RUSH: Did you see where John Boehner and Obama met at the White House face-to-face for the first time in 23 days? I wonder if Boehner had to wear one of those cheesy name tags. “Hi, I’m John Boehner, Speaker of the House.” It’s been so long since he’s been there. No word on whether Boehner took a white flag with him or not. Well, what can you say here, folks? Fiscal cliff negotiations proving once again that Obama is never worried about trying to fix the problem. All he’s trying to do is fix the blame.

Now, there was a guy on CNBC. Does the name Peter Schiff ring a bell? It does to me. I’ve seen this name over and over. He is the CEO of something called Euro Pacific Capital. He lives in Connecticut. He was on CNBC recently, and he said, “First of all, I’m in the top two percent. Right now, I’m paying 45% of my total income in income taxes, both to the state of Connecticut and to the federal government, and if you take the 3% Medicare tax. After the tax hikes go into effect next year, more than half — more than half of my total income is going to go to the government. You tell me, what’s fair about that when medieval serfs pay 25%, I’m paying half?”

He’s introducing a new fairness argument here. What the hell is fair about the top 2% already paying close to half the income tax burden, and then having their income taxes go up? And he then said, “I don’t care what the majority voted to do, they don’t have a right to steal my money just because they vote for it.”

Oh, yes, they do. That’s where we are. They do have a right to your money, Mr. Schiff. That’s what the election of Obama meant. That’s why people voted for Obama. I am more and more convinced that the Obama voters knew what they were doing just as the voters in California, Proposition 30, knew what they were doing. Look, as long as the gravy train keeps rolling, and we’ve talked about this I don’t know how many times, the unemployed have their unemployment extension. And, by the way, that’s been proposed, a new extension for unemployment because you know what’s hurting the unemployment extension? The falling unemployment rate.

As the unemployment rate goes down because of the formula, unemployment extensions expire. The regime has to something about that. So now there’s a new wrinkle that’s been added to the fiscal cliff deal and that’s extending unemployment benefits. I kid you not, and it’s gonna happen. As long as the gravy train keeps rolling and they’ve got their unemployment, got the plasmas, cell phones, debit cards for food stamps and so forth. Obama’s basically gonna believe everything’s hunky dory. As long as there aren’t any cuts to the programs that provide for them, they’re gonna think everything’s fine, and there aren’t going to be any cuts to entitlements. There just aren’t going to be. A, the Republicans don’t have the leverage. B, I don’t think the Republicans have the real desire to do that. I mean, en masse, I don’t think there are enough votes for that to happen, let me put it that way.

But as Brit Hume today said on Fox News, there’s just certain realities here. Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, take your pick, all these entitlements, I mean, those are, to the Democrat Party, the crown jewels of their existence. I mentioned this last week when I talked about the fact that there is no middle ground. There is no common ground here for a negotiation, because what the Republicans want, what the Democrats want are two totally different things. The Republicans want spending pretty much cut, they want taxes held pretty much the same, although they’re willing to increase revenue. That’s gonna happened, too. Boehner’s already offered $800 billion.

But, you know what, the New York Times has a story out, the timing is just wonderful. Guess what, folks? Guess what? The New York Times has just learned that the revenue raised by eliminating loopholes and deductions, you know, darn it, it just isn’t gonna be enough. We’re going to have to raise the rates, too. Shazam, just figured out it out over the weekend in a late dispatch to help Obama. They can’t do this with just closing the loopholes. Not possible. Gonna have to raise the rates, too. Jackie Calmes, New York Times. That’s it.

Well, I’m sorry, folks, there’s no common ground because the Republicans do not want to raise taxes. They want to cut spending. The Democrats don’t want to cut spending. The Democrats don’t want any changes. The Democrats want more spending to sustain the entitlements because that enables the gravy train to keep rolling. As long as the programs that provide for Obama’s-low-information, high-benefits voters, as long as those things continue to provide their benefits, what do they care about the deficit? Seriously, the low-information voter, the Obama voter, what do they care about unfunded liabilities? They don’t even know what that is. What do they care about credit ratings?

You run up to a typical Obama voter, “You know, we’re gonna lose our AAA credit –” “What? What’s credit? The country has a credit rating? I don’t understand. Explain it to me.” And then you start explaining and you lose them because they don’t care. What do they care about inflation? What’s any of that to them? It’s just gibberish.

A great piece over the weekend, actually a couple great pieces on many of the problems conservatives have. Democrats sell benefits; we sell features. Stop and think about this, and I’ll give you some examples as the program unfolds. The Democrats sell benefits. What does this mean to you? We talk about features. We talk about how low taxes are gonna spur economic growth and create upward mobility, but there’s no direct benefit to it. It’s a theory that is true, but there’s no immediate payoff to it. There’s no immediate benefit. We’ve got all the great features, but they offer all the benefits.

I saw another analogy that what the Republicans are in the process of doing is making the mistake that Coca-Cola made. Back in 1985, Roberto Goizueta, who was the CEO of Coke said, “You know what, we’ve had this same formula for all these years. We need to modernize.” So they came out with new Coke, and an uproar took place, and within, what was it, three weeks they had to reintroduce the old Coke as Coke Classic and the new Coke was gone. Well, the theory that I read, I think at Red State, actually, the theory is the Republican Party has been doing new Coke, but gradually. We have been caving on the things that identify us. We’ve been giving away our recipe. We changed our recipe on our own, and the latest example of changing the recipe is, “You know what, we’re all for amnesty now. We’ve gotta go demographics. We’ve gotta open the borders and we’ve gotta get those voters. Yeah, we’re being rejected because of our policy on immigration and Hispanics.”

And so the Republican Party, nobody knows what it is anymore. Whatever it used to be, it’s changing the formula. Whereas Coke did it overnight — this is just a theory, and it’s interesting. In addition, oh, talk about a snake-bit party. No sooner does Obama win the election, no sooner predictably do all the wizards of smart in the Republican Party from the Weekly Standard to the Wall Street Journal to wherever say, “We gotta modernize on immigration. We can’t talk about self-deportation. We’re gonna have to acknowledge that we’re gonna have to grant amnesty. We’re gonna have to really modernize our immigration. We’re gonna have to get up to speed on this.”

No sooner do the wizards of smart decide to do that then, guess what, Michael Barone has a piece: “The End of the Wave — Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past?” And he chronicled something we reported to you months ago. The net has changed. There are more Mexicans leaving America to return home than there are Mexicans coming to the United States. There are many reasons for it, but primarily economic.

The Mexican economy is growing sufficiently so that the Mexican middle class looks a little better to people who live in Mexico. There’s no reason to flee it or not as big a reason. The second reason is, interesting stat from Barone’s piece: 25% of home foreclosures in this country have been experienced by Hispanics. People who moved here wanting the American dream, they live in the southwest, in the dust states, as it’s referred to by Barone, and they got here and they bought into the dream and they bought a house and then market went south, it tanked, and their house is underwater, what the hell? And they’re leaving.

(laughing) So no sooner do the Republicans say, “You know what? Immigration’s our answer,” than people are leaving. (laughing) They’re not coming in net-increase numbers. It’s becoming comical. The whole thing is just becoming comical. (interruption) Yeah, the Coke analogy was Patrick Millsaps’ at Red State. The Mexican economy is growing at 3.5%. Ours is not even half that. So the Mexicans, they have their choice. They’re more than welcome here, as we know, but they’re choosing to stay in Mexico, and some here are choosing to return to Mexico.

Now, there is, you know, a factor here that some of Obama’s voters are leaving, but they’ll be brought back in time for the next election. They won’t be a problem. But the time of the next election, they will be able to vote in Mexico City or Guadalajara or wherever they live. Obama will see to it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Michael Barone’s story on immigration: “The End of the Wave — Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past?” Probably so, since the Republican Party is preparing now to totally alter its identity, is preparing now to open its own borders and go ahead and stand for amnesty or some sort of relaxation of immigration policy. It would be fitting, wouldn’t it, that the Republican Party do this when it no longer matters. After they’ve already been beaten by it, they arrive a day late and a dollar short. At least for the moment, Barone says that the wave is over.

“Last May, the Pew Hispanic Center, in a study based on U.S. and Mexican statistics, reported that net migration from Mexico to this country had fallen to zero from 2005 to 2010. Pew said 20,000 more people moved to Mexico from the United States than from there to here in those years. That?’s a vivid contrast with the years 1995 to 2000, when net inflow from Mexico was 2.2 million people.”

In other words, we have a net loss of Mexicans. Mexicans are leaving the United States in greater numbers than they are coming here. Now, according to Barone, “Because there was net Mexican immigration until 2007, when the housing market collapsed and the Great Recession began, it seems clear that there was net outmigration from 2007 to 2010.” Meaning, that once our economy began to fail, or plunge, and the housing market crashed, that’s when leaving the country began, and Barone has calculated that outmigration has continued into 2011 and 2012. “There?’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again.”

“But,” Barone says, “I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case. Over the past few years,” Barone has “been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I’ve found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.

“Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end,” he says, historically. “For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past,” and they could not, obviously, have been more wrong.

“Experts have also tended to assume that immigrants are motivated primarily by economic factors. And in the years starting in the 1980s, many people in Latin America and Asia, especially in Mexico … saw opportunities to make a better living in this country. But masses of people do not uproot themselves from familiar territory just to make marginal economic gains. They migrate to pursue dreams or escape nightmares. Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days.”

It used to be, but it isn’t anymore. “Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country… And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered” in this country, so they’re leaving! (laughing) Just at the time the Republican Party decides to open its own borders. Don’t you just love it?