RUSH: Steve in Chicago as we start on the phones. I really thank you for waiting. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush, it’s great to be on with you. Thanks for having me. It’s a great day to talk about the literacy that this guy doesn’t have in the financial and economic markets.
RUSH: You mean Obama.
CALLER: Yep. I spent 25 years practicing economics and finance and that speech yesterday shows a scary level of financial ignorance which he’s spewing forth to people like the Occupy people, which is damaging and dangerous to the future of this nation.
RUSH: Well, let me ask you a question, Steve, ’cause you’ve said the president’s knowledge of finance and so forth, capitalism, is really nonexistent, ignorant. Do you think he’s ignorant and dumb, stupid, or does he really know what he’s doing here and is trying to camouflage what he’s doing with ignorance? What do you think?
CALLER: Rush, I believe the motives to people smarter than me but I can tell you he’s the product of an America and global educational system that doesn’t teach people how economics works. When the 1990s, early part — I had an opportunity to take Soviet company personnel around the United States, and we visited grocery stores and neighborhoods and big box retailers, and without exception, those people left this country saying, “Government is the problem, not the solution.”
RUSH: And it wasn’t long after that that glasnost and perestroika failed and the Soviet Union imploded.
CALLER: And it imploded because socialism, slash, communism, don’t work. What you have is a system that demotivates productive behavior. It institutionalizes poverty like we’ve seen in this country since the late 1960s. We have spent trillions of American dollars on the war on poverty, and what we have now is worse poverty than we had when it began.
RUSH: He’s right. He is right. In fact, expressed as a percentage it’s the same. After all of these trillions, after all these trillions of transfer payments, the percentages of people in poverty are the same. Now, we define poverty pretty high. But still, everything’s relative. And the way we define it has been pretty constant over the years. You are exactly right. The war on poverty, the Great whatever, Society, none of it, none of it has worked, not one liberal program has worked.
CALLER: All we have done is forced the tax bill into fewer and fewer people. In 1980 20% of Americans paid no income tax. Today, 48% pay no income tax, and the top 10% paid 70%. You cannot push that further without fundamentally destroying the opportunities that exist —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — in this nation.
RUSH: And during all of this our exalted president tells us that the top 1%, the top 10% are not paying their fair share.
CALLER: Well, the top 1% is anybody who makes more than $35,000 in the US because compared to the globe, that’s the top 1%. That’s the wealth transfer that’s going on. And for him to have the audacity to say that this system hasn’t worked, look at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the most explosive economic growth in the history of humanity. It was a miracle that happened, and it happened because of the Founding Fathers’ belief in limited government.
RUSH: Yep. He’s exactly right. There is no question. So what we’ve done, we’ve subsidized poverty. I’ve heard stories, we’ve had people call this program, just like this guy, Soviets, ex-patriots, people that used to live there, government officials, when they came here and saw the corner grocery store, their minds were blown. They’d never seen that kind of plenty. When they saw a big box store, they had no comprehension. They had no way to comprehend a Costco. It made no sense. They had no experience with that. Their experience, forget the name, but in Moscow there was this giant big store that had everything. GUM. That’s right, it was the GUM department store, except it didn’t have anything. There was a shortage of everything in this store all the time. Now, the leaders never shopped there. The leaders took all the good stuff before it ended up at the GUM department store. We’ve spent $16 trillion in the war on poverty since the sixties. The same amount of money we owe in our national debt. Our national debt equals what we have spent on the war on poverty. What does that tell you? Thank you, Steve. That’s Steve, Chicago. Great, great call.