RUSH: Yesterday afternoon on CNBC’s Street Signs, the leader of the regime appeared with John Harwood who said, ‘If reducing consumption is a good idea, could you see the potential for a value-added tax in this country?’
OBAMA: That is something that has worked for some countries. Uhhhh, it’s something that would be novel for the United States. And before, you know, I start saying this makes sense or that makes sense, I want to get a better picture of what our options are — and my first priority is to figure out: How can we reduce wasteful spending so that, you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide; and then we decide how do we pay for that, as opposed to figuring out how much money we can raise and then, uh, not have to make some tough choices to the spending side.
RUSH: Okay, so are we going to have a value-added tax, VAT tax, ‘That is something that has worked for some countries. Uhhhh, it’s something that would be novel for the United States. And before, you know, I start saying this makes sense or that makes sense, I want to get a better picture of what our options are…’ It sounds to me like it’s on the table. It sounds to me like a VAT tax is on the table here, and all the rest of this is just words made to look like, ‘Well, we gotta examine it! It’s pretty novel for the United States, a pretty strange thing. I gotta look at this, ’cause, you know, I’m OBAMA! I’ve got so much financial experience. I know all about taxation. I know all about everything to do with high finance. I just have to call George Soros to find out what he thinks about this, and I’ll get back to you.’
So here is the giddy Associated Press report of this: ‘President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days. Before deciding what revenue options are best for dealing with the deficit and the economy, Obama said in an interview with CNBC, ‘I want to get a better picture of what our options are.” So we’ve had Volcker out there talking about it and a number of other people have been talking about it. ‘For days, White House spokesmen have said the president has not proposed and is not considering a VAT.
”I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,’ White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters shortly before Obama spoke with CNBC. After the interview, White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki said nothing has changed and the White House is ‘not considering’ a VAT.’ They’re not? Who are we to believe here? I mean, the president just said he’s looking at it! His press secretary said: No, no, no, that’s not on the table; not considering it. ‘In the CNBC interview, Obama said he was waiting for recommendations from a bipartisan fiscal advisory commission on ways to tackle the deficit and other problems.’ Yeah. So he’s waiting to hear what Andy Stern of the SEIU thinks we ought to do to reduce the deficits.
He’s on the commission along with Alan Simpson ‘Babe’ and ‘Irksome’ Bowles — and, of course, they will make their recommendations in December following the November elections. And, folks, what’s going to happen here is that Obama’s never, ever going to say anything more than he did here. What’s going to happen is, you’re going to have join us presser and you’re going to have Alan Simpson ‘Babe’ and ‘Irksome’ Bowles come out and say it’s the only way we can do it. I told you the other day, the smart people are saying, ‘Rush, Rush. No way we can ever pay down this debt. The reason they ran it up so large is precisely that. There’s no way. This cannot be paid back. What has to happen for markets to be cool with it is for an effort to be made to pay it back. Make it look like serious effort is undertaken to reduce the debt.
‘And how do you do that, Rush?’ they asked me. ‘You do it with tax increases.’ That’s what leftists around the world will applaud. That’s what world bodies will applaud. That’s what Democrats will applaud. The UN will applaud it. The ChiComs will applaud it. Hugo Chavez will applaud it. So the world will say, ‘You know this man Obama, he gets it! He’s very serious about reducing the debt load of the United States. This is a very serious man.’ So he puts this commission together, they come out with a VAT tax and whatever else they add to it. Obama never has to have his fingerprints on it, but he adopts the recommendation because these are learned people! A bipartisan commission announced in December of this year, long after the November elections — and then the world applauds. (clapping) ‘All right! All right! The US is finally getting serious about managing its debt.’
When, of course, we are going to keep spending and spending and spending as the tax raises continue and the spending will continue, and at some point the smart money people are going to be wrong. At some point it is going to collapse. It can’t be sustained forever this way. In fact, guess what they’ve just done in Greece? They have just realized — get this, now. They have just realized they underestimated the size of their debt by a whole whopping 2% of GDP, which is significant. It’s even worse than they originally thought. Let me amend that: It’s even worse than they originally said. They’ve known it all along, and now there are strikes. Everybody that’s on a freeloader status over there — teachers, doesn’t matter — are striking, promising all kinds of civil unrest. They’ve had decades of a welfare state, and now all of it’s going to be taken away under austerity plans.
You look over there and you might see a little microcosm of our future. These guys are being honest. The White House is not considering VAT, but the deficit panel is. Alan ‘Babe’ Simpson and ‘Irksome’ Bowles.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Every six months the Congressional Budget Office revises our debt, claiming they underestimated it. It happens here; it happens in Greece; it happens in the European Union and Obama is doing exactly what they accused Ronald Reagan of. They accused Reagan of purposely running up a whole bunch of spending so that government would have to be slashed. Remember that accusation? Reagan was spending all the money ’cause it was the only way to get government to start cutting back. Now Obama’s actually doing it, and Obama’s doing it so that taxes would have to be raised tremendously. That’s what’s gonna get everybody’s feet out of the fire on this in government, in terms of the rest of the world looking at our debt, looking at our financial system, looking at our health. As long as we come in with massive tax — do you know how the Europeans are going to love a VAT? Do you know how the ChiComs are going to love a VAT? Do you know how all these people who are nervously holding our debt can be mollified if we just start raising taxes? And it’s coming in January with the sunset of the Bush tax cuts.
This is Warren, Calabash, North Carolina, great to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Greetings.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I want to talk about this — I heard part of your bank regulation before. Now, the bank regulation, they want to do a lot of high-class tuning of the banks and how to regulate them. When you think out of the box, a simple sentence will solve the problem. You take these big banks and you cut them down to size. In other words, make them half of their size or a quarter, whatever it takes to get proper disbursement of monies.
RUSH: Wait a second, now. What does the size of a bank have to do with proper disbursement of monies?
CALLER: Well, there’d be more smaller banks and by that they’d be more banks in the neighborhoods, large banks, not gigantic banks.
RUSH: So wait, you want to cut the big banks in half, cut ’em down to size, make ’em smaller?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And you want the people who write the US tax code, who run the health care system, who run Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all that, you want them to be in charge of how big banks ought to be?
CALLER: Well, that’s up to the Congress or —
RUSH: That’s what I’m saying.
CALLER: Our esteemed people which have an oath. They all swear this oath to protect the Constitution and —
RUSH: Nah. That went out the window a long time.
CALLER: — against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
RUSH: They are doing that. I mean they’re coming after the tea parties, domestic enemy, there’s no question.
CALLER: Oh, yeah. (laughing)
RUSH: I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to be very honest here. I do not understand accounting, the banking business, I’m not going to sit here and pretend I’m an expert in banking. I’m not. I’m not an expert in the US financial system. I have to ask economists. I have to ask people that I trust, who I think know what they’re talking about in order for me to learn about it. I think it’s a closed society. All these terms they come up with are designed to — it’s like legalese in any other kind of contract. I don’t know what that means. But I do know this. I do know this. I know that we do not need to put in charge of these banks some guy who has never, ever produced a dollar, who has never done anything but spend somebody else’s money, that doesn’t have the foggiest idea how capital is created, doesn’t know the first thing about capital formation, in fact, resents it. This is like putting Colonel Sanders in charge of the henhouse, folks.
We’ve got a guy who does not like the way this country was structured and founded, he does not like the way it operated under a capitalist, free market economy, and we’re putting him in charge of it. And we’re putting somebody in charge of it who has deep resentment for this country and the way it’s operated. Don’t doubt me on this. The guy runs around the world apologizing for the country. (doing Obama impression) ‘Well, you know, whether you like it or not, we must have a superpower military. Whether you like it or not, we are world class economy.’ What do you mean, whether you like it or not? Don’t tell me that that’s not a rhetorical device, that’s just the way Obama speaks. If you don’t want to admit who Obama is and what he’s all about, it’s just because you want to keep your head in the sand and don’t want to deal with the hard, cold reality of what we face. But everybody who has the ability to keep both eyes open for ten seconds and both ears open for 20 can see exactly what’s going on. And the last person qualified to determine how big a bank is, the leader of the regime, the last guy, Barack Obama. He’s working at a business newsletter and he writes in one of his books that he feels like he’s behind enemy lines working in a capitalist endeavor.
Chester, Pennsylvania, this is Dan. I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. It’s a great honor.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I just want to know if you can enlighten me. I’m trying to figure out how Timothy Geithner gets off saying it’s not going to cost the taxpayers a dime when he’s creating a whole new government agency that’s going to employ hundreds of overpaid federal employees to shred apart our Ninth Amendment rights.
RUSH: Well, they’re lying. They don’t have a dime without taxpayer money.
CALLER: It’s not going to cost a dime. It’s going to be a pretty penny. I mean look at the Department of Energy. That was supposed to get us off of foreign oil. It hasn’t produced one drop of oil —
RUSH: Exactly right, exactly right. What they want you to believe is — what you’re talking about is this $50 billion bailout fund. They’re not calling it that. It’s a slush fund. What they want you to believe is the banks are contributing to that, these evil Wall Street bankers and these investment bankers, they’re going to have to cough up the money, not the taxpayers. Well, the taxpayers are at the end of the line on all this. The taxpayers here in this case are investors, shareholders, and if the banks have to pool resources and put whatever total of $50 billion in a fund, whatever bank puts ten billion in is going to find a way to recoup it, and what they charge people, they might raise the ATM fees, they might raise their fees per transaction. Oh, and speaking of that, wait ’til you start getting a tax on every trade, a t-a-x on every trade that you make. Oh, yeah, in your portfolio, yes, inside your portfolio, every trade you make, tax on it. Not capital gains, just a transaction tax. You don’t think that’s coming, Snerdley? Ha. We don’t have any money. They have to create the illusion that they are being responsible managing the debt.
This is Tim in Biloxi, Mississippi. Nice to have on you the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you very much, Rush, for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I am a CPA, I’ve been a CPA for 35 years and the Obama administration just continues to do so the same — it’s a one-trick pony, the whole banking regulation aspect that’s out there is designed to do, in my opinion, little more than create yet another layer of bureaucracy, take more jobs out of the private sector, fatten up the government even more. We have regulation out there. Bernie Madoff, the SEC, the FTC. If those clowns were doing their jobs, none of those things would have happened. Why in the world should we possibly believe that with a new layer of regulation that the individuals that are doing the job are going to be any more competent or qualified or diligent in their tasks?
RUSH: It’s a great question, except you have to look at this in a different way. I’m assuming that you are accepting the premise that what they really want to do here is regulate for the good of the industry.
CALLER: My premise is all they want to do is put more power in government.
RUSH: All right, then you’re right. It’s not about regulation. It’s about control. It is about picking winners and losers. It is about rewarding your friends and punishing the people you don’t like.
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: This is how regimes work, and that’s the command-and-control authority here, under the guise of consumer protection. See, that’s how this is all being set — and there are some consumer protection provisions in this bill, and they’re not bad. That’s not at all what this is about. That’s just to get people sucked into thinking their ATM fees aren’t going to go up or if the ATM fee does go up, Obama’s going to fire the CEO. So, it is about control and picking winners and losers and punishing the people you don’t like.