RUSH: MarketWatch has a story today that the ChiComs have now surpassed us. “For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the” world’s largest economy. The world’s largest economy now is the ChiComs. According to the MarketWatch, the ChiComs have officially overtaken the United States of America as the world’s largest and number one economy for the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was drunk and president. Now… (interruption) Now… (interruption) It’s fact. He’s a great guy, don’t misunderstand. But, I mean, I write history books here, folks.
Don’t give me the business now, ’cause I know. Now, buried in this story is one of the reasons why the ChiComs have overtaken us as the world’s largest economy. It’s not the only reason by any stretch, but one of the factors is our birthrate. It is so low that our birthrate’s not sufficient to maintain our population. For whatever reason — abortion, people aren’t having kids, you name it — our birthrate is below replacement levels.
Now, the ChiComs don’t have that problem even though they’ve got their one-child system, because they’ve got a billion people — and population is a key to economic growth. There’s another factor, folks. While Obama’s running around worried about all these civil rights violations, there are now the largest number of Americans ever not working in this country, expressed as the labor force participation rate. Ninety-three million Americans who are capable of working, are not — and that number is growing.
Unstated in all these factors that I’ve mentioned, the birthrate is below replacement levels — and that’s key, by the way. Can I share something with you? I remember back when I worked in Sacramento at KFBK, my adoptive hometown. UC Davis was right down the road, the university that has that professor of economics who says there is no American dream. I was actually asked to come down and do a lecture for a class. I forget the class, but it was at UC Davis.
I readily agreed. I thought it would be fun. I mean, here I am at one of the citadels and institutions of higher learning, just a guy on the radio. You won’t believe this. I chose as one of the key elements of my lecture, the American birthrate and the fact that early demographic trends — even back in 1985 or ’86 now — were trending toward a birthrate that would end up in 20, 30 years, below replacement levels. I tried to warn them what this would mean for the US economy.
I tied it into abortion, which they didn’t want to hear. Those are college students, after all. I tied it into a number of things. It’s something I had never talked about the on the radio, which I wanted to make also a fact. I didn’t want to just take the radio show to the classroom, ’cause I figured, correctly so, they all listened anyway. So I wanted to talk about something I had not spoken about on the radio, that I was researching and preparing. That was just one of the things I discussed.
Now here we are 30-some-odd years later, and it’s come to pass. (interruption) Oh, yeah, even then the accuracy rating was intact. This is before the Sullivan Group even started auditing my opinions. Now, let’s add one other thing to this mix. It’s something that’s not talked about. I don’t think… I didn’t read the whole story, but it is why there are certain people in this country who are hell-bent on facilitating amnesty and illegal immigration.
The simple fact of the matter is we are a shrinking economy. There are a lot of reasons for it, and I would put at the top of the list way too much liberalism, too much of a welfare state on top of a Nanny State. It has become too easy and comfortable in this country not to work. Everybody not working is eating. Most of the people not working have a cell phone. Almost everybody not working has a television of some kind. You simply cannot grow an economy this way.
You cannot grow an economy with more and more people not working and not contributing. The whole concept of economic growth and the nation growing, you just can’t have it. Now, I know some of you are shouting, “Hey, don’t forget NAFTA! All these jobs were shut down and sent overseas.” I know. It all gets thrown in the mix here. I’m not purposely trying to ignore things, but the primary cause of all this is socialist tendencies in the welfare state which creates a growing government which grows by taking things out of the private sector.
Obamacare is the latest assault on it, but there was plenty of it happening before Obamacare. Then you add abortion into this. I don’t care… Folks, I don’t care what you think about abortion politically, but you simply can’t retard your birthrate by 1.3 million a year every year since 1973 and have it not mean something. We had a number the other day that the vast majority of abortions in this country occur among minorities, African-Americans and Hispanics — and it was a striking number that I came across.
Do you know 78% of all abortions in New York City are African-American? I don’t know if that’s the case nationwide, but it’s pretty close. Now, this is not realistic, but it makes the point. If there weren’t any abortions — if there hadn’t been maybe not even all of them but just a great reduction — the black population today would be 36% of the country instead of 15%. So it matters. Well, anyway, all of this is why there are some people hell-bent on illegal immigration.
Because if we’re not gonna give birth to replace our declining population, then we gotta find it somewhere. Somebody’s gonna have to pay for this. We gotta get money from somewhere. Obamacare is creating part-time workers left and right. Obamacare — and Obama period, the Democrat Party — has created an ever-expanding dependency class. Somebody’s gotta come here and work. This is the attitude of the Chamber of Commerce, and they’re not alone. Now, the Democrats, their economics is not their concern. Votes are their concern.
But all of this stuff is intertwined. Do not misunderstand. I’m not supporting or I’m not trying to make a case for illegal immigration or amnesty. I’m telling you why it’s happened. All of this is happening because we’ve made absolutely disastrous mistakes in our leadership. At the top of the list, this idea that we have a labor force participation rate where 93 million Americans are not working. You can’t chalk it up to, “Well, Rush, there aren’t any jobs. It’s the economy.”
That’s certainly a factor, but we also have to admit you don’t have to work to eat anymore. You don’t have to work to drive a car. You don’t have to work to get health care. You don’t have to work to watch television. You don’t have to work to make a phone call. I’m not trying to criticize the recipients, but with some of this stuff, if we can’t talk about it honestly even in an abstract way, we’re never gonna get anywhere near solving it.
I don’t mean any of this personally to anybody, but it all adds up, and it all has meaning. The ChiComs, a communist country, have overcome us as the world’s largest economy? This is the exact kind of thing the so-called Greatest Generation sacrificed everything to prevent in World War II, fighting the communists, all of that.
But then again, the World War II generation did play a role in creating all the dependency in a way. They gave birth to them. They didn’t want their kids to go through the hell they went through. It’s a natural human desire. Every parent wants better for their kids than they had for themselves. So, anyway, it’s a mess, and if somebody wants to know why, there are answers.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This Mike in Albany. Mike, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: How you doing, Rush? This is the third time I’m calling, and the first time my battery has last long enough to get in touch with you.
RUSH: I’m glad you made it through. I appreciate your patience out there.
CALLER: Listen, here’s my question. It’s about Ferguson. It’s about the guy, Garner, down in Staten Island. Most of us citizens out here in this country are living paycheck to paycheck. What we earn, we need to keep. Like you said before, these governments outstretch themselves and outspent themselves. Now they’re trying to squeeze us, the people, for everything to pay them back. It’s frustrating. This is a powder keg that’s gonna explode. And that’s all I got to say.
RUSH: Well, that’s why I wanted to take your call, because I had enough of an inkling of what you were gonna say that it was intriguing to me. Let me tell you what his point is. He says most everybody out there is living paycheck to paycheck. And it’s probably true. I didn’t get to it, but about a week before Thanksgiving there was another, in an endless line of these: “Americans are not saving enough.” And it’s almost predictable that, as we approach holiday time, the AP or somebody is gonna run a story on some economist or series of economists worrying that the American people are not saving enough.
Twenty-five years in a row I’ve seen this. It’s almost as though it’s on some agenda calendar, and as we get near Thanksgiving, the calendar pops out a to-do list for the media, and one of the things on the to-do list: “Run story that says Americans are not saving enough,” ’cause this happens all the time. And it seems to happen around holiday time. There’s a purpose behind it, and it’s generally used to attack Republican presidents.
It’s usually a sympathetic story: Well, Americans aren’t making enough to save anything because the economy is so bad because only the rich are doing well. But they can’t run that story because that’s exactly what’s happening with Obama. So they can’t blame it on him. So this story blamed it on the American people, who were spending everything and not saving it and were behaving irresponsibly. That’s generally the way these stories do run when Democrats are in the White House. When there’s a Republican in the White House, the people not saving enough story is always because the Republican president only cares about the rich. You can make book on this.
Now, I didn’t get to the story because other things superseded it in terms of my hierarchy in determining what was important that day, but it’s out there. The fact is, when you’ve got — let me circle back to this, when you have 92, 93 million Americans not even working, what is paycheck to paycheck? Now, when you talk about the people who are working, a number of people working full time have been reduced to part time. They’ve had to either make adjustments and deal with it, or go out and get a second and/or third job.
But the fact of the matter is, disposable income is dwindling because the cost of satisfying government is going up. The cost to satisfy government is taxes and regulation. And what Mike here is referring to, “Hey, we’re all paycheck to paycheck, and the government doesn’t care.” They keep demanding more, as in the cigarette tax in New York City. They keep demanding. They keep raising taxes and it doesn’t matter whether people can afford them or not. They just keep raising them.
And when somebody turns around and says, “Well, we gotta cut government.” Oh, no, government cannot do with one penny less than it ever had last year. If we’re gonna have a tax cut we gotta make it up somewhere by raising somebody else’s taxes. And he thinks with all of these never-ending efforts to raise more and more money and tax people more and more, that a powder keg is being created here. I think there are a number of people who might think that these excessive actions by the cops are brought on by people being just totally frustrated.
Here’s a guy trying to earn a living selling individual cigarettes. I don’t know about you, but that causes me to sit up and kind of cock my head and say, “What?” That’s pretty dire. That tells us quite a lot, right? Single cigarettes, he’s selling loosies they’re called, because for many people that’s all they can afford, is one cigarette? All the while the government’s done everything they can to addict people to them.
I mean, it used to be that bumming a cigarette was, “Hey, man, you got a cig?” A guy would give you a cigarette. Try that now. It’s like asking somebody to give ’em 20 bucks. It doesn’t happen. His point was that there is a bunch of effervescing, beneath-the-surface economic tension, and that now and then it’s gonna boil over. And I don’t doubt that at all. Because the government — look at Obamacare. If you don’t get insurance, what, pay a fine, pay a tax, whatever they want to call it to make it constitutional. And they raise taxes to boot. It just never ends.
The federal government, $18 trillion national debt, and they dare run stories blasting the American people for not saving. Do you think you can get by on three trillion a year? I think I could. There are people in our government who think no, that’s impossible. Three trillion? Not possible. We need at least four. For what? The idea, $18 trillion in debt. This is why the Tea Party came into existence. There are people who know that this simply can’t go on interminably.
There is going to be a day of reckoning on this. Nobody knows when, and people are afraid of what it will manifest itself as, but it will happen. (interruption) Is that right? Eric Garner, after the arrest he was still alive. He died in the hospital later and the medical examiner ruled that it was a homicide caused by compression? You know, he had six kids. Eric Garner had six kids and he’s out there selling loosies. He’s trying to support six kids by selling single cigarettes? At least he was working.