RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I sit here today, I am — yeah, I guess I’ll admit it. I am somewhat amazed. Last week, even though I knew this was coming, even though on Friday I predicted it to you, I’ll let you hear the prediction again in a moment just to refresh your memory. When the CBO report came out, the revised CBO report, they have now additional years of Obamacare to plug into the formula, and they learn that Obamacare is gonna kill even more jobs than originally thought. Two and a half million additional jobs killed by 2017 or 2018.
Now, in your old standard America that would have been devastating news for everybody. But the spokesman for the president, Jay Carney, came out and praised it, said it’s a good thing. These people are now liberated from the pressures of having to find a job in order to get health care. And then Nancy Pelosi came out and repeated her philosophy that this is one of the greatest bits of news that’s happened in her professional lifetime. Finally people are not gonna have to work in order to have health care in America. And then the New York Times picked up on it and endorsed the concept and said this is a liberating thing, finally.
This country has been too pressure packed. This country has been forcing choices on its population that they’d rather not make. And now Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, has liberated people from the necessity of working. In one day, one day’s worth of stories — folks, that’s the biggest Stack of news that I have today. The biggest Stack of Stuff in all the show prep is all the stories and all of the people and all of the sound bites that are endorsing this concept that work is punishment. Work is a holdover punishment from the founding of this country that is punitive, and it is discriminatory because it leads to unequal outcomes, and it forces people to do things that they would rather not do, which is not what a free society should be about.
Even a conservative columnist in the New York Times writes approvingly of this new mind-set, if I’m understanding this piece right. I’ll run it by you as the program unfolds. But it’s stunning. It is literally stunning. Not too long ago the entire notion of being liberated from pressure-packed choices means not having to work, whoever made that statement would have been laughed out of existence. They would have been ridiculed. They would have been mocked and made fun of, and, instead, now they’re praised as forward thinkers.
So Snerdley walked in here today about an hour ago. He delivers his own show prep Stack of Stuff, “Yeah, this is crazy, never gonna happen. No, no, no, that means we’re guaranteed to win the election in 2014.”
I said, “What do you mean?”
“They’re actually gonna push the concept of no work? They’re actually gonna say that’s beneficial? They’re gonna say that’s good for America? We’re gonna smoke ’em.”
I said, “No, no, no, no. You’re looking at it the wrong way.” I used to think that, too. For the last 25 years. Another example. Remember on Friday we had sound bites of Lesley Stahl and Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell at CBS openly expressing shock and dismay that men and women are different and wondering if we’ve learned in time. And that, to me, is just the height of ignorance. I mean, I don’t know where that comes from, the notion that men and women are the same. I know where it comes from. I know it all derives from liberalism. Well, anyway, I got beat up over the weekend for calling them stupid. I got criticized for calling them ignorant.
But now they’re back. My point is that there’s something else that happened on CBS. Let me just find it here very quickly. Where is it? Yeah. Today, on the CBS morning show, they’re worried that global warming is gonna lead to human extinction, and they had a serious discussion about this. In the last sound bite, Norah O’Donnell asks if this extinction is reversible or is it too late? Granted, we’re sitting here laughing ourselves silly.
But they really believe it! For 25 years I have been mocking, laughing, making fun of all of these crazy, just nonsensical, totally 180 degrees out of phase factual and philosophical beliefs, and yet here we are. Those people are in power, and they are implementing all of these things, and they are shaping the country. They are shaping the culture. They’re shaping the political ground.
It is just absolutely stunning to me that the conventional wisdom is that, and more and more people are picking up on this idea, not working is somehow liberating, that not being productive is somehow positive. One thing that I looked for in every one of these stories, I looked for somebody who believes that, if you don’t want to work, you shouldn’t have to. By the way, “pursuit of happiness” in the Constitution, what the Founders meant was leisure.
That really should have been written “pursuit of leisure,” not “pursuit of happiness,” because everybody knows that happiness is the opposite of work. Happiness is what you do when you don’t work! Happiness is what you’re doing when you’re not forced to do what some boss makes you do. That’s not happiness. Leisure time pursuits, sybaritic pursuits, that’s happiness — and that’s what this country is all about.
Finally we’re getting there, where people can do that. In none of these stories have any of the proponents ever discussed, “How is this paid for? How do people who do not work, live?” It’s just assumed that we are a rich country and that as a rich society, we can choose, for a sizable percentage of our population not to work and happily pay them not to if that’s what they want to do. Beyond that, we shouldn’t care if they don’t want to work.
And it’s also, by the way, a mistake now to assume that people on welfare want to get off of it. It’s a mistake to assume that there should be any association with work or a requirement to work with welfare. “Who are we to condemn people to work that don’t want to? Who are we to condemn them to that? It’s their choice! We’re all Americans, and as a society, as a population, as a country, if some of us don’t want to work, that should be fine. We shouldn’t condemn that.”
Remember, folks, the modern liberal will inevitably side with evil over good, wrong over right, the lesser over the better, the ugly over the beautiful, the profane over the profound, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. They will always do that. Because, remember, now: On the electoral side, the people that benefit the most when people fail are elected Democrats — and so they’re all for it.
I know some of you are gonna still say, “Rush, come on. You’re overreacting. This is never gonna really become the norm in this country.” It may not. Simple necessity may dictate that. But nevertheless, I want you to be as up to speed and informed as possible that this is a very fast-moving movement now, if you will, that is being used to win elections.
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RUSH: Now, you might think this stuff just springs out of nowhere, like this new phenomenon that a job is passe, that working is punitive and limiting choices — and not working, being fired but still being paid for your health care, that’s liberating. You might think that, wow, this came out of nowhere. It didn’t. This is the kind of thing liberals contemplate, write about, dream of all the time. Let me take you back to June of 2005.
The New York Times did a review of a book nine years ago called, “How to be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto.” That was the title of the book. Now, the book described as being “about the freedom and fine art of doing nothing.” It says that it’s “not simply a book, but an antidote to our work-obsessed culture. In How to Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson,” that’s the author of the book, “presents his learned yet whimsical argument for a new universal standard of living: being happy doing nothing.
“He covers a whole spectrum of issues affecting the model idler: sleep, work, pleasure, relationships, and in the book, Hodgkinson claims that “Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution…” So, in effect, jobs are unnatural. Jobs, if they were a product of the Industrial Revolution, well, we hate that, right? Because the Industrial Revolution gave birth to what?
(interruption) Pollution? No, no. No, you might have said “prosperity” but, no, no, no. In the liberal mind-set, the Industrial Revolution gave way to child labor, slave labor, cheap labor, forced labor, no wages, pollution, global warming, planetary destruction, and now jobs. No, no, no. That stuff came after and with the Industrial Revolution.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the world was pristine, and it was at peace, and there were no mean robber baron CEO companies that were punishing employees and mistreating them, and there was no steel, and there was no heat, and there were no blast furnaces, and there was no polluted rivers, and there was nothing like that. I mean, it was just a gloriously peaceful, quiet, undisturbed time, before the Industrial Revolution.
A doctor would come to your house and not charge you, and the… (interruption) What does it matter what the life expectancy was? If the life expectancy was 30 years, it was 30 years lived in peace. There was no stress, there was no pressure, there were no forced choices that people had to make. Everybody was liberated, and then the Industrial Revolution came along — and with it, jobs. I’m just telling you what this clown in the book is associating jobs with.
“Jobs are a relatively recent invention, a creation of the Industrial Revolution…” So this clown (nine years ago in a book seriously reviewed by the New York Times) attempts to equate work with jobs, and therefore jobs are bad, because work is bad. It’s assumed that nobody did any work before the Industrial Revolution, that you worked when you wanted to, you worked as you needed to, you worked as you had to, but nobody made you.
You worked when you wanted to. You plowed your own field — or you plowed the neighbor’s field, whatever — but it was total leisure. See, that kind of work was fine, but this forced labor business and the creation of the job, that’s bad — and, by the way, all of that is associated with Republicans. There is a “professor of leisure studies” at the University of Iowa, and he has written an essay. The title of the essay:
“Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?” Why do Republicans want us to work all the time? So now work is going to be plugged into the War on Women. It’s gonna be plugged into the pro-life movement. It’s going to become part of the punitive, moralistic, forceful life you must lead if we are governed by Republicans who are gonna make you do one thing after another that you don’t want to do, and then they’re gonna judge you — and we can’t have that.
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RUSH: Let’s go back to this program. Here is me on Friday (I should better say, “Here I am on Friday”), trying to get you up to speed on all the things in the past 25 years. In 1997, I warned you they were gonna be after your SUV, and you pooh-poohed me. “Come on, Rush! That’s ridiculous. Nobody’s ever gonna try to take away your SUV. They drive them, too.” There are countless examples of that, yet it continues to happen.
If I would have told you three weeks ago that in three weeks a major movement on the Democrat Party’s behalf to encourage people not to work and yet be able to live a life of leisure would become popular and widespread, would you have laughed at me? You probably would have laughed at me and you would have thought, “Rush, can you get focused on what’s really important here like the latest on Hillary?
“Why do you keep talking about these liberals?” You would have laughed it off. You would have thought that, once again, I was seeing bogeymen where there aren’t any bogeymen and so forth, and yet on every one of these occasions it turns out that I am, for the most part, right on the money. And here’s a reminder what I said on Friday…
RUSH ARCHIVE: This is not their new spin. This is an attempt to redefine what work is, what unemployment is. It’s no different than their attempt to redefine the relationship men and women, feminism. It’s no different than their attempt to divide the country however they do on climate change and science and all of that. For the past 25 years, every time I’ve reacted to these people, we’ve laughed. We’ve had our Peace Updates. We’ve had our feminist updates. We’ve just laughed at these people left and right for saying things that were just outrageous, and here we are 25 years later, and they are in power and implementing these things.
RUSH: Now, some of you might be saying, “Rush, wait a minute. Maybe the Democrats are promoting leisure time and not working, but it can’t happen. The country can’t survive.” Look, you may know that and I may know that, but remember what this is about. This is about getting votes. This is about attracting voters. It’s about winning elections. Remember on Friday I made the point that the Democrats, in both 2014 and 2016, have essentially said, “To hell with ideas! To hell with winning in the arena of ideas.
“We’re simply gonna win on demographics. We are gonna go out and we’re gonna put together a coalition of people who will vote for us to take care of ’em, plain and simple. We don’t care to get into policy debates with the Republicans. We’re not gonna get into ideological debates. We’re not gonna defend what we believe. None of that. We’re just gonna win the elections and then we’re gonna implement what we believe. We’re not gonna tell people what we’re gonna do.”
They can’t, actually. So they have decided that they are going to continue to win elections by growing what I refer to as their “permanent underclass,” a permanent and growing group of totally dependent people. What they’re trying to do now is take away the stigma of not working, the stigma of being unemployed, the stigma of being on welfare, the stigma of being a sloucher, the stigma of being lazy.
They’re trying to remove all of that — and not only that, they’re trying to attach virtue to it, folks. The reason this concerns me is, I love the country. This is destructive to the country, and once again it’s the Democrat Party destroying the lives of people they promised to help. They’re destroying the human capacity, the human dignity of the very people they claim to be looking out for. It really… It makes me outrageous, to tell you the truth about it.
But then on the other side of this are people like this “leisure studies” professor at the University of Iowa: “Why Do Republicans Want Us to Work All the Time?” So now work is punishing, hard, uncompensated or insufficiently compensated. You have to do what you don’t really want to. It’s a choice you’re forced into. It’s dirty. It’s filthy. You don’t get to spend time with your kids — and it’s what the Republicans want!
Republicans don’t want you to be happy. Republicans don’t want you to spend time with the family. Republicans don’t want you pursuing happiness. They don’t want you pursuing leisure. It’s all political, is the point, and that’s what gets my hackles up. So I’m simply trying to alert people to it. Let’s go audio sound bites. Our old buddy Keith Ellison, member of Congress, Democrat, Minnesota, was on ABC’s This Week yesterday.
The fill-in host was Jonathan Karl, and they were talking about the CBO report. Karl said, “This CBO report showed the equivalent of two million-plus workers coming out of the economy, but the CBO report did not say that it was going to result in 2 million fewer jobs.” Of course, not! Who would make that connection? Right. Two million-plus workers are gonna leave the economy but don’t anybody think that that means we’re gonna have two million fewer jobs. Why wouldn’t we think that?
Anyway, that’s not the point. This is what your Democrat congressman from Minnesota had to say…
ELLISON: What the Congressional Budget Office is saying is that we’re gonna discourage kids having to have latchkey. We’re gonna have parents being able to come home working reasonable hours. People are gonna be able to retire. People might be able to actually cook dinner rather than have to order out and get some takeout. Americans work way more than the average of industrialized countries around the world. We need a better work-life balance. Ask a working mother, okay, if she could use a few more hours in a day to take care of her family.
RUSH: (sigh) Now, he’s dead serious here. So finally parents are gonna be able to come home! They’re gonna be able to work reasonable hours, maybe even be able to retire. They might actually be able to cook dinner rather than have to order takeout. You know, being an American is really hard. I mean, it’s so much harder than being a citizen in another industrialized country. We work so hard here! In Europe, they don’t work nearly as hard; they don’t get nearly the benefits.
(interruption) Of course they’re poorer, and they don’t have the GNP, the GDP. They do not have the economic output. They don’t have air conditioning, they don’t have plumbing that works, they don’t have diddlysquat. But none of that’s a concern to Congressman Ellison. Who’s gonna pay for these people’s retirement, for crying out loud? He doesn’t bring it up. It’s not a problem right now. That’s not the point. This is all about getting more and more people to sign up and onto the notion they don’t have to work, and the Democrats are gonna take care of them.
And they’re still gonna have their health care, and they’re still gonna be able to eat, maybe even cook it themselves instead of takeout. But I don’t think they want to work that hard. I think they’ll still opt for the takeout, if you ask me. In fact, probably these people’s panacea would be if Mickey D’s delivered. E. J. Dionne Jr., a columnist — a scholar, we’re told — at the Washington Post was on Meet the Press at the roundtable on Sunday, and they’re talking about the CBO report, the impact of Obamacare on the economy. David Gregory said, “These were congressional researchers who issued this report, E. J., and you wrote about it strongly this week.”
DIONNE: Just think about the money put in people’s pockets when they’re saving on their insurance from subsidies! Think of two people. We’re supposed to be for family values. You have a couple where somebody wants to leave the labor force for a couple years to take care of their kids. Under the old system, if that person carried the health insurance, they didn’t have the option to leave. Uh, now they can! What you’re doing is expanding people’s choices.
RUSH: So now even at the upper — so-called, upper — levels of Democrat Party scholarship, the entire premise that work results in fewer choices and that people need to be liberated from work has taken hold. And that the Republicans ought to be for it, because they’re the ones that talk about family values. Chuck-U Schumer was also on Meet the Press. David Gregory said, “For Democrats who thought that Obamacare was going to be a plus in this election year, are you on the defensive again, Senator [Chuck-U]?”
SCHUMER: What CBO said is that many American workers would have freedom. Now, that’s a good word, freedom to do things that they couldn’t do. The single mom whoÂ’s raising three kids has to keep a job ‘cause of health care can now spend some time raising those kids. That’s a family value. The student, 27 years old, wants to finish school quickly so he can get a great job, can’t ‘cause he needs health care, is now free.
RUSH: To not have to get the job. He’s free now not to have to go get the job because he’s gonna have Obamacare regardless. So he doesn’t have to have the stress of getting a job. So the Democrat Party is in the process of impugning, trashing, and tarnishing the whole concept of work as a Republican idea that imprisons people into lives of great suffering, disappointment, and economic disparity, all while being denied the pursuit of leisure. And it’s all the Republicans’ fault because they gave us this concept and they don’t support a pregnant mother being able to stay home with her kids. They don’t support that at all. The Republicans don’t want any part of that. They don’t want people being liberated from the punitive jobs that they’ve got. So you have to ask yourself, how’s the low-information voter gonna receive all this?
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RUSH: Now, this modern incarnation of work being a very punishing entrapment orchestrated by mean white power brokers, members of the majority, i.e., Republicans, I think the modern incarnation of this attack is really all about Obamacare, because Obamacare must survive. No matter what else, Obamacare must survive because that’s Obama surviving, that’s liberalism surviving. Obamacare surviving is the transformation of the United States.
Obamacare is under assault, justifiably. It isn’t working. It is an absolute disaster. Obamacare is a number of false promises that were made for three years running. It does not have the popular support of the people of this country. It’s an absolute disaster. Yet it must survive, it must survive. Whether something is good or bad for the American people doesn’t matter. It’s whether or not it’s good or bad for the Democrat Party and for the left. And one of the things that happened, people were unable to qualify for subsidies for Obamacare because of the formula. Because of the various levels of income they were earning, many people were earning too much money to get a subsidy for Obamacare, which means they were losing it. They couldn’t afford it otherwise. Nobody can, really.
The vast majority of the American people cannot afford Obamacare without a subsidy, and yet many people were losing it, can’t have that. In one area people were losing hours, employer’s cutting people back to 29 and a half hours so they wouldn’t have to provide Obamacare. That had to be turned into a positive, and then other people’s incomes had to be brought down somehow in order to qualify for the subsidy. So what has manifested itself now, folks, is that people are leaving their jobs in order to qualify for subsidies for Obamacare. And that has to be turned into something good.
In the normal ebb and flow of the United States, in the normal ebb and flow of our culture and population, people leaving the workforce in order to comply with a federal program would be political disaster for the party that designed it. Okay, so you’ve got Obamacare. It’s the brainchild of Barack Obama, the Democrat Party. It’s sold for five years as the greatest thing on earth. It’s gonna make sure you get your health care and doctor, and it’s gonna be much cheaper and for some of you it’s gonna be free, and it turns out none of that’s true. Massive disaster.
So people have to leave their jobs in order to qualify for Obamacare. In some cases they are asking for their hours to be reduced, and the employer is saying, “Sorry, that doesn’t help me.” So under normal circumstances, a government program forcing people on unemployment in order to be legally compliant, would destroy that political party. However, in this climate, the media and the Democrats have got to act fast and turn it into a positive so that the party is not hurt by it.
Common sense says new law: You have to do this. And the only way you can afford to do it is to not work and go on welfare and get it. That would kill the party that came up with that plan, and the Democrats know it. So they did a quick turn on a dime and it turns out that this is the best thing that’s ever happened, people leaving their jobs. Finally we’re liberating people from choices that they didn’t want to make and don’t have to make, and now the Democrat Party has made it possible for people to have their health, not just health care. It’s possible for the American people to stay healthy and not have to work. And that’s being sold as one of the greatest ever benefits offered by government. So it’s just the Democrats doing a 180 here trying to take credit and turn into a positive something that should have, by all rights, wiped ’em out.
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RUSH: That’s exactly right. This is a great example of how stupid the Democrats think their voters are. This no-work business, liberating, no work, is simply a way of taking the disaster that is Obamacare and turning it into something that will not hurt them at the ballot box. See if they can make this work.