{"id":3743,"date":"2016-04-05T16:45:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T16:45:35","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2016-04-05T16:45:35","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T16:45:35","slug":"obama_interrupts_our_program_to_get_ahead_of_the_panama_papers_story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2016\/04\/05\/obama_interrupts_our_program_to_get_ahead_of_the_panama_papers_story\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama Interrupts Our Program to Get Ahead of the Panama Papers Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Listen<\/a><\/p>\n

RUSH: I have a little bit of what President Obama\u2019s talking about and, as usual, it\u2019s hypocrisy on parade here. The president is talking about how most Americans work hard and play by the rules, and they need to know that big corporations are not gaming the tax system. He\u2019s talking about corporate inversions, which is not hard to understand. The US has the highest corporate taxes in the world, 35%, and Obama\u2019s out there talking about the unintended consequences of this being real. And he said, “When companies exploit loopholes, it sticks the rest of us with the tab.” <\/p>\n

<\/a>They\u2019re not exploiting any loopholes. There\u2019s a 35% corporate tax rate, so corporations are setting up offices in foreign countries. And they are being taxed on money they earn elsewhere in the world in those countries and keeping the money in those countries, wherever they happen to be. It could be Ireland, Europe, China, doesn\u2019t matter. They\u2019re not exploiting a loophole. They are simply following the laws of other countries rather than this one. <\/p>\n

They\u2019re avoiding a 35% tax rate. There\u2019s no loophole here. The unintended consequences are the high tax rate. This is exactly what happens when you have punitive tax rates. People will do what they can within the law (which means there are no loopholes) to avoid them. And he\u2019s complaining that these are loopholes that only wealthy Americans have access to \u2019cause they have offshore accounts.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: All right. I figured it out, why Obama is now interrupting on this program and stepping on what we had planned to do today. We haven\u2019t discussed this, but you may have heard it by now, this leak of memos, letters, data, files from a law firm. It\u2019s got a name called the Panama Papers leak. <\/p>\n

And what this Panama Papers document is: the offshore accounts of a whole slew of world leaders, where they have wired, sent money from their countries into their own personal stash, Cayman Islands and elsewhere. <\/p>\n

In the case of Vladimir Putin, for example, the amount is like $21 billion, and it mentions a whole lot of other world leaders. And they have been working in consort, the suspicions — folks, this is, you know, I hate to be a See, I Told You. This is exactly what socialists and communists do. They literally steal from the wealth of their own countries. <\/p>\n

They punitively tax everybody. They keep everybody equal. It\u2019s all totally fair and equal, but everybody\u2019s miserably poor, except the people who run the country, the leaders, they make out like bandits because that\u2019s what they are. And in order to keep the circumstance that profits them in place, they build walls around their country. They penalize people that would speak out against it. They put \u2019em in political prisons, you name it. <\/line><\/p>\n

I mean, this is what communism and socialism are known for. And Obama is worried about this. Obama\u2019s worried this stuff is all leaked, so now he\u2019s out there trying to blunt the news from the Panama Papers leak and shift the blame as far as the American public is concerned to the corporate tax rate and what are being called corporate inversions. <\/p>\n

Do you know what a corporate inversion is? It can be complicated. One of the simplest ways to explain it, you have, let\u2019s say a major US company, the ABC Widget company, and they don\u2019t like the 35% corporate tax rate, so what they do, they sell, quote, unquote, a majority of the company to a subsidiary in Europe where there is a much lower tax rate, which then ends their requirement to pay the US corporate tax rate. <\/p>\n

These corporations have asked that the 35% corporate tax rate be reduced. They have not been satisfied on that. The US corporate tax rate is in the top five highest corporate tax rates in the world. And this is what Obama described as an unintended consequence. It\u2019s what the left, doesn\u2019t matter how many times they try it, they come out, they raise taxes, and they think everybody\u2019s just gonna sit there and pay it. A liberal tax plan is a tax plan rooted in punishment. They raise taxes on the rich, thinking the rich are just gonna sit there and pay it. <\/p>\n

Corporations don\u2019t pay taxes. They increase prices as much as the market will permit, sometimes in collusion, in order to have the prices they charge increase, which means that whatever taxes they pay end up actually being paid, the money is generated by consumers. Everybody knows this. You don\u2019t have to have read Friedrich von Hayek to understand this. <\/p>\n

But when the rich don\u2019t sit there and accept the punishment, pay the rate, then people like Obama pull their hair out and say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, loopholes, loopholes, unintended consequences.” There aren\u2019t any loopholes. The way they use the word loophole, they want you to think these people are breaking the law. They want you to think they\u2019ve found someplace in the tax law that they can squeeze in there to evade the left\u2019s attempts to scorch them. They call that breaking the law, i.e., using loophole. <\/line><\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t any loopholes here. It\u2019s simply called incentive. If you can find a way to avoid a high tax rate, you do it. They\u2019re all within the law, all these corporations are. It may make you mad. It may make you think they\u2019re not patriotic. It may upset you because you can\u2019t do it yourself, but they\u2019re not breaking the law, and they\u2019re not exercising loopholes. Not as loopholes are defined by people like Obama.<\/p>\n

I am sure this press conference he just concluded is all about these Panama Papers. And I\u2019ll tell you about that, the Panama Papers, there\u2019s story in the International Business Times here, this is day two or three of this story, and the headline, this version of the story is about all the people that made this possible, made possible for worldwide, primarily dictator leaders, to steal money from their own people and then transfer it to offshore accounts where there is no taxation, or very little, and there\u2019s no record of it. The equivalent of squirreling it away in Swiss banks. <\/p>\n

And the latest iteration of this story from the International Business Times headline says it all: “Panama Papers: Obama, Clinton Pushed Trade Deal Amid Warnings It Would Make Money Laundering, Tax Evasion Worse.”<\/a> Bingo. You want to know what the purpose of any of these international trade deals has been, it has been to enrich profits of people who are the donor class in American politics. It has nothing to do with party other than the greatest recipients in recent years have been Democrats of corporate money, particularly Wall Street corporate money. <\/p>\n

“Years before more than a hundred media outlets around the world released stories Sunday exposing a massive network of global tax evasion detailed in the so-called Panama Papers –” by the way, which come from a law firm which helped to set all this up. “– US President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for a Bush administration-negotiated free trade agreement that watchdogs warned would only make the situation worse.<\/p>\n

“Soon after taking office in 2009, Obama and his secretary of state — who is currently the Democratic presidential front-runner — began pushing for the passage of stalled free trade agreements (FTAs) with Panama, Colombia and South Korea that opponents said would make it more difficult to crack down on Panama\u00c2\u2019s very low income tax rate, banking secrecy laws and history of noncooperation with foreign partners.”<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that\u2019s why he went out there today. He\u2019s trying to counter what happened because the Trans-Pacific Partnership that he\u2019s authored is all part of the insiders deal to make this kind of thing easy. You wonder why nobody\u2019s allowed to read the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal? You wonder why nobody\u2019s allowed to tell you what they read when they go down to a secret basement room to read it? You wonder why nobody\u2019s allowed to take notes? <\/line><\/p>\n

So that that that\u2019s what\u2019s that\u2019s what\u2019s going on here. And so Obama\u2019s out here now trying to blame all of this that his buddies, people like him, worldwide leaders are getting rich on the backs of their own people, he\u2019s now, doing what leftists doing, going out and blaming corporate America for exercising loopholes and unintended consequences. And now he\u2019s pushing for tax reform, which includes two things. I think he wants to reduce the corporate rate, but he kept talking about closing loopholes. There are no loopholes. I\u2019m sure what he wants is legislation that would make corporate inversions illegal, because he thinks they are now.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t like that people are able to slither and work their way around his efforts to punish them. So he wants more legislation to trap \u2019em and to limit their mobility, their freedom to move their money around and structure themselves in legal ways to avoid — I\u2019m not making excuses for \u2019em, folks, I\u2019m just telling you, this is what happens. This is not abnormal. Smart people are not just gonna sit there and accept punishment in the form of high tax rates. They\u2019re going to try to avoid it. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s no different than average, ordinary Americans leaving, say, New York to go to Texas to avoid New York taxes. It\u2019s the same thing. It\u2019s no different than that. Those people are not using loopholes, and there aren\u2019t any unintended consequences there. It\u2019s just the law and common sense. You have people leaving New York. You have people leaving a lot of high-tax states. California. They\u2019re going places where there are either no income taxes or very low state income taxes because the economy is tight and they want to keep more of their money; they\u2019re the ones that earn it. <\/p>\n

In Obama\u2019s world, that\u2019s not good patriotism. You\u2019re just supposed to sit there and pay these tax rates, and that\u2019s what US corporations are supposed to do. Obama and… Hell, not just Obama; everybody in Washington! They want that money back. They want the grand total of whatever corporations are keeping offshore. I don\u2019t mean in the accounts. I mean profits they\u2019re keeping in foreign countries, say Europe or China. They want that money back here. It would help the GDP. It would help the statistics. It might help grow the economy.<\/p>\n

So this is all about nudging them, threatening them to start doing things he wants so that he will look better. It isn\u2019t about improving anybody\u2019s life or any of that. This is not, “About our values and who we are.” It\u2019s not about any of that. I\u2019ll tell you what it\u2019s really about is the Republican presidential campaign, because when Obama finished, he cited both Cruz and Trump and their economics and immigration proposals. He said Cruz and Trump\u2019s proposals are just as Draconian when it comes to immigration as anything he\u2019s heard. Trump and Cruz are equally bad. So he wanted to get a nudge in on the Republican presidential primaries as well. <\/p>\n

So that\u2019s what this is about. <\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: There\u2019s no question here, folks, what Obama is trying to do. He\u2019s trying to change the narrative, particularly with low-information voters, into thinking that the Panama Papers corruption is about corporations. And it isn\u2019t. The Panama Papers corruption is about socialist, communist dictators. There\u2019s not a capitalist leader in the bunch. Not a single one. The Panama Papers expose corruption of socialists and other dictators, not capitalism. <\/p>\n

So here\u2019s Obama riding to the rescue, making it look like what you\u2019re learning about the Panama Papers is about corporations, primarily US corporations, exploiting tax loopholes and not being willing to pay their fair share. But the truth is the narrative is not about American companies; it\u2019s about corrupt public socialist and communist dictators, the same people, the same people who signed laws to make all these tax shelters legal. Some president had to sign this stuff. “What do you mean? I signed the law, and it\u2019s got loopholes in it? <\/line><\/p>\n

“Well, somebody better move in and close the loophole!” This is all just insulting to anybody\u2019s intelligence who has any idea what\u2019s going on here. And it\u2019s typical. I wouldn\u2019t think it\u2019d go so far as to point out Obama\u2019s buddies here are in a little bit of a vise, and he\u2019s trying to get \u2019em out of it. There\u2019s not one capitalist country leader mentioned in these Panama Papers, not yet, and it has nothing to do with American corporations. This is about world leaders from communist and socialist countries stealing their own people blind and establishing offshore accounts for money laundering, tax evasion, all that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RUSH: I have a little bit of what President Obama\u2019s talking about and, as usual, it\u2019s hypocrisy on parade here. The president is talking about how most Americans work hard and play by the rules, and they need to know that big corporations are not gaming the tax system. He\u2019s talking about corporate inversions, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"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},"categories":[],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nObama Interrupts Our Program to Get Ahead of the Panama Papers Story - The Rush Limbaugh Show<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2016\/04\/05\/obama_interrupts_our_program_to_get_ahead_of_the_panama_papers_story\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Obama Interrupts Our Program to Get Ahead of the Panama Papers Story - The Rush Limbaugh Show\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"RUSH: I have a little bit of what President Obama\u2019s talking about and, as usual, it\u2019s hypocrisy on parade here. 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