TODD: Joe in Detroit, Michigan, joins us on the Rush Limbaugh program. You think you’re gonna tell us about the greatness of this bill, Joe? Welcome to Rush’s show. It’s Todd Herman, your guide host.

CALLER: Hello, Todd. Thanks for taking the call. Seventy-five percent of the people in the country want this bill, this $1.9 trillion. It’s a relief measure, and I love listening to right-wing commentators like you saying Biden is, um, insane, that he’s, uh, demented, and so on and so forth. This guy’s just put something past you. Now he’s gonna go to infrastructure, he’s gonna go to voting rights, and he’s gonna run the table while you guys cower in fear of Donald Trump. Keep up the good work.

TODD: Joe, so here’s the question for you.

CALLER: Don’t change a thing.

TODD: No, I’m not gonna change a thing. Joe, here’s the question for you. What do you think are the most controversial aspects of this bill, of this law?

CALLER: I don’t see too many controversial aspects. I think they’re all —

TODD: Wow.

CALLER: They’re all good provisions.

TODD: I see. So you don’t see anything controversial in this law?

CALLER: Well, I think getting people out of poverty and helping the unemployed —

TODD: Can you remind me who Dylann Roof is?

CALLER: Is he that Confederate guy?

TODD: Didn’t he kill nine people?

CALLER: He was one of those Confederate gunslingers, wasn’t he?

TODD: Yeah, a southern Democrat. So did he kill nine people?

CALLER: No, he —

TODD: Didn’t he kill nine people? What do you think he’s gonna do with his $1400? What do you think he’s gonna do with his $1400 check that Joe Biden sent him from China?

CALLER: That’s none of my business.

TODD: Oh, okay. What about the Boston bomber? Do you remember the Boston bomber?

CALLER: No. You tell me all about him. You mean DeSalvo?

TODD: I usually don’t say mass murderers’ names on the air, usually. My question is, what do you think he’s gonna do with his 1400 bucks?

CALLER: Don’t change a thing, Todd. Keep up the good work.

TODD: I’m just asking you this, Joe. What do you think he’s gonna do with this 1400 bucks?

CALLER: You’re telling me Biden is —

TODD: See? ‘Cause you called this program with the bullet point that you read about 75% of people supporting this. I have some data for you. The three major mockingbird media networks did 40 stories on the $1400 checks, but they missed the part about it going to mass murderers, which, by the way, Republicans tried to stop.

But your team said, “Nah, we gotta make sure the mass murderers get this money.” They talked about the additional unemployment benefits, the funding for vaccines. This makes up maybe 6% of this bill, maybe — or law — Joe, maybe 6%. They didn’t talk about the money for Amtrak, the bailouts for the teachers unions. By the way, it doesn’t get spent this year, Joe. So what’s fascinating —

CALLER: (garbled)

TODD: No, Joe, you called with a point. You read a bullet point, and then you said, Joe —

CALLER: (garbled)

TODD: — and then you said you couldn’t think of anything controversial to this bill. Can you think of anything controversial now?

CALLER: Well, I think when he gets infrastructure and immigration —

TODD: Okay. So we’ll go back —

CALLER: — and shoves it down your throat.

TODD: There’s two ways to do this, Joe, there’s two ways. We can stay on topic or we can end the call. So it’s real quick here. Can you see anything controversial about the call now, Joe?

CALLER: You guys are gettin’ hosed.

TODD: I appreciate it. Thanks for the call, Joe. So when you call a show and you’re liberal, and you’re gonna interact, we can interact, and we can go Socratic. And if you don’t have your ducks in a row when you call a program like this, all right, you might end up on sort of the embarrassing end of things. I don’t try to embarrass callers. But listen just to this analysis. Just listen to this.

The major three networks, $1400 checks for individuals. That’s how this was pitched to the American people by Joe Biden’s media. Forty stories. Twenty on the unemployment benefits. Funding for testing vaccines, 20 stories. On the $15 minimum wage, 19 stories. Help for small businesses, 12 stories. Money for state and local governments, five stories. No stories on previously unspent monies which exist, but we need $1.9 trillion. We need to invent that.

Examples of the bill’s unrelated spending, zero stories. No huge state-local government shortfalls where they’re covering the pensions for government employees taking home $350,000 a year to not work. It’s everything the Maha taught us about bills like this. We had his great wisdom yesterday. You’re gonna hear more of that on the program. This is how Rush fashions a radio kingdom. His talent, his decision to be America’s Anchorman in face of what the liberal media hides.

This is propaganda of silence, and in a way… We don’t believe in victimhood on this show, but in a way, I feel a bit sorry for Joe, because he’s a victim of this propaganda of silence. So let’s lay out what’s to come on this program. More of Rush’s wisdom on this, specifically Rush talking about the role government cannot play. We’ll talk about that. We’ll get into a long, long discussion from Rush on Trump urging austerity versus Biden’s ridiculousness versus a law like this or a bill like this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: So apropos to that, Rush fully understood that liberalism and cultural leftism, so economic liberalism and cultural leftism, they’re conjoined twins. One needs the other to survive. Another way to look at this is like a two headed snake. Here’s Rush describing it.

RUSH: I have a theory. You know, I have a lot of theories, and my theories evolve just like our culture evolves — and our culture’s been evolving in ways that a lot of people are not happy, in a lot of ways people oppose. Our culture is evolving in a way that has a lot of people angry, really ticked off, and scared, and I think priorities change. Whereas one day some people might think federal spending is the gigantic dragon that needs to be slain, the next month or the next year it could be cultural liberalism or the American left in general that has to be done away with or else nothing else matters.

Things culturally shift. Priorities change based on who wins and loses elections at the same time. So we’ve got this massive new budget agreement between the House and the Senate, massive discretionary spending increases. Well, I say “massive.” They’re fairly significant. We’ve got a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big bump in military spending, and we got the tax cut. And, of course, that’s half of this. The literal eggheads and the people with their heads in the sand think the tax cut is a net loss of revenue, when it’s not.

It’s gonna be a net gain. So now it’s budget time. Now we have to do another budget even though we just finished a bipartisan budget agreement. What is this? Well, the president has to present a budget. “But wait, Rush! I thought we had a two-year deal.” Well, we do. But the president still submits a budget that spells out spending priorities. It’s just a proposal. Presidential budgets are always declared DOA in Congress: Dead on Arrival. And Trump is demand tough budgeting cuts for domestic programs, and people are gonna say, “Wait, wait, wait. We just blew through spending caps. We just blew through all kinds of limits on spending. We’ve got a trillion-dollar deficit.” What is this? “President Trump is expected to renew his call for drastic reductions to nondefense programs in rolling out his budget request today, even with hundreds of billions in new cash at hand.” What is that, hundreds of billions of new cash at hand?

Where did that cash come from? We don’t have hundreds of billions of new cash! We don’t have any cash. We’re $20 trillion in debt. Where are we getting this cash? “While Congress busted strict spending caps last week — allowing for an extra $300 billion to be spent over the next two years — the Trump administration is still urging severe austerity for some arms of the federal government. Trump’s budget will lay out ‘an aggressive set of spending reforms’ to reduce the deficit by $3 trillion over a decade, according to a preview released by the White House on Sunday. …

“Officials said the budget would also prioritize border security — proposing to hire roughly 1,000 more patrol agents and immigration officers than its previous budget. The White House will ask Congress for a total of $23 billion in border security programs, reinserting Trump into the center of a fierce immigration debate on Capitol Hill. Roughly $2.7 billion will go directly to the detention capabilities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.” With that money, the White House said the agency could reach an “average daily detention capacity of 52,000 illegal aliens at ICE, the agency’s highest-ever detention level.”

So Trump wants more money to grab more illegals and hold ’em before sending ’em back. “Trump is also making good on his campaign promises to boost funding to fight opioid addiction and to improve veteran health care. “Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget said Sunday that Trump will request more cuts to the State Department and the EPA this time while urging Republican lawmakers to resist the urge to boost spending on social welfare programs.”

Bingo! That’s where it’s all gonna come down to, folks. Bingo! Right there! I had to read one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 — 11 paragraphs to get to “the screws.” That’s golf lingo for the sweet spot. Now, there has been… Since that congressional budget deal was struck, there has been a lot of anger out there. There’s been a lot of charges of hypocrisy aimed at the Tea Party and others for not being true to conservative fiscal restraint, ideology and theory by not trying to stop this monstrosity of a budget. And some of it’s legitimate. No question about it. But I think that this little paragraph here: Trump is gonna urge lawmakers “to resist the urge to boost spending on social welfare programs.”

That’s entitlements, folks, and there’s one thing… Can I get some general agreement just with the idea here that all of these years we have continued to hear about the deficit monster, the national debt monster, depriving us of our prosperity — freedom, maybe — and none of those threats have come to pass yet? Now, I’m over 60, and I’ve been hearing this all my adult life, and none of it’s happened. So could I be blamed for maybe ignoring it now and then when it’s… I mean, when this doom and gloom is preached at every budget signing, at every expansion…

Which, by the way, I actually went and looked it up. The last time the federal government’s budget was reduced from one year to the next was during the administration of Calvin Coolidge. Other than that, the budgets get bigger every year. They never, in aggregate, get cut. Individual things may come and go, like we may starve kids one year and get rid of school lunches. (sigh) You know, I should not do satire that. There’s some lamebrains out there that will actually, “Limbaugh actively is all the concept of starving children today on his radio program!”

Individual budget items get cut, pared back, but overall spending constantly goes up. And this dragon that’s out there waiting to breathe fire on us so far is firing blanks. So can people be blamed for having a ho-hum reaction or maybe not even believing it or maybe thinking, “You know what? Isn’t that big a deal.” But would I be hypocritical to point out that in the area of entitlements, the demographics don’t lie.

For example, if Social Security and Medicare are not reformed — because of demographics and how long people live and that kind of thing — they will grow insolvent. But then how many times have we been told that’s happened? How many times in our lifetime have we had an emergency session of Congress where Medicare had to be saved and we were told it was — or Social Security had to be saved and we were told it was — for the next 10 years? Bob Dole was on one of these commissions that got a lot of credit for saving Social Security.

So every time the crisis comes up we somehow find a way to save it. And all of this stuff has a repeat cycle. And we go through it every so often. And we are treated to crisis after crisis after crisis with miraculous, last-minute relief and solutions. And life goes on. And if you want to borrow money to buy a house, all other requirements met, you can get it. You want to borrow money to buy a car? Fine. If you want to brother money to get the latest iPhone, you can do that.

I mean, people’s prosperity is increasing, standard of living is rising and faster now that Obama’s gone. But at some point these entitlements are gonna take a lot of money from elsewhere in the economy, because the day is coming where these entitlements are gonna eat up all of the budget. Right now the entitlements are what, Mr. Snerdley, 60%? Ballpark. What happens when entitlements are 80? That’s the real threat. When discretionary spending is only 20% of the budget? That’s exactly right. It is not sustainable. It simply isn’t sustainable.

No matter how much money you print, that isn’t sustainable. But when does that moment of truth happen? The discretionary type spending, which is what we blew the caps on in this deal with the Republicans and Democrats, that doesn’t bother people as much, because it’s not locked in, by definition, it’s discretionary. You can change it year to year or whatever term the budget agreement is. But entitlement spending is on autopilot, so to speak.

And it’s in the math. It’s not voodoo economic theory. You see, the problem with the earth, the problem with the world is the unequal distribution of capitalism. But they think it’s the unfairness of capitalism hogging all the resources and denying a quality of life standard of living to most people because we’re a bunch of pigs! They haven’t the slightest idea. Life is a zero-sum game to these people. If we have it, some other people don’t. They don’t understand the concept of everybody can grow of the pie, the overall worldwide or the nationwide economic pie growing. They’re simply unfamiliar with the concept.

TODD: Did you hear that? The unequal distribution of capitalism? That’s brilliance in and of itself.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: Now, Rush, speaking of current news, Rush could be speaking of this $1.9 trillion spendinggasm that does nothing really related to the covid. It’s a massive, massive Democrat power grab and probably the institution of guaranteed basic income. Rush Limbaugh said… You know, if he hadn’t conquered radio, I think he could have the economic chair at some prestigious university if he wanted to. Here’s the Maha’s take on the economic role the federal government wants but we must work to stop.

RUSH: You know, when you talk about spending, the American people — and particularly conservative, rigorous spending wizards that pay strict attention. This is an ideological concept. There’s different kinds. And some government spending is applauded as necessary and valuable. Some people look at tax cuts as government spending. I’m not one of them, but there’s some idiots that do, because they view all money as Washington’s. So you keeping more is effectively you being given money by Washington, ergo, it’s government spending.

Well, that is a crock. But money spent to prop up useless, wasteful solutions to problems where there is no solution, just to continue to buy votes — that kind of spending — people have not changed at all. They’re gonna oppose that kind of spending left and right if it’s done to buy votes, if it’s done for any of these nefarious political reasons. But if there is spending that is actually going to modernize, going to improve, going to increase jobs, people are gonna be all for that. And it all boils down to what your definition of government’s role is. And the Democrat definition of the government’s role is Santa Claus. And the Republican definition of government’s role has not become Santa Claus.

But that’s what the Democrats’ version of government’s role in people’s lives is. That’s how they get power and keep it, by creating as much dependency as they can, importing as many dependent people as they need. We conservatives are about something entirely different. But I really do think that there is something to the fact that Trump’s voters trust him and look at him as the only person standing up to the destructive forces of the left or wherever you want to say they’re from. And if he says he needs specific tools to continue to stop them, people are gonna support him having them. Because things change. People’s priorities change.

The things that scare people change. And ideological rigidity sometimes ends up being fluid as well. To a lot of people, this kind of budget busting spending is an academic exercise. You can never accept this kind of budget spending because it’s destructive, it’s gonna destroy us in this case. If you’re rock solid married to that then of course you’re gonna have a problem with all of this. But this infrastructure plan is to rely mostly on funding outside the federal government’s control? Hallelujah! Outside the federal government’s control! Hallelujah!

TODD: Ah, Rush, and you can apply that thinking about Santa Claus today. That the way the liberal media pitched this to the American people… If you ask, “Look, you know what?” Just ask one of your Democrat friends the question I asked a caller earlier. “Is there anything controversial in the bill?” See if they even know that mass murderers are on getting $1400 checks. See if they even know that or $1.5 billion is going to the failed Amtrak… Not failed. I mean, they’re very successful at being cronies.