RUSH: Louisville, North Carolina, this is Jeff. Great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Oh, thank you, Rush. I’m a 20-year-listener, and I am thrilled to be talking to you today.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: I wanted to comment on the jobs stuff that you had talked about earlier with the new numbers coming out and so on, and I think that a gross miscalculation that the administration has made, it really goes to their arrogance, is they think that companies are going to rehire at the same rate that they let people go. And they are sadly mistaken. No one is going to hire until they absolutely have to hire because they have way too much work to handle. And there’s nobody out here that I know of that’s got way too much to handle.
RUSH: Good point. There is a giant misunderstanding of capitalism by people who hate it, and they look at it and they see it as a perpetual machine producing dollars and profits that they can skim and tax and take. And they look at these people as all greedy, and if they’re not hiring people it’s because they want their high profits to be maintained. They have an ingrained hatred for the pursuit of profit and they have a double ingrained hatred for the people that make a profit. Look, your theory is solid. It’s dead on. I can’t get past the fact that there’s a part of me that believes Obama is very happy —
CALLER: I agree.
RUSH: — for unemployment to stay where it is.
CALLER: Well, you know, I’m in the construction industry here in North Carolina and we’re suffering. I mean it’s unbelievable how bad we’re suffering, and he thinks that he’s gonna, you know, turn it on here before the election and put that stimulus money out, there’s not enough time. There’s not enough time at this point for that to happen, and it’s not nearly enough money to make it happen.
RUSH: It depends. Now, remember, this bunch will manipulate numbers. We’ve now passed the point or reached the point where there are more government union workers than private sector union workers. And this stimulus money is gonna go to states and gonna go to cities where they’re going to be able to keep people or hire new ones. He doesn’t care where jobs are as long as he can say the unemployment rate is going down.
CALLER: Yeah. I agree. But I don’t know that he’s going to be able to take it down. Everybody is so strapped, all the government entities. I don’t think it’s going to happen.
RUSH: If they put out these numbers that unemployment is coming down and it’s going great guns out there and people still aren’t finding jobs they’re going to wonder, ‘Well, where the hell are they? I can’t find a job. Nobody I know has got a job.’ But see, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin yesterday in a statement after reading the Obama budget came out and said, (paraphrasing) ‘Look, there’s no question what this is. This is an attempt to turn this country into a collectivist society that is a predominantly government-run welfare state.’ And I don’t disagree with that. In fact, I have been one of the first to say so. The choice that we have in this budget is either the destruction of the United States as we’ve known it or the maintenance and the promotion of the United States as we’ve known it. That’s what we face here.
The Heritage Foundation in their Morning Bell blog: ‘The President’s Permanent Political Slush Fund.’ And if I may remind you that I, El Rushbo, was the first to call these slush funds. ‘After suffering major electoral and legislative defeats last month, President Barack Obama took to the campaign trail in Nashua, New Hampshire, pitching his administration’s latest new plan to lower our nation’s double digit unemployment rate. This time, the President hopes to do for small businesses what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did for home mortgages. Specifically, he wants to create a new $30 billion ‘Small Business Lending Fund’ which will loan money to banks with assets under $10 billion at favorable new rates, as long as they comply with a slew of new regulations designed to incentivize them to loan that money to small businesses. Never mind that a recent poll of small business owners by the National Federation of Independent Businesses ranked ‘Finance and Interest Rates’ as the second to last most important problem facing their business.’
Interest rates are low! The problem here is, they don’t want to hire ’cause they have no idea what they’re going to be facing in addition to Obama’s massive tax increases coming down the pike. They don’t know yet if there’s going to be a hook and crook way to get health care. They don’t know yet if Obama’s going to succeed in getting cap and tax. It’s that simple. But the Heritage Foundation asked a good question. Where’s Obama getting this $30 billion?
‘President explained yesterday: ‘This proposal takes the money that was repaid by Wall Street banks to provide capital for community banks on Main Street.’ In other words, TARP — the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program first signed into law by President George Bush, and then used by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to force many financial firms into taking taxpayer money they never wanted in the first place. But if Wall Street banks are paying back their TARP funds, then how can President Obama say the following when justifying his Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee: ‘We want our money back, and we’re going to get it. And that’s why I’m proposing a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee to be imposed on major financial firms until the American people are fully compensated for the extraordinary assistance.’ … So which is it? Are Wall Street banks repaying their TARP obligations in full so that the President can afford to spend $30 billion on his new Small Business Lending Fund? Or is TARP going to lose $117 billion? The answer is both.’ But again, the blatant hypocrisy and lie that Obama gave for raising fees on banks has been exposed. They are paying the money back, and he’s gonna take some of it to fund small banks so that they’ll supposedly loan to people.