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RUSH: Bill, Dallas, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, I am. Hi, Rush. How you doing?

RUSH: Great. Great to have you here, sir. Doing well. Thank you.

CALLER: Good. Good. Good to join your program today.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Let me just start out by saying that I’m totally on board with you in terms of the free enterprise system and hard work and that’s the way I’ve spent my life. I’ve worked long days every day and I’ve accomplished what I’ve accomplished. I haven’t been as successful as you, but I’ve been successful in my own eyes, and have done okay. But I want to, as brothers in that position, ’cause I really do believe that’s the way we should go forward, I think that there’s an opportunity here that we may be overlooking and that is that, you know, there’s just a lot of people out there, and it’s a significant percentage of the population, that just are not gonna be able to be entrepreneurs.

RUSH: I know. I know not everybody can be.

CALLER: You got that, and then the second thing is that you got a lot of people out there with the disparity that we have now between the cost of living and income, you got a lot of people that just can’t pay their bills. And it seems like that if our group could reach back and really do what the Democrats are doing except do it in a proactive and a positive manner —

RUSH: How would you do that? How do you pay somebody in a positive, proactive manner?

CALLER: Well, I don’t think you can do it directly. I mean the implication of what you’re saying is that you can’t, and I agree with that, but there has gotta be a way — well, let me say it like this. You were talking a little earlier about free enterprise and all that stuff, and this is meant as a positive statement, that the implication that one could take from that is, well, okay, everybody ought to go out and work hard and do all this stuff, and then anybody that doesn’t do that, just forget ’em.

RUSH: Nope, that has never been what America’s been all about. But to discuss this problem honestly, we’re gonna have to go back 50 to 75 years. How did, do you think, how did we as a nation, how did people in this country get along when they lost their job before there was unemployment compensation? Because it happened. How did people get along before the government came along with Social Security, how did it happen? How did people get along without Medicare and Medicaid? Because it happened. How did that happen?

We have destroyed the work incentive for 50 years. We have been conditioning people that if they don’t get what they want, it’s not their fault and it’s the government’s job to make things equal. We have conditioned laziness in an ever-increasing portion of the population. We have skewed our values somewhere along the lines. If you just woke up today as an adult and you look at the disparities in income and say, “My God, what an unfair country,” don’t blame you, but we didn’t get here overnight. We got here by virtue of misplaced policies. I don’t even care if they were well-intentioned or not. We got here by misplaced policies that had as their central premise, if you just let the government redistribute income, you can have equality of outcome and everybody would be fair, and there is this utopia out there.

Government dependence is a learned behavior, and there are people teaching it, and they are Democrats. The Democrat Party, the American left, the worldwide left have been teaching dependence on government, they have been encouraging it for years. I don’t think you can take a snapshot of America today and indict capitalism. Capitalism didn’t cause the disparities as they exist. Capitalism didn’t cause the income inequality. Capitalism didn’t cause people wanting to work hard but can’t find work. Capitalism didn’t cause that. It’s a combination of other things, a belief primarily, though, that a centrally planning entity like a government can eliminate such disparity. It can’t. Government can only exacerbate. Government cannot create wealth, it can only destroy it.

We’ve been on this road for a long time, and that’s why I constantly say it’s going to take more than one or two elections to reverse the direction that we’re going and to deal with the attitudes that we’ve got. You might think it sounds cruel to say to somebody, “Hey, you outta work, go get a job.” What happened when somebody lost a job 50 years ago and there wasn’t unemployment compensation, what did people do? They didn’t just shrivel up and die. What happened when the buggy whip industry got put out of business by the automobile? What happened? People adjust to it. Today we’re not allowed to adjust. We subsidize.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’m keying off a column that my brother wrote (it’s out today) about the reelect and what really we face. Obama in a normal circumstance in the United States of America, would be finished. With this economy, with the destruction that’s gone on, it is policies that have mailed miserably to do what Obama promised they would do or projected they would do. The swath of destruction is wide. Home values have plummeted. People can’t find work. The jobs they have, they’re worried about keeping. It’s horrible. It is just heartbreak out there — and we have a regime that is not in in the slightest bit interested in altering their policies to do something that might work.

So we have to ask ourselves as we approach the election: Just what kind of country are we? Are there now people who are willing to settle for a second class country, who want the government to be primarily the agent of redistribution of income and wealth, who are perfectly fine with America declining as a superpower — militarily and economically, internationally and domestically — and I’ve got a statistic, a news story out of California that sort of establishes why I’m a little worried aboutthis. But before we get to that let me go back to the last caller that we had, a good guy, a compassionate conservative. “Rush, you and I, we agree with things but there are people hurting. They’re outta work. We’ve gotta do something for ’em.”

As I say, you take a snapshot of America today and say, “Yeah. Boy, what’s wrong with this country? This is not America,” but you can’t take a snapshot of the country right now, claim that “America” is not good, that it is wrong that the systems we have are flawed, ’cause where we are is the result of 50-plus years of liberal Democrat planning that has in way too many ways come to fruition. Look at the guy that called. Our country, folks, is more than broke. Generations of future Americans owe trillions of dollars. This matters. This is not something in the abstract. Just because it’s government debt doesn’t mean you forget it. It’s there and it must be serviced. At the very least, that debt must be serviced, if not retired.

We have a national debt of $14.3 trillion. It’s incomprehensible. The tax rates that people who are not yet born are going to face? You add Obamacare to this, folks, and the future is a real nightmare in terms of future generations of Americans even having a chance at prosperity. You see it happening in Greece and the UK and throughout the European Union. You see 15% unemployment. You see people living in squalor in small spaces, narrow streets, tiny little cars, with no hope for anything better — and we had this guy on the phone still talking about a “safety net,” as if we haven’t done enough to help people. The safety net has become a hammock, and it’s been a hammock for many decades. We have spent money in the quest to alleviate the problems of people being out of work or underemployed.

We have spent and spent and spent under the theory that spending will alleviate these real, genuine human problems. But he calls here as though we haven’t done anything yet. “We gotta get serious. We haven’t done enough.” We have done more than any society in history has done for the underprivileged around the world, but we’re no longer talking about the underprivileged. We are talking about the fully, entirely capable, who we now excuse for tuning out and not even trying. One person gets offended over something in this country, and everybody must stop whatever it is they’re doing. “That offends that one person,” and regulations are written to make sure that that one person will no longer be offended. This is not about a safety net. It’s about the survival of our country as we know it.

It’s about the left redistributing wealth and waging war on the private sector. That is what’s happening. We’re not talking about a safety net anymore. The “safety net” is dragging us down, strangling us because it’s a hammock. Our safety net’s become a vacation destination. Now, look at this from California. Let me go back now and set the table again. I raise the question: Where are we here with our population at this stage of our development and existence as a country? Do we really think, a significant number of people think the purpose of the government is to redistribute wealth — to take from those who have on the basis it’s not fair they have it in the first place — and give it to those who don’t regardless why they don’t have it, and if that doesn’t happen we’re somehow immoral and unjust?

This is the LA Times: “California’s economic recovery stumbled in May as employers shed 29,200 jobs from payrolls, a surprisingly large loss in a state that had been on the mend.” It has not been on the mend! You thinkthat’s correct that therehas been any “recovery” in California? The headline here: “California Loses 29,000 Jobs In May, A Blow To Recovery.” “The state’s unemployment rate dropped to 11.7% from 11.8% even though there are 29,200 new unemployed people,” and it went down simply because they are reducing the universe of available jobs. Now, here’s a state which has become essentially a welfare state — not just for Americans, but for illegal immigrants — and yet who wins the elections there? The people who have made it this way! The people who have caused this.

This is why we wonder.

The people in California who object to what has happened to their state are in a minority. The Democrat Party owns and runs that state, and they’re destroying it. Destroying it within the context of how we’ve always defined prosperity and success. It’s stupefying. The people that live there, though, continue to vote for this, and there’s a reason for it. These 29,200 people who are unemployed are gonna be okay somehow, some way. They’re being taken care of. They got health care, welfare, food stamps. They have everything they need. They have a Hollywood left that makes great movies about ’em, has great sympathy for them. Democrats are always gonna win elections in welfare states. That’s why they want there to be more and more welfare states.

It’s a real question.

Another story. This is from CNBC: “How Miserable? Index Says the Worst in 28 Years — When it comes to measuring the combination of unemployment and inflation, it doesn’t get much more miserable than this. In fact, misery, as measured in the unofficial Misery Index that simply totals the unemployment and inflation rates, is at a 28-year high, reflective of how weak the economic recovery has been and how far there is to go.” There ought to be no question: Obama ought to be finished now. Any other president would be. Any other sitting president would be destroyed. The media would have already made it certain that this president could not be reelected. If it were a Republican president and these economic events hadn’t happened, the media would lie and say that they had happened, and they would try to convince people that they were in a state of misery when they weren’t. So we’re getting to the point where it’s not gonna be red states and blue states, It’s gonna be welfare and nonwelfare states. That’s how we’re gonna distinguish them.

Then there’s this. I don’t care what stack I go to, I can pluck something from one of these stacks that shows you what we’re up against. Again, this is the LA Times. Your DVR, set-top boxes, your TiVo, your DirecTV receiver, “even when not recording … suck out the same amount of energy annually as is produced by nine coal-burning power plants, according to a new report. About 160 million digital video recorders and cable and other pay-TV boxes in the U.S. eat up 27 terawatt-hours of electricity a year and cost consumers about $3 billion, according to researchers from the [far-left] Natural Resources Defense Council.” So now DVRs are evil. They “waste” $3 billion a year, meaning you use it. How can it be wasted? You use it! You derive pleasure and satisfaction.

You buy the product under the pretext it’s gonna provide this. It provides it; you use it. You pay for it. Now you’re “wasting” $2 billion a year. Wasting? Where would the money go otherwise? This is my point. Here you have the National Resources Defense Council that doesn’t like the fact that all of us are buying DVRs and cable set-top boxes, so we’re “wasting” the money. They want that money to be spent somewhere else. They want the government to come in, declare these things energy hogs, get ’em out of people’s houses (don’t laugh, this is how the anti-SUV thing started) and free up that two billion for…what? What would they have it spent on that would not be a waste? Is there any electricity if we don’t make it?

Can’t we make as much electricity as we want? How do you “waste” electricity? This is not the kind of thinking, this is not the kind of talk that is consistent with a great country; with a growing, thriving economy. Here we have people who once again want to take every shot they can at this country — take its economy back to the Stone Age — for their own minority, silly, stupid, sniveling little agenda: Which is make the government all powerful. Give the government the power to go in and turn these things off and make sure you can only use ’em X-number of hours a day, and then make sure you can only use ’em to record certain approved programs.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the people now claiming that your video recorder, Digital Video Recorder, your cable box is wasting all this electricity and you gotta get rid of them? These are the people that were behind the Alar scare. You remember Alar? One night on 60 Minutes they had a feature on Alar, the substance put on apples to make them shiny and red. They had Meryl Streep on there, the renowned actress, who shouted (Meryl Streep impression): “What! Are we doing! To our children? What are we doing to our children? We’re poisoning the children with Alar!” It was a hoax. Like so much of what comes in the environmental left, it was a pure hoax. It damaged the apple industry, particularly in great state of Washington in the Great Northwest, and these are the same clods that are now focusing on your TiVo or your DirecTV receiver. Same bunch of people.

END TRANSCRIPT

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