits.” It doesn’t happen that way. They grow up thinking that’s what being a citizen is. The government buys your lunch at school and your breakfast and the government should take care of your health care. The government should get you out of this jam or that jam. It’s not up to you. You don’t know how. You haven’t been taught that. You haven’t been raised that way.
So the left takes advantage of the natural state of human birth, which is total dependency, and never weans children from it. When the left gets a hold of students in school, they expand on the notion that they really don’t have control over what happens to them in their lives. It’s up to other people. We all are in this together, and all gotta look out for each other, and it isn’t fair when some do better than others, stigmatize those who do, stigmatize success. But, you see, the problem with all this is the government can’t afford to be the source of prosperity. The government doesn’t have any money until it taxes people who work. Or borrows it. Or prints it. But the government doesn’t have any money.
It’s like the stimulus, folks, the first Obama stimulus. Most people thought that $800 billion that was sitting idle was gonna be pumped into the economy, gonna build roads and bridges and that meant jobs, and oh, yeah, $800 billion, that was economic growth. Well, that $800 billion was not sitting idle. It was in people’s pockets. And before the government could inject it into the free market, into the economy, they had to take it from people first. So it was a net wash. There wasn’t $800 billion new dollars. It was your money all along, taken from you and then redistributed back, except it went to Obama’s friends in the unions. It didn’t really go to roads and bridges or any of that stuff.
Anyway, we’re now at the point where nobody has any money. The states are out of money, individuals don’t have any money, everybody’s in debt. And getting money is the first overall concern people have. Not being Republican or Democrat, not being conservative or liberal, not George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, not the founding, not the Constitution — money. ‘Cause you can’t live without it. So these Republican governors, they’re told that they gotta pick up increasing amounts of the Medicaid expense. They don’t have the money. Here comes Obama dangling $300 billion per state that he doesn’t have, either. We don’t have any money, but he’s dangling it. The governors will take it, that’s the easy way, and they say, “If I don’t, some other governor will.”
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RUSH: Keep in mind, now, when you talk about weaning children, the role of parents in weaning children, even those parents who give it a shot today are met with what when the kids leave home? Head Start, Big Bird, day care, any number of government programs which oppose any parent attempting to teach self-reliance, rugged individualism, and providing for yourself. Then the kid gets to regular school and the same thing happens there. So even the parents that are doing it right find opposition the second their kids leave home. Both those programs, Head Start, Big Bird, are dedicated to indoctrinating kids as soon as possible and as much as possible.