RUSH: Jeff in Greenville, South Carolina. Great to have you here as we start on the phones. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Thank you, sir, from the first state to secede from the union and also the home and friend of Jim DeMint, the honorable one.
RUSH: You bet, sir, thank you very much, when did you secede?
CALLER: We’re thinking about doing it again.
RUSH: I know. You’re talking about the War Against Northern Aggression.
CALLER: The reason I called you is to give you evidence about earlier what you said in the day about, you know, people that have money don’t necessarily have to spend it and that they hold onto it, which if they spent it, of course, it would make the economy grow —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — and I sold luxury cars for ten years. At the end I was selling Lexus —
RUSH: Okay, I was gonna ask you, you sell luxury cars and you say Lexus is a luxury car. Okay.
CALLER: I used to sell Lexus. I mean I used to sell luxury cars. I’m not anymore.
RUSH: Why not? ‘Cause nobody’s buying, is that the point?
CALLER: Yeah, 2007 was my best year, and 2008 I made a little under half what I made before because people that have money don’t necessarily have to go out and buy a new car and what ends up happening, back in 2007 they came out with this new model of the LX which was selling anywhere from $78,000 to 81,000, and nationwide (unintelligible) sticker price.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But come the next year, you know, when you’re commissioned only, and people are not coming in, you know, people are smart, they’re not going to bring, you know, go buy —
RUSH: Yeah, let me tell you what’s fascinating about this caller. Let me tell you what’s fascinating about this because he’s bouncing off a story yesterday, Obama out there saying, ‘Look, the rich, they’re gonna buy their big-screen TVs anyway, whether we give them a tax cut or not, they’re not gonna take their ball and go home.’ What really needs to be pointed out here, we have to define rich versus wealthy. Far too many people mean rich people when they really are talking about wealthy, or they mean wealthy people when they’re talking about rich. There’s a huge difference. Somebody making $250,000 a year is not wealthy. In fact, I would go so far as to say somebody making $250,000 is not rich. They’re paying the biggest burden of the federal income tax. They don’t have money to burn. It’s really a mistake to categorize these people as the group that will spend regardless of taxes ’cause they’ve got so much, I mean they got more than they need is the way the Democrats look at it. So I guarantee you most families, $250,000 a year, do not think they’ve got more than they need. Would you agree with me on that, Snerdley? All right. Now, I got a break here in 15 seconds, but I am going to expand on this as only I can. This is going to be a classic illustration of making the complex understandable. Because the wealthy, even they’re dialing it back some. But that’s not who we’re really talking about here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. Let’s go back. Our caller in South Carolina says that he used to sell luxury cars. He described as a luxury car a Lexus. He said the rich stopped buying luxury cars starting in 2007 and it just continued to get worse, he’s now not selling cars, the rich aren’t buying luxury cars. This term rich is used to encompass and include way, way, way too many people, and it is done to the benefit of the Democrat Party because there’s well-to-do, there’s rich, there’s upper middle class, there’s filthy rich, there’s wealthy, there’s the idle wealthy, and then there is the elite blue-bloods who inherited great fortunes. And remember, behind every fortune is a great crime. But that’s a subject for another day. I would argue just myself that a Lexus is not really a luxury car. It’s way, way, way, way up there. For a lot of people it’s way, way up there in a luxury car.
This whole subject has fascinated me my whole life, and back in the early nineties is when I first started meeting really, really, really wealthy people. I asked a guy, ‘In your circle of people that you work with, circle of people you do business with, what’s rich to you?’ He said, ‘You’re not a player unless you have $500 million. Your net worth is $500 million. If you’re not at $500 million you’re not a player.’ Okay, the $500 million guys and above that, the $250 million guys, buying a Lexus is no different than buying a pack of cigarettes, they’re going to do it regardless what tax policy is. We’re not talking about consumption. This is not simply about consumption. This is where Obama’s gone off the rails. This is where he is a jackass, an ignoramus on economics and particularly capitalism. And I do believe both. I believe he is an ignoramus on capitalism and is also purposely destroying capitalism, and I think the two go hand in hand. The only reason you’d want to destroy capitalism is if you’ve been lied to about how unfair, unjust, and immoral it is. And I believe he has been maleducated, ill-educated, he has been lied to by a bunch of angry people his whole life who turned him into an angry person, and who believe that the ills of this world are rooted in capitalism. I mean it’s right out of the Engels and Marx belief system.
So it’s entirely compatible that you could be an economic ignoramus and a jackass where capitalism is concerned and purposely want to destroy it. So he covers both bases there. Now, he says to his economic advisors, Mr. President, really, you ought to leave alone the tax structure right now. In fact this whole language, tax cuts — nobody’s taxes are gonna get cut! If the Bush tax rates are left alone, nobody’s gonna get a tax cut. It’s just that income tax rates are not gonna change. The only way the taxes are going to change is go up if Obama does not stand aside. If Obama lets these things sunset, he lets them end, then everybody’s taxes are going up, and I mean everybody’s. Not just the $250,000-and-up people. Everybody’s taxes are going up. But nobody’s taxes are being cut. And this is what Obama and Axelrod and the Democrats all want you to think is that what we’re talking about here is cutting taxes for the rich. We are not. We’re talking about leaving them alone.
So Obama’s two economic advisors, one of them Martin Feldstein, says, Mr. President, the problem you have out there is that there’s no confidence. Not among consumers exclusively, there’s no confidence among investors. There’s no confidence among people who will use what they’ve got to grow their businesses and thus grow the economy. If you are going to play games with their tax rates, then they are going to sit on what they have and their focus is going to be preservation of principal. This is what they were trying to tell him, their focus is going to be how do we lose as little as we can, rather than how do we take risks and grow this? Because, Mr. President, under your policy they’re not going to think there is much of a chance at growth. The risk is going to be too high so they’re gonna sit on it. In other words, you jackass, they’ve already taken the ball and gone home. They’re already sitting on their trillions of dollars of cash that we’ve heard about for months now because the people in the media think — like Chris Matthews said the other day, businesses are doing this purposely, to purposely depress the economy to hurt Obama. They don’t understand that the self-interest aspects of capitalism are what drive it and are good for everybody.
You see, self-interest is not selfish. They are entirely different things. A father, a mother acting in self-interest incorporates the family. When they act to improve themselves they’re improving everybody in whom they come in contact. But to Obama, giving these people a current tax rate of 35%, ‘Rush,’ he would say to me, ‘I mean they’re still gonna buy their flat screens.’ Mr. President, the wealthy don’t buy flat screens. The wealthy don’t even really know what they are. The wealthy have somebody go set up their media room and they walk in and say, ‘Where’s the power switch when I want to watch this? And who do I call if it doesn’t work?’ They’re not walking into Best Buy or wherever and looking at flat screens, the people you’re talking about. They really don’t care. They’re not buying Lexuses. The truly wealthy — I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not — the shops where they shop are still open, and there’s still traffic in there. The wealthy are still chartering yachts for Mediterranean cruises at $250,000 a week. But they’re not the rich.
See, Mr. Obama’s tax policy is not going to affect the wealthy in terms of consumerism. What we’re talking here about is the people who will invest what they’re now sitting on in risky ideas, entrepreneurial ideas that will result in growing businesses, which will require more people to work at them, which is jobs, which is what the president keeps telling us he’s interested in. But he talks about that 98%, the 2% that may see their taxes go up. (paraphrasing) ‘Well, they can afford it. I mean I’d rather have that $700 billion taken away from them and given to government.’ He actually said, the president, ‘I want to take that $700 billion,’ which is a mythical, lying number. He doesn’t know what the number is. ‘Seven hundred billion dollars and I want to transfer it to the people who will spend it today, because they need to spend it, because they don’t have much money,’ because of my own policies. So the president wants everybody to believe that he believes that economic recovery is driven by consumerism. Why isn’t there a whole lot of consumin’ going on out there?
Even people who are not rich or not wealthy, who are not the idle rich, are not the idle wealthy. They’re not spending. There are necessities that have to come first. The flat screen is a luxury, if you will, to the people he’s talking about. What isn’t happening is productivity. We are not creating supply and therefore the creation of jobs isn’t happening. Before you can have consumption you have to have disposable income. To have disposable income you have to have a job. For people to have a job there have to be ongoing enterprises and businesses that are investing in their own growth and are enjoying success, which is increasingly hard to do with this regime because success is punished. The more successful you are the bigger target you are of people like the president and his party, because somehow it’s not fair that you’re succeeding while somebody else isn’t. So we’re going to take what you have achieved as a result of your success and we’re gonna distribute that to the other people who are the victims of your success. And this is how jackass neophytes look at capitalism.
So we have no hope, as long as this guy is in charge and is ignoring the people who know what they’re talking about, for whatever reason, he wants to destroy it or he’s an economic jackass, whichever, the two go hand in hand, as long as his policies are in play nobody’s going to be buying flat screens, because nobody’s going to be making ’em. Well, I take that back. There will always be people making flat screens for a relatively few who can afford them, and just charge the price that’s necessary. Because the people we’re talking about here at this stage really don’t care about the price of things. There is a level of wealth where that doesn’t matter to people. But the intelligence or the common sense of what they’re doing does enter into it. I don’t know how to explain this. The wealthy, to whom the cost of something really doesn’t matter, even in times like this, when they check into a hotel, might forget the three-bedroom triplex suite and just go for a one-bedroom suite. But they’re still gonna check in, and they’re still gonna go for the one-bedroom suite, but the three-bedroom triplex at the top of the hotel is going to stay vacant simply because they don’t think it makes sense in this economic time to spend their money that way. And that’s all part of the whole confidence thing. So it does affect all levels.
But this idea that people at $250 grand need to be punished, need to take their earnings away from them and they’re still gonna buy their flat screens, it’s an insult to them and to everybody else in the country. To reduce this economic disaster to the simplistic notion of buying flat screens when they can still do it, that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about having to overcome our own government. We’re talking about having to overcome policies implemented by our own president. We’re talking about the obstacles being placed in the way of prosperity by our own government. That’s what people face today. And that’s what many people don’t think they have ever faced before. Sure, there’s competition out there from your competitors, but the government never got in your way. Not like this. We got a taste of it with Jimmy Carter, but not this bad.
We’ve never had as the number one obstacle to prosperity in this country the president of the United States. That’s what’s new and that’s what people are awakening to each and every day. So, yeah, economic neophyte jackass, or purposely destroying it, the two go hand in hand, because the only reason you’d want to destroy capitalism is if you’d been lied to about what it is by all of your professors and by all of your friends and by all the theoreticians that you have hanging around you, all the Marxists and all the communists and all the people that believe in black liberation theology, whatever, people that want to blow up the Pentagon, your closest friends, the people that hate this country and have convinced you to, too. That can make you want to destroy it and be an absolute blithering idiot at the same time.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me tell you something, folks. In California, people on welfare can buy flat screens. People on welfare in California can go to Las Vegas casinos and cash their debit welfare cards. People on welfare in California can go to Miami, Florida, and get on a cruise ship. People working for a living don’t seem to be able to do those things now. Just think what historic times these are, though. Right now we say it’s the worst economy in the last 50 years, the worst economy since Herbert Hoover, but somewhere down the road long after we have all perspired, future generations will say, ‘My God, this is the worst economy since Barack Obama,’ if we’re lucky.
Martha, Winchester, Virginia, I’m glad you waited. Welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program.
CALLER: Rush Limbaugh, congratulations on your marriage.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Hey, you have done something that is so brilliant. You have finally brought light to the thing that I’ve been thinking about for years. He’s not a Keynesian economist. He’s a jackassian theorist.
RUSH: A jackassian theorist.
CALLER: Theorist.
RUSH: A jackassian theorist.
CALLER: Yes. I think that that’s perfect. Also, I know that people are gonna say that you hate him because he’s black and all that.
RUSH: Nobody’s — no, no, no, no, no —
CALLER: That’s what they always say.
RUSH: No they don’t. Nobody is saying I hate the guy.
CALLER: I know, but —
RUSH: Nobody’s saying that I’m calling him a jackass because he’s black.
CALLER: I know —
RUSH: Don’t say that, people are not saying that.
CALLER: No, it’s not the color of his skin; it’s the thickness of it. That’s what you need to be concerned about.
RUSH: Yeah, he’s been kind of thin-skinned all of his life. I don’t think he’s used to being criticized. He’s thin-skinned, thin period. Like I’m telling you, folks, these pencil neck geek people that look like they need to eat, there’s just something not right about that. I don’t know. This is just me. Yeah, it’s like Blumenthal. These guys that have a 14-and-a-half-inch neck, 15, come on. If a woman could wear your shirt and have it fit, there’s something not right. I don’t know. I can’t be more detailed than that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There you have it, El Rushbo once again demonstrating what we do here. We make the complex understandable. Our last caller, you know, when you get right down to it, it’s not the thinness of Obama’s skin. Our problem is the thickness of his skull and how long it takes common sense to permeate the damn thing, get in there and start roaming around with the other neutron brain energy. It doesn’t happen much.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I don’t want to leave this tax cut, tax increase business alone. I want to reiterate, nobody is talking about tax cuts for anybody and what Obama is counting on is class envy. He’s counting on being able to get you to agree for tax increases on the so-called top 2% of wage earners ’cause they don’t need the money anyway, we could better use that money for deficit reduction or giving it to you to spend. But here’s the dirty little secret, and this is what Obama and his little gang of Marxist socialists do not understand, and they never will understand, they won’t understand it while it’s happening right before their very eyes. The thing that they don’t get is how industrious and clever, creative, and entrepreneurish, productive Americans can be, particularly in coming up with legal tax avoidance plans. That tax code isn’t multiple thousands of pages for no reason.
Now, we’re talking about the wealthy here, folks. We’re not talking on the $250,000 or $500,000 a year people. They’re not going to have access to that multiple thousands of page tax code. They’re earning wages. They have income. Income taxes, there aren’t a whole lot of shelters anymore, and that’s not the people we’re talking about. Obama wants you to think that everybody at $250 grand is no different than somebody who has $250 million. But there is a huge difference. These people that Obama thinks you’re going to be happy being targeted, these people are going to devote themselves to coming up with legal ways to avoid paying Obama’s taxes. They are going to spend all of their time doing that instead of being productive. They’re gonna spend all of their time protecting what they’ve earned and what they’ve got, via the tax code. They’re gonna spend as much energy, creative and entrepreneurish as they have to make sure Obama doesn’t get his greasy hands on it. And they will succeed.
The tax code, as I say, is not multiple thousands of pages for no reason. It is written by people to help the very people Obama wants you to hate, hold onto what they’ve got, while you can’t. We saw this in the seventies and eighties. We saw this when the top marginal tax rate was 90%, and there were brackets way below that, I mean lots of brackets, 80%, 85%, there were brackets out the wazoo. And people who were genuinely wealthy spent all of their time in the seventies and eighties focused on more elaborate tax shelters rather than creative entrepreneurship because the tax code punished that. The tax code punished success, and that’s where we’re headed with this gang of jackass, neophyte ignoramuses. We’re heading to the same place where success is going to be punished. So rather than be punished, the really brilliant, creative people are gonna focus on holding onto what they’ve got. They’re not gonna let him take it and give it to you come hell or high water. It ain’t going to happen. It happened in the seventies and it happened in the eighties, and this is why Reagan finally had to come in and cut tax rates from 90% to 70, from 70% to 50, and from 50% to 28. And we know the story. We know what happened to revenues when those tax rate reductions took place.
I am here to tell you, there is nothing Obama and his little merry gang of Marxists can do to stop this from happening. The tax code is written to help the very people he wants you to think are being targeted to hold onto what they’ve got. It’s gonna cost ’em a lot of money. You may say, ‘Rush, why would they spend all this money on tax lawyers? Why would they spend more money than it might save them?’ Because it’s a matter of principle. When some socialist, Marxist gang is running your country and their efforts to take money away from you, you stop ’em. If it costs you more than it would cost you to pay taxes, you do not let them have it. It’s the whole concept of estate planning. I didn’t understand it at first. I had all these leeches hovering around me. ‘You need an estate planning lawyer and tax accountant advisor.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you gotta keep the government from getting the money.’
I said, ‘What do I care? I’ll be dead.’ We’re talking about estate. ‘What do I care?’
‘There are places more valuable than the government for your money to go, charities or your family?’
And I would say, ‘The last thing I’m going to do is give somebody a whole bunch of money and ruin their life. It will destroy their work ethic.’
‘But, Rush, but, Rush, don’t you –‘ and for the longest time I said, ‘Screw it, I don’t care. I won’t be here. I’d rather go the simple route, not have to mess with all this and not have to pay all these lawyers, not have to pay all these accountants,’ and finally, I forget when it was, but the light went off and now I will spend whatever I have to make sure that somebody else gets it besides Obama. I’m just telling you, and I know you in the audience here are not the kind of people that are going to be persuaded, but you know who I’m talking about. The very people Obama hopes will vote Democrat because he’s gonna go soak these people, he’s gonna go soak these wealthy — I’m telling you, those people are gonna spend as much time and money as they can to make sure he doesn’t get it. Which is gonna result in those people not being productive, and those people not creating jobs, and those people not investing in their own business. They’re going to be investing in lawyers, and you know how that goes. They’re going to be investing in lawyers and accountants as a matter of principle, folks. It’s a matter of principle. I mean it’s a normal thing to want to shelter your money from the government.
When you’ve got a Marxist little guy and his gang actually trying to take it from you, then you get your back up and you become even more resistant to it. You explore every option you can, including leaving the country, if it gets really bad, which some people are doing. That’s why there are little acres over there in New Zealand that look good, except global warming is creaming these people. They’ve had a blizzard over there wiping out livestock, at the end of winter, but that’s another matter. I’m keeping track of what’s going on in New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. Europe’s lost. UK is gone. They may as well have erased their borders 20 years ago. They’re finished. You don’t want to go there. Some of the former Soviet bloc, eastern bloc, some of the new democracies over there, they show some promise, but Putin’s got them targeted. Cuba, interesting, might be a place, but I don’t know if that will happen soon enough. But regardless, yes, lots of places being examined.
My only point, folks, is this. People say, ‘Wow, look at how much money Shaquille O’Neal has or LeBron James.’ Yeah, look how much money the guy paying them has, that’s what nobody thinks about. You think Shaquille’s rich? How about the person paying him? Shaquille’s chump change to the guy paying him. LeBron, chump change. Same with Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods is chump change compared to all of Nike paying him. What are they going to do? They’re going to find ways to keep Obama from getting it. Individuals, corporations, but primarily individuals. They’re going to do everything they can to make sure Obama doesn’t get it rather than invest in growth. And this is what happened in the seventies and eighties, and this is why Carterism happened, this is why the malaise happened, just everybody shut down. The productive class, the entrepreneur class shut down. It made no sense to succeed when 90% of it had to go to the government. When 90% of the last dollar you earned had to go to Uncle Sam, when 70% of the last dollar you earned had to go to government, it made no sense to earn it. It wasn’t worth the time. You lowered that 70% to 28, now we’re talking, now we’re going to go out and we’re gonna bust rear ends, and we’re gonna start creating and we’re going to be entrepreneuring and we’re gonna invest and we’re gonna try to make as much profit and we’re gonna report as much income as we can rather than sheltering it ’cause we get to keep 68 cents of it rather than 20 and 30.
That’s what’s going to happen, where we’re headed. This socialism, this communist stuff, just cycles and repeats. The difference here is that this guy is intending for us not to come out of this. That’s the difference. He is intending for this to be fini and permanent. What’s he calling it? The hope and change reform, the new America or what have you. So if you are in any way dependent on anybody else for what you have. I mean if you’re dependent on a job and therefore somebody having a job and work needing to be done, for which you will be paid, if you’re counting on that, you cannot in any way support not just Obama, but the Democrat Party. They want to pull that rug out from underneath you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And let me give you another thing to think about, just one word. Snerdley, look at me. Belize. Caribbean superpower of Belize. Look it up on a map. You’ll find it down there in Central America. Belize, New Zealand, Singapore. What does it say, what does it tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that three of the wealthiest Americans — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot — hold the bulk of their wealth in the nontaxed form of unrealized capital gains? How many of you know what an unrealized capital gain is? Dawn doesn’t. See, it’s what I’m talking about. Do you think whatever Obama does is gonna cost Gates and Buffett anything, or Perot? The Clintons, I don’t know if they still do, but they had three investment entities registered in the Cayman Islands as recently as 2004 with Ron Burkle. And you had John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, once upon a time he had a Cayman Islands account. That’s called offshore sheltering. I mean there’s one reason why you have an account down there and it’s not to keep Luigi from finding you. And, by the way, John Kerry found a way to avoid paying his yacht tax, until people discovered what he was doing. Oh, yeah, you think those thousands of pages of tax code are just the result of helter-skelter addition and bureaucracy run amuck? Think again who’s writing ’em. Who’s writing it all? Obama keeps saying about the tax cuts, ‘Let’s help the people out there who are suffering.’ Well, people who have to worry about still getting the Bush tax cuts obviously already have well-paying jobs or it wouldn’t matter to ’em, so they aren’t the people who are suffering. The people who are suffering are the people that don’t have jobs, and the only way to help them is to get rich people to hire ’em. Really, it isn’t complicated.
Charles in Etowah.
CALLER: Etowah.
RUSH: Etowah, Tennessee. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Thank you very much, sir, you’ve brought many smiles, laughter, and much thought into my life during dark days.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: I want to convey something about UT. I was walking by a newsstand and saw a headline Sunday, and it is UT’s in a mess because of the stimulus program. They were already in —
RUSH: Are you talking about the University of Tennessee?
CALLER: Yes. Now, in 2008 they had already planned on making massive cuts, about 700 on the faculty and administration. They were going to do many things to streamline the program and save money because —
RUSH: Right, just after the paid off the football coach, Lane Kiffin.
CALLER: (laughing) Yeah, that’s quite a joke. And he crashed his Lexus.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Well, all this was going on. Well, they accepted stimulus money. They could not do the cuts, and the money was used to pay lecturers, renovate some classrooms, hire fundraisers and do various things. Guess what? When the stimulus money’s gone, they’re gonna still have to make the cuts —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — the school is in bad shape —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: — and the governor’s office said we hoped when the money came to an end the economy would be back going strong.
RUSH: What a crock.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: The very fact they took the money was a contributing factor of the economy not coming back. But this is starting to happen, all of the stimulus money. They hired a bunch of people, it’s starting to end now, jobs, it’s artificial, the artificiality is ending, and now the reality is starting to hit. Just as he says.
Rochelle, Fort Worth, Texas, you’re next, Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, yeah, you’re so right. President Jackass is doing this on purpose. Anyone with eyesight could see — I mean we fall into that category, that magically wealthy that he keeps calling us and we’re absolutely middle class. We paid for all of our cars, we don’t go into debt, we’re very careful, but we’re not living high off the hog. In fact, we just bought our first big screen TV in December after contemplating it for a year.
RUSH: How big is it?
CALLER: You know, you’d have to ask my husband. (laughing)
RUSH: See, she doesn’t even know. Your husband probably knows every dimension of the flat screen TV, and you don’t.
CALLER: ‘Cause it took him a year to decide to buy it. It was his combined Christmas, birthday, and Father’s Day gift. And, you know what? We ended up canceling cable in the end to save money.
RUSH: Wait a second. You bought the flat screen, but you cancel cable?
CALLER: We did, because we’re trying to make sure that we stay within our means every single month —
RUSH: I understand that.
CALLER: — we’re very careful.
RUSH: What are you watching on the flat screen?
CALLER: You know what? He ended up getting the antenna, the HD antenna.
RUSH: So you’ve got rabbit ears out there, essentially, you got a rooftop HD antenna.
CALLER: We do, but it works. But, you know, we’re not these people that he tries to make us out to be. There’s no Cayman Islands resort for us. We’re normal people. And, you know, Rush, part of the reason why we live in Texas, aside from the fact that we love it, is because there is no state income tax.
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: Yeah, we’re trying to keep as much of our own money as we can.
RUSH: I know. There’s no state income tax in Florida. I remember when I moved here and I publicly proclaimed that was the reason. I had all these people accuse me of being unpatriotic, running away from my obligations. I was obligated to stay in New York and pay confiscatory taxes. By the way, a story out of New York, for the first time in a long time, I’ll have to look at the period of time, New York per capita income is down. Folks, do not doubt me. When I know it’s time to leave someplace, follow me.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Diana in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the one and only Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. The reason I was listening to you is this government truly is getting rid of the American dream. I mean my daughter went to law school, did it with student loans, her husband, same thing, and they make within that same range you were discussing and they’re barely making it, they’re living paycheck to paycheck with student loans and everything else that they have to pay. Everyone assumes because they make this kind of money, that they live just wonderfully. And I mean they don’t. They still have all these bills and stuff. And what’s sad is I have teenaged daughters that — me and my daughters, my oldest daughter discussed it, we want them to go to college and do things but when you look at what’s going on, what can we promise them? Oh, yeah, if you can go to college and do something with yourself but you’re going to be paying out everything and you’re really —
RUSH: Diana, more and more people are starting to realize this. More and more kids in college — you said your daughter’s a lawyer. I know some friends of mine whose kids are lawyers. They’re in law school. And they’re sitting there and they’re seeing the student loans pile up, and they’re looking at 15% unemployment, they’re thinking, ‘What happens to me when I get outta here? When I graduate this law school, where am I gonna go? All I’m going to have facing me is these student loans.’ There are people beginning to question the genuine high cost of education, how long it’s gonna take to pay that back.
I want to address one thing. We’ve had a couple callers here, and you’ve heard them say that they’re in this 200 to $250,000 range, and I’m sure that some of you are not all that sympathetic listening to them describe their plight. Some of you who make $50, 75, whatever, you’re looking at somebody making $250, ‘What is this, barely make ends meet?’ You can’t imagine it, you’re making $50, 75, ‘My God, if I had $250 I’d be in fat city,’ and you would for a while. But how do I explain this? Well, your lifestyle catches up to you. But why? You see, at every level, folks, at every level of economic class there’s somebody out there willing to take your money from you for something. Either a Motel 6 for a hotel room or a Ritz-Carlton for hotel room. I mean if you make $50, 75 you’ll find a hotel room you can afford. When you make $250, you’ll find a hotel room you can afford. You might buy a car more expensive than you would buy if you make $50 or 75. At every level of income there is a group of people willing to take what you’ve got. I mean you pay them for it, they give you something back, but you know what I’m talking about. So people in the $200 and 250 range can just as easily be in the same financial condition as somebody at $75. Their house may be a little bit more expensive but they still owe on it. Their utilities, they still owe.
The point here is that Obama wants you to believe those people are wealthy, and they aren’t. Now, I don’t want you to think ill of these people and think that they’re spoiled rotten because they didn’t start out at $250. They at one point were at $50, maybe less. I can remember my first job as an adult was for $12,000 a year. We’re all like this. So the people at this $250,000 range, they at one time were less than that. And it’s true that if you are in that 50 to $75,000 range, if somebody came along right now, tomorrow, your paycheck goes from whatever it is from $50 to 75 to 250, the percentage increase, you’re gonna say, ‘Wow, look at all this money I’ve got,’ and you will find a way to do something with it. If you are disciplined, you’ll save some of it. But if you’ve got kids and cars, a wife, if you’ve got satellite, cell phone, if you’ve got any number of things — ex-wife — the point is that whatever income level expenses are going to match the income level, they will find you. The people that have Ritz-Carlton hotel rooms will find you. The people that will charge you $200 a year to use their credit card will find you, and you’ll happily pay it because, wow, look what I can afford. It’s the way things are. And it’s entirely natural, and it doesn’t mean when you hear people who earn $200 or 250 talking about barely making ends meet, believe me, that’s true for everybody in this current economy. It’s worse for the people that don’t have jobs, but even some of them are going on cruises and hitting Las Vegas casinos.