RUSH: The CBO report. Folks, to do this properly we almost have to go back to January 16th of 2009. This would be two weeks before President Obama was inaugurated. January 16, 2009, was when I said over and over again — what happened, the Wall Street Journal had asked for 200 words from a bunch of conservative media people, advice for President Obama, one of those kind of things. I forget what the exact question was. I wrote back and I said, “I don’t need 200 words. I just need four. ‘I hope he fails.'” The reason I said that is because I meant it. I hope he failed because if Obama would fail the country would survive, the country as founded.
Now, it was immediately seized upon and predictably misreported, taken out of context, and it was reported to all the low-information voters that I was hoping, I was so partisan, I was so pro-conservative, so GOP, that if my side didn’t win, that I wanted the country to go in the tank. And that’s what was reported. That was just one of the most unpatriotic things anybody could say. Nobody wants the president to fail, nobody wants America to fail. But, see, the two didn’t go together in my mind. Obama failing meant the country being spared.
So I went on Hannity’s show one night to explain it in great detail, and it was a waste of time, even though appearing on the Hannity show was fun, ’cause everybody knew what I meant. They just took the occasion to distort it and misrepresent it, but everybody that was criticizing knew exactly what I meant. It was just typical behavior of the left and the left will the wing media. They all knew exactly what I meant but they were feigning ignorance and acting as though they don’t. As the controversy continued to attach itself to it, I continued to explain it. To me, I still stand by it.
More and more people, by the way, according to the polling data, CNN, not happy. They’re very troubled at CNN over this. More and more people are now adopting that attitude, that Obama has failed. It’s not looking good in a whole lot of areas. They’re very concerned about it in the Drive-By Media. And that led me to go into great detail, even though I had spent the entire campaign detailing for people, making predictions.
When it came to Obamacare — and it wasn’t just me. There were a whole lot of us on the right who were predicting exactly what has happened, and let me fast forward to 2009 when we got the first CBO estimate of Obamacare. Remember, the CBO is valuable. It’s the coin of the realm in Washington because — dadelut dadelut dadelut! — it is “nonpartisan,” so they say. I will accept the premise that they try to be.
It’s a tough one, I’m sure, to pull off because of the pressures that are being applied and the tricks that are being employed by the party in power writing legislation to trick them, but nevertheless, let’s just accept that they are nonpartisan. The CBO only deals with 10 years in the future. That’s by policy. So when the Democrats and Obama originally proposed Obamacare and then spelled it out, they provided the ingredients, if you will, for the CBO to analyze.
They included a trick, and that is key. See, the magic number was $1 trillion. They had to bring Obamacare in under that. The CBO had to say that Obamacare was going to lower the deficit, it was gonna create jobs, it was going lower premiums — and that it was going to do this all for the cost of the Iraq war. “We get out of Iraq, that’s $999 billion that we won’t have to spend on that that we are spending. We’ll just transfer it to Obamacare — ergo, no added money to the deficit,” and this was how they sold it.
Now, how did they get that figure, the total cost under $1 trillion? I’m sure that for those of you that listen to this program every day, this is redundant for you, but it’s important to revisit this. The way they did it was to structure the 10 years — and the only 10 years the CBO could score, started in 2009. In case you wonder, why is the CBO report now different than it was four or five years ago, it’s because it’s a new ten-year period is now. Now we’ve got implementation.
Now the lie to the original CBO report… Well, “the lie.” Yeah, the lie in the data given the CBO by Obama and the Regime has now been brought to light. The trick they played was, the tax increases and the fee increases and all of the new sources of revenue for Obamacare would start immediately in year one. So they were able to count and tabulate 10 years of so-called revenue generation after Obamacare was passed.
However, they delayed implementation of the key elements until this year, so that there were only six years of spending and 10 years of tax collection in the original CBO projection report. So if you have four free years to raise money without any spending that’s associated with Obamacare, that’s how they kept it under $1 trillion. That’s how they lied. I mean, that’s how they pulled it off. That’s how they kept the figure under the magic number of $1 trillion.
And they had four years to lie to you about keeping your doctor if you like him and keeping your insurance if you like it and your premiums going down $2,500. They had four years to lie to you, two elections to lie to you, two elections of a free run at all of the benefits and the wonderful aspects of Obamacare. Now, while this is going on I and a few others — at the beginning it wasn’t many because there was fear.
There was abject fear of opposing Obama, especially in the first year, because of the historical nature of his presidency (i.e., the first black president). The Republicans were afraid to death of criticizing Obama, and many of them still are. Conservative media was reluctant to go there. In fact, that’s during the period we had David Brooks talking about how the “crease” in Obama’s slacks told him that he was qualified to be a great president.
This when all of that rigmarole was going on. Now, I knew — and a lot of other people knew and were telling you — what the trick was. We were telling you everything. This is the thing about this, that if I really let this get to me, it could really tick me off. I don’t let it get to me. Because I’m satisfied, at the end of the day, every day, that I’ve done my best. Every dire prediction, everything they were lying about, you were told in advance.
And every prediction we’ve made about what was gonna happen to health care, in the economy, and jobs has been coming true since the first day of implementation, and the CBO just happened to come along this week and codify it in a so-called nonpartisan way. It is an utter disaster. It was never going to be anything but an utter disaster. If you wanted to look at it in terms of mathematics, it never added up.
If you wanted to look at it in terms psychology, people’s behavior, it was never gonna add up. If you wanted to look at it in terms of good intentions, well, he might have really wanted all this stuff to work but it didn’t have a chance the way it was designed. Don’t forget, at the time Obamacare was implemented, 85% of the insurable public had health insurance and 15% didn’t.
One of the lies that was the only thing Obamacare was really gonna do was cover the uninsured, which was 30 million, we were told. That equals 15%. So we have totally wrecked the world’s best health care system, that was insuring 85% of the country, in order to insure the remaining 15%. Now where are we? The LA Times story. This story is just devastating from top to bottom, beginning to end, side to side. It’s got a quote from a woman whose life has been destroyed because of Obamacare.
She is quoted as saying, “I can’t believe Obama intended this to happen,” and, see, that’s the rub. It’s very hard to convince people that Obama intended this to happen, but how else is it explained? Either it’s intentional or it is the biggest, most incompetent president and Regime we’ve ever had. You take your pick. But I don’t think gross negligence and incompetence covers this. I don’t think it gets anywhere near explaining this.
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RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, let me explain again for you why I am revisiting the history of this. Because it need not have happened. We do not have to be where we are. Had the Republican Party had some gonads — had the Republican Party reacted to the president as the president and not an historical figure that was immune from criticism — we would not have this. We do not have to be here. This is not about me doing a “See, I told you so.”
This is not about me spending some time here reminding you that I was right. That would be childish. This needn’t have happened, and this is horrible for our country what is happening. It is horrible for the people of this country who do not have a lot of resources and where health care is the most important things in their lives. This is an absolute tragedy that’s happened here, and it did not have to happen. The truth was known.
Had there been sufficient push-back and opposition…
Now, I will admit that in the first two years, the Republicans didn’t have the votes is in the House or the Senate to stop Obama doing anything. Despite that, look at how hard it was and all of the chicanery and tricks they had to play to get it passed. If there had been sufficient push-back and therefore education of the public the large about what was coming their way, we could have avoided this — and I can’t tell you how it breaks my heart, folks, to see this literal tragedy happen to this country.
It would be easy for me to say, “Hey, you know what? I don’t care. I called it, and everybody’s gonna know I was right.” That’s not at all a factor to me. That’s not why I’m reliving the history and reminding some of you — and telling, teaching, whatever, the rest of you who may not have been around here when we were talking about it. Now we’ve gotten to the point where the CBO says, just as we said five years ago, that Obamacare’s gonna cost this country 2.5 million jobs minimum.
Obamacare, alone, was gonna reduce the deficit, was gonna lower premiums!
No, it’s going to cost 2.5 million jobs — and the Regime says that’s good.
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RUSH: I checked the e-mail at the bottom-of-the-hour break and I got an interesting note. “Rush, it has happened. This isn’t like you. You never bellyache about what’s happened, because it is. It is what is.” I’m not bellyaching. We need to learn from it, because you know what’s coming next? In the midst of all this, is amnesty. That’s why this needs to be put in the proper context and focus and learned from.
Amnesty is what’s coming next, and in addition to that, there were fireworks this morning up on Capitol Hill over the hearings on the IRS. Obama goes on O’Baxter’s interview before the Super Bowl game on Super Bowl Sunday and says, “There’s not a smidgen of controversy at the IRS.” He’s being undermined by his own words every day. These people still have three years, folks, to continue to wreak havoc — or for their incompetence to, whichever word you wish to attach to it.
It’s got to be opposed.
We need to stand up and say, “No more,” and that’s what the 2014 midterm elections are all about, but this is particularly devastating because it was well known. People were afraid to be critical of the president — and every bit of this not only was predictable, but it was predicted. Now the Congressional Budget Office essentially said that because Obamacare’s means-tested subsidies phase out as cash income rises, people will choose to stay poorer to keep earning benefits.
That has already been happening, and we have reported it. I remember a couple of instances out of San Francisco. Well-heeled Obama supporters in San Francisco making well into six figures, a 55-year-old man and wife. They learned that they weren’t gonna qualify for subsidies, and so they made the strategic decision to reduce their income so that everybody else — you, me, their neighbors — pays their health care (i.e. the subsidies).
This has gotten so bad that some of the giddier liberals are out there now extolling Obamacare for “liberating workers” from the adult responsibility of earning a living. But what’s Obama love to say lately? Every time he makes a personal appearance, what does he talk about that this country features? (impression) “If you work hard, you take responsibility, you get ahead.” He’s been beating that drum to the point of redundancy.
“You work hard, you take responsibility, you get ahead.”
What a load of crap.
The fact of the matter is Obama’s policies are forcing people out of work in such high numbers that the New York Times is editorializing how liberating that is. It is “liberating workers” from the adult responsibility of earning a living. You know, the media that covers Obama, I refer to them as the first responders, because they are the ones that are entrusted with dealing with these Obama emergencies, and this CBO report is one.
They say the CBO report that 2.5 million people will leave the workforce by 2017 is good news. The news media is now claiming the CBO meant that Obamacare will just give those 2.5 million workers the liberating choice to stop working. Obamacare, you see, is a success, because it is liberating people from the responsibility of working! It is offering the choice to stop working and maintain their health care.
Nancy Pelosi, in a press conference, said, “Yesterday, the CBO projected that by 2021, the Affordable Care Act will enable more than 2 million workers to escape ‘job-lock’ — – the situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits,” but no other reason. Job lock! Obamacare allows Americans to escape their policies and doctors. Obamacare allows Americans to escape the Constitution.
I mean, this is perverted, the lengths to which now they’re going. Dana Milbank had a column in the Washington Post earlier in the week. The way it ended was, Obamacare has been undermined by the very entity they had used to validate it, and that would be the CBO. The original scoring was based on false data, which is all the CBO had to go on. The Regime gave them false data: 10 years of tax collections on six years of spending.
So they were able to keep the magic number under $1 trillion, which is a psychological number for the public to go along with it. You couple that with the lies about keeping your doctor and keeping your policy and your premium coming down $2500, and it was a panacea, it was utopia, it was gonna be great! Now the lie has been fully exposed, and the only way the left can cover it is to just say, “Well, these 2.5 million people are only working for health insurance.
“They really don’t like their jobs. If they had their choice, they wouldn’t be working, and now they don’t have to,” and that is somehow a benefit. That’s just another 2.5 million people who are gonna be eating, and they’re gonna be driving, and they’re gonna be watching TV, and they’re gonna be texting and making cell calls while not working. ‘Cause somebody else is going to be paying for it.
They’re gonna have their health care, ostensibly; somebody else is gonna be paying for it. We’re gonna pay another 2.5 million people not to work, and the New York Times, the Democrat Party, the Regime are coming along and now saying, “Oh, yeah, yeah! This is a great thing. This is one of the great benefits of Obamacare.” Now, you tell me: How does this equate to a growing economy?
How does this equate to a growing economy with burgeoning job opportunities, a growing private sector and expanding pie where people truly working hard are able to access their share of it based on their input and their hard drive and ambition? Whatever additional they earn is going to be taxed from them to pay these other people who are choosing to get out of “job lock,” choosing not to work and still have health benefits.
So, my friends, the thing is, everything — and if I wanted to, I could spend another hour reminding you of the year-by-year history and the predictions that were made on this program and the intentions Obama really harbored. We could go by year and relive it all again, but those of you who have been here every day, you know. You heard it said. You heard the predictions, and we know and we knew what was gonna happen because we know liberals.
We know liberalism. We know what their intentions are. So it was not hard to predict at all, and it was not hard to say, “I hope he fails.” I wanted the country to survive! I wanted the country to remain what it was. So everything we said was gonna happen is happening. The best the left can claim is that people losing their jobs is great for them and great for America, and an added benefit of Obamacare — and now, of all things, we’re going to move on to amnesty?
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RUSH: Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, your guiding light, Rush Limbaugh, doing what I was born to do.
Here is the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, and is this the current guy? Yeah. He’s being questioned by Paul Ryan, who says, “So it’s not that employers are laying people off. It’s that people in the workforce are not supplying labor to the equivalent of two and a half million jobs in 2014. As a result that lower workforce participation rate lowers economic growth. Who are these workers? What kind of worker from an income scale side are being affected by this?”
ELMENDORF: By providing heavily subsidized health insurance to people with very low income, and then withdrawing those subsidies as income rises, the act creates a disincentive for people to work, relative to what would have been the case in the absence of that act. Now, these subsidies, of course, make those lower income people better off. This is an implicit tax, not the sort of tax we normally think about where if the government raises our taxes, we are worse off and face a disincentive to work more. By providing a subsidy these people are better off but they do have less of an incentive to work.
RUSH: Anybody think that wasn’t intended? Of course it was intended! Something people need to remember when analyzing any of these outcomes of Obama policies, but better than that, something you need to keep in mind whenever you hear an Obama policy announced, you’ve got to have the courage to admit this to yourself. The country is flawed. Unjust, improperly founded, the people who really make it work have gotten the shaft from day one and it is his mission to reverse all of that. It’s payback time. Therefore, the least achieved among us are not the least achieved because they work haphazardly, don’t prepare, are not educated, unqualified.
No, no, no. It’s none of those things. They are victims. Any failure is an indictment of the country, wherever it happens. If any individual fails, something’s wrong with America, not the individual, in Obama’s world, in the left’s view of things. And that failure, engineered by the country, occurred because powerful people set the wheels in motion to generate that failure and that failure and that failure and that individual, that group, that group. The failures, the unachieved, the unaccomplished, slackers, whatever, they have no role in their current circumstances. They are nothing but victims, and they fail not because of anything they’ve done; they fail because the country has seen to it.
So when you hear Elmendorf talk about the disincentive to work and yet end up with health care, reduce your income, somebody has to pay for that. Who is going to pay for it? The suckers who continue to work. And the suckers who continue to work are who? Winners of life’s lottery. They’re not the achieved. They’re not the accomplished. They’re the privileged, the advantaged. Success, same token, is failure. Failure is not the fault of anything but a flawed system that devised America. Success is the same, because the people who succeeded were given unfair advantages or they were targeted for success or they had connections, or whatever, however it manifested itself.
But in liberalism nothing is genuine. Everything is the result of flaws in the structure of our culture and society and country. Have you ever wondered why the mainstream media gets practically everything wrong? Not just a little off here and there, but, I mean, it’s major. The things they get wrong, the errors they make, including but not limited to the editing of 911 tapes to create a totally different impression from what really happened. Have you chalked that up to bias? Have you chalked it up to incompetence? Have you chalked it up to whatever you’ve come up with as an explanation?
Why is it that they all — ’cause they all report the same thing — how is it that they are all wrong, dramatically so? I would submit to you that they are wrong because their starting point is flawed. Starting point that they’re educated in journalism school, starting point that they are all taught. And it flows from this belief that this is an inherently unfair country, and so any minority, any failure, any disadvantaged, less advantaged, is actually the hero, because of victim status. And they are going to be protected, never, ever blamed. They’re going to be hoisted as true heroes because they’re the victims of a rigged game going all the way back to the 1700s. “Come on, Rush, you can’t believe they really believe –” This is my point. I do hope that you will believe this.