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RUSH: People have been waiting patiently. We’re gonna go to Shiloh, Illinois. This is Janet. Janet, I’m glad you waited. I appreciate that, and hi.

CALLER: Hi, Last Man Standing. And, boy, have you proven today you are the last man. Rush, you’ve been brilliant, and you’re absolutely correct on Gruber. You’ve nailed it. And I hope Ron Fournier is listening so he knows how he got played. You’re right. Ron Fournier is a nice guy who wants good, and it’s in that piece how he got played. Knee-jerk reaction of the Republicans.


RUSH: Right. And how disappointed and shocked and surprised he is. He can’t believe that somebody like Gruber would lie like this.

CALLER: Right. And, Rush, when you said yesterday you believe Obama wanted a Republican Senate, you’re straight on the mark. You hit that one like you hit everything else: out of the park. He wanted a single-line party vote on Obamacare, for many reasons, which we can discuss over port and brandy someday. But, anyway, they —

RUSH: No, no. You mean port and cigars.

CALLER: Port and cigars. Excuse me. Yes.

RUSH: If you want port and brandy, have at it, but —

CALLER: I don’t inhale, though. I just hold onto ’em. (laughing)

RUSH: I don’t inhale, either.

CALLER: I love the smell of tobacco. Okay. What we need to focus on right now — and I do have a question if you’re generous enough about Mary Landrieu and what she really needs to win, which is not Keystone, and you would get this. But, anyway, the proof, it’s the Cadillac Tax. That’s what we have to look at. This is how stupid they think the media is. Not the American people, ’cause it’s the American people who are paying for the Cadillac Tax. The Cadillac Tax is for the high-end health care plans. It’s part two of the funding. It is a pure revenue tax. Forty percent. Gruber’s talking about it, they found him last night, he says they passed it over to the health insurance companies, I think he even called them “evil,” which, again, that only says Rush Limbaugh was right. I love this, don’t you? Anyway, so it’s that 40% that they rolled over to the health care —

RUSH: Yeah, but they called it a tax on the rich in order to, what they thought, would get the poor people, the average, whatever, to support it.

CALLER: Right. And it’s a tax on union health care plans. A 40% tax for no other reason than to pay for Obamacare. And the American taxpayer, through their property taxes, through their municipal taxes, through their school budgets, are gonna pay for every single public union and federal union employee’s 40% tax hike. The actual policyholder, the individual union member is not going to pay it. They will pay a little bit, but — and we are looking at Americans who had health care, who had doctors, who could afford what they had, losing it. It’s going up in price! They can’t afford it! So they’re gonna pay a tax for something that they have to get —

RUSH: Yeah, but the real reason for that is to wipe out private sector health insurance companies so that the people that can’t afford it there will eventually find a very eager government to give them a policy. I appreciate the call very much, Janet.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, to explain what Janet in Shiloh, Illinois, was talking about with Gruber, and she swerved into the Cadillac Tax out of nowhere, and I just want to explain to you what she was talking about. Gruber, in one of these videos — and I’ve got all three of them here. I’m trying to decide if you’re Grubered out now. (interruption) You’re not Grubered out now? Well, I’ve got ’em here. Friday, stand by, seven, eight, and nine. What he was talking about, Cadillac taxes, he was bragging to all of these economics colleagues, or “colleagues,” is now the proper way to say it in the elite circles.


(imitating elitist) “And like what my colleague tried to say, errr, Cadillac Tax, sequence of this is, errr, Cadillac Tax, going to tax insurance companies, evil, evil, evil, heartless insurance companies, 40%, gonna sock it to ’em. And when we do that, we’re gonna tell these stupid Americans that means they’re gonna get a tax cut ’cause we’re gonna sock the insurance companies. See, that’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna, 40% tax on the insurance companies, tell these stupid idiots that that results in a 40% tax cut for them so they’ll support this thing. See, the public is too stupid about economics to realize that the tax would be passed on.”

That’s what Janet’s point was, is that the tax is gonna be passed on to them. And that the people who are the beneficiaries of all this are all Obama buddies, primarily union and elites who have access to the Cadillac. And the Cadillac plan is the most expensive plan. The Regime is running around, the whole point of the Cadillac plan, it’s unfair that they exist. You know, why should one human being in America be allowed to have a better plan than any other human being? That’s just inherently unfair. And if your answer is, “Well, because he’s paying for it.”

Well, see, that makes my point. It’s unfair that he can pay for it, but not everybody else can. So what? Maybe the rich are paying for their health insurance plans because they can, but it’s unfair that they can afford it and everybody else can’t. And so we’re gonna slap a tax on these Cadillac plans and we’re gonna soak it to these rich people that do not deserve to have something that much better than you do. And then what we’re gonna do is that 40% tax is gonna make your policy cheaper and cheaper, and the lie was that the tax was going to be passed on to you by the insurance company.

If the government levies a tax of 40% on any entity that sells something in the retail markets, or even wholesale, what happens is that that tax, if it’s 10%, 15, 40, whatever, the retailers add that to the cost of whatever it is they’re selling. The end user, which is the consumer, is always going to end up paying for these things. And it was that that Gruber was saying they had to lie about because you’re too stupid to figure out how this all works ’cause you don’t understand economics.

So, in other words, Gruber was laughing about raising taxes on the stupid public without them knowing that’s what was going to happen. Grab sound bite seven. Hear it in the audio we have from the video. This is November 1st of 2012 in Kingston, Rhode Island at the University of Rhode Island. MIT egghead Jonathan Gruber spoke about the political and economic impact of health care reform and a Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act.

GRUBER: John Kerry said: no, no, no, we’re not gonna tax your health insurance. We’re gonna tax those evil insurance companies. We’re gonna impose a tax that if they sell health insurance that’s too expensive, we’re gonna tax them. And conveniently the tax rate will happen to be the marginal tax rate under the income tax code. So basically it’s the same thing. We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices, that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.

RUSH: It’s brazen what they were doing! It’s brazen what they were doing here. They were raising taxes on you and convincing you that they’re raising taxes on the rich, which, by the way, is a standard, ordinary operating ploy. How often have you heard liberal Democrats talk about raising taxes on the rich, and the next thing you know, you’re paying higher taxes? It’s a common ploy. It goes way, way back in their playbook.

What is really disgusting about it is that they tell the average middle class guys, “Yeah, we’re gonna soak it to the rich. Those people have got way too much, and they probably got it from you in the first place. So we’re gonna really soak it to ’em!” And you applaud because you are afflicted with a disease called get-even-with-’em-ism, and you love the fact that government’s gonna penalize these people, and even if that’s what ultimately would happen, your life doesn’t change. They don’t do anything to improve your economic circumstance. They just tell you that they’re gonna soak it to the rich, they’re gonna sock it to the rich, and you’re supposed to be happy with that, but you don’t get any benefit from it. You’re just supposed to be happy that somebody else is in pain.

That’s what the left sells. The Democrat Party and the left, they come around, and they sell pain and suffering in other people. And you are supposed to be mollified by that. You are supposed to feel good about that. You’re supposed to be happy about that. And it works. Class envy, they’ve tried it, been doing it as long as I’ve been alive and I’ve been confronted with people on the phones here who are just happy as hell when they think the rich are gonna get soaked, even though their lives aren’t gonna change at all. I submit to you that this kind of emotional manipulation by the Democrat Party does not do anybody any good.

What good does it do to make somebody happy at what they think is the suffering or inconvenience of somebody else? What’s the good of that? Talking about people you don’t even know. The rich? Don’t even know them. Here comes Obama, here comes Gruber: Yeah, we’re gonna really load ’em up. We’re gonna have a 40% tax on their plans.

You go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you stick it to ’em!” You don’t even know them. And it doesn’t help you an iota. All it does is fuel continued rage and resentment, all these really destructive human emotions, and those are the emotions the Democrat Party plays on. Those are the emotions they try to triumph on. It’s really despicable. There’s nothing inspirational about it. There’s nothing uplifting about it. It’s totally destructive.

So here’s this guy Gruber bragging, he’s speaking real fast here. I want sound bite seven again. But he’s really bragging here about raising the tax on insurance companies by 40% and how that’s gonna convince everybody to support the plan, ’cause they don’t understand how the insurance companies are just gonna pass that new tax on in the form of higher prices.

GRUBER: John Kerry said: no, no, no, we’re not gonna tax your health insurance. We’re gonna tax those evil insurance companies. We’re gonna impose a tax that if they sell health insurance that’s too expensive, we’re gonna tax them. And conveniently the tax rate will happen to be the marginal tax rate under the income tax code. So basically it’s the same thing. We just tax the insurance companies, they pass on higher prices, that offsets the tax break we get, it ends up being the same thing. It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.


RUSH: “A basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.” And that lack of understanding is very simple. They think that you don’t understand that corporations don’t pay taxes. They think that you believe that when they raise taxes 40% on some insurance company, that that insurance company pays the 40%. ‘Cause you’re not sophisticated enough to know that you are actually gonna pay it. Because your prices are gonna go up, too. The insurance company is gonna pass the new costs on.

It’s sort of a wink wink, nod nod deal between Gruber and the insurance companies. And they make you think all the while that they’re really soaking the rich, when they’re not. That’s all this talk about marginal rates and it ends up being the same thing. That means it ends up being a wash, except for you.

So what he’s really chuckling about here is how all of these supposed new punitive taxes are actually going to be paid by you, but you’re too stupid to know it. So they’re gonna lie to you and tell you the rich are paying those taxes, and you’re gonna applaud that, and you’re gonna support the bill because of that. That, I think, is the entire foundation of all of Obamacare — and not just Obamacare, folks.

That’s every piece of legislation they come up with. The only intelligent thing… You know, I have this phrase, “intelligence guided by experience.” It’s a classic, perfect example of using it here. Now that you know — and you all in this audience do. I’m speaking to those of you who may be new arrivals, not regular listeners here. All of this, you’re just figuring out. The thing that you must do first down is accept the reality.

They admittedly lied to you about this, which means what else have they lied to you about and what else are they going to lie to you about? Or, better stated: What haven’t they lied to you about? Because the fact is, truth is, there is nothing — very little — of liberalism that if they honestly presented it to you, you would support. I mean, you’re looking at it. You’re look at it.

We’re living it for six years, and what happened last Tuesday? The American people showed up and said, “Stop this!” They don’t want any part of it, and the liberals know it. They know they have to camouflage who they are and what they believe. They know they are always governing against the will of the people. The way they end up dealing with this is trying to buy as much love and support as they can by expanding the welfare state. It’s that simple. That’s how they do it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Pay close attention in the future when anybody in the Democrat Party starts talking about the entities that they consider the enemy. The Democrat Party, the American left has enemies. They are always telling you who is out to get you and they’re always telling you who they are gonna protect you from. Make note of these. They are the oil industry. They are big anything. Big Food, Big Retail, Big Oil.

In other words, the Democrat Party’s primary enemies list happens to be industry engaged in the private sector or the free-enterprise economy. So here we have an example of the architect of Obamacare lying about every aspect of this bill that’s important to all of his economic buddies, and it’s a teachable moment. In this latest example, he’s excoriating Big Insurance. “It’s not fair, 40% on these Cadillac plans? We’re gonna punish them!

“We are gonna punish them!”

Who gets punished? Their customers! And they’re gonna punish Big Oil. And they’re gonna punish the Big Polluters. They’re gonna punish big Walmart, Big Retail. They’re gonna punish them. They end up punishing you. But make a note of who their enemies are. They make no bones about who their enemies are. It’s institutions, it’s traditions that have defined this country’s greatness.

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