RUSH: So the media is gathered now awaiting breathlessly President Kardashian’s announcement that he’s going to extend the Bush tax cuts. Now, I seem to remember President Kardashian blaming these tax cuts for most of his economic problems. Am I right about that? Even today, even over the weekend, President Kardashian blaming Bush for the economic woes the country finds itself in. And at the top of the list of things that he blames Bush for are these tax cuts.

And so, President Kardashian today is going to extend the very tax cuts that he says have caused his own economic problems. Well, the reason I point that out… (interruption) why are you frowning? I think this is a brilliant point. That’s what he’s gonna do. He’s announced extending some of the Bush-era tax cuts for people who make under 250 grand, but he has been blaming the entire Bush tax cuts for his economic problems. Now, this is the second time that Kardashian has extended them. There was the lame duck session of Congress after the 2010 midterms, and now this, the second time.

Now, back in June I made a prediction on this. I made a prediction that all of Obama’s surrogates would keep talking about the need to extend the Bush tax cuts in order to convince the business community there would not be Taxmageddonon. Taxmageddon was due to hit us in January with all the health care taxes and all the others that are due to hit, that people like Clinton and Dick Durbin and the others would continue to talk about the need to extend, that Obama wouldn’t say anything. My prediction was that next year Obama would pull a Clinton and convince the business community all year for the purposes of reelection he’s gonna extend ’em and then get to January, February, if he’s reinaugurated and say, “No, I can’t.”

Look, they’re doing a big ceremony here. This is amazing. A huge ceremony. The very thing that Obama has been blaming for our economic woes he is now extending. And, of course, he’s gonna get all the credit for this. The Bush tax cuts are the Bush tax cuts, but here comes Obama to save the day, launching a push to extend some of the Bush tax cuts. It would be for people that earn under $200,000 a year. Isn’t this interesting? Isn’t it amazing? Here is a guy who wants to be reelected — don’t believe all this talk that he doesn’t. Here’s a guy who wants to be reelected as much as he’s ever wanted anything, and, in order for that to happen, he has to push tax cuts.

It just confirms everything that we’ve said over the years about the left, and that is when they’re in trouble — and that’s most of the time — when it comes time for reelection, they go conservative. They try to claim the mantel for themselves. They do it only for a few short months leading up to the election, and then they abandon all of that, of course, after they’re elected. But why is President Kardashian doing this? The economic news that came out late last week when I was away — you know, folks, this number, 85,000 people went on Social Security Disability Insurance in June, 84,000 people found jobs. More people went on disability than found jobs. And of the 84,000 jobs, what percentage of those jobs were part time and not really growth-oriented jobs? This is just astounding.

Now, has anybody heard from Nancy Pelosi yet? Has Pelosi shown up and declared that having more people on Social Security disability is good for the economy? Remember, every dollar spent on unemployment benefits was supposed to create $1.73 of economic activity or something like that. So has Pelosi said the same thing about Social Security disability payments? “Oh, yeah, every dollar of Social Security disability payments creates a buck-and-a-half growth in economics in the country.” I don’t know if anybody’s gonna ask him any questions today. It gets reporters in trouble when they ask President Kardashian any questions. But I still don’t understand why we could balance the budget when taxes were only 18% of the gross domestic product during the Clinton years.

We’re running a huge deficit. Our taxes are 25% of the GDP. That’s how much taxes have gone up. Taxes were 18% of the gross domestic product during the Clinton years. With all these tax increases, why is the budget deficit continuing to skyrocket? Another question I have. All of this rotten economic news, and it was. It was horrible. The released data toward the end of the week, unemployment rate up to 8.2%, 84,000 jobs added in June, one-third of them at temporary agencies, 85,000 went on disability insurance. The real jobless rate if you count people who have given up looking for work but would like to find a job is at 14.9%, that’s the U-6 number, so basically 15% real unemployment. Unemployment, of course it’s gonna get worse.

I’ve got a story. Jim Pethokoukis has a chart, some graphs here about how the economy and the employment circumstances are going to worsen the rest of the year. The unemployment rate for blacks has jumped to 14.4%. It’s 11% unemployment for Hispanics, and 780,000 fewer women are employed under Obama. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged late last week. You go back and you look at what the regime was predicting, and you realize that unemployment was going to be 5.6% today, with the stimulus. That’s what they predicted it would be.

At this point in Reagan’s recovery, you know how many jobs we were creating a month? 273,000. In the third year of Reagan’s first term coming out of the recessions of ’81 and ’82. We were creating 273,000 jobs a month. We are averaging, under Obama since he took office, 75,000 jobs created a month. It’s a total of 2.3 million jobs that have been created, but a lot of those are temporary, a lot of them are part time. They’re not growth oriented, career-type jobs. Talk to anybody coming out of college. And yet Obama’s favorability rate in certain polls is at 47%.