RUSH: Here’s the great economic news, actually two stories. The first one: Target. Target has been a target, have they not? Target has been a target of the American left. Target is a big-box store that the left has gone after. They’ve looted ’em. They’ve blown ’em up out there. They’ve broken in, they robbed ’em, done all that. Look at this: Target has just announced the strongest quarterly sales growth ever. Their profits are up 80%.
The Democrats cannot take credit for this because this, to them, is not good news. This is not supposed to be happening. The Democrats have Minnesota shut down. That’s where the Target Center is. The Democrats have Portland, Oregon, shut down. They’ve got Seattle shut down. They’ve got Chicago shut down. They’ve got these cities dominated by mobs and mob rule.
We’re in a pandemic! We got people out of work. We got people that don’t have any money. How in the heck did this happen? Strongest quarterly sales growth ever. Profits up 80%. Who is the one person talking about making this happen? Donald Trump. He’s the one person, even though his great economy was snapped right out from underneath him with the demanded shutdown of two months of our economy because of the COVID-19 virus.
Trump has kept talking about the V-shaped recovery. He’s kept promising it. He’s kept reminding everybody it’s what he’s focused on. The Democrats have not. The Democrats have mocked this kind of recovery, saying it’s not realistic. And then Apple has just become the first company with a market cap of $2 trillion, and it happens in the midst of this pandemic.
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RUSH: This is, I think, fascinating. “Target Strongest Quarterly Sales Growth Ever. Profits up 80%.” Now, the naysayers are gonna say, “Rush, they had nowhere to go but up. I mean, come on. They’re coming out of a pandemic. Everything is as low as it can be.” Misses the point. People want to throw cold water on this stuff. The fact is, it happened. The fact is that their sales growth is the most rapid ever.
That means people are out there engaging in commerce, which is what our economy is. You can call it trickle-down, whatever you want, profits. Profits, the name of the game. It means they’re not giving stuff away. It means that they’re still selling enough items at profit points to earn a profit. You can try to diminish this all you want, but you can’t.
Now, Apple Computer, the first indication this is gonna happen, their fiscal year is one quarter off from the calendar year. So their Q1 in business starts in the fourth quarter on the calendar. So the Christmas quarter is their fiscal year first quarter. They reported the June quarter, they had a record amount of revenue and a record profit with their stores closed. All these Apple Stores around the world — well, in China they were open, but most of them in Europe, in the United States, most of the Apple stores are closed. No matter, they’ve got the online store. Their sales growth has been such — everybody knows that new phones are coming. New phones are coming in September, October. They may be delayed a little this year.
So arguably a lot of people would just wait for the new phones. No, need a new phone, go get one now. I mean, it’s across the board, they have not started lowering prices. Some of the cell providers do. But they’re selling iPhones out the wazoo. Mac sales are through the roof during a pandemic. When it’s the last thing that ought to be happening. It’s a testament to many things, the quality of the products and the things that people can do with their devices, and to their marketing and so forth.
But just, to me, it’s two examples of an economic recovery that’s entirely possible, that one guy has been talking about it. One guy has been urging it on. One guy has been veritably promising that it’s going to happen. An entire political party has been mocking him and making fun of him for it and claiming that he only had a great economy because he inherited the massive growth from Barack Obama. What an absolute crock that is, which we’ve been through countless times.
You know, it’s interesting. The Democrats never said that Obama had a great economy until Trump became president. All during Obama’s term they never talked about the great economy because that’s not how they viewed it. They really were trying to get everybody ready for an economy that was in decline. They were trying to get everybody ready for an economy that was slowing down. They wanted people to believe that our past was largely illegitimate, including our economic success.
We weren’t to feel good about it. We were not to feel enthused about it because it was unjust and immoral. Why, this country was built on the backs of slaves. We can’t sit here and feel happy. And who knows. All of the economic success we’re having is built on the backs of somebody. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last night actually accused America of colonialism. We have never engaged in colonialism. Hell, we were a colony, a series of them at one time.
They have done everything they can to destroy the image of American greatness and exceptionalism by claiming that our economic strength was built on the backs of others or that we had stolen natural resources from other countries, anything they could come up with that would serve their agenda that there’s no reason to feel like America’s anything special, anything great.
Madeleine Albright, former secretary of state for Clinton, teaches at Georgetown, said there’s nothing special about the American founding. Just happens to be a coincidence of dates and a bunch of people showing up here at the same time. There’s nothing special about it. That’s what she teaches. They don’t even provide much lip service to a strong economy ’cause they really don’t believe it. To them, a strong economy is a threat, folks. To them, the Democrats, the American left, a strong economy is an obstacle to them.
They want the government to always be seen as the source of happiness, decency, goodness, whatever it is. They want you thinking that you have what you have or you use the opportunities you have because government made it possible. The fact that the economy is roaring means that people are doing well financially. It doesn’t fit with what the Democrat Party agenda is.
So this news is not gonna make them happy. And they have a tough time even faking it. And they’re talking about when the economy roars back, they’re gonna have to act like they’re happy about it, but you can see when they talk about it their heart’s not in it.
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RUSH: Here’s Tom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as we head back to the phones. Great to have you with us, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Mega dittos. You were starting the program today about how the economy was coming back and Target’s numbers so forth. Something that I don’t hear a lot of lately — and you’re never gonna hear it on the mainstream media — is how are America’s 401(k)s doing? I’m only gonna use my own personal information and wonder how many other people have this. Back in roughly February-March, my family’s 401(k) stock was at an all-time high, and then the COVID-19 stuff hit. We dropped near 22% of our value.
RUSH: Yikes!
CALLER: As of today, I am back to less than 0.7% down. You don’t hear about all that comeback in 401s.
RUSH: Well, of course not.
CALLER: I’m less than 1% down now from my all-time high. It’s just coming back.
RUSH: Of course you’re not gonna hear it —
CALLER: Nope.
RUSH: — and your 401(k) is invested where, among other places?
CALLER: Stock stocks, bonds, mutual funds.
RUSH: There you go.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: It’s in the stock market, which has recovered. The stock market has now recovered everything it lost.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: And your 401(k) has come back right along with it. No, it’s a good point. It’s a good point. You’re not gonna hear about that for precisely this reason. (Give me line 3 next.) You’re not gonna hear about it because the media and the Democrats do not want that kind of news out there. They don’t. Look, the reason they’ve kept New York and Minneapolis and the state of Washington and the state of Oregon shut down is to slow down any economic recovery so they can blame it on Trump.
Listen to these speeches these people are making! You heard Michelle (My Belle) Obama. They’re blaming this economy on Trump. She’s out there talking about what a great economy her husband left Trump. Now, Trump’s gone out and destroyed it because he didn’t take the China virus seriously enough. It’s a total lie. It’s a gigantic crock. There’s only one guy focusing on bringing the economy back.
One guy pushing against the headwinds to even reopen the economy, and that was Trump. There’s one guy pushing against the headwinds to get the schools open again. There’s one guy trying to tell college and NFL players, “Please play. Go ahead and play. Our country needs to reopen. Our country needs it,” and yet they’re out there trying to blame Trump for all of this, the economy. So they need economic misery. They need economic slowdowns. They need any news they can manufacture that is not indicative of the economy recovering. And they need that to last for a couple of months now through November.
Jeff in Fairfax, Virginia, you’re next, sir. Great to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: An honor to speak with you. I hope you’re feeling well.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. Appreciate that.
CALLER: While I hope for a V-shaped rebound recovery, I fear that it’s gonna basically allow the big box stores and the monopolists to consolidate their position and the middle class entrepreneurs are gonna get kicked to the wayside.
RUSH: This is a good point. And I wanted your call to be juxtaposed right against the guy who talked about his 401(k) coming back. He is an average guy. He’s got a 401(k). That’s his family investment. And he’s only down .7 tenths of a percent now. So he’s happy. Stock market’s come back. His 401(k) has come back.
I know exactly what your point is. It’s one thing for the big box stores to come back, the Targets, Apple, Walmart and so forth. But there are a bunch of mom-and-pops who, if we’re not careful, are not gonna recover. Some may never reopen, and some may have been wiped out already.
And look. That is a valid concern. It was one of the first concerns I had when I started traveling around about two weeks after the first lockdown and I saw boarded-up dreams, essentially, in various cities and along various streets. So your point is it just can’t be a corporate recovery. It’s gotta be economic. It’s gotta be expansive throughout the width and breadth of the economy, is your point, right?
CALLER: Right. The future has to involve humans. It can’t all be digital. It can’t all be Amazon. And while Amazon employees humans right now in their factories or their warehouses, that soon is gonna go by the wayside as well.
RUSH: So what would you do?
CALLER: Well, I think we have to rebuild a backup analog system to what we’re doing. Digital is fine. The rapidity, the speed at which we can conduct transactions digitally is a fine thing, but there has to be some return to a society where we have cash, we have cashiers, we have people that actually do physical work. The digital profits can subsidize that in some way, but —
RUSH: Well, now, wait a minute, you’re describing problems actually that predated the virus and the shutdown. So your argument’s about much more than that then.
CALLER: That’s true, but we could put people back to work if we did the right testing, and the right testing would be the antibody testing. We need to find out how many Americans have already beaten COVID-19. We need to stop testing ourselves over and over and over again to see whether we caught it when most of us might have already had it. We’re doing the wrong testing and that’s what’s keeping us out of school, out of work, out of football.
RUSH: I know what you’re saying, but I don’t think that’s what’s keeping us out of football. I don’t think it’s keeping us out of school. I don’t think the wrong testing is doing it. I think the Democrat Party is keeping us out of school. The Democrat Party. You people gonna have to get it through your heads. The Democrat Party for four years has been trying to overturn the election results of 2016. Everything, even today, is about that.
The China virus is about that. The post office thing. There’s always something that pops up. There’s a new crisis or controversy seemingly every week. It is all oriented toward getting rid of Donald Trump. Not opening schools is all about getting rid of Donald Trump. It’s happening because Mueller failed. Everything here, every obstacle, everything that represents an obstacle in the way of the country recovering has been placed there by the Democrat Party and its adjuncts, which would be the Drive-By Media, education, academe, you name it.
Testing is simply the excuse that they use. I’m not against antibody testing. I’m not against, you know, trying to identify the people who may have developed immunity to it. I think in certain places, in fact, we may even be getting close to herd immunity. And in Florida and a bunch of these states you’re not even hearing about the vast numbers of new cases stories anymore, ’cause they’re going down.
Even with the testing that we are doing, the numbers of new causes are going down. And guess what? All of those numbers of new cases have not equaled an associate or approximate number of deaths.