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RUSH: Rob in Louisville, Kentucky, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Oh. Hello. How are you?

RUSH: Great, sir.

CALLER: Great to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Well, I just wanted to say that I’m one of those people that you referred to in the beginning of the show. I’m really focused on the economy now. So when you start talking about budget, I’m totally okay with that.


RUSH: Yeah, it’s a major shift. It used to be death to even bring the budget up or to talk about how it works on a talk show. But now it’s something that is of paramount interest to people. It’s an indication of profound shift. What is it…? Well, obviously, I don’t need to ask you. You’re very much concerned about what’s happening to ours.

CALLER: Well, yeah. It’s been mostly in the past like five years. You know, I bought my own house, got married, and had my second baby just three months ago. I started my own business while I’m still working, just to try to help make ends meet while the wife is in school. And everything matters a lot more now than it did, say, six or eight or ten years ago in my life.

RUSH: Yeah. I totally understand that.

CALLER: Yeah. Everything that they do really, really has an impact on my life.

RUSH: And it shouldn’t! That’s the important thing.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: It should not have such a big impact on your life, but it does. That’s exactly right.

CALLER: Yeah. Oh, I’m a firearms manufacturer on the side. That’s what I do. And that, what’s going on now is just ridiculous. But aside from that, it’s the national debt. If somebody could actually say, “Okay, what I want to do,” not necessarily make a promise like, “I’m gonna cut the debt in half.” That’s ridiculous. But if they could just say, “You know, I want to see the debt clock stop going up, or maybe even make it go in the other direction.”

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Man! That would seal the deal, wouldn’t it? I think.

RUSH: It would. I think people realize, like you have, that the budget and the US economy, that’s your pocketbook now. That’s your bank account. It’s your job, it’s your income, it’s your house. It’s whether you can afford to have kids!

CALLER: Right. And let me tell you, it’s expensive as hell.

RUSH: Well, I wouldn’t know, but I’ve heard.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: (laughing) Yeah, I know.

CALLER: I paid $9,600 in day care last year.

RUSH: No, well, you’re at the right place. If you want to hear about this stuff, you don’t have to go anywhere because we are going to continue to try to inform people and open their eyes about it. I just saw that number that Apple’s cash hoard that they’re trying to figure out what to do with is $100 billion and that that’s $100,000 million. I think that may be the most effective translation of size I’ve seen. Everybody is constantly looking like, “You could stack dollar bills from here to the moon and that’s $5 trillion” or whatever number. You can’t see that. You can’t see $5 trillion worth of dollar bills stacked. You can’t visualize it ’cause the moon doesn’t really look that far away.

It’s 240,000 miles away, but it doesn’t look it. So those analogies leave me cold. But this one, for some reason, got through because a million dollars is a magical number. Most people think a millionaire, that’s a big thing. $100,000 million, gosh, that’s a lot of money! That is more money than anybody can comprehend having or spending, and then when you realize that is .006% of the national debt, that puts in perspective just how much money we are spending, and it also reinforces the notion of the federal budget. Just look annually at the federal budget, which is $3 trillion. It’s absurd.

It can’t possibly cost $3 trillion to actually constitutionally run this country. The only way we spend $3 trillion is if we make welfare recipients out of increasing number of people each and every day, which is what we’re doing. These entitlement programs, these giveaway programs. People think Obama’s gonna fill our gas tank every week or buy ’em a new car or what have you. But in terms of what is constitutionally required of this government, there’s no way, even today, that it costs $3 trillion. But $100,000 million, that was the first expression of an amount of money that I thought everybody could understand just how big it is. And then the next step: How insignificant it is compared to what all we’re spending.

It’s $100 billion is $100,000 million.

And you would be happy with one million. A hundred thousand million? You’d be happy with a hundred thousand dollars!

So this, to me, is relatable.

Anyway, Rob in Louisville, thanks for the call. I appreciate it.

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