RUSH: We’re going to start in Indianapolis. Julie, great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s great to be on your show.
RUSH: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I’m calling in about the housing market. I’m a RE/MAX owner in the Pendleton area in Indiana.
RUSH: Yeah, go ahead. Keep talking.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I’m trying to hear you.
CALLER: Okay. Over the past five years as we watched our community lose their jobs and their homes during the recession, we are now seeing a small improvement in the housing market and now the USDA is shut down and 20 to 25% of our loans in our area are using this USDA program. So we have buyers who cannot close on their houses and sellers who are walking away from them.
RUSH: And you attribute that to what?
CALLER: Well, right now the USDA is such a loan program, it’s a no-money-down government program for rural areas and about 20, 25% —
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait just a second. You’re saying USDA?
C 
ALLER: USDA. It’s a rural development loan. So the government, again, has gotten involved in the mortgage business. (chuckle) So now that they’re involved, it’s a no-money-down, families up to about a $73,000 a year income, with a combined income of about $73,000 a year can qualify for a no-money-down loan that allows them to purchase a home in these rural areas, which my area qualifies for. It’s a 100% financing, and it’s a fixed rate, and it’s a conventional loan product.
RUSH: So you’re saying that the government shutdown is killing you? Is that your point?
CALLER: I’m saying that we have many, many loans. We’ve got about 25 to 30% of our personal loans are USDA, and the USDA takes about 30 to 45 days to approve these loans and so now these loans are stopped and our sellers are walking away from the transactions because they don’t want to wait on the USDA to open and they’re looking for a new buyer.
RUSH: All right. I think I get it. What you’re saying is that the government is purposely delaying all of this, using the shutdown as an excuse to hurt people?
CALLER: I can’t speak for the government, but I can’t understand when we finally have a slight increase in our housing market and then the government will not open USDA so these loans can go through. I would say that that’s definitely a pain put on our backs.
RUSH: What they want to happen here, Julie, is for you to blame the Republicans for this.
CALLER: It’s absolutely not the Republicans’ fault. Absolutely not.
RUSH: Well, they want to you to think it is. Whoever’s being denied the right to buy the house, the mortgage, whatever, they want Republicans getting blamed because they want the shutdown being blamed for this. The objective here is to make sure the Republicans get that blame.
CALLER: Correct, correct. I know.
RUSH: That’s all this is about. That’s all this is about.
CALLER: Well, I am surprised that nobody is talking about the housing issue. Nobody even…. Of course, I’m a big fan of yours and Sean Hannity and all the Fox people that we watch, and nobody has even seen how this has impacted our housing. The other thing, Rush, that’s interesting — and I don’t know if it’s changed yet. But all new loans now, the mortgage company has to get from the IRS directly a copy of someone’s transcript for their tax returns to make sure there’s no fraud. Well, I don’t know if they’re open now, but at the beginning of this, they couldn’t get transcripts, so they couldn’t write any new loans because you can’t get a transcript from the IRS.
RUSH: Well, that just sounds horrible.
CALLER: It’s ridiculous. We’re finally getting a small amount of steam. You know, our appraisals are an issue and such.
RUSH: Well, I hadn’t heard that. I hadn’t heard the housing market was rebounding. That’s even news to me.
CALLER: Well, we’re not rebounding. I didn’t say that. I didn’t use the word “rebound.” I said, “We’re starting to get a little bit of steam.” We’re starting to slowly come forward and people have this false impression from the media that the housing market has recovered. The housing market has not recovered. The housing market is trying to get some steam and move forward.
RUSH: Well, look, I hate to… I know this is an area of specific interest to you because you’re in it, but nothing in this economy’s rebounding! Nothing is going right. Nothing’s going well. That’s the whole point. There isn’t any economic recovery going on, and Barack Obama is not miraculously helping people. He’s not lifting people out of doldrums. Obama, the Democrats are not about that.
There’s none of that. I think this is false. All of this is a myth. There is no economic recovery. People are losing their ability to buy homes, and when they have the ability, you’ve got a situation like you describe where the government walks away from it and takes away the opportunity. They’re not about improving opportunity for people, particularly right now, Julie, because there’s a golden opportunity to blame the Republicans for this.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Maybe you don’t, but they want the people affected by this. Just like the guy in the LA Times, this rancher who got hit by this blizzard: It’s the Republicans’ fault for shutting down the government, that FEMA hasn’t been up there to rescue him. See, the way this works is liberalism is this giant utopian place where nirvana exists — and when anything goes wrong, the government is in there immediately to fix it.
Except it doesn’t work that way.
Here you have real life — a real life blizzard, a real life disaster — happening to South Dakota ranchers, and the government can’t do anything about it. And if there weren’t a shutdown, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. They weren’t able to rebuild New Orleans. They still haven’t rebuilt parts of New Jersey and New York after the hurricane there. They just can’t. And look at Obamacare. It’s an utter disaster.
The government does not do these wonderful things, they cannot make these wonderful things happen, and yet all of these people have this blind investment in it, as though utopia’s right around the corner. But the reality? Look at Obamacare. The reality is it is an outright disaster. So is your program, and yet the government’s supposed to be making sure this doesn’t happen. When, in fact, they’re taking the occasion of this shutdown to make it happen so the Republicans get blamed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, I don’t want to appear insensitive here, folks, but one of the reasons that I had problems with our previous caller is the USDA is the US Department of Agriculture, right? I had no idea that the USDA had a no-down-payment home-buying plan, and it just didn’t compute with me. The USDA’s got to mean something other than US Department of Agriculture. But no, lo and behold, there is this USDA rural loan program, and I for the life of me did not know that the USDA is giving out loans with no money down for houses in rural areas. I guess this is after we pay taxes for them to have telephone service and then Internet service.
I was sitting here, I was literally stumped trying to figure out what in the world this woman was talking about. And now that I’ve finally figured it out, it makes total sense.