BRETT: The big speech is tonight from the president of the United States, Joseph R. Biden. (groan) Oh, get ready, folks. You are about to be steeped in a stew of spending that you have never imagined in your lives. I am breathless at the amount of spending and tax increases and fundamental transformation that is going to be proposed tonight.

The good news is… I will give you the silver lining up front here. The good news is Joe Biden has almost no chance of enacting much of this. So much of this is excessive — so much of this is unpopular, uncalled for, undesired by the broad spectrum of Americans across the fruited plain — that I am confident to the extent that I can know this that much of this that he’s gonna talk about tonight is aspirational.

And it has been aspirational for the better part of 40 years, but it doesn’t mean that the press isn’t gonna try to sell and he’s not gonna try to sell it and the pressure isn’t gonna come on the Republicans. It is going to come. Now, this is going to be sold to you as a triumphant first 100 days of Biden’s presidency, a victory lap with a pathway forward, because he’s already checked so many boxes.

We went through the boxes just a couple of days ago. He has gotten the vaccine rollout going. Oh, wait. No. That was President Trump that got the vaccine rollout. He continued the vaccine rollout that he inherited, and he got that going, and now we’ve got 100 million-plus people who have gotten the vaccine.

Although now it’s starting to taper off and people are starting to say, “I don’t know if I want to get it,” and that caused Joe Biden yesterday to go out at the White House with his mask on to tell you it’s okay to take your mask off outside then put his mask back on and walk back towards the White House again, all by himself. But he has set up an expectation tonight that this is going to be the Second Coming of FDR, and it’s really…

There’s no way to put it other than that. This is going to the Second Coming of FDR. Joe Biden and Democrats broadly (and some of them in the House of Representatives), including likely Joe Biden remember the 1930s distinctly. They remember the Great Depression. Nancy Pelosi, Pat Leahy, Joe Biden, they remember those days of the 1930s — the Grapes of Wrath, if you will — and they think that this is the 1930s all over again.

They think America is absolutely on the brink of collapse if we don’t do all of this massive spending, and the fact of the matter is they’re wrong. They’re wrong on a couple of counts. Number one, Joe Biden thinks this is the 1930s. It’s not. Much of the economy is still in fine shape if you’ll just have these unelected bureaucrats and mini-dictators reopen businesses across the country.

Number two, if you just get the federal government out of the way and stop the subsidization of nonwork. You have people who are running small businesses, medium businesses, larger businesses, independent businesses who are unable to compete with Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam is bidding out nonwork at 1400 bucks a week or 600 bucks a week, and the businesses that desperately need to hire people are unable to match that.

It is a complete unfairness when you look at the free-market economics that we ought to be enjoying. But I didn’t want to get too far in the weeds on that yet. But it’s important to understand: Joe Biden thinks it’s the 1930s, but he thinks he can pay for all this with the economy that Donald Trump had in 2019 before the coronavirus came to our shores, and that’s the important thing to think about.

Biden and Harris think they can spend like it’s 2019, but they want you to believe it’s 1936, and that’s what’s going to happen tonight. They’re gonna come out and they’re gonna try to sell this stuff to you as being an imperative. Everything he’s going to propose is optional. He’s not going to mention border security. He’s not going to mention getting people back to work. He’s not gonna mention any of that.

This is spend, spend, spend as far as the eye can see. We certainly want to get your thoughts as we preview this speech coming up tonight. At 800-282-2882, be a part of that conversation. One of the points that we have to know right out of the box is, this is going to be a much pared-down environment to give the speech. They’re behind the Iron Curtain there on the Capitol.

You’ve got the fencing and all that stuff still up. The razor wire has been removed at points, but you’ve got a massive presence of the National Guard. You’ve got all these hundreds of people that are gonna be going in there to hear the speech, but it’s not the hundreds of people you would think.

I heard a number earlier today that said typically you’ll get like 1500 people crammed in for a State of the Union address. This is gonna have about 200, and it was Marco Rubio on Fox & Friends yesterday talking about the absurdity of this pared-down speech that’s going to be given tonight relative to what happened back during the crowded impeachment proceeding.

RUBIO: It’s interest when it came to, like, coming together to impeach Donald Trump for the second time after he was out of office. They put a hundred senators in the same room sitting just inches apart for hours at a time over five or six days. Apparently, the covid was not an issue then but now, of course, for something like this? Well, we can’t have that many people in the room sitting next to each other.

BRETT: So as a result they’re gonna have 200 people there in attendance. You will have the representative of the judicial branch, the Chief Justice John Roberts and a crowd of dozens to watch this speech, which is not a State of the Union address, obviously. It’s a joint address to the two houses of Congress that are brought together, for a joint address to a few representatives and senators who will be in attendance at the speech.

But the optics are what matter most to television — especially your progressive, your liberal channels, MSNBC and CNN, who keep pointing out the fact that Joe Biden will be standing on the dais and behind him will be Kamala Harris, the vice president, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, two women. Well, that’s an interesting note about the speech that’s gonna be given tonight.

But the really interesting thing is the profligate trillions of dollars in spending that are going to be offered up. One of the areas they’re going to be focusing on tonight is the notion of free preschool and subsidized college, basically free college. “Free, free, free! It’s for me, me, me!” It’s gonna be an unbelievable thing. He’s encouraging people to get out there and to get in college.

Stay in college. Get those degrees. Do the things you need to do to get those phenomenal social studies degrees, those STEM degrees (if you can find them), and he wants to subsidize in a big way junior college. He’s saying, “Listen, you need to have access to those junior colleges to get the education that you so desperately need across the country.” Former Speaker of the House Newt is Gingrich coming out talking about maybe some of the offerings you might have at some of these junior colleges.

GINGRICH: What’s this free junior college gonna be like? What is it gonna teach? Can you get an undergraduate degree in woken or critical race theory? Meanwhile, the Chinese are getting degrees in engineering and in science.

BRETT: The Chinese are not still, you know, locked down in many places. They’re open for business and figuring out how to dominate the rest of the world. I’m talking about the CCP, the PRC. But Joe Biden’s coming out here with a whole list of expectations. You are familiar with so many of them. You are familiar with so much of what it is that he is offering.

He is looking to hire a hundred thousand teachers. He is looking to rebuild the decimated ranks of the union teachers and educators out there across the country. He is looking for universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. Why not 2-year-olds, Joe? Why not? “President Biden [is] calling for a national partnership with states to offer free, high quality, accessible, inclusive preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds benefiting five million children and saving an average family $13,000.”

But we’re gonna be spending trillions to save the average family $13,000, and many of those average families are gonna be seeing their taxes rising, and they’re gonna be seeing less opportunity with jobs as businesses choose not to expand or the investor class chooses not to expand because of the capital gains tax hike. We’ve got a president who’s going to be speaking tonight and is going to propose a 40% top tax rate.

Yeah, 39.6% is where he’s looking to go for, quote, “the richest” to pay their, quote, “fair share.” He’s also looking at raising corporate taxes to 28% and capital gains taxes to almost 40%. There is nothing to induce people to go out and take their capital and take risks. And yet, and yet, and yet you’ll hear the complaints from the progressive left. They’ll talk about the need to pay your “fair share.”

Andrew Cuomo was crying poor mouth once upon a time when he was worried about Donald Trump’s tax cuts that didn’t allow people to write off their SALT deduction on those houses that are in states like New York and New Jersey and Illinois and in the big, blue states. Well, Andrew Cuomo once upon a time admitted the truth about taxes.

RUSH: It’s not SALT driving out people, Governor Cuomo. It’s your own independent tax rate, your irresponsible spending and the fact that you’ve kept coming back and coming back and coming back and soaking the rich over and over and over again, and there’s nothing to show for it. You’ve got a crumbling infrastructure, you’ve got a widening income gap. You’ve got nothing to show for all this money that you’ve been collecting. So now here is Cuomo admitting what you never hear a Democrat admit, what you never hear a leftist admit.

CUOMO: 1% of the taxpayers —

RUSH: Speed it up!

CUOMO: — pay nearly half of all the taxes. The top 5%, 63% of all the revenue, the top 10%74% of all the revenue. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich. We did! Now, God forbid, the rich leave. Before SALT, a New York City taxpayer paid about 45%. After SALT, that tax increase goes up about 12%. A taxpayer in Florida would see no increase, probably would see a decrease, and Florida also has the advantage of no estate tax.

RUSH: Yeah!

CUOMO: This is also going to be the tipping point.

RUSH: Right. And you don’t see Florida running out of money the way you people are with no state income tax and no estate tax. It’s why I fled down here in 1997.

BRETT: Right on, El Rushbo. Look, we’re going to do a deep dive into taxes today because that’s what all this spending is ultimately going to result in.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: I will clarify what I said right up front about the fact that much of this agenda will not be successful that Joe Biden is going to propose, and I’ll give you details on that in just a little bit. But let’s take a deep dive into what it is that he’s trying to pull off, okay? We know that the economy of the United States of America has its money, has its money created by the investor class and investors broadly speaking.

The reason why you have an Apple, why you have a Google, why you have a Tesla, why you have an Uber — why you have any of the big companies that are offering services that you and I buy every single day, the reason why those exist — is because there was capital that was willing to be invested in those companies. And when those companies came out of the venture capital phase and then went into the free market move into the stock market and the initial public offerings, you had investors.

Not just billionaires and trillionaires, right? But you had individuals, and you had IRAs and 401(k)s willing to invest in those companies to grow those companies so they would be successful. The problem is the orientation. The orientation of the Biden administration and liberals broadly is that all the money in the country belongs to the government. It just does. They let you have some of it.

They let you use some of it. But at the end of the day, it all comes from the government, and they control where that money goes. That’s their orientation. They may not admit that to you, but that’s what they think. We, as free people, believe that money is ours. The money we earn in exchange for our labor, or the profits we reap in exchange for our investments belongs to us. So what does Joe Biden do?

He comes out with this American Families Plan: The $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, filled with everything you could possibly want. (Mostly not.) “Biden wants Congress to approve federal funding for national child care to cap family expenditures to 7% of income, $200 billion for universal prekindergarten for 2- and 3-year-olds, paid family leave and $109 billion for two years of tuition-free community college, among other domestic priorities, as part of a Democratic vision of a more prosperous, competitive and innovative America.”

How does “universal pre-K” get you “a more prosperous and competitive and innovative America”? Well, because people can drop their kids off and go to work. And more people can come out and go to work because the kids are now in the care of a publicly controlled program to educate them at age 2, 3, and 4. That exists now.

It’s called day care. You can actually take a child, enroll them in day care. You can take them to pre-K. That exists right now. But he wants to create a government-driven system. We know what happens when the government drives those systems. They become incredibly bloated and expensive and taken over by unions.

We also know: “The president’s plan also proposes investing $225 billion over a decade for ‘comprehensive’ paid family and medical leave with partial wage replacement, rising to a guaranteed 12 weeks by the end of an envisioned 10-year phase-in.” Why does this matter to you?

Because this is about Joe Biden trying to tell you he cares about you. He is a charitable person. He is a compassionate person. Government is not compassionate. Government is a force that can confiscate your dollars and turn them into pennies. Rush talked about how conservatives define compassion. Here’s what he said.

RUSH: What is fair? Nothing about life is fair. Everything that happens in life, some days are good, some days are bad. Everybody deals with things as they happen. And the left has been very successful in creating this notion that the government is an independent source of money and benevolently distributes it to people in need, but before they get that money they have to take it from somebody else.

Now, we Americans are compassionate people. This is the mitigating effect. We Americans are compassionate people. So we don’t want people to suffer. The objective, though, is to provide the kind of help that teaches people to eventually learn to provide for themselves because that’s where pride in one’s self comes from, that’s where the sense of achievement comes from, the sense of accomplishment.

When you do it yourself. When you buy your own car instead of having somebody give it to you, you’ll appreciate it much more, you’ll care for it better, you’ll feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. This is what the American left doesn’t want you to feel, in my opinion. They want people to stay dependent because that’s where the American left derives its power, people needing them.

We conservatives define compassion this way: not by counting the number of people who get help and who get aid, but by counting the number of people who don’t need it anymore. They’ve been helped in such a way that they are able now to go out and be self-sufficient and productive and contributing to society.

The American welfare system got so bloated at one point that it became profitable for unmarried women to have kids because the government, state and federal, would pay them to take care of them. This led to all kinds of dissolution of families in certain poor communities around the country because it obviated the need for a father.

If the government is going to pay you to have a baby or a series of babies, what do you need to get married, what do you need a man around for? You don’t. And this was also part of a devious plan, I think, to create power in government, create need in single women and so forth. These things are very hideous because to me they end up doing great damage to people. It’s not good for the babies born that way, it’s certainly not good for the mothers.

BRETT: The government does not ever take your dollars and give them to charitable causes. The government takes your dollars and then they look to the House and the Senate to figure out how to parse out those dollars to various groups that are preferred in this way or that way. “In 2018 the American people donated,” this is a real number, “$427 billion in charitable money.”

That’s $427 billion in charitable donations, free will, voluntary donations. The government is unable to do that. Why? Because the very government that’s going to spend $200 billion to get you pre-K education and family leave and all those sorts things that they’re gonna call charity or benefits or whatever they want to label them is the same government that will spend billions of dollars subsidizing Planned Parenthood.

And it will spend billions of dollars keeping children in underperforming schools in the inner city and will take government programs to go in and ensure that the streets are not as safe as they could be, because they’re gonna start targeting police departments. It’s the same government that will tell you one day, “Don’t wear a mask;” the next day, “Wear a mask.” The government’s not your friendly, fuzzy teddy bear.

They want you to believe that it is, but it’s not. Joe Biden’s gonna stand there and look incredibly reasonable tonight. The reason why Joe Biden wants to ask for $200 billion for a pre-K education is because he knows he’s not going to get $200 billion. You want a $100,000 salary? You go in for a negotiation, and you ask for a $200,000 salary, and then you settle on $100,000.

Joe Biden is going to shoot for the moon and hope that he gets a piece of that tree three blocks away. That’s what he’s hoping for. These are aspirational promises that he can continue to use to stoke the fears and to stoke the grievance culture in our country. He knows much of this will not be enacted.

But he wants to use it as a wedge issue to make the Republicans and the conservatives look mean and greedy. We’re not buyin’ it. We’re not believing it because we know how good the American people really, really are. It’s not hard. It’s math, and it’s politics. And this party, Democratic Party, will always run back to the mean.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Let’s go back out on the phones and check in with Ken in Livonia, Michigan. Ken, what’s on your mind?

CALLER: I just wanted to comment that as Joe Biden prepares to give his speech to the nation tonight, I thought it would be nice to take a step back in time, go back to when Rush Limbaugh gave a speech to CPAC. This is right after Barack Obama won the presidency the first time around, and Rush made a very important comment, and I want to say, “Ditto, ditto,” and apply it to Joe Biden and the Democrats today, where Rush said he hoped that Barack Obama’s presidency was a failure.

And Rush knew exactly what he was talking about because of the direction that our country was going in. And so, remember that, people. Look at the direction that the Democrats, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris want to take our country, a direction I don’t think you want to go to. And I wanted to say, “Rush, you got it right the first time,” and, “Ditto, ditto,” now to Joe Biden.

BRETT: Ken in Livonia, Michigan, thank you for checking in.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: Let’s give a listen to Joe Biden’s presidential address courtesy of Paul Shanklin.

ANNOUNCER: Now, Joe Biden delivers his presidential address.

BIDEN (impression): I live at 16 million hundred Pennsylvania, you know, in Pennsylvania somewhere.

ANNOUNCER: This concludes his presidential address.

BRETT: You got what was promised. That’s the address. That’s the Biden address right there. Big news coming out of the Washington Post. Remember when they were doing their big fact-checking thing, and they said that Donald Trump told 55 trillion, quadrillion lies during his presidency? Remember that? I just… It was so tedious an adventure to go on, as they were saying, “We’re gonna count every single lie of the Trump presidency, and we’re gonna post an article about all the lies that he tells!”

Well, the Washington Post has decided that are there no lies coming out of the Biden administration. This bit of reporting coming from the Washington Times. “The Washington Post is calling a lid on the presidential fact-checking database 100 days into the Biden administration. Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer of the Fact Checker, tweeted late Monday that the team would continue to fact-check President Biden ‘rigorously’ but would no longer maintain the database started under former President Trump.

“‘Here’s the Biden database — which we do not plan to extend beyond 100 days,’ Mr. Kessler tweeted. ‘I have learned my lesson.'” Ah. Ah. Okay. So turnabout isn’t fair play there, Glenn Kessler. We mentioned in the last hour the proposals coming out of the Biden American Families Plan. He is going to promote universal pre-K, he’s gonna promise free junior college, he’s gonna promise free college-college.

And I asked a question: Where’s any mention of the trade schools, learning a trade, getting out there so that you can get employed as quickly as you possibly can without having to sit there listening to, you know, some crazy professor like Elizabeth Warren telling you that your country is awful?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BRETT: We’ve got this big speech coming up tonight, and we’re all gonna be watching with rapt attention, listening to what the president has to say, what he’s offering up, what he wants us to understand. Rush… In anticipation of Biden’s big speech tonight, Rush would have wanted us to have a little fun like we’ve done with past speeches.

RUSH: Hey, folks, do you want to have a little fun tonight? Yeah, it might be a little fun. We used to suggest this when I hosted my television show. Whenever Clinton press conference or State of the Union speech or something was coming up, we’d tell people to make little signs that you could tape to the TV screen to remind you what you’re watching so as to keep focused rather than being lulled by what you were hearing.

So with Obama speaking tonight, if you want to have some fun, just prepare a sign that fits on your screen that you can read from where you’re watching it. You put it in the lower fourth of the screen, and it says something along the lines of, just off the top of my head here. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have no experience.” Make up one of your own to remind you.

BRETT: That’s what you can do tonight, folks. Pick up that trick from the Obama speeches and apply it to the Biden speech tonight. I mean, you can add, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” You could say, “I don’t know who wrote this speech for me.” “Who are these women standing behind me?” “Is it time for bed yet?” “Are there going to be cookies when I get home?” “Where’s my 10%?”

Oh, that’s… Now we’re starting to get a little chippy.

“I’m going to spend all of your money.” You could just have any number of messages up there. “Brought to you by the CCP.” I mean, whatever you want to say. You could just take whatever shot you want there in terms of the commentary, and you could even make a bunch of Post-Its and just kind of rotate them throughout the speech, just to keep it fresh.

Just to keep it fresh, that’s what you gotta do.