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RUSH: Amy in New York City is in the same vain on the line? All right, okay, Amy in New York City. Let’s go to her because she wants to talk about the bonus as well. Amy, I’m glad you called. You’re up next on the Rush Limbaugh program, and I have to say that Amy is one of my all-time top ten favorite female names.

CALLER: Oh, wow, I feel very honored. Thank you.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: It’s a pleasure to speak with you, and I apologize I missed the first part of the discussion with Mark, and I was so happy to get the last copy of his book in Union Square yesterday, which is exciting, but, yes, I did call about the bonuses, and I wanted to further Eva’s point, and I feel her pain. I used to work on Wall Street, before becoming a stay-at-home mom. My husband still works on Wall Street and has for the past 22 years, and I just wanted to share some insight with you, if I may, and your listeners. Number one is that the current buzz right now on Wall Street is that the quality people that are there, like Eva’s husband and my husband, are now thinking about leaving these US firms, maybe not Eva’s in particular, but my husband knows a lot of people that he manages that want to leave because these foreign companies are coming in and they’re marketing themselves to US employees by saying, ‘We didn’t get any TARP money, so your bonuses won’t be affected, come over with us.’ That’s one of the big things, and they’re approaching all of these really top-quality candidates to do that.

And the second thing that I wanted to mention is, with regard to the bonuses, is that what I don’t understand, and obviously the media is very biased, as we all know, but nobody is talking about what the cost of living is in the Tri-State area, meaning New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, versus other areas of the country, and I’m sure Eva is feeling the same way living in New Jersey. I mean, you know, Wall Street, it’s not everybody’s fault that Wall Street and the insurance world happens to be in New York City. It’s not as easy to live in other areas of the country working for those kind of firms. You know, for example, and I’m sure Eva feels the same way, but we’ve made the decision to live up here because if we didn’t, my husband would never see my kids for dinner, and we wouldn’t be able to educate our kids, you know, here in New York City. So we feel penalized because we might not be able to afford private education if these bonuses end up being taxed or have to give back to the government in some way, and it’s very disheartening, quite honestly. I know a lot of people in the city that voted for Obama, obviously in New York. We were, of course, not one of them. My husband is from Dublin, Ireland, originally and he’s not currently a US citizen, but he has a green card. You know, but the point is —

RUSH: If he works at AIG, not for long.

CALLER: No, no, my husband doesn’t work for AIG, he works for Morgan Stanley, but the point is that a lot of these folks that are working at these firms are saying to themselves, ‘Well, gosh, as much as I want to stay and I want to be loyal, why am I going to do that when I gotta give my money back?’ For example, I was looking up the cost of living in New York, okay, versus some other areas of the country just to kind of get my head wrapped around it, because nobody is really talking about that. So I went onto this site, it’s called salary.com, and I looked up what it would cost to earn $500,000 in like Chicago, Illinois, where our friend is from, right? In order to obtain a current standard of living in New York City, you would have to make approximately 44% more to live in New York City. So in other words, you would have to make over $725,000 to make it in New York versus Chicago, Illinois.

RUSH: Now, wait a minute. I have to stop you here.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: I want to try to help.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Can you hold on through a commercial break?

CALLER: Of course.

RUSH: Okay. This is Amy in New York City, and we’ll be back in just a second.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are back, and we’re with Amy in New York City whose husband is an employee on Wall Street (not at AIG) and is being recruited, like a lot of other people are, for foreign-owned entities because it just doesn’t make sense to work for American entities because the Obama administration is out to destroy them. Amy, I have to tell you something here. You, as you described your financial circumstances to me and thus over 20 million Americans tuning in, you are one of the 40,000 families in New York City who are making the city work. Mayor Bloomberg said the other day — in opposing a new tax on the wealthy in New York, a state tax that the governor wanted to impose — that he was afraid these new taxes would cause people to leave the city. You have a city of eight million people, but 40,000 of them pay over half of the income taxes that generate the revenue for the city to function with its welfare state. As a result, Amy — now, please listen to me — you are not allowed to complain about it.

CALLER: I know. (chuckles)

RUSH: I’m just being honest with you. Your circumstances, I totally understand them. I lived there. But you did not generate much sympathy for your circumstance when you said you had $500,000 in Chicago, you need $750,000 in New York. We live in the city; we have to send our kids to private schools. People out there hear you say that, ‘Why? What do you mean, ‘have to’?’ They’ve not lived in the city and they don’t know what P.S. 44 looks like.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: Or P.S. 195 or whatever. They don’t know that you would work as hard as you have to not to send your kids to a public school in the city before the dropout rate is over 50%. Let me try to explain what she was saying. Hang on here, Amy.

CALLER: (chuckles)

RUSH: We went that website during the break, the Salary.com website. The Salary.com website tells you wherever you’re living now, what you’re making, and how much you would need additional if you lived in New York City or how much less you would need to stay even if you lived in a smaller city. So right now as an example if you make $250,000 a year gross in Milwaukee, to have the same lifestyle in New York City, you would have to earn $450,000. Now, you cited the example of $500,000 Chicago, and you need over $700,000 in New York City to replicate a lifestyle of $500,000 in Chicago.

I need to point out to people that $500,000 a year is not enough for your average Chicago black family to get by on. The Obamas couldn’t do it. When the Obamas lived in Chicago, when Barack got elected to the state Senate, I mean that’s chump change money he gets paid. That’s why he needed help from Tony Rezko to buy his house.

CALLER: (chuckles)

RUSH: It is why he needed to get hold of a hospital to create a job that paid over $330,000 a year for his wife, Michelle — and since she’s left that job, they’ve not replaced it. It was a job created with money that was guaranteed to the Obama family in the form of a salary for Michelle Obama, simply ’cause her husband was in the Illinois State Senate.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: That’s why they had to write the two books and earn them $2.5 million, ’cause not even your average black family can get by on half a million a year in Chicago. So I understand where you’re coming from, but you are not going to evoke sympathy from people who will never earn $500,000 a year, much less $750,000 a year. It’s because you earn that much, your family does, that they are susceptible to being whipped into a mob frenzy by the president of the United States when you get bonus money — and Wall Street right now is the whipping boy. Wall Street is the seat of capitalism; it’s under assault by the Obama administration. The people up there, they took the bailout money, and once you take money from people like Barney Frank, the Democrats in Congress, and now Obama, all bets are off. You have to understand that you no longer have your freedom. I know your husband’s not at AIG, but I’ll bet your husband works at a company that took a bailout of some kind, or is a subsidiary of a company that did.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: So I totally understand the challenges that you face. You want to live the best life you can. You look at living in the city of New York as a sacrifice. That’s where your husband’s job is. You don’t want to live a three-hour commute away so your husband can only come home on weekends. You want your husband to be able to come home at night after his 14-hour days and see the kids.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: That, to you, is a sacrifice; and what it’s costing you and so forth. But, see, in these class-envy times, your story only serves to throw more gas on the class-envy fire.

CALLER: (chuckles)

RUSH: People want families like yours to suffer. They want you to understand how hard life is for them. And that’s why they support Obama, because they think that Obama’s gonna get your mind right. Obama is gonna take away from you all these things, and you’re going to have to find out what it’s like to send your kid to a rotten school, and you’re gonna have to find out what it’s like to have your husband never be home, and you’re gonna find out what it’s like for the rest of them. That’s what Obama is gonna do. He’s gonna equalize things; he’s gonna level the playing field. You should be hurting! You should be in pain! So you know what it’s like for every other American.

CALLER: (sniffs)

RUSH: That’s the prevailing attitude today. Whereas you think you and your family doing great things for the country, great things for the company, the best thing you can for your kids, you are now said to be totally out of touch. You just can’t complain about your financial circumstance at your income level.

CALLER: But ultimately what’s going to happen is that, you know, because Wall Street is shrinking and the insurance sector is shrinking, people will go to foreign entities to make money.

RUSH: Yeah! Yeah. Yup. That’s exactly right! That’s exactly what Obama wants. He’s trying to destroy all of this, and he’s got people voting for him and supporting him on that basis.

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