RUSH: All right, back to Steve in Richmond, Virginia. Thank you, sir, for continuing to hold on. You have an eight-year-old son. You’re worried about the future with all these bailouts.
CALLER: I’m worried about his freedoms, too, not just that. It comes down to Big Oil, right? Government is attacking Big Oil. What about us attacking government for a big bailout, and the bailout being just another vehicle to encroach upon our freedoms? I mean, that’s the endgame: punish and control society. Wouldn’t you think?
RUSH: This troubles me greatly. As I say, I spent a large part of the first hour discussing this. All of these bailouts, it’s getting to the point now that there isn’t any risk, that whoever takes a risk doesn’t really view it as such because it’s going to be bailed out. The bottom line: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are classic to me. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they exist in an impossible universe. They are government-owned private businesses. They pay no taxes; the SEC can’t look at them. They are immune from any regulatory structure, examination. They have, theoretically, a limitless supply of money — and they’re going broke! What in the government isn’t going broke? And what was the purpose of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? Why do we need two? Why wasn’t Fannie Mae good enough? Why, then, did we need Freddie Mac? Was it because of political correctness and gender equity? Why did we need two of these? Why did we ever need more than the FHA?
The FHA used to make no-down-payment loans or low-interest loans to people that couldn’t afford a 20% down payment. They still do. Okay, so the VA and the FHA, then we got Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, how in the world can you have a government-owned private business? But that’s the best way to explain it — and they’re in deep doo-doo. So we gotta bail ’em out. Too many people have borrowed money to buy their houses from the government. This is not by accident. The people who set these agencies up… We’ve been trying to tell people for years and years and years the whole purpose of a lot of people in government is to get as many people dependent on it as possible. That’s why the whole notion of self-reliance, people sneer when you discuss it. ‘Oh, yeah! Easy for you to say! Why, you walk a mile in my shoes and find out about self-esteem reliance.’ A lot of people have.
When you become, when you become dependent on the government, not just for your needs — that’s bad enough, but when you start depending on the government for your wants, folks! And when the government’s always there, even when you botch it, even when you make a lousy decision with government money, they’re going to bail you out. That’s what this is. They can’t afford to let this go south. (No offense, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee.) They can’t allow this to happen. So as I’ve been brilliantly pointing out all day, these renegade conservatives who want a big, active government interested in people’s lives ought to be celebrating today ’cause we’ve got it. And the problem is the people that do not end up investing in government or taking government money or having the government support them, are going to end up paying for it for everybody else. So it encircles and entwines virtually everyone.
Kevin in Bozeman, Montana, it’s great to have you with us on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, Mega Big Sky dittos.
RUSH: Thanks very much, sir.
CALLER: It’s an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Hey, I wanted to touch on something and give a comment on something you said earlier about an AP article where they’re valuing human life and they put it at, what, six and a half million or something like that?
RUSH: $6.9 million. The government has now valued each American life as $6.9 million, down a million from two years ago.
CALLER: Well, what do you think of this? I think they’re starting to put that out to tie it to the socialized medicine that we’re probably going to be getting down the road.
RUSH: Oh, yeah! That’s exactly it. That’s how you can compute the value of medical treatment. It’s the whole reason the EPA is doing it —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — so you can compute the value of benefits and the amount of benefits and how they can shortchange people on it: ‘Well, your life is not worth as much as it used to be. You don’t need as many benefits.’ Of course. Absolutely right.
CALLER: And then they’ll start breaking it down to the first 25 years, the second 25 years, the third 25 years, and the fourth, and then what they’ll say is, ‘Well, by the fourth 25 years, if you’re 80, your life is really only worth a hundred thousand dollars —
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: — and if you need a procedure that’s $250,000, well, you’re outta luck.
RUSH: Right. Yeah. Because you’ve long since outlived your value and usefulness to your government, and now that you need surgery here that will sustain your life another two years, we have decided we don’t need you another two years. You’ve already been useful. We’ve used you up. So we’re not going to pay for you. You’re dead.
CALLER: Yeah, and they’re introducing it to us slowly the way they do.
RUSH: Yep.
CALLER: They incrementally give us the stuff; we digest it, and people go, ‘You’re crazy. That’s not what they’re doing,’ but they slowly dribs and drabs, give it to us.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Then it’s like, ‘Oh, okay. An 80-year-old is only worth a hundred thousand dollars, apparently.’
RUSH: A lot of people listen to this out there, Kevin, think that we’re taking this a little far, that we are exaggerating, that our government would never say to a seasoned citizen, ‘You need a $200,000 procedure but our charts only show you’re worth a hundred grand to us. Sorry.’ It could happen. Folks, if we are broke now, if we are having to bail out mortgage lenders… We haven’t even gotten to health care yet! We haven’t even gotten to national health care. Can you imagine single-payer, socialized medicine? Can you imagine getting to that on top of this? And you think you’re going to get decent care just because you don’t have to pay for it? You are going to be paying for it, in more ways than one, but can you imagine piling another entitlement or anything on top of the mess that we have now? What are we going to call the new national health care program, Health Mac? We got Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Health Mac? What are we going to call these things? We haven’t even gotten there yet.
Seriously, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they don’t even promise to give everybody a house. They just commit to make it available to some people who otherwise couldn’t get a loan, but, you know, national health care, single-payer is going to guarantee everybody health care and… (interruption) We can’t even afford…? We can’t…? Mmm-hmm. No, I didn’t see that. Snerdley is telling me something. That’s the reason why there was some dead air. Dead air never hurt anybody, folks, so don’t worry about it. Snerdley was telling me a story. Some woman fell over in a hospital in New York City. People just kept walking by for 40 minutes. It was a city hospital, and people kept walking by her. Kind of like that video out of Connecticut where the guy gets hit by the car, and everybody just watches him unconscious in the middle of the street. Or how about that woman got caught in the elevator for three hours and died? Nurses, doctors, 40 minutes, just walking around the woman in a New York Hospital. No, I missed that video. I did not see it.
Let’s see. Hemet, California. Vern, thank you, sir, for calling. You’re up next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Oh, Rush Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh! God bless you, Rush Limbaugh.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you, sir.
CALLER: You changed my life, sir.
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: And you’ve also made me laugh a lot, and I just wanted, in that vein, you were talking about the bailouts this morning, and there’s a number of institutions that failed. You know, if we’re going to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, why don’t we bail out liberal talk radio?
RUSH: Hey, hey, wait, wait. They’ve been trying!
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: Do you know how many idiot investors have infused money into that bottomless pit over the years? And every time they do it, the Drive-By Media salivates (panting), and they report every new investment. That’s been tried, two or three times.
CALLER: I got another one. How about organized crime? They took a big hit in the eighties and nineties from investigations and prosecutions. Why don’t we help them? There’s another American institution.
RUSH: (laughter)
CALLER: And then while we’re at it, how about us? How about me? You just talked about how my own personal stock dropped a million in just one year. How about me?
RUSH: Well, you’ve lost some significant equity in the stock market?
CALLER: No, no. I lost my own personal value. You said the value of a life dropped one million from $7.9 to $6.9.
RUSH: Oh, oh, bail you out! Make up the difference since it’s the government claiming your value has shrunk. (laughing)
CALLER: (laughing) Anyways, that was my contribution to today — and, you know, I’m a trucker here in LA. I’ve got one thing that I write on the back of my trailer.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: Instead of ‘save the planet,’ I’ve got ‘use the planet.’ So I want to pass that on.
RUSH: Good for you! Why, that’s what the hell it’s for, here!
CALLER: That’s right. It’s our birthright.
RUSH: All right, good buddy.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Kathy in Williamsville, New York, great to have you.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How you doing? It’s going to be hard to make a serious point after that soccer commercial. That’s very funny.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: You know, we have ended up with a society where all the people that work in government, all the politicians, the teachers, the firemen, the policemen, all of our state governments, municipalities, and we are in a very heavily governed area here in western New York, all of them are living inside the castle walls, and all of us, everybody else is living outside of the castle walls. And all of the rules they make protect them, where our people, the public employee, they can retire at 55 here and they live to 85.
RUSH: Yeah, but you know, even that — I know what you’re saying, and conceptually, theoretically, you’re right on the money. What was it, Vallejo, California, I had the story about a month ago, they can’t pay their pension promises to the cops and some of the other city employees, and they’re off-loading the program, and these politicians made these promises to these city employees, and that’s what got them elected and reelected, and they can’t afford it. I’m telling you, they can make all these promises, but paying people money when they’re no longer working, when they’re no longer productive — and of course that’s an arguable concept with a government employee anyway, it isn’t going to be there.
CALLER: Well, New York is slated to go bankrupt first, and we are a state that’s shrunk in population and grew in government workers, again. And I don’t understand why they don’t get that this model is not gonna work.
RUSH: Well, there’s a simple human nature answer for that, and that is until it happens to them, it’s not happening.
CALLER: Well, they’re just saying, ‘Well it’s not going to happen in my lifetime, so it doesn’t matter.’ That’s what it is.
RUSH: That’s true, too, because the things that this generation, couple of generations before us have caused, they’re trying to insulate themselves from dealing with.
CALLER: Well, I’ll tell you, I know the car companies, we have GM and Ford here, and my dad used to sell to them, and I said, ‘What were they thinking?’ He said, ‘They were thinking that by the time that it all crumbles, I’ll be retired,’ and that’s it. These people that are in office right now —
RUSH: I know, I know.
CALLER: — in our state capital, just don’t think it’s going to happen in their lifetime, so who cares.
RUSH: I know. A lot of people outside government think that, too. They really do. Look, that’s great, Kathy, I appreciate the call.