RUSH: The other day also we had economic news not good about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. We had the news that the smarter are getting wealthier and the stupider are getting poorer — I mean, it wasn’t good — and that the wealth gap was wider, much wider today between the top 1% and everybody else than five years ago when Obama took office.

We have more details on this, and one of the fundamental aspects of the story we had was the median income. We pointed out the median income in the United States is $51,000 a year, but that there are six counties in America where the median income is over twice the national median. Four of those counties are suburban Washington. The median income in those counties is it $101,000.

Do you know the difference in a mean and an average? “Mean” is that points where there are just as many above the number as are below it. An “average” is not that. This is the mean, and the mean income in this country is $51,000. That’s why I’ve always said, “If you earn $50,000 or more, you’re in the upper 10%,” but that’s getting worse. It ought to be trending in the opposite direction.

Of course, it can’t with economic policies like these. Another way of looking at this is, median incomes in the United States are $644 less than they were in 1989, and the New York Times has a story: “Household Income Remains Flat Despite Improving Economy,” and they’re puzzled, and they’re wringing their hands, and this has some fascinating data in it that I’m gonna get into in some detail.

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RUSH: On this story, “Household Income Remains Flat Despite Improving Economy,” the New York Times is wringing their hands; they’re very puzzled over it. Others have dug deep into the Census Bureau, which is the source for the data, the information, and they’ve done great work. The New York Times starts out this way: “Despite the addition of more than two million jobs last year, soaring corporate profits and continuing economic growth, income for the typical American household did not rise in 2012 and poverty failed to fall, new data from the Census Bureau show.”

Now, what’s wrong there? Here you have a story about “two million jobs last year, soaring corporate profits and continuing economic growth,” and no new jobs that pay anything. “American household income did not rise in 2012,” then how can there be an economic recovery here? How can there be economic growth when the people of the country are losing ground? So clearly the inference that you’re supposed to draw is that all these evil corporations are hoarding the money.

They’re making all these profits, and they’re not giving any of it to you. Two million jobs created last year? What kind? The sad fact is that over two million jobs have been lost from the entire labor force since Obama took office. You’ve heard me talk about this ad nauseam. The labor force participation rate literally plunged. We’re getting close to three million jobs just wiped off the books. We have 90 million Americans out of a population of around 300 million not working!

We have a record number of Americans on food stamps. We have people in poverty in greater numbers and at a higher percentage than ever. Yet they want to maintain this fiction that there’s some kind of great economic recovery going on with soaring profits and jobs being created. If there were two million jobs…? I guess they’re arriving at that number by adding up all those phony numbers that we get every month, they say we added 173,000 jobs this month.

So I guess they’ve added that up and they’ve come up with two million jobs in the last year, but they’re not talking about the number of jobs lost. They don’t talk about the number of people that have stopped looking, and so they’re really puzzled here. How is it that household income is remaining flat despite all this great work by Obama? And then they say, “Over a longer perspective, the figures reveal that the income of the median American household today, adjusted for inflation, is no higher than it was for the equivalent household in the late 1980s.”

In fact, the median income is lower than it was in 1989 by about $644. We’re losing ground. Everybody is losing ground — and note the year, ’89, when Ronaldus Magnus left office, and there began immediately an effort by everybody to tear down the economic policies that he had put into place, on the basis they didn’t work. But since 1989, since Reagan left office, the median income is down. It’s astounding.

“The government’s authoritative annual report on incomes, poverty and health insurance, released Tuesday, underscores that the economic recovery has largely failed to reach the poor and the middle class, even as the unemployment rate continues to sink…” The unemployment rate sinking is a mirage. This is journalistic malpractice. The unemployment rate is what, 7.3, 7.4%? If it were based on the same number of jobs that were available to be held, to be filled, in 2009 — if those jobs existed — the unemployment rate today would be 10.8%, almost 11%.

That’s nothing to sing about.

So they’re hyping this lowering unemployment rate, which even the media admits is coming down because more people have given up looking for work and they’re no longer counted as being unemployed. Unemployment levels are still at recession level. GDP is only around 2%, even after being adjusted to make Obama look better. There is no economic growth to speak of here. The real question is, “Do these people really believe all this or is this just pap designed to be propaganda?”

Who knows.

These are true believers. “Since the recession ended in 2009, income gains have accrued almost entirely to the top earners…” Again, since Obama, “income gains have accrued almost entirely to the top earners.” Little side note here: Remember, everybody thought that the election of Obama was gonna mean prosperity for everybody. Finally, they had somebody who really cared about the little guy now. We had somebody who really was gonna be brand-new in politics!

We’re gonna have somebody who’s gonna get rid of all disagreements and all partisanship. We’re gonna be unified. We’re gonna be happy. Kumbaya is here, and everybody’s gonna be do well. If someone needs a new car, they’re gonna get it. If someone needs a new dishwasher, they’re gonna get it. Just magic was gonna happen! But we come to find out that Obama’s policies are killing all that off. None of what the Times claims is happening is possible, given the Obama economic policies.

There’s a little story that’s out today about how black leaders, after a few short months of Obama being in office, had to complain to Obama that he had no black officials high up in his campaign. Everywhere you looked at his campaign, it was white people. And aside from Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett, everywhere you looked in the regime was white people. So black leaders had to come along and put pressure on Obama to hire black people. Now, this guy was Mr. Civil Rights, we were told.

He was Mr. End of Slavery, Mr. End of Racism, Mr. All of This. All this wonderful, magical stuff was gonna happen, but he had to be pressured to hire African-Americans. The first black president had to be pressured by civil rights activists. So not only did he not follow through on what they thought would be automatic, that every position of power and wealth in the regime would go to somebody African-American, in fact none did. Well, so, too, everybody thought that Obama and his magical policies were gonna bring prosperity to everybody, but that hasn’t happened, either.

So more failed premises, and false promises that have not materialized. All the magic that was assumed has never happened. Most of all, in 2008 Obama ran as the guy who was gonna fix the recession that Bush caused. What do you think that, “Yes, we can” business was all about? “Yes, we can! Si se puede! Yes, we can!” and “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and “I’m the one you’ve been waiting for,” whatever it was. It was all about ending the recession.

It was all about economic revitalization. But again, sorry to beat a dead horse, not possible with economic policies that Obama has. Now, from the Cybercast News Service, Terry Jeffrey, “Census on Obama’s 1st Term.” Here comes the real numbers: “Real Median Income Down $2,627.” Real median income is down under Obama. In his first term, the median family income, families have lost $2,627 annually. “People in Poverty Up 6,667,000; Record 46,496,000 Now Poor.”

None of this was in the New York Times. This was all in the Census Bureau data that they didn’t publish. A record 46,496,000 Americans are now considered poor. Ninety million Americans are not working in a population around 300 million. People in poverty are up 6,667,000. “In 2008, the year Obama was elected, real median household income in the United States was $53,644 according to the Census Bureau. In 2012, [it] was $51,017.” So real median household income has dropped.

I know what you’re saying. “Rush, we know all this. Come on. Move along.” I’m putting the numbers to it. These are facts, and these numbers constitute the way people are living. These numbers represents real life in this country, and it’s getting worse. In a country where everybody’s expectations are rising incomes, increased prosperity, better standards of living. They had to work for it, but people don’t even have that chance now.

Fewer and fewer people have an opportunity to work for it, and because of Obama’s policies. The place in this country where people go to make their mark is what we call the private sector, but that’s getting smaller, because Obama’s co-opting more and more of it for the federal government, like health care. That’s one-sixth of the private sector just taken away. Look at it the same way you look at Obama closing federal lands, closing down parks.

People can’t go visit it because it’s people that destroy these things. People destroy the parks. People create global warming. So we close ’em off; you can’t go in there. Federal land, National Parks areas are closed down. You can’t go. Well, the same is happening with the private sector of the economy. Obama’s taking it. Inch by inch, mile by mile, dollar by dollar, he’s taking it, and he’s co-opting it for the federal government, and they take it and they use it and they redistribute it on the basis they call fair. But there is less money.

The pie is shrinking, let’s put it that way.

The pie that everybody wants a piece of is shrinking, precisely because of Obama economic policies.

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RUSH: Now, just one more bit of information on this median income business. Next we want to look at this by race. This is from the Business Insider. The Census Bureau has released its annual report on poverty, income, and health insurance. Now, this stuff may run together, all these numbers, and it may even bore you. But I hope it doesn’t.

Because the point is that the left and the media want you to believe that life in this country for minorities is just unfair and mean and all that because of racism and because of discrimination, and because this country’s unjust. This country was founded in an immoral, unfair way. This country was founded so that white people would forever hold all the cards, all the power, all the money, and white people would subjugate everybody else. This is taught more often than ever before in this country today.

We’ve had the Democrat Party, which is responsible for making this charge, largely in power since 2007. Democrats took over the House of Representatives starting in 2007, and they held it until just last year, a couple years ago. They’ve got the White House. They basically were able to shut Bush down in his last two years. They had Clinton for eight years. They ran the House of Representatives for 40 years prior to 1994.

They had FDR, who set the table for a lot of things with the New Deal. LBJ then added to it with the Great Society. We had Woodrow Wilson. The Democrat Party, liberalism has been a dominant aspect of American life, and in the past five years we have had radical liberalism running this country, radical leftism. These are the people who are gonna fix all this unfairness. These are the people gonna fix all this injustice, these are the people gonna fix all this immorality.

These are the people who are gonna get even with these white Europeans who came here and founded this absolute disaster of a country with racism and sexism and bigotry and homophobia. This crap is taught to young kids today. So with these people being in power for so long and supposedly being the remedy for all of this injustice, how can this be? “Among the race groups, Asian households had the highest median income in 2012 ($68,636).

“The median income for non-Hispanic White households,” which would, of course, exclude George Zimmerman. “The median income for non-Hispanic White households was $57,009, and it was $33,321 for Black households,” which is falling, after nearly five years of the first black president. After all of these years, 50 years-plus that the black population this country been voting by 93% every four years for the Democrat candidate.

Under the premise that the Democrats are the ones looking out for ’em — with the belief that the Republicans are keeping ’em down, but the Democrats are gonna sweep those old guys away, we’re gonna bring in a new era of prosperity and love and whatever else for everybody — black unemployment remains the highest in the country, black median income at the lowest. Teen black unemployment is unacceptably, almost criminally high.

And for the vast majority of the last five decades, this country’s been run by the Democrat Party and/or a bunch of moderate Republicans. So where’s all the relief? Where is all of this success that’s been in waiting? Where is all this prosperity for all it is downtrodden? And, by the way, the Asians don’t have anybody looking out for them. And they’re at the top of the list. Nobody. They have $68,000 median income. Hispanic households are higher than black at 39 grand. African-Americans, arguably the beneficiaries of the most federal largesse and attention for 50 years, are at the bottom in median household income.

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RUSH: Where is the social justice? African-Americans don’t know this. When they find out, they’re gonna be asking themselves, “Where’s our quantitative easing? Why isn’t anybody pumping us up?” Again, if you just joined us, we have Census Bureau data. We’ve just covered the fact that median family income in this country is down from 2009. It’s down $2,000 a year. By the way, in addition to all of that, before I get into this other thing, the number of people in poverty is up.

The number of people losing their jobs is up. The number of jobs lost, all of this, is up. The one thing that none of these stories cover is another thing that’s going on, and that is the price of gasoline has been over $3 a gallon for 20 months now. Now, Obamacare is gonna raise everybody’s health care costs. Premiums are gonna skyrocket. The cost of food is way up. Gasoline is over $3.

So with all of these basic needs — health insurance, food, gasoline — seeing big increases, the fact that salaries are stagnant is even more devastating. Because everything’s getting more expensive. Yet the New York Times wants to persist in this farce that there’s some sort of economic recovery going on because, of course, it’s all about Obama and Obama must be made to look good. It’s an absolute disaster.

Again, folks, despite some interruptions with some really good work in those interruptions, this country’s been run by liberal Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, and arguably the most impactful growth of government policies have been made by Democrats. FDR, LBJ — and now, the most radical of all of them, Barack Obama. There have been interruptions of Republicans running things. Reagan, Bush, running the House for a few years, but nowhere near the 40 consecutive years the Democrats ran it.

The vast majority of economic policy and result in this country has been by Democrat Party policy and politics, liberalism. Yet all the people who are supposed to benefit from voting Democrat are doing miserably. All the people the Democrats are looking out for are doing miserably. The black population in this country has seen their family busted up. What is it, 73% of black babies are born to a single-parent household because of the federal government assuming the role of husband and father via welfare payments, under the guise of compassion”

Well, I’ll just to go through this again. You look at median income by race, and it gets even worse. Asian households had the highest median income in 2012, $68,000. Median income, non-Hispanic white households, $57,000. Hispanic households, median income, $39,000. At the bottom are black households, $33,000. Now, the Asians — let me repeat again — don’t have anybody looking out for them. The Asians are entirely on their own. White people don’t have anybody looking out for them, and they’re number two.

The groups that have the Democrat Party as their stewards, as their guarantors, as their whatever you want to call them, sugar daddies, whatever it is — the groups depending on the Democrat Party — are at the bottom of every list. Hispanics, African-Americans, black unemployment, teenage black unemployment. It’s near criminal levels, and they gotta be asking themselves, “Where is the social justice?

“Where in the world is there social justice — and what is this with the Asians? How in the hell can they be at the top of the list when nobody’s doing anything to help ’em?” Asians are a minority, by the way, and I thought, by the way, Asians have been discriminated against. A, they were made to build a railroad. B, they were put in interment camps by another great Democrat, FDR. They’ve been discriminated left and right. (interruption)

That’s my point. How in the hell are they at the top of the heap? They’ve been discriminated against, but I don’t know where the JAACP is or the Chinese version of the NAALCP. I don’t know where those groups are. Where’s the Asian union leadership? Oh, yeah, they had Charlie Trie and John Huang, but those were a couple of get rich-quick-artists, you know, skirting on Clinton’s back end.

There’s a lesson here. They depend on themselves. Their culture is traditionally American, even though they’re Asian. They come here and they run rings around others. I remember back, as far back as the 1980s when I lived in Sacramento, the University of California was already having “problems” because the Asians were acing everybody on admittance scores, and they were gonna have to start discriminating.

They were gonna limit Asian admissions ’cause they were outdoing everybody, simply ’cause they were studying harder. They were just working at it harder, and getting better grades ’cause they’re working harder. The University of California system said, “We got a problem.” So here came affirmative action for admissions and all this stuff to take care of the unfairness. The “unfairness” was that some people were working harder than others. Oh, we can’t have that!

But when you strip all this away, the worst investment you as a human being can make for your future is the Democrat Party. It’s the worst investment you can make, unless you’re a Hollywood liberal, unless you’re a Wall Street fat cat, unless you already have your money and can influence the Democrat Party to let you keep yours. Unless you happen to have enough money to donate to them, you are making the worst investment you can make by throwing in with the Democrats, and the numbers bear it out.

This is not even opinion.

You throw in the fact that gasoline costs are steadily above three bucks, and all the other household necessities rising, with all this salary stagnation, and it’s even more devastating.

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RUSH: Kevin, Rockford, Illinois. Glad you called. Hello, sir.

CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. You are the ultimate truth campaigner, and I am a high-information voter.

RUSH: Well.

CALLER: The reason I’m calling is you were talking earlier about different groups, and the Asians. One of the earliest books that Thomas Sowell wrote, I believe it was called “Civil Rights and the Politics of Race,” took Social Security information and the data, and he looked at different groups that came to the United States. One of his theses was about those groups that came to the United States and used politics — for instance, the Irish that got into city governments and police — versus those people that stuck together and created their own economic endeavors.

The people that went with government were stunted economically, and he looked at different groups. He looked at whites, he looked at the blacks, he looked at the Asians, and the subgroups within them and he came up with the data. Even back in the seventies, the Asians were the highest income earners. One of the things that you should know is that he looked at black women with college educations, and blacks who came from Britain and those areas, and they actually had higher per capita income than white women. So you can’t go by what the government’s telling you.

This is something that has happened for the longest time, and it supports the fact that if you want to make it, you have to make your own way.

RUSH: Well, that’s a great point, and you’re right about Sowell. The great way to summarize the point is that there are numerous ways that people seek economic success and power. Some do it through politics, and some do it through hard work. It’s not even arguable. The people who are trying to find their way through politics are the ones that depend on somebody else in government taking care of ’em or doing something for them.

The black population of this country, sadly, is one of the most glaring examples for 50 years. They have been waiting for the Democrat Party to, quote, “make it right,” unquote, “to level the playing field,” versus the Asians, as you cite, who don’t care. They don’t have advocates. There’s nobody looking out for them. There’s nobody running interference for ’em. I mean, they have special interest groups that they themselves belong to, but they’re not making their way by making government make sure they’re treated okay.

They are just finding their way via hard work, industriousness and all that. I remember when Sowell wrote that book. I remember reading it. Like so much he does, it’s just brilliant. That, I think, is a brilliant way of saying it: “People seek power through politics or through hard work.” Now, politics can be hard work, too, but what he means by this is: If you’re seeking power through politics, you’re asking for vengeance to be meted out to somebody else. You’re asking government to level the playing field. You’re asking government to take care of whatever you think has been unfairly done to you, versus just, “To hell with it,” and go out and make your way.

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: I’m glad you read the book. Thomas Sowell is such a — such a —

CALLER: Well, read the book Inside American Education and you’ll really get an earful.

RUSH: I know. There’s no question.

CALLER: (chuckles)

RUSH: He’s just… I want to call him a national treasure, but that’s kind of cliched. He just is really special. He is uniquely insightful and intelligent, and he’s fearless. I got to meet him one time — a couple/three times — and it’s always been a great thrill to talk to him.