RUSH: Jeff in Albany in New York. Jeff, I’m glad you waited, glad you called. It’s great to have you with us. Welcome, sir, to the program.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Thanks for having me on.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: We have major problems with literacy in our schools overall, and that’s a major problem for us to tackle. But far, far worse is the level of economic illiteracy that exists among people. And it just seems as though the president is worsening that problem and deliberately so with his public pronunciations. He’s interested in having people misunderstand basic economics because then he can pose as their great ally and protector from these demons that just simply do not exist.

RUSH: How long have you had this opinion? How long have you thought this?

CALLER: I’ve thought this I think since the campaign of 2008, because he was saying things that just weren’t making sense to me.

RUSH: All right, do you mind if I ask how old you are, Jeff?

CALLER: I’m 38.

RUSH: Thirty-eight. So basically when you were 33, 34 is when you first saw this?

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: The arguments just seemed disingenuous.

RUSH: You’re right. Don’t misunderstand. You’re dead on right. In fact, one of the express purposes of liberal domination of the public school system is to dumb down the people in school. And it’s working. In New York City, get this, 80% of high school graduates, Jeff, can’t read. Now, you move on to economics and start talking about literacy, and I’m telling you, it’s a total lost cause. If you’ve got a public school system where you are graduating 80% of your students that can’t read, then any other subject you want to talk about I guarantee you they’re going to be profoundly ignorant about. And they’re not gonna have been taught how to think, how to learn, how to absorb, and how to understand anything. I’m glad you realize this. Frankly — this is not a criticism — I wish you’da realized it when you were 20, but you did when you did. You’re dead on right. It’s exactly right, and it’s more widespread than just economics education. It’s every element of education in the public system where people are being dumbed down.

CALLER: I would lower my own expectations to the hope that people understand that their employers are not their enemies. That taxing the top one or 2% and will not forever fund our expanding welfare state. And I’m just hoping that these little anecdotal stories that people have, something like the White House tours closing, other things remain open and funded while these crazy studies are still getting done, and people are still having to wait in long lines at the airport, I hope these things start to show people that —

RUSH: Well, wait a minute, how about Harry Reid? We got seven Marines dead in a Nevada military base accident, and he runs around and blames the sequester for it. Now, that’s reprehensible. It is obscene, and yet we have to conclude, we have to assume that a whole bunch of people believe him, because their foundational starting base for knowledge is nonexistent. They believe what they hear from government, They believe what they see on TV. They believe what they see in the news. So if you got a major senator out there blaming the sequester for this, we are gonna have to accept that people do believe that, rather than react the way we do and pooh-pooh it and laugh at it, or get offended at how dare he.

He knows exactly what he’s doing. The Democrats know exactly who their audience is. They are perfectly happy with a dumbed-down, totally dependent population. Perfectly happy with that. Because they view themselves as elitists anyway. They don’t need those people to make the country work. They don’t need a thriving, growing middle class. The Democrats need, in fact, a permanent underclass that is constantly dependent. And as members of that underclass somehow managed to become educated and more economically prosperous and move out of the underclass, they gotta be replaced. They gotta find more poor, uneducated, uninformed people who will remain deadlocked Democrat voters. Hello amnesty. It’s exactly what it is and exactly what it’s all about.

So the Democrats have an entirely different view. You and I, we want an informed public, an educated public going about their business, pursuing excellence. That’s the definition of a great country. It’s how it happens, using the freedom that exists in this country, that’s how we became the greatest superpower in the history of mankind. The Democrats don’t care about that. They don’t care. All they need is a bunch of people voting for ’em to keep ’em in power, and that’s how the country works. And what the country is and what its status is, irrelevant. As long as they have theirs, as long as they are in the upper echelon of the elite perpetually, that’s cool.

They do not look at this government of, by, and for the people. We do. I do. I speak for myself. The people I’m talking about are people that do make the country work. And they’re not able to when they’re not educated, they’re not informed, they’re not ambitious, when they have no inspiration, no ambition, when they have no expectation, they are not doing anything but becoming deadweight. The country can’t afford that, not if it’s to maintain its greatness. That’s what bothers me, not to mention the absolute loss of dignity and humanity all these people undergo by virtue of not being educated, by not learning, by not being informed, by not reaching their potential, not even trying to. It frosts me, I can’t begin to tell you how much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to not really apologize, although if some of you think I need to, I will. Our previous caller in the program, I checked the e-mail. Some people said, “Why were you so short with the guy?” I didn’t mean to be short. His name was Jeff and he had a great point about economic illiteracy in the schools. He was bouncing off Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder, saying that he talked to a bunch of his business buddies, and employees who saw their paychecks get smaller in January, because the payroll tax holiday ended, blamed the employer. They don’t even know that it’s the government that ended the payroll tax holiday and restored the full-fledged tax on Social Security. They blame the employers for it.

The guy called and chalked it up to economic illiteracy. And I asked him how old he was because I wanted to find out when he first observed it. He said he was 38 and he first became aware of this kind of thing four years ago when he was 34. I did say to him (paraphrasing), “That’s great. I wish you’d have seen it when you were 20.” It’s not anything about him. I was merely talking about the more people who become aware of what’s going on as early in their lives as possible, the better off we’re all going to be. I did not mean to sound dismissive or critical at all. I was ecstatic. Did I sound disrespectful to the guy, Snerdley? You think I sounded disrespectful to the first caller? I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t.

He discovered it at 34. He came to the conclusion at 34, and he’s dead right on it. There is no economic literacy in the country. But I didn’t mean to impugn what he was thinking or whatever. I was just curious. I’m fascinated at what age people see the obvious and how they see it. And I guess that’s the key. To me, and a lot of people, the fact that education in this country’s corrupt, practically, in its incompetence. I’d just be happy if more people saw this earlier, but I did not mean anything disrespectful to that first caller.