TODD: The Washington Post had an analysis. Let me just give you the headline, because we’ll get into the body of the text to come. This is about the alleged COVID bill, which is the alleged bailout bill, which is an enormous amount of pork (and worse) spending. This is the Washington Post, and next segment we’ll tell you what they said about Trump’s effort to help people get around the lockdowns, financially.
“Biden’s Stimulus Showers Money on Americans, Sharply Cutting Poverty in Defining Move of Presidency.” Now, it’s true that they have raised the income of, for instance, the Boston bomber. I don’t know how much money he was getting for work in prison, but he’s getting a $1400 check, the Boston bomber. So is Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people. So clearly their income has shot up by perhaps 1400%. But there is almost no actual spending related to the COVID lockdowns in this, almost none. We’ll talk about that.
Listen here to what Joe Biden was told to say about this spending orgy.
BIDEN: This nation has suffered too much for much too long, and everything in this package is designed to relieve the suffering and to meet the most urgent needs of the nation.
TODD: I mean, I can’t even respond to that intelligently other than a “ha” which just popped out of me. Frank Hill at the North State Journal went through and looked at this monstrosity. There might be in this $1.3 trillion, there might be $600 million tied to relief from the government-imposed lockdowns. There is $1.5 billion for Amtrak, which is an organization that sells $9 microwavable hamburgers and loses money on them.
If you go to an Amtrak station such as in Washington, D.C., you can buy a McDonald’s hamburger for 99 cents and pop on the train, or you could wait, get on the train, get a lesser hamburger for nine bucks, and know that Amtrak loses money on that. That’s just one example. And, of course, there’s bailouts for pension funds in blue states where government retirees are making $350,000 per year.
None of that is related to the medically useless, deadly, politically advantageous-for-Democrat-friends lockdowns. There’s $200 million for museums, et cetera, and then you’re gonna hear, “Oh, well, we’re gonna make the schools safe from the COVID flu.” No, you’re not. There’s $128 billion for K through 12 public education, which is really just for the unions.
Ninety-five percent of that money will not be spent until between 2022 and 2028. None of it in 2021. So this is “showering Americans with money,” and there’s more. We’ll get into some of the details in this bill. If you are like me, a longtime, lifelong listener to Rush, you’ve heard his brilliant monologues over the decades explaining government spending and how we need to look at it. As Rush said here.
RUSH: When is the last time that you recall anybody…? Conservative, Republican, think tank, when is the last time anybody has really, really, really been upset over government spending? When’s the last time you can remember it?
The Tea Party — which was average, ordinary Americans who’d never been in politics before; they had never been activists. This was the beauty of it. This was the power of it. They were not professional political people or employees. They were just outraged over Obama. They were outraged over this wanton spending with seemingly no concern and no even imaginary limitations and what that might mean for their children and their grandchildren. The Tea Party’s being portrayed as the Alt-Right, white nationalist, racist movement even now.
Okay. So follow along here. Tea Party gets started, Tea Party takes over, Tea Party secures the Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2010, a 50-vote margin. It was overwhelming. The Democrats and media even began targeting the Tea Party as a bunch of racist, sexist, bigots, which is the default. But they’re being positioned as the mainstream, while at the same time the left-wing extremists are being ignored and tamped down and Pelosi and Schumer are being built up as the moderate, normal, standard Democrat issue.
But let’s go back. The Tea Party comes into being for a lot of reasons, but spending was one of the things that woke ’em all up. Now, these are people that had never been in organized politics before. They had voted, but they had not donated to anything. They’d maybe go to town halls once in a while. But these were the essence of citizen involvement in government.
They were not being paid. They were not on anybody’s donor list or any of that. And that’s what gave them power. There was no leader. There was no Tea Party leader. There was no figurehead responsible for it. It was an effervescent, natural eruption of conservative citizens of all ages, religions, creeds, sexes, orientations, you name it.
It scared the hell out of Washington, D.C., long before Donald Trump came along and scared the hell out of Washington, D.C., precisely because it couldn’t be controlled. You couldn’t demonize the Tea Party by taking out one person, the leader.
It was just a mass movement at the same time by average, ordinary Americans. And it was spending that was Obama’s stimulus and then health care that scared the hell out of ’em. Well, eventually the Republicans listened, and the Republicans started attacking Obama on the spending, and the Republicans started attacking the Democrats in general. And the budget deal after budget — we had reconciliation. We didn’t have budgets. We didn’t do budgets. The Democrats found a way out of having to do budgets.
There were no debates. People got even more infuriated. So the Republicans listening to the Tea Party, realizing what a voting bloc it was, actually began talking spending discipline. And what happened? During all of that, remember the time the Republicans offered a plan to address the deficit after Obama’s stimulus and after Obama’s Obamacare? What did Democrats do? The Democrats prepared an ad showing Paul Ryan pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair over the cliff.
We all got outraged by it. Some people laughed at it. Some Republicans, “Come on, Rush, nobody’s gonna take that seriously.” I’ve been hearing this my entire career. “Come on, Rush, nobody’s gonna take what the Democrats do seriously, nobody’s gonna fall for that.” And yet here we are. A lot of people have fallen for a lot of Democrat crap over the last 50 years. And here we are.
And after the Paul Ryan wheelchair ad, then we had all kinds of similar kind of ads. Republicans were gonna starve the kids. Republicans were going to foul the water. Whatever the spending cuts, Republicans were gonna take Social Security away from people. Republicans were going to deny old people their housing allowances. This is what happened.
How do you talk about balancing the budget, how do you talk about the deficit when your opposition is promising to give everything away to everybody, including free health care for illegal immigrants? How do you talk about spending discipline and the deficit with a media famous for destroying economies and jobs, favoring policies which destroy economies and jobs?
And when you keep in mind that this is the Democrat agenda, the Democrat agenda requires as many people in need as they can create. The Democrat agenda requires poverty. The Democrat agenda requires people unable to cope with day-to-day life. The Democrat Party requires more and more people living in economic despair. That circumstance allows the Democrats to blame the Republicans for it and then propose even more programs and even a more benevolent, gigantic government to take care of all the people the Republicans don’t care about.
Making the government a bigger percentage of GDP is not how you grow the economy. It’s how you grow government. And Obama was making no bones about his intention! Here comes the Tea Party demanding Republican fiscal responsibility. They tried, they started providing more than lip service on balancing the budget. That’s when the ads started coming with Paul Ryan sending grandma over the cliff in a wheelchair.
And that was just one of them. The Republican Party thinks they got destroyed in the arena of public opinion with the media distorting their efforts, just like happened in 1995. They think they got destroyed over the starving kids school lunch cuts that weren’t. There were no cuts in the school lunch program. There were simply reductions in the rate of growth.
TODD: Timeless. It’s timeless. There were Republican senators who tried to stop this giving of money to murderers, to the Boston bomber. It is Daily Wire that covered this, Ryan Saavedra. Cotton, Cruz, Cassidy, all offered amendments to not send checks to the Boston bomber and to the murderer, Dylann Roof, and the Democrats voted that down. There’s your ads. They’re right here.
We can run that ad, and we were just talking during the break. We can run an ad showing Andrew Cuomo. How many grandmas did he literally push into the cliff of the long-term care facilities? We’ll talk more about Cuomo. It’s now five or six women who’ve come forward to say that they were sexually harassed by him? We should start a watch. Maybe there will be seven or eight by the end of the show.