RUSH: I played for you, an hour ago, a three-minute sound bite from my television show 1995 illustrating how Democrats use scare tactics to get everybody to agree with growing the budget and expanding government… By the way, this is a challenge for me. The Democrats are talking about what a great era the Clinton era was. They tell us now, when they want to come and raise taxes, “Well, look, let’s go back to Clinton-era taxes. We had an economic boom and everything was great back then!”
Of course, we played sound bites, a sound bite from 1995 of Democrats employing the same scare tactics then as they do today. It really is quite instructive. If you missed it, we got the link. It’s a YouTube video now at RushLimbaugh.com. It’s also… You’ll see. It’s The Daily Show, except the conservative version of it, the forerunner to The Daily Show, ahead of its time. Our TV show was literally ahead of its time, I kid you not. We made the point that the government’s only gotten bigger since 1995. Democrats have gotten everything they want.
They say bigger government equals solution to problems — and, of course, it doesn’t work that way.
I made all that very clear in the first hour. There’s another way of explaining it that I don’t think low-information voters and even a lot of high-information voters can comprehend. But here it is. Back in the Clinton years, like in 1995, government spending was 18% of GDP. Another way of saying that, for those of you in Rio Linda — and, by the way, speaking of, in Rio Linda, that’s tantamount knowledge expressed by me of the existence of low-information voters. That is why I’ve been singling Rio Linda out for 25 years, to make things clear to them in ways that is not necessary for others. So I’m on the cutting edge here in I can’t tell you how many ways.
Anyway, 18% of GDP, what does that mean to anybody? I can sit here and say it all day long, okay, it’s 18% of gross domestic product. Okay, what does that mean? Well, it’s 18% of the whole economy. Well, okay, so what? Well, it’s too high, 18% of all economic activity is the government which doesn’t produce anything. The only way it gets 18% is by taking it from people. Maybe try it that way. “But, Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Limbaugh, the government does such wonderful things with the money. It takes care of people. It feeds the hungry and clothes the naked and it provides home for the homeless and medicine for the sick.” That’s how the low-information New Castrati think of it.
Anyway, the size of government back during the Clinton years, back during this panacea, was 18% of the economy, the GDP. Today it’s 24%. So it’s grown by a third. And how’s that working out? I mean, the government is now nearly 25% of the whole economy, and it doesn’t produce anything. The only way it can get that big is taking money from other people. Not other people, everybody. It is the only way. Now, knowledgeable economists say that 18% of GDP is a good size. Knowledgeable economists — I’m not trying to sound like Obama. I’m talking about genuine, real economists, say that a government that is 18% of GDP, given a country like ours, makes sense, because 18% of GDP is enough to be able to provide for the national defense, defend and protect the Constitution, and take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves and still have enough left over in the private sector for there to be the opportunity for plenty of prosperity on the part of the people.
Now, when you get above 18%, now, we’re 24%, what that means is, the size of the economy where you live is getting smaller ’cause the government’s taking it away. And they don’t produce anything with it. They just take it, and they’re doing much more now than providing for the common defense, and defending and protecting the Constitution and building roads and bridges and providing for the needy. Now they’re doing much, much more. And we can’t afford it. Anyway, I think that may be a helpful way of explaining, and it dovetails, by the way, if I might now, into the unemployment situation, because the Drive-By Media and the Regime are ecstatic today.
The unemployment rate went down from 7.9 to 7.7%. We’re in a circumstance now, folks, where it has been like this for so long that many low-information voters are gonna assume that this is normal when it’s absolutely a disaster. Unemployment, the entire employment universe, everything about employment in this country at present, is a disaster. And yet, the media and the Regime today are treating this drop as though it’s nirvana.
J.C. Penney announced today that they had laid off around 2,200 people at a hundred stores and offices. This is in the Chicago Tribune, and this is happening every week now. So while you hear that the unemployment rate went down to 7.7%, know that a minimum of 2,200 people lost their job, that’s just J.C. Penney, more and more happening all over the country. And one of the hidden bits of news in the unemployment report today, another 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force, which means that the number of jobs that are available to be filled fell by 130,000.
Now, here’s the important number on that. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the universe of jobs has shrunk by over 8.5 million. There are 8.5 million fewer job opportunities in this country than there were four years ago. That’s how many businesses have closed. That’s how much downsizing at businesses large small there has been. There are just 8,500,000 fewer jobs. Our population hasn’t dropped by 8.5 million. Our population is either steady or increasing a little bit. But there are more and more people coming out of college that want jobs that just aren’t there. And another 130,000 people dropped out of the labor force.
That means they’ve burned through their unemployment compensation benefits. They’ve gone through their 99 weeks and there isn’t anything and they’re just out in the ether now. They are not counted as unemployed, by the way, because they’ve given up looking. So the way the government does this, if you’re not looking for a job you’re not counted as unemployed. You’re just forgotten. That’s how the unemployment rate can come down. People who drop out of the system are treated by the liberals and the media as if they never existed, much like unborn babies. Unborn babies, aborted babies, are forgotten. They never existed. The same thing with people who drop out of the employment system.
Their 99 weeks of unemployment, they burn through it, there’s no job, they’ve quit looking, bye-bye, we don’t know who you are anymore. You never existed. And here’s another dirty little statistic about it. In February, one of the reasons there is any good news in this unemployment report, multiple job holders, people who hold more than one job, went up by a record amount. Full time employees dropped. Part time employees increased. When you hear employment, you think the full-time, career oriented job, those are going away lickety-split. They are vanishing.
The number of people holding two or more jobs went up. And they are counted. Yes, Obama’s the reason. It’s his economy. So the people who hold multiple jobs — one or two, three jobs — they are increasing. It takes that many jobs for many people to make ends meet. Full-time employment is dropping. People working part-time is also increasing. There isn’t any good economic news or unemployment news today, no matter what you hear anywhere.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more thing on unemployment, and we come back from the break here bottom of the hour and we’re gonna get to your phone calls.
White unemployment, 6.8%. Black unemployment, 13.8%. Hispanic unemployment 9.6%, teenagers, 25.1%. The actual unemployment rate made up of people who are out of work and not looking for a job, and out of work and are looking, is 14%. But that doesn’t even tell you how bad it is. What you need to know is we’ve lost 8.5 million jobs in four years. That’s how bad this economy has been.
