RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, Investors.com has an interesting piece today. One of their editorials is called His Agenda, and the headline of this piece is “The Terrifying Line in Obama’s Speech That Everyone Missed — President Obama’s convention speech got rough reviews, and rightly so. He offered little but tired bromides and recycled promises. But critics overlooked one promise that will guarantee an even bleaker future. There was plenty to dislike in Obama’s speech. The language was flat, his delivery languid. The speech was stuffed with standard Obama chestnuts about the smallness of politics, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and how cynicism is our worst enemy. Instead of stirring rhetoric filled with hope and promise, Obama pledged that under his leadership, ‘our path is harder’ and ‘our road is longer.'”

Really?

“After four years of the worst economic recovery since the Depression, falling incomes, lower-paying jobs, increased hopelessness and exploding debt, all Obama has to offer is that he’ll make this nightmare last even longer? He also told the public that they ‘elected me to tell you the truth’ not to ‘tell you what you wanted to hear,’ but then proceeded to hide inconvenient truths while filling the public’s ears with sweet nothings. For example, he pledged government help for everyone who could possibly want or need it, but managed to avoid any mention of the hard truth that the national debt just topped $16 trillion and entitlements are unsustainable.

“He said he’d spend money saved from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on roads, bridges and schools. Even the liberal press wasn’t buying this one. As the AP pointed out, Obama ‘laid claim to a peace dividend that doesn’t exist.’ Obama promised to ‘take responsible steps’ that would ‘keep the promise of Social Security.’ But he failed to mention that the only options he’s left on the table are raising taxes or cutting benefits. That may not be what people want to hear, but it’s the absolute truth. He trotted out his supposed plan to cut deficits by $4 trillion over the next decade,” which is a laugher. I don’t know how he gets away with that stuff. This guy wouldn’t know cutting a deficit if it slapped him. “His actual plan — the budget he presented in February — would add $3.5 trillion in deficits,” over the next decade. Not cut four trillion.

“Then Obama said he’d create a million new manufacturing jobs, recruit another 100,000 math and science teachers.” This was the State of the Union portion of the speech. He said he would “cut tuition growth in half, and reform the tax code. All by magic, apparently, since he’s provided no detailed plans on any of this. But while everyone was picking apart these and other flaws in Obama’s speech, they overlooked the most frightening line of all. That was when Obama promised that he’d pursue ‘the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.'”

Our path is harder. Our road is longer. He promised more of the same. He was being honest. If I win re-election, it’s going to continue as it is. Because for him to accomplish what he wants, it must continue. He has to. If he’s going to be the transformative president that he wants to be, he is going to have to do his double whammy on the private sector. He’s going to have to continue to grow government. He’s going to have to continue to spend money that we don’t have. He’s going to have to raise taxes. He’s going to have to diminish wealth in this country, and he’s at the same time going to have to diminish the opportunity to create wealth. So he said it. He promised it. More of it. Straight ahead.

Back to the audio sound bites. Last night On the Record, Greta Van Susteren, she had Kelly… how do you pronounce Ayotte? The New Hampshire Republican Senator. It’s Ayotte. I never hear these names pronounced because I never have the volume up because I couldn’t hear it anyway if I did. I oughta start asking people. It’s only been 10 years that I can’t hear. There ought to be a procedure for me to know how names are pronounced rather than having to guess this. Anyway, just because I don’t know how her name is pronounced doesn’t mean I don’t know who she is. She’s the Republican Senator from New Hampshire. Greta Van Susteren said, “Senator, do you agree with Rush Limbaugh that we’re heading toward economic collapse, or is he overstating it?”

AYOTTE: We’re still over 8% unemployment. And for every one job we’ve added, four people have left the workplace. It’s the lowest labor participation rate since 1981, over 43 straight months of 8% unemployment. And then there’s the debt. We met the marker of $16 trillion in debt. This president has added $5 trillion in debt, and frankly, our country can’t take anymore. What he had to say about Obamacare is absolutely right. I’ve heard it from employers in my state that they’re not adding jobs because of the cost of Obamacare and worries about it. So yes, we’re in deep trouble, I think, if we have four more years of these policies and this president.

RUSH: Folks, there’s no question. It’s what he intends. What does it mean when he says the road is harder and longer? Our path is harder and our road is longer. He’s not promising salvation from any of this. He’s promising more of the same. Anybody want that? We are being told —

(interruption)

How is it pronounced? Ayotte. Okay. See that was my inclination. Even when I think I’m wrong I’m right. That was my instinct in how to pronounce it. I am all-knowing. I know it when I don’t know it. Sometimes I know it when I don’t think I know it. I need to trust myself in these moments, these rare moments of self-doubt.

“Our path is harder and our road is longer.” Does anybody want any more of this? And what the media is telling is, yes, millions of Americans do want this. That’s what they tell us, folks, when they’re suggesting that Obama is leading in the polls. That’s what they’re suggesting when they tell us that these millions of people want to vote for Obama. That people want more of this. Well, who are the people that want more of this? And are they a majority? That’s the big question. Who is it that wants more of this? If you like working, if you like having a career but you don’t have a job, you don’t want any more of it. The only people that want more of this, I would think, are the beneficiaries of Obama’s crony capitalism and the people who think that the gravy train of government benefits will never end. But they will.

Folks, this is unsustainable. When I was growing up, which was a long time ago now, I remember my dad’s friends, who sound like we sound today, talking about national debt. Now, the national debt when I was growing up, I’d have to look it up, but I don’t even think it was a trillion dollars. It might have been. The point is it was nowhere near what it is today. And back then my parents’ friends, my dad’s friends, were all saying the national debt was going to be our ruination, and I would always ask them, “Well, who do we owe it to?” Back then the answer was ourselves. I said, “Well, then why does it ever really have to be paid back? If we’re all Americans and we’re all in this together, and if we owe the money to ourselves, why does the money have to be paid back?” Which begot lessons to me on debt and why it must be repaid. But the point is for all of my life I started hearing people talking about the national debt and how it’s going to be our ruination. And through all of my life it wasn’t.

The national debt hasn’t mattered a hill of beans, that people are aware. Now, of course, it has. It has in enumerable ways, but they’re not obvious. The national debt takes money out of the private sector, the people who would otherwise have access to borrow, to buy homes or start businesses or what have you. Now the debt is owned by the Chi-Coms and the Japanese and who knows who else. In 1969, it was a good year, I was 18. The national debt was $286 billion, $286 billion in 1969, and my dad’s friends were telling me as a youngster that this national debt is going to end up making you and your brother slaves.

That’s what my dad said, too. “You boys are going to be slaves if the liberals are not stopped. This national debt is going to end up destroying the country.” Well, I lived my whole life and it never destroyed anything that I was aware of. Now, I got fired seven times but I never chalked it up to the national debt. I never chalked the national debt up as an excuse or reason why I wasn’t earning very much money. I continue to hear the national debt, the national debt. So here I am a little older than my dad and his friends were when they were telling me about the danger of national debt, and what am I doing? I’m saying the same thing they said.

Only what makes now different? Why do we not have another two generations of okay? We had a $286 billion national debt in 1969 and we have a $16,000 billion national debt now. In 1969, the welfare state wasn’t nearly as big. We had only started the Great Society and the War on Poverty five years earlier in 1964. Medicare and Medicaid were relatively new. All of this stuff… I guess my point here is, I am saying the same thing that adults were saying to me when I was a kid.

And I wonder how many kids say, “Ehhhhh, it’s just a bunch of old fogeys whining and moaning. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” Clearly there are people that don’t care about it. They don’t understand it and they don’t see the danger in it because (like I was told) they’re probably being told that we owe it to ourselves. So it’s really not like a debt. But now… I said this yesterday, and this is what Kelly Ayotte was being asked by Greta Van Susteren.

I asked the question yesterday: “How long before the collapse of our financial system if this guy gets re-elected?” It is imminent! We are now at the point, I think, that my dad and his friends were warning me about. No, I don’t think they knew that it would take until 2012 for this to manifest itself in such obvious ways. But we finally reached that point where now I am fully aware of the dangers that the national debt and these never-ending annual deficits portend.

This is now real money we don’t have, and add to that the people who own our debt are not really our friends. But that is kind of mitigated, because if we go down the tubes so do they. Although some of them might want us to go down the tubes. The ChiComs, I don’t think would actually care. They like us for the market, the purchasing market that we represent and the manufacturing market they have created to satisfy our purchasing demands and desires. But we’re still an enemy to them.

But I digress on that. Four more years of not caring, four more years of purposely adding? The road, the path is longer. The road is harder. He’s going to keep doing this, and it isn’t sustainable. All of these entitlements are going to literally hit the point where they don’t have the money to pay out the benefits. I know people have been hearing this all their lives and the checks still keep flowing.

So what makes now different?

What makes now different is that we have someone in the White House who is not concerned with it at all. This is just fine with him. But who wants more of this? Who wants the same path? Or, in fact, a harder one? Who wants the same road, and even longer? Where is this taking us? On what path are we, and on what road are we? Where are we headed? Everybody, I think, could agree that the road that we’re on is not to prosperity. This is not the road to prosperity. This is not how you get there.

The same thing with the path.

Why would the next four years of the same policies be any different? If spending $1 trillion to create jobs sufficiently to get the unemployment rate down to 5% — which is what Obama promised, that the stimulus would get unemployment down to 5%. If it didn’t work, if $1 trillion didn’t work, why would $2 trillion work if they tried to, say, double it? It won’t! What Obama claims to want versus his policies cancels each other out. His policies cannot get us to what he says he wants: A strong, thriving middle class with beau coup job creation.

The evidence is the last three and a half years. His policies do just the exact opposite. He promised more of the same, and obviously it will be harder if there’s more of the same. So who wants more of this? That boils the question down to its essence. The people who do want more of this are actually the problem, because they haven’t the slightest idea what that means, because it’s going to run dry. The spigot’s going to run dry. They’re going to end up with nothing, because Obama is killing off production. He’s killing off wealth creation, or dis-incentivizing it.

Let’s put it that way.