RUSH: I got a couple e-mails here. One e-mail: ‘Rush, I really enjoy listening to you talk about all this bailout and the economy and so forth. What do you know about any of it? You keep talking about how people are going to suffer, where nobody is going to have anything. What do you know about bailouts and fear and so forth?’ Okay, okay. I’ll answer the question, ’cause it comes up. ‘Rush, you’re outta touch! You don’t have to worry about any of this stuff. You’ve got reserves and resources. This is never going to impact you.’ Uh, I don’t think any of us can say this. Have you heard about this guy in New York that was running this $50 billion Ponzi scheme? He was the former head of NASDAQ. Folks, do you know how many charlatan cheats there are in the financial asset management industry?
It’s a crapshoot. This is why I didn’t stay in it very long. I never did, instinctively, understand why I should give people who had less money than I have my money to manage. If they were so smart at it, they’d have more than I do. If they ever get hold of Social Security, it could be trouble. This guy was running a Ponzi scheme. He had $50 billion, he said, of managed assets, and he didn’t have that much. What he was doing is taking the investments he got to pay previous investors, and it finally caught up with him, and he’s admitted it — and a lot of his clients live here, in Palm Beach, where I live! This stuff can happen to anybody. But I remember, I was in Pittsburgh, at my second job away from home. I was working at an ABC O&O, KQV and that’s when Nixon slapped wage and price controls on everybody, and we were at 3% inflation, and that was a crisis.
So he had to put wage and price controls. Well, management loved it. They loved it! They were able to freeze everybody’s salaries for as long as Nixon wanted it. But they didn’t have to freeze their own advertising rates because they were able to create new categories of advertising just like butchers were able to invent new cuts of beef that were not subject to the original price controls. There are a lot of things that happened to me in my life that were formative experiences, and I said, ‘If I have anything to say about this, I am not going to be put in prison like this again. I am not going to live this way,’ and I’ve had a desire to insulate myself from all of these things, and I’ve been very fortunate and lucky in a lot of instances to be able to do it, but I have been fired eight times. I was making $17,000 a year when I was 32. Do you know how embarrassing that is? It was horrible. So I’m fully aware of all this. I had to eat potato chips because the only place that would accept food on a credit card was a snack store, and I didn’t have any cash because the credit card bill and the house payment were due in the same two weeks of the month, MasterCard wouldn’t change the date! So (sigh), I’m not going to do this if I don’t have to.