X

Don’t Count Your Chickens, GOP

by Rush Limbaugh - Feb 15,2010

RUSH: Here’s Wayne in Roanoke, Virginia. You’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.

CALLER: Yeah, Rush, thank you very much. It’s such a privilege to be able to talk to you. What I want to speak about is that it is increasingly looking like more and more the Repubs to take over the House and the Senate and like Bob McDonnell did here in Virginia, the first thing he did was cut his pay and the staff pay and the cabinet pay, I’m wondering if the Republicans and the ones running could make agreements similar to like Newt and say one of the first things they do as a minimum is to like quit paying for the czars — czars can take a pay cut and cut a lot of this budget stuff and all this spending like I think the — right now the cabinet for Obama administration’s spent 120% more.

RUSH: Just a second on this, there’s something I want to say here before I answer your question specifically, and you are the second person to hit me with what you think is a likelihood today. Snerdley was the first. I walked back to his office minding my own business, and he’s watching Andrea Mitchell and I looked at her and said, ‘This woman looks heartbroken.’ She was leading off with the Evan Bayh story, I said, ‘This woman looks heartbroken today.’ He said, ‘They’re all going to want you on election night.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Yeah, even these people, they’re going to want your opinion on election night, when that big sweep comes.’ Folks, I don’t like thinking that. I don’t want us sitting here thinking there’s going to be this massive sweep, that we’re going to take over the House, take over the Senate, because if you start thinking that, you’re going to let other people do the work and you won’t show up and vote. It’s only February. You can’t take that for granted right now. The last time I was on there was 2002. Tom Brokaw had me on and they’re not going to do it again. It was Russert that asked me. Brokaw willingly went along, but they’re not going to have me back there. They know I’ll just come on and gloat, you know, tell ’em how stupid and wrong they’ve all been all these years, that this was in the cards.

It’s like after the Steelers — I forget the year, 2003, 2004, lost the championship game to the Patriots at Heinz Field, the next season, from the coach on down, ‘Yep, we’re Super Bowl champs this year,’ and they asked the owner Dan Rooney, ‘Do you like this kind of talk?’ ‘I sure don’t. We haven’t even started a season and they have us in the Super Bowl? No, no, no, no. We’ve still got 16 games to play here. We got a bunch of months to get through here.’ We have a lot of Republicans who, I mean if we’re not vigilant here they’re going to fall prey to this bipartisan crap, despite the polls, they’re going to be pressured by the culture inside the Beltway to go along to get along. And let’s not count our chickens before they hatch. Now, let’s deal with the hypothetical. Yeah, the Republicans, look at Chris Christie in New Jersey. He ran on a premise that we can’t afford what we got coming down the pike on this budget and I’m freezing it, and he did. And they are squealing like stuck pigs with the hoot owls and the polecats and the barnyard in Morristown. It is amazing to see.

I’ve got a story here that is just amazing with what New Jersey is facing in pensions. They can’t pay it. They have no way. Here it is: ‘The New Math: Union Pensionomics Levies Crushing Debt on State and Local Governments.’ I’m going to just have to give you this briefly because we go into a break here, but how’s this for an investment, you’re a public employee and ‘You pay a total of $124,000 into your pension plan,’ over the course of your work life, ‘and, upon retiring at age 49, you receive $3.3 million in pension payments and $500,000 in health care benefits. You receive $3.8 million in total on a $124,000 investment.’ That is a real world example in New Jersey, public employee union people get that kind of deal. This is what Christie knows. We can’t afford this. The state will go bankrupt if they don’t do something about this. This is simply undoable. So whether the Republicans get tax cuts, you know, getting Obama to sign them is another thing. We’re not going to have a veto-proof majority no matter what happens.