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RUSH: Cynthia in Tucson, Arizona, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Dittos. I just wanted to say that, in my opinion, Hoffa\u2019s rhetoric shows how scared he is of his own thugs. I think he was pressured into this.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Hoffa scared of his own thugs?<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, in my opinion. I think he well remembers what happened to his father.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Ohhhhhh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n
CALLER: I don\u2019t think he\u2019s his own man.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Well, it\u2019s entirely possible. You have to understand out here, Cynthia, it\u2019s entirely possible that the people who rubbed out Hoffa\u2019s father simply misunderstood “take the son-of-a-bitch out.” They got that the message was to take him out, not vote against him.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Well, I\u2019m glad that\u2019s made clear now.<\/p>\n
Glen Cove in Long Island, this is Rob. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?<\/p>\n
RUSH: Good.<\/p>\n
CALLER: Good. You know, I am very concerned about the employment levels. And, you know, we talk about fixing entitlements, Medicare and Social Security, but my point I wanted to address to you is, isn\u2019t it time that we really expose all these promises that local politicians over generations have made to local county workers, state workers with respect to health benefits and defined benefit pensions that are nowhere near in lockstep to the private sector, that in my mind here in New York, where our manufacturing index is way down, almost two million New Yorkers left in the last ten years.<\/p>\n
RUSH: Right.<\/p>\n
CALLER: It\u2019s gonna maintain the inability for there to be a real multiplier to really create job growth where anyone who saved 200, $300,000 who wants to come and start a business is hit with these overhead costs, that isn\u2019t it high time we really opened up a discussion about these kind of benefits that are borne to the local taxpayers that I think prohibit these small businesses from really, you know, flowering? What do you think?<\/p>\n
RUSH: No, I think you\u2019re exactly right. When you say it\u2019s time to start talking about it, I don\u2019t mean for you to take this personally, please, but we have on this program discussed the burden of all of these pensions and lifetime health care benefits, we illustrated it in great detail during the Wisconsin debate, and we pointed out, I pointed out and I\u2019ll take the occasion of your call to do it again, you\u2019re talking about all this on the local level. Guess who it is that\u2019s paying that? It\u2019s the citizens. That\u2019s why this is untenable. You have citizens who are at an unacceptably high rate unemployed paying not just the salaries of all these local and state employees, regulators, bureaucrats, but also their pensions and their health care benefits for the rest of their lives. And you\u2019re exactly right, the people paying them have no such program, the people paying them have no such pension or anything of the sort.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a scheme that\u2019s been going on for a long, long time. It\u2019s a Ponzi and we\u2019ve caught up to it now. We\u2019ve gotten to the point now where the latest recipients no longer get paid because there aren\u2019t enough investors. The early investors get paid by the subsequent investors, and now we\u2019ve gotten to the point where there\u2019s no money to pay the investors that came along later, meaning these employees, state, local employees who are expecting all these pensions that are now underfunded, unfunded, all these liabilities are sky-high. Obama will not even mention problems with unions and pensions and regulations, not one time in his Thursday speech. Not once.<\/p>\n
There was an article over the weekend that said nowadays only 21% of companies even offer pensions. Only 21% of companies, private sector companies offer pensions, yet practically everybody in the public sector has one. And they expect it, and they can retire at age 40 or 50 and get 80% of their top salary for the rest of their life, including health care, paid for by who? By the citizens. And so the point here that Rob is making is that all of those costs and the power invested in those people make it difficult if not impossible for some average, ordinary person to just come in and start a small business because of all the money it\u2019s gonna cost them to pay for all of this. And he\u2019s exactly right. And it surfaced in Wisconsin. They ran out of money. It wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not there in California for the public employees. It\u2019s not there for the state teachers. There are two retirement systems in California, two big ones, STRS and PERS. The Public Employee Retirement System and the State Teachers Retirement System. I had a friend who ran PERS way back when I was in Sacramento in the eighties and shortly after when I moved to New York. And the stories this guy told me about dealing with the state treasurer on this stuff, it was his job to invest the fund, and the battles he had investing the fund so that it would grow and have the money there when all these teachers, well, public employees in his case, retired. But you look at the unfunded pension plans for the state teachers and the public employees in California, it\u2019s in the trillions, or high triple billions, hundred billions. It\u2019s just unmanageable. Nothing\u2019s real. In that regard, the money just isn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the story, let\u2019s see, June 1st, 2009, “Jobs That Offer Traditional Pensions,” and it\u2019s US News & World Report, 21% of companies offer pensions. The way I was brought up, I never once in my life expected to be paid by a place when I no longer worked there. Common sense told me that it wouldn\u2019t work and never once did somebody try to tell me that that should be the case. (interruption) Well, but you grew up in the Northeast, though, where it was normal that you went to work for someplace you would be paid even after you stopped working there. You work 20 years, you got paid the rest of your life. That was something that was never part of my growing up. Being paid for not doing anything was never part of my growing up. The pension, there was no such thing. I was raised that all that was my responsibility. Just the way it was.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s not financially possible to earn money while you\u2019re not producing anything. It\u2019s not possible to be paid while you don\u2019t do anything. “But, Rush, but, Rush, they were promised.” Well, okay, they were promised. Promised by a bunch of scum. Right, it worked for the first few generations, right, it\u2019s a Ponzi scheme and now we\u2019ve caught up to the fact there\u2019s no money for it anymore. It was all a Ponzi scheme. It\u2019s common sense. Who pays you to not do anything, unless you\u2019re so good at what you do when you retire that they don\u2019t want you competing against them, then they\u2019ll pay you to retire. I have a lot of friends that do that. They\u2019re so good at what they did that when they retired they were paid by their companies not to go to work for anybody else, just so they wouldn\u2019t be a threat, but I\u2019ve never heard — well, I have heard. I just hadn\u2019t when I was growing up.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: We have all these stories out there today about the post office may shut down by the end of the year, you\u2019ve seen those stories. They\u2019ve closed 3,200 post offices. They\u2019ve talked about — they still haven\u2019t done this — they\u2019ve talked about ending Saturday delivery, they have let go of some employees, and still they\u2019re insolvent. You want to know why? It\u2019s the pensions! It\u2019s their pensions. It\u2019s paying people that no longer work there. Yes. That\u2019s exactly what it is. That\u2019s not all of it, but I mean it\u2019s the lion\u2019s share of it. Folks, I hate to tell you, if you got a pension, I don\u2019t know how to break this to you, but… I don\u2019t have the heart to break it to you. I do not have the heart to break it to you.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re not gonna see all of it. It\u2019s gonna be taken over, all these unfunded pensions taken over by the government at, what, 10 or 20%. We\u2019re gonna still be paying it, yeah, but they\u2019re not gonna see all of it, but that\u2019s not my heartbreaking point. I just don\u2019t know how to tell people you don\u2019t get paid for not working. I\u2019m sorry to break it to you. This is GM and Chrysler all over again. Why the hell does Obama own General Motors? Why did the bondholders at Chrysler get screwed? Why is the post office insolvent? Take it into your household. Imagine paying ten people who don\u2019t work for you the rest of their lives enough that they don\u2019t have to work. And then put yourself in the opposite position. It\u2019s a deal you would never make on the payment side<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: Cynthia in Tucson, Arizona, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello. CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Dittos. I just wanted to say that, in my opinion, Hoffa\u2019s rhetoric shows how scared he is of his own thugs. I think he was pressured into this. RUSH: Hoffa scared of his own thugs? CALLER: Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n