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RUSH: In Washington, President Obama is out talking to his left-wing extremist buddies at the Center for American Progress, a town hall on the education arts recreation campus. He’s talking about the economy and income inequality.

OBAMA: Starting in the late seventies, this social compact began to unravel. Technology made it easier for companies to do more with less, eliminating certain job occupations. A more competitive world let companies shift jobs anywhere — and as good manufacturing jobs automated or headed offshore, workers lost of their leverage. Jobs paid less, and offered fewer benefits. As a trickle-down ideology became more prominent, taxes were slashed for the wealthiest while investments and things that make us all richer, like schools and infrastructure, were allowed to wither.


RUSH: That’s not the sound bite I meant, but that’s okay ’cause I can’t take it back. I wanna stop it because that’s Obama playing off the pope. That’s Obama once again attacking trickle-down, lying about it. Everything economic growth happens with trickle-down. You hiring somebody to mow your yard is trickle-down. You get a service, whoever mows your yard gets paid, there’s value all around. It’s negotiated.

That’s trickle-down.

You go buy a TV, it’s trickle-down.

You buy the TV, you get the TV, you take it home.

Whoever made it benefits. Whoever sold it benefits. Whoever got it to the store benefits. That’s trickle-down. It’s exactly what capitalism is. These people have been on an all-out assault to demonize capitalism with that term “trickle-down.” What they want you to think trickle-down is that the rich will be generous and give money to people or that the rich will pay people thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars an hour, that the rich will be nice people.

That’s what trickle-down is to them, and when the rich do not give their money away — and they do, by the way, in charitable donations that you couldn’t and wouldn’t believe. “A more competitive world let companies ship jobs anywhere”? That’s been going on, that’s the way of the world, and it’s up to people to adapt. It’s like Jeff Bezos said. It’s a tough place out there, the world, and you gotta make your own place in it.

The world is not gonna make any allowances no matter where you go. The world is what it is. The world economy is what it is. You carve your niche in it. You take your piece of the pie. The world economy, if it was all capitalism, would be growing faster that anybody can keep up with. This man is simply, ladies and gentlemen, uneducated on the economy. He does not understand it.


He’s simply a socialist who believes the rich are inherently evil, that income inequality is inherently evil, and that it’s gotta be fixed by taking from the people who have it and giving to the ones that don’t — and this business, “workers lost their leverage, jobs paid less, offered fewer benefits.” There’s that word again, “benefits.” Benefits. What the hell’s “benefits”? People are waiting around for benefits.

(New Castrati impression) “Mr. Limbaugh, health care was a benefit, and people were losing their health care!”

No, they weren’t. All of this is a crock. “A trickle-down ideology became more prominent, taxes were slashed for the…” Taxes were slashed for everybody. The Democrats still can’t come to grips with the fact that the tax cuts and the economic boom of the eighties are what made the Clinton years seem so prosperous. They just can’t stand that, and so they have to go in and rewrite history and try to say that Clinton’s tax increases are what made us prosperous, and that is in defiance of sheer logic.

You cannot take money away from people and grow their economic circumstances. You just cannot do it. You can’t take money from businesses or anyplace in the form of taxes, redistribute it, and call that economic growth. That’s not what it is. Obama’s been raising people’s taxes for five years. Where are we at, economically? I’m telling you, the man is incompetent when it comes to economics. Dangerously so. All right, here’s the next bite.

What is this? Yeah, he it is. He cites the pope. This is it. The pope, the media love him. He’s the greatest pope ever! This guy’s out there ripping Reagan, ripping capitalism, the pope’s out there ripping trickle-down, and they love the pope now. They’re really conflicted ’cause they hate the Catholic Church, ’cause the Catholic Church is anti-abortion. But here comes the pope ripping Reagan and trickle-down, and now they’re conflicted. So I guess they can love the Catholic Church for a couple of weeks.


OBAMA: Some of you may have seen just last week the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. “How can it be,” he wrote, “that it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points.” But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.

RUSH: Do you believe that? This is the worst place in the world for economic opportunity and freedom! This, the United States, it’s the worst place in the world! Cuba, China, Venezuela, you name it. Any number of places do it better than we do, do it smarter than we do. “This increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country.” What? This is… Folks, there nothing smart about that. That’s not even a good lie.

I don’t think he’s capable of a speech saying he loves the country. No liberal is. But this! To say that the increasing inequality is most pronounced here, after five years of Obama? What the hell has he been doing about it? Five years of Obama and he says this! He doesn’t say this after five years of Bush or five years of Reagan. Five years of his own policies, and it’s the worst place in the world?

I don’t know, folks. This is just unconscionable. And then the pope, how come it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies? It must be. We know about it! It must be a news item. Elderly person dies, homeless, we know about it. It must have been a news he item. How else do we know about it? Obama, it’s your buddies in the media reporting on the stock market — and, by the way, your buddies, Obama, are reporting on the stock market ’cause the only way that they can tell people that your stinking economy is any good.

That’s why your buddies are talking about the stock market.

Okay, I got two more of these. These are the two. I think where Obama goes after income inequality, but I don’t know how he can outdo, frankly, “the increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country.” Now, remember this IBD poll. There are Democrats cheering this. They are the extreme outliers, Democrats. “Damn right! This country has the most inequality in the world, the United States. We have the most economic hardship in the United States. Damn right! Way to go!” People that believe this, folks, but they are not in the majority. All right. Here’s the same speech, same place.

OBAMA: It’s well past the time to raise a minimum wage that in real terms right now is below where it was when Harry Truman was in office. This shouldn’t be an ideological question. It was Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, who once said, “They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And for those of you who don’t speak old English (laughter) let me translate. It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living. If you work hard, you should be able to support a family.

RUSH: Yeah, you can’t do that in America anymore, especially after five years of Obama. You can’t even find a job because of Obama. So now we’re going to go out there and attack Adam Smith and claim that Adam Smith wanted to increase the minimum wage. “It’s well past time to raise the minimum wage… real terms…” It’s not gonna solve anything. It never has. We’ve raised it I don’t know how many times.


“But never enough Mr. Limbaugh! We’ve never raised it enough.” All right, what should be enough? This is exactly why we have to keep re-litigating this failed crap of liberalism. We have to keep going through this. It never works, it never has worked, because we have to keep reminding people of it ’cause we still have the brain-dead advocates of this stuff. Okay, here’s the last one, I promise.

OBAMA: This law’s gonna work, and for the sake of our economic security it needs to work. (applause) If you still don’t like Obamacare — and I know you don’t — even though it’s built on market-based ideas of choice and competition and the private sector, then you should explain how exactly you cut costs and cover more people and make insurance more secure. You owe it to the American people to tell us what you are for, not just what you’re against.

RUSH: We do it every day. That’s another thing. You never tell us what you’re for. We do it every day. Everybody knows what I’ll for. Anyway. From the New York Times, one quick thing. August 31st of this year: “Income Gap Grows Wider and Faster — From 2009 through 2011, the latest year for which the data is available, the ratio increased 1.14 percentage points annually, or roughly four times faster” under Obama than prior to Obama. He’s out there ripping into income inequality, and it has grown four times faster during his presidency.

He’s the architect of it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: How come nobody has a problem with Obama quoting the pope to make a point about how awful we are? Nobody has a problem. Obama can go out and quote the pope to make the point the United States is awful. Well, if Obama can quote the pope about how bad America is, why can’t we quote Jeremiah Wright to make a point about how awful Obama is? Why is Jeremiah Wright off-limits and the pope isn’t? It’s just a question. No. I’m not trying to stir things up here. It’s just a question that occurred to me.

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, you know, Obama is out trying to rebrand Obamacare. He’s out there trying to convince people now that — I don’t know what he thinks he can say after six years. I don’t know what new he thinks… You know what he’s doing? He’s actually claiming that one of the benefits of Obamacare is the redistribution of income. He’s actually promoting this as though it’s one of the great benefits of Obamacare. And we thought that you would like to hear how it sounded when he got out there yesterday.

(playing of Obama spoof.)

Rebranding Obamacare. Oh, whoop-de-doo.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Folks, if you missed this, you’ve got to hear this again. This is the president citing the pope, his new best friend. ‘Cause the pope is ripping America. The pope is ripping capitalism. The pope is ripping Ronaldus Magnus. The pope is ripping trickle-down economics, and Obama’s having an orgasm. Jeremiah Wright is beside himself. Jeremiah Wright thought he was Obama’s preacher, now the pope somehow has co-opted Obama. Who would have ever thought?



And, by the way, the pope is out there saying that no matter what, Pope Francis, he said yesterday, no matter how progressive minded the world turns, the Catholic Church can never compromise on its no-abortion rule. He said it’s a matter of human dignity. In Democrat parlance, the pope is an old white guy. They don’t like old white guys. Old white guys are the problem, nuclear family and all that. So they’re really conflicted. I mean, the pope is singing their song on trickle-down and capitalism, but he’s not budging on abortion. But Obama’s still overcome. You’ve got to hear this one more time.

OBAMA: Some of you may have seen just last week the pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. “How can it be,” he wrote, “that it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points.” But this increasing inequality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.

RUSH: That is infuriating. The increasing inequality in the world is most pronounced in our country. This guy just can’t wait to rip this country apart. He just can’t wait. Every day, whenever there’s an opportunity to criticize this country, he’s the first in line. And that is just an outright falsehood. The increasing inequality, income, wealth, whatever, is most pronounced in our country?

Now, I’ll tell you the way he means that. We’ve got too many rich people. We need more people who are poor and lower middle class. That’s the only way we can have equality and fairness. People have gotta be cringing that they ever voted for this guy. And how can it be it’s not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure? How can it not be a news item when four people die in Benghazi? How’d that not end up being a news item? Four people, our ambassador, dead in Benghazi. Why was that not a news item? Why wasn’t there any compassion about that, trying to get to the bottom of that? Why’d we blame that on some nameless little guy that did a video nobody ever saw? Anyway, it’s just astounding, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Do you know what real inequality is? You got Barack Obama, who is a multimillionaire because of books and whatever else he’s been able to do, sitting in the White House. He’s in the lap of luxury, his own Boeing 747, and in Kenya his brother is living in a hut. You want to talk about income inequality? Barack Obama has family members living on less than a dollar a day, one of them in a six-by-nine-foot hut. Dinesh D’Souza went over, tracked the guy down, confirmed it.

That’s income inequality, wealth inequality. The highest levels of income inequality were not found in the last decade in the United States. They were found in countries such as the Central African Republic, Honduras, Angola, Haiti, South Africa, and Namibia. And there’s a web link source for this. The United States is never gonna be at the top of any list of income inequality.

I gotta stop. If I keep going here, folks, I’m never gonna get to the phones and I’m promising this, so we’re gonna go back to ’em.

Now Boca Raton. Phillip, thanks for waiting.

CALLER: Rush great to be with you.

RUSH: It’s great to have you on the program. (He can’t hear me when he’s talking.) How are you, sir?

CALLER: I am doing well, and congratulations on the massive success of Rush Revere. It’s great. I’m looking forward to reading it over Christmas and ordering a copy. Thank you again.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: I wanted to interject something that’s a little more encouraging and positive from your opening monologue and it has to do with what the media is doing here and a turn that I’m beginning to see — and specifically when I was in college, and this is going back to the early eighties. CNN was still very new. It was just launched. Ted Turner had the 24-hour channel for cable news, and in my broadcast journalism class, they stated that in order to get the kind of credibility you need to be noted by other organizations, news organizations, you know, AP, UPI in different —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait just a second. You said that they taught you in broadcast journalism that in order to get the kind of a credibility you need, you need to be cited by other organizations?

CALLER: You needed to be quoted or cited in order to establish credibility, therefore if you saw an AP report that said CNN confirmed that they had sources that said the following. By AP associating a quote from a newly organized news organization like CNN, that promotes their credibility.

RUSH: I see. Okay. All right.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: So when AP cites a CNN story, that grants CNN credibility?

CALLER: Are you there?


RUSH: Yeah. I’m here. You’re on a cell phone. You can’t hear me.

CALLER: I’m not sure if you can hear me, Rush. Can you hear me?

RUSH: You with be with I hear you. You’re on a cell phone. You can’t hear me. Do you realize I could…? We got his point. Phillip, thanks much. I know what he’s talking about and where he’s going with this. He’s now saying that in other media, they’re citing conservative media. Based on what he was taught in broadcast journalism, he’s claiming that just the rest of the media citing conservative media is automatically bestowing credibility on it, ad he thinks that’s a positive. That’s what he was gonna say. So I wanted to help.

Toledo, Ohio. Zack, great to have you on the program. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. How are you doing?

RUSH: Good, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Good. I am actually an undergraduate student, just finishing up a degree in economics, and so president’s speech really bothered me in a lot of ways. But one point I haven’t heard you discuss today is the part where he spoke about post-World War II America and how we got to where we were with the economic growth we experienced then. He cited the safety net system as giving us huge amounts of growth post-World War II, and it’s incredible to me that essentially an increased tax burden upon the American people is how he associates growth. It’s backwards. It makes no economic sense.

RUSH: Well, first thing, I didn’t hear him ’cause it happened while I was on the air, and nobody has given me a transcript. I haven’t had a chance to read a transcript of what he said, but now that you’ve told me, I will comment on it when we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right. Here’s what Obama said. This is what Zack was talking about when Obama claimed that the safety net was responsible for our economic boom. Now, just in the first place, what he’s saying is that welfare benefits and paying people not to work creates an economic boom. He’s not alone. Nancy Pelosi, don’t forget, said that unemployment compensation stimulates the economy. She said, what, for every dollar of unemployment we get $4 of economic growth or some such thing.


This is what these people say. Whether they really believe it or not, that’s up for grabs. But here’s what Obama said. “When millions lived in poverty, FDR fought for Social Security, and insurance for the unemployed, and a minimum wage. When millions died without health insurance, LBJ fought for Medicare and Medicaid. Together, we forged a New Deal, declared a War on Poverty in a great society.

“We built a ladder of opportunity to climb, and stretched out a safety net beneath so that if we fell, it wouldnÂ’t be too far, and we could bounce back. And as a result, America built the largest middle class the world has ever known. And for the three decades after World War II, it was the engine of our prosperity.” Obama is claiming that it was the New Deal and the War on Poverty and the Great Society that created economic prosperity.

Not work, not free markets, not growing economies and increasing job opportunities, but government taking care of people, government creating dependent people. Anybody who wants to talk about the safety net driving prosperity, the fact of the matter is, there was a time, folks, when we could afford the safety net. We can’t any longer, but there was a time where we had the money to have a safety net for people who really needed it. The problem with Obama and the Democrats is, they want everybody in the safety net.

They want everybody there.

You and I happen to believe that we need a safety net for people literally incapable of helping themselves. We are compassionate people. But we would never have been able to afford it. Those are lavish things. A social safety net, paying people not to work, whatever he talked about. Those are really luxurious, lavish things, and we were able to afford those things because we had an economic boom.

At the same time we didn’t have a whole lot of economic competition, and now we do, in spades. There wasn’t a lot of worldwide competition. By Obama’s logic, Greece should be an economic showplace. By Obama’s logic, Cuba and Venezuela ought to be superpowers. This… I’m telling you, it’s silly. It’s dangerously dumb to really believe this stuff. Now, it resonates with people, but it doesn’t work. They have to create this level of dependency first for this to be perceived as something really valuable.

But it just goes against every fabric of our foundation, and it’s colossal ignorance to think that is what built the United States as a superpower. A safety net? The welfare state? That creates economic growth and a nation becomes a superpower because of it? This is why people call Obama “an economic jackass,” and it’s being kind. What he is is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. No. I didn’t call him that. That is why people have called him “an economic jackass.”

I’m not calling him that. I’m calling him a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. This is a guy… Remember, Obama is the guy who said, “You didn’t build that. Y ou didn’t make that happen. We all built that for you.” This guy’s to the left of Elizabeth Warren. You know, we’ve never elected a president like this — I mean, arguably, not even FDR. Woodrow Wilson, those guys, maybe FDR. It’s a close toss-up, but it’s just mind-boggling to hear this stuff. To believe that we actually elected somebody like this is just stunning.

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