RUSH: This morning on CNBC, the host there, Dylan Ratigan, was interviewing Mrs. Clinton. The question, ‘Is it the role of the government and tax policy to try to reconcile fairness?’
HILLARY: Well, you know, I — I think it certainly is. I mean tax policy is one of the instruments the government uses. I mean, George Bush has two major commitments in his term as president, tax cuts for people like Bill and me, and the Iraq war, neither of which he’s paid for. And at some point you’ve got to say, ‘Look, our system is out of whack –‘
RUSH: Stop this. Stop the tape. What do you mean neither of which is paid for? Mrs. Clinton, don’t be a dunce. You may be, but don’t act like it. You’re making it too easy for us here. What do you mean the tax cuts aren’t paid for? Have you seen the revenue rolling into the treasury? It is a fact that can’t be denied even though your buds in the Drive-By may not be reporting. It is a fact there’s more money rolling into Washington and the states than anybody dreamt would be rolling in. This business of including you and Bill, tax cuts for people like Bill and me, that is just classless. You’re just telling people, ‘Like my husband and I, who are filthy rich,’ and I don’t see you giving the money back, Mrs. Clinton. I don’t see you taking some of these tax cuts that you’ve received and sending the money back to the treasury department. Here, listening to the rest of this.
HILLARY: — people to do well, a lot of people did extremely well during the nineties but so did everyone else. When you lift 22 million people out of poverty and when economic policies lifts a hundred times more people out of poverty than in the Reagan years, you know, that’s the way the economy works for everybody.
RUSH: Prove it! Prove it! A hundred times more people out of poverty than the Reagan years, 22 million — prove it! Throw these numbers around, nobody challenges the numbers, prove it. It’s a bogus number. If they prove there’s a hundred times more people out of poverty, then we wouldn’t have Edwards running around. And then, of course, tax policy, one of the instruments the government uses to reconcile fairness. There it is, folks, they’re blazon, they’re being dead, straight honest with us as to what they view the purpose of the tax code for, fairness. They define fairness as making sure nobody can get as rich as they are with the income tax, and making people in the middle class think that their life’s better off because the rich people are getting it stuck to them, their taxes are going up. It won’t change anybody else’s life for the better. Maybe for the worse, actually, you start taxing the people that hire other people and you’ve got problems. This woman is a disaster waiting to happen, and there’s an 80% chance as we sit here today that she’s the next president of the United States. She is a disaster waiting to happen.
Ray in Nashville, cell call, glad you waited. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Military chapa dittos here on the road as I pass the Titans stadium. Pleasure to talk to you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I started paying attention about 17 years ago when I started listening to you —
RUSH: I appreciate that.
CALLER: And ever since then I have not been one to panic and I’m one of those who graduated seminary and got into one of those low rate adjustable mortgages. Over the past couple weeks I’ve heard nothing but the record foreclosures and how the housing market is just going to crash in the next year. I couldn’t get a hold of my financial advisor, so I called Rush to get a better perspective.
RUSH: Well, look, the US economy is not bulletproof. And throughout my life, when I’ve been through what were called recessions, hell, I was alive. How old are you?
CALLER: I’m 37.
RUSH: 37. So what year were you born?
CALLER: 1970.
RUSH: ’70. Well, you’re too young to remember this. Richard Nixon put wage and price coals on because we had inflation at three and a half percent. Everybody was panicking over that, wage and price controls and of course it was an abomination, it was a disaster. The wage controls worked, the employers loved the wage controls, but the price controls didn’t work, because let’s say you go to the grocery store, and before the price controls go into — lets say you go to the butcher, and you have your rib eye, and your fillet, your T-bone, your Porterhouse and your ground sirloin, your ground chuck, whatever it is. After price controls, guess what? There’s a whole brand-new cut: the special rib eye super-duper. There’s no price control on it, so they can charge whatever they want for it. Any number of places operated that way. So it was abomination. We had gas lines, we had rising energy prices, and then we got Jimmy Carter. Inflation was 14%, interest rates were 20%, it was a disaster. The point I want to make to you is, the housing market, because of some of these subprime mortgages, the whole industry, it might cause a temporary blip. But let’s say when the oil price — I remember this, too, in the seventies sometime, plummeted, oil was at ten bucks a barrel. It was so low the domestic industry couldn’t make any money. They capped wells. They’re still capped.
The consumer was making out like a bandit. It was great news for the consumer. But the oil industry domestically was really taking it hard. So my point to you is that, yeah, there may be a housing blip. Nothing goes up and keeps going up forever. Everything levels off, may drop here, and head back up. But it’s no reason to think it’s the end of the world, and it’s no reason to think as far as the US economy is concerned, that it’s the end of the prosperity and it signals the peak of American experience of exceptionalism and we’re going to start a downward trend. The Drive-Bys will try to convince you of this, but I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. My guess, wild guess, is that the fed’s are going to meet I think Friday, sometime this week, the fed’s going to meet sometime Friday, interest rates probably will hold steady at five and a quarter. If they lower the interest rate, then no problem, everything will be solved, but they won’t do it. Probably in October they’ll lower it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the interest rate’s down a point and a half by sometime next year.
Now, if they don’t lower interest rates, what will happen is — if it’s that bad — there will be some kind of federal intervention, bailout to cover it. I hope not, but it could happen. But there’s another way to look at record foreclosures out there, Ray, and record foreclosures are a great time for investors to purchase. The vulture funds are really kicking up in gear here. Warren Buffett can’t wait. He just can’t wait. This is where people make their money, in the foreclosure. Everything is cyclical. There is no single element that will single-handedly destroy even a segment of the economy. People are always going to need shelter ’til we start growing fur and are able to climb trees, and so don’t let anybody make you panic. It’s really unfortunate and could be tough for people who have gone through it, but we’ve all been through tough economic times, relatively speaking. So your financial advisor may tell you something totally different as to what to do with your own portfolio loot, or what have you, but I’m just saying giving you a philosophical attitudinal reaction to it all.
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RUSH: The Fed Reserve meets today, and we’ll have an announcement on what they’re going to do with interest rates. I said they will meet Friday. They will meet today.
You just heard Mrs. Clinton’s sound bite, and you just heard my call with Ray in Nashville, worried about the housing market. Folks, it’s an incredibly great county where the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton — who have never managed anything, who have never created anything, who have never done anything productive private sector-wise, who have only run for public office — can become multimillionaires. And it is a great country where they can make it known to everybody how wealthy and how rich they are and not be called gauche and classless. What a great country! They tried to do this in Whitewater, and it didn’t work, but they are finally able to go out there and tell us as often as they wish how wealthy they are. Now, as to Ray in Nashville. Conservatism 101: each of us decides what type of life we’re going to live, what kind of obligations that we’re going to take on for ourselves. We know what we can and what we can’t afford. Whether we live by it is another thing, but we know what we can and can’t afford. If you take out a loan (I don’t care what kind of loan) that you can’t afford, and then if things go south (no offense to Mississippi), it’s simply not the responsibility of your neighbors to pay off your loan. It may happen, if this is reputed to be as calamitous as they say. But if that ever occurs, there will be no responsibility by those who, on their own, assume these obligations.
If you know somebody else will bail you out… On the other hand, in our country you can work and produce and think your way out of these situations. But there is an assumption, just like we had the guy calling the other day, Friday, on health care. ‘I think the government ought to pay my health care.’ We got opportunity for Conservatism 101 in that call. There’s no responsibility of your neighbors to bail you out of a bad loan, or bail you out of a loan that you had no business taking. ‘Rush, I can’t believe how cold and cruel you’re being.’ I’m not being cold and cruel. We’re talking about responsibility. Do you know how many people encounter difficulty and don’t start running off and whining and moaning to the media, or don’t start running off whining and moaning to the government, they just deal with it? We’ve done shows on those people, white-collar people in their forties and fifties who got laid off. They didn’t demand everybody else take care of them after that because they got screwed late in their careers. Why do you think we have such a large middle class as well as wealthy people? We’re not a Third World economy where the central government regulates these things. At least, they shouldn’t be. They regulate a lot. But we all face challenging events.
The housing market now, high oil gas prices now, low oil prices back then. In Jimmy Carter’s administration, we had four years of malaise. We all face challenging events, economic and otherwise. But on the whole, we’re able to earn, learn, and progress. You know, in a lot of places, and I’ve been to some of them, there aren’t any good times. There are no good times, and the expectations of people in these countries where there are no good times don’t match ours. We have high expectations because we’re Americans. We have high expectations because we have experience. We’re born and raised in this country; we grow up knowing its potential. This is why I just cringe when I start hearing people talk about, ‘Well, we’ve peaked. American exceptionalism is over. The days of kids being able to do better than their parents are not anymore.’ We have people want to make that happen in this country, and they actually do believe it: pessimists, doom-and-gloomers and so forth. But it’s not the history of the country. It is not what happens, and it’s not what’s predicted. This is the one country where people have great and high expectations because this is the one place in the world where people know that they can meet them and achieve them.
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RUSH: Binghamton, New York, Gary, welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure — hopefully for both of us.
RUSH: (Laughing.)
CALLER: Well, I wanted to defend you. A fellow called several calls ago and said, tongue-in-cheek, about you being a millionaire, billionaire, whatever. One thing you have never said is that is you hate rich Republicans, and it leads to my question, because I’m going crazy about this. How can someone in the movie industry, TV industry, anchor on TV make 15, 20, 30, 50 million dollars a year and hate ‘rich people’? I need your answer. How can they hate rich people when they’re making millions themselves? How do they make that go away?
RUSH: This has been one of these age-old questions that psychologists and psychiatrists have examined. I myself, not trained in either of those disciplines, have yet come up with the answer. It’s not going to satisfy you all the way, but the overriding emotion that they feel is guilt, be it the actors and actresses or be it these news info babes and anchors that you’re talking about. But actually, beyond that, it’s liberalism. You know, I liberal is a liberal first. A wealthy liberal is a wealthy person second. The liberalism comes first. Liberalism is a religion. It has definite requirements, and you must resent the ‘disparity.’ As a liberal, you are able to exempt yourself because you are a good person. A TV anchor is not a corporate interest destroying jobs, stealing money from the hopeless. A Hollywood actor or actress is not doing what they think other rich people do. It is the height of denial and elitism. There’s also an element in there of trying to hide their wealth, or make it appear otherwise, because they need box office appeal. They need ratings. They need viewers. So they adopt this persona. The Kennedy family is classic at this, and Edwards is trying to pull it off now. You act like it’s an accident that you got rich, but you’re not going to give it back. You are going to do good work. You are serving our culture and society with your wealth by trying to deny it and take it away from the people who are destroying the country — i.e., capitalists and conservatives.
CALLER: Thank you very much. You are the best three hours of the day — and I mean that other than occasionally my wife once in a while.
RUSH: (Laughingm.)
CALLER: But you are the best three hours of my day. You always pick me up. Whenever I’m down I listen to Rush, and I say, ‘Rush, get me through the day.’
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you so much.
CALLER: God bless you, Rush.
RUSH: God bless you, too. Thank you. Thank you so much. Dawn, did you hear that? Did you hear what he said? You and Snerdley are talking. Snerdley has this new computer program called Comic Lite, and he’s in there taking pictures of Dawn with his iPhone, and then you can pick the bubble you want and put whatever thought you want, and they’re in there chatting and he’s showing her after he’s got a full board of calls here. He’s playing with his Comic Lite program. This guy just had a humongously hilarious line, and I don’t think you guys heard it. Brian got it. Brian started a combination laughing and shaking his head. This guy said… Well, it’s too bad if you didn’t hear it. Well, of course it was only hilarious to men. Some women would find it funny, the women that laugh at themselves would find it funny. Everyone would. He didn’t mean it. It was stereotypical humor. I love stereotypical humor. I absolutely love it. Like, you know what irony, you know what ‘mixed emotions’ really are? Your brand-new Cadillac is going off the cliff, but it’s being driven by your mother-in-law. (Laughing.) Do you remember there was this comic strip back in the seventies called ‘The Lockhorns’? It was about this married couple, and he was constantly fighting with his wife. His wife couldn’t park the car. In one cartoon she was trying to parallel park in a rainstorm, and he’s on the sidewalk saying, ‘Why don’t you just throw me a line here, and I’ll reel you in,’ based on the fact that women can’t drive. Of course, all this stuff is stereotypical. It’s just funny. People can’t laugh at themselves enough anymore. Everybody is too uptight. We have political correctness, all that kind of stuff.
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RUSH: Hoboken, New Jersey. This is Ben, and I am glad you waited, sir. Welcome.
CALLER: Hell-lo!
RUSH: Hell-lo.
CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to comment on a lot of the Democrat tax increase perspectives that we hear about. There we talked about the soak-the-rich perspective, but that’s really very disingenuous and misleading because it really means whack the middle class. It’s for two basic reasons. One, the rich are already quite overtaxed, and two, there just simply around enough rich people around with that kind of incomes.
RUSH: Exactly right. We’ve discussed that. You can confiscate all the money over, what, $400,000 a year, and you could run the country for a couple weeks, maybe a month.
CALLER: Any meaningful increase that’s going to come into the treasury has to come from the middle class taxpayers. That’s just a fact of numbers.
RUSH: Why would you say that?
CALLER: Because there simply aren’t enough rich people!
RUSH: There are more of people of the middle class.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Exactly right.
CALLER: And, you know, and the way our tax system works, we have an overly complex system, which in and of itself is a problem, but the way our tax system works and the way the tax laws are written, it’s based on a few kind of like hinge numbers like adjusted gross income and taxable income, and while the soak the rich — or however you choose to describe it — really doesn’t come down that way. It really comes down to much lower income levels.
RUSH: It does, exactly, and here’s the dirty little secret if you ever to pull it off. It’s hard. This is why most people don’t understand the tax-the-rich business. You’ve got to structure your life so you have no ‘earned’ income. I’m out of time. I’ll explain that. There’s a category called earned income versus other kinds of income. Earned income is what the income tax rate is on. That’s how ‘the rich’ do it. They don’t have ‘earned’ income.