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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I’ve been here 24 years. We’re into our 24th year now, is that right? Yeah, we’re in our 24th year because we’re 23 plus. Our 24th anniversary is August 1st. And there were three-and-a-half years doing this program pretty much the same way in Sacramento before it started nationally. (sniffs) So that’s 27, 28 years. (interruption) No, it’s the cigars that are causing the sniffles here. Cigar smoke is one of the best decongestants that I have run into. Anyway, I can remember when this program started back in Sacramento and even moving forward in the early nineties. It was death — it was talk show death; it was guaranteed tune-out — to start talking about the federal budget. That was so minutia-like. It was such boring drivel. It was numbers; it was inside baseball congressional stuff.


And today it’s pretty much the lead item that we’re going to talk about, and I think it’s interesting to note that because of that we have a clear illustration of just how much the American people have become concerned about such things as federal spending, the debt, the deficit, and what it means to ’em. It really is striking as the host of a program profoundly concerned with tune-out. It’s the last thing you want. You want people to listen. And I can tell you, it wasn’t that long ago — 20, 23, 24 years — that you start talking about the budget and there go the buttons being pushed in the car going to a different station.

Today Paul Ryan’s new budget is out. He’s the budget expert the Republican side in the House of Representatives. It’s a budget that deals with the problems that we have. The really shocking thing about Paul Ryan’s budget, which is the Republican budget, is that it does many of the things that voters sent the Republican Congress to do back in 2010. And that really ticks off the news media. The one-party news media is reporting the news of the Ryan budget, with AP calling it “an election year budget.” These venal Republicans never do anything except for political advantage! Yes, it’s an election year budget by Paul Ryan!

You never hear Obama and his “election year budget,” or Obama and his “election year” whatever. We’ve never heard from the AP or anybody else in the State-Controlled Media how the Democrats have refused to come up with any kind of budget for three years ’cause they’re afraid it will hurt ’em in the elections. The Democrats haven’t submitted a real budget! Obama has, but it’s one the past two-to-three years that’s never had a prayer. The last Obama budget that was voted on lost 97 to nothing. So he’s not even serious about it. Speaking of budgets, Mark Knoller of CBS News has committed another random act of journalism.

Mark Knoller of CBS News is reporting today that the national debt has now increased more during Obama’s three years and two months in office than it did during eight years of the George Bush presidency. The national debt has increased more during Obama’s first term than in all of Bush’s two terms, and we’re not even through Obama’s first term. In the real world, in a world of sanity, there’s not a soul — there’s not a single person, there is not one individual in the Obama administration — who can attack the Ryan budget with any credibility whatsoever. Not in a sane world. The Obama budget team are the architects of an abysmal failure. The Obama budget team are the architects of a debt crisis that threatens the very foundation of our country.

And yet they are all over the place (because it’s an “election year,” don’t you know) responding to Ryan’s budget and belittling it and pooh-poohing it and talking about how it doesn’t do enough for the poor and how it’s going to take away benefits from the poor. The architects of an absolute, literal disaster are the first out of the box to rip Paul Ryan and a studious, responsible budget effort. It’s just laughable. The whole thing is virtually laughable. These people do not know how ridiculous they’ve become. I’m talking about the Obama people. They don’t know how ridiculous they sound. They don’t know how incompetent people know they are. So this Ryan budget… Let’s listen to Paul Ryan. Let’s go to the audio sound bites here. We’ll start here at the very top. This is this morning in Washington up on Capitol Hill. Paul Ryan, Republican from Wisconsin, held a press conference to introduce the Republican budget. It’s called “A Path to Prosperity.”


RYAN: We propose that we repeal the president’s disastrous health care law. We propose to save and strengthen Medicare by taking power away from government bureaucrats. We believe competition and choice should be the way forward versus price controls that lead to rationing. We also propose, as one of our hallmark issues to get to economic growth and job creation, to reform the tax system. We propose to collapse the six different tax brackets into two rates: A 10% bracket and a 25% bracket for individuals — and a 25% bracket for corporations, which is at the international average and going to a territorial system.

RUSH: Right: $5.7 trillion in cuts, two tax rates of 10% and 25% … $5.7 trillion in tax cuts. I ran across something the other day. There’s a little controversy swirling around not so much Apple (I guess it is Apple) but some guy who does a stage show, some theoretical performer named Mike Daisy who… Ah, I’ll get into it in just a minute. But there have been a lot of blog references to this, and in the process of keeping up with this I saw a little blog post about Apple’s announcement yesterday of what they’re gonna do with their nearly $100 billion in cash. One hundred billion dollars. One company, Apple, Inc., has a $100 billion in cash just sitting around, and they’ve had it for a while.

It keeps growing. Investors, a lot of people say, “What are we gonna do with this? Should we pay dividends? Should we do stock buyback? Should we do nothing?” Steve Jobs didn’t want to do anything with it; Steve Jobs wanted to keep it; it was security for him. It gave him all kinds of flexibility running the business, being able to prepay shipping, for example, being able to lock up every airplane shipping cargo from China to the United States for a new product introduction like the iPad so that no other competitor could ship their stuff at the same time and use it for that. Anyway, I want you to listen to this little post about that aspect of this.

“Tim Cook, AppleÂ’s CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, AppleÂ’s CFO, will host a conference call” (they did it yesterday) “to announce the outcome of the companyÂ’s discussions concerning its cash balance” of $100 billion. That is $100,000 million. That’s what I wanted to get to: $100 billion is $100,000 million. They could buy Walmart with just their cash reserve. But my point here is finding a way to illustrate, in understandable terms, the kind of money we’re talking about here: $17 trillion or $18-whatever trillion national debt. An annual budget of over $3 trillion dollars. There was just done a survey of spending in the UK. They found that one-third of all tax revenue goes to the welfare state. One-third goes to people on welfare.

The way these things are presented is the way you get people’s attention with it and the way you then are able to start persuading them. So here’s a company with a $100 billion cash hoard. They’re trying to figure out what to do with it, and it’s described here as $100,000 million. Now, the richest guy in the world view has $50, $60, $70 billion. Apple has a hundred billion. That is $100,000 million in cash. Now, you think what would a lot of money be to me, “What would you say if you had it would make you rich?” And that answer differs from person to person. What I’m trying to convey here is, Apple’s $100,000 million — $100,000 million! — would not even show up as an accounting error in the federal budget.

And yet they tell us we’re not spending enough money and we’re not taxed enough. And every year this country’s government spends over $3 trillion — and of that $3 trillion, close to $2 trillion we don’t have. That’s above and beyond what’s collected from tax revenues and other income sources for the government. Folks, it literally is insulting for us to be told that this country can’t be run on $2 trillion. That $100,000 million is just $100 billion. That’s considered part of the largest market cap company in the country, and it’s nothing! It’s nothing compared to the government. What do you think you could do with $100,000 million dollars? In addition to never having to work, what do you think you could do with it?


Could you possibly spend it all? Go ahead and buy ten Boeing 747s. Go ahead and buy ten of the biggest yachts in the world. Go ahead and buy Walmart. You’re still going to have money left over and you’re still being told by your government that we can’t get by as a nation on $2 trillion a year! This debt is out of control. It’s out of sight. It’s incomprehensible, except in one way: It’s destructive. It is so large, it cannot be understood, the debt. It is so massive, it cannot be quantified. It’s like the universe. Have you ever tried to picture the universe? We humans are not capable of that. We don’t have enough data. And then if you want to get really tied up, ask yourself: Where is the universe?

“Mr. Limbaugh, that’s a silly question.” This is the New Castrati speaking, folks. “This is the silliest question you’ve ever asked. Where was the universe? Everybody knows the universe is everything!” Yeah, well, where is that? Where is it? Where are we? If you could step outside the universe, where would you be? “You can’t step outside the universe, Mr. Limbaugh because the universe is everything.” It’s gotta be someplace, Mr. New Castrati. We all have to be somewhere. Where are we? It’s the same thing trying to understand this debt, folks. You can’t comprehend even $1.8 trillion in debt. You couldn’t spend it. And $100 billion is a thimble compared to $1.8 trillion, because a trillion is 1,000 billion.

We’re being sold such a bill of goods. It’s outrageous the amount of money that’s being spent and what little we’re getting for it. All we’re getting for it is the empowerment of the Democrat Party and the destruction of our culture. The destruction of our society. And it’s so much money, we can’t comprehend it. One hundred thousand million is just 100 billion. And people start talking about, “Well, we’re $2 trillion in debt and the federal budget is $3 trillion.” We hear the number “three,” which is a small number. We don’t have any trillionaires, so it’s not possible to relate to some individual who has that kind of money. No individual does.

Except Obama. It’s all his.

But it’s a long way around getting to the point that we’ve got to start going the other way on the spending of money that this nation doesn’t have. Because we are getting the money that we don’t have from the tax payments that will be made by your grandkids. Do you realize the annual federal budget when your grandkids become 20 or 21 years old is already spent? The normal tax rates, if tax rates are what they are today, your grandkids’ lifetime taxes have already been spent. What do you think their ultimate, real tax rate’s gonna be if we don’t get a handle on this?

And every time somebody comes up with a responsible way to get started on it, they get shouted down by the media, shouted down by the Democrat Party, ridiculed. It’s just an election year trick. Meanwhile, the authors of this debacle continually are praised and held up with the highest regard as people with compassion and caring and big hearts. And they are the destroyers. It just offends my sensibilities to have the architects of an absolute national disaster come out now and dare comment on the competence, the quality and the relevance of Paul Ryan’s budget. They have no right to say a damn word about it because they are the problem.

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