RUSH: I want to know, ladies and gentlemen, where does the buck stop with jobs? We were told yesterday in an attempt to sound like Harry Truman that the buck stops with Obama, when he really means Bush, on all these terrorist snafus. But where does the buck stop on jobs? I think the Associated Press writes their stories just to amuse me and to get me to mention them. And now they’re putting this in the headline: ‘Economy Sheds More Jobs Than Expected.’ Who the hell would expect jobs to increase with what’s going on here? Who are these experts they run every month? Jobs are either up more than expected or they’re down more than expected. ‘The economy lost more jobs than expected in December while the unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent, as a sluggish economic recovery has yet to revive hiring among the nation’s employers.’ That’s not what we read yesterday and the day before. They kept telling us, various websites and news organizations, that there’s a sign of uptick here in the economic recovery and that people are hiring.
Here’s the weirdest damn headline. This is AP: ‘UPS Cutting 1,800 Jobs in US, Raising Outlook.’ This is a story of optimism! ‘UPS said Friday it will cut 1,800 management –‘ Oh. That’s why. They’re cutting evil management people. Not the precious, beloved union workers. Yeah. ‘UPS said Friday it will cut 1,800 management and administrative positions to streamline its U.S. small package segment. … About 1,100 employees will be offered a voluntary separation package as part of the work force reduction.’ They talk about this as positive news for the stock price, and yet the economy lost more jobs than expected in December, while the unemployment rate held steady at 10%. ‘A sharp drop in the labor force, a sign more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work, kept the unemployment rate at the same rate as in November. Once people stop looking for jobs, they are no longer counted among the unemployed.’
Now, here’s Reuters: ‘Employers Unexpectedly Cut Jobs in December — U.S. employers unexpectedly cut 85,000 jobs in December, cooling optimism on the labour market’s recovery and keeping pressure on President Barack Obama to find ways to spur job growth.’ Good Lord, do you people not understand in the media that Obama is responsible for all of these job losses? There is no stimulus. Stimulus is not possible. Government stimulus mathematically, economically, is not possible. You can’t stimulate an economy by taking 50 million out of it and then putting the 50 million back in. You can’t stimulate an economy by borrowing 50 million and then throwing it into the private sector, ’cause it’s all coming from the private sector. The private sector is being depleted on purpose. Unexpectedly cut jobs? ”The economy continues to take three steps forward and two steps back. I wouldn’t read too much into it beyond the fact that this will be a slow employment recovery. Directionally, the economy is on a mend,’ said David Katz, chief investment officer at Matrix Asset Advisors in New York.’
Here’s even worse news. ‘The report showed there were 929,000 ‘discouraged workers’ who had given up looking for a job, up from 642,000 a year earlier. Chris Rupkey, an economist with Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, called the rise in discouraged workers ‘a simply astonishing number that borders on the frightening. If they were still looking for work and counted as the unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been 10.5 percent. This clearly isn’t your father’s recession. It is looking more like your great-grandfathers. Brother, can you spare a dime?” So the way to calculate the people who have given up as unemployed, you know, once you quit looking they don’t count you as unemployed. The unemployment rate would be ten-and-a-half percent.
Now, this leads me to a couple other things here: ‘State Tax Collections See Third Consecutive Double-Digit Drop in 3Q 2009, the third consecutive double-digit drop in tax collections.’ Now, for those of you who think that there might be job growth on the horizon, be sure to factor in the coming layoffs in state, county, and city jobs. Now, the only reason those layoffs haven’t happened is Obama’s slush fund, which he calls the stimulus package. Because thanks to Obama’s stimulus bill, his slush fund, the states have not had to suffer mass layoffs needed to put their budgets in balance with true revenues, revenues not supplemented by payoffs from slush funds. So states all over the country are grappling with huge deficits thanks in part to a 10% unemployment rate or ten-and-a-half or 17. In some of these states it’s even higher than that.
The tax base has been decimated. This next year look for higher levels of job cuts in state, county, and city jobs. You can see with tax collections now falling for the third consecutive quarter, double-dip. When they run through this stimulus money that they got — you didn’t get it, the states did — to shore up their deficits, to shore up state employment — when they run through that and they’re going to run through it like a hot knife through butter then they’re going to have no choice than to start laying off people and the unions are going to howl and it’s going to be a big, big mess. Cities all over the country don’t have enough money in their budgets to clear snow from the streets, and when the snow is not cleared people can’t get to work much less the store. Vital city service can’t be provided in some places now. This has been caused now thanks to the failed economic policies of the buck-stops-here President Obama. The buck ought to stop with the private sector. But it doesn’t. Obama has made it his private sector, and he has failed, as has every other central planner who’s tried to micromanage a giant economy, or any kind of small economy.
Now, the reason Obama failed is because he embraces failed policies, failed political philosophies, knowingly. He took responsibility for job creation when tax cuts for the private sector were in order. And then there was this upside down comment about who was responsible for keeping the country safe. ‘This incident, like several that have preceded it, demonstrates that an alert and courageous citizenry are far more resilient than an isolated extremist.’ That was Obama December 28th, 2009. When it comes to national security the buck stops with the president. When it comes to job creation, the buck stops with an alert and courageous citizenry who are far more resilient than an isolated central planner is, who really doesn’t care. He’s now almost a single payer in the student loan program. So there’s no improvement month to month in the employment picture. It is worsening. It’s going to worsen even further with state and city and county layoffs that are sure to come at some point in this new year. And then there’s going to be inflation with all this printing and borrowing of money, and they’re talking about a double-dip in the housing market now or commercial real estate.
I don’t mean to be a downer here. What’s frustrating is that once again this government’s governing against its own citizens. This president and his party are governing against us. We are at war with our own president. We are at war with our own government. They are the ones standing in the way of the private sector rebounding. They’re the ones standing in the way of job creation, purposely. And it’s just frustrating, and it’s something that I think people have to know. They’re now talking about a second stimulus. Christine Romer, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re starting to see some positives. It may be time for a second –‘ that would be disaster. Utter disaster. Besides, at last I saw they’ve only spent 30% of this stimulus because it’s a slush fund, and the majority of it was reserved for being spent in this year, which happens to be a reelection year and that’s what matters to the Democrats and to Obama.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mike in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hey, great to talk to you, Rush. On the unemployment stuff, I’ve been driving trucks since 1974, so we’ve always been able to kind of see the trends in the economy because of the lack of freight. And right now there’s a huge lack of freight. There’s a lot of companies closing, a lot of owner/operators losing their trucks, going out of business, and one of the things that the statistics don’t count is the owner/operators that have gone out of business. So every month you can probably throw anywhere from five to 7,000 more people into the mix.
RUSH: Right. He’s referring to a story we had earlier today that UPS is laying off 1,100 workers and this is bright news, Reuters says it’s good news, it’s bright news for the stock price. Well, I know, the stock price, they’re thinning the herd. Of course investors like it. But it’s 1,100 more jobs lost, and you factor in the people that have given up looking, and a lot of these truckers you’re talking about own the trucks, right?
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: They don’t get unemployment compensation. If you own your own business you don’t get a check.
CALLER: No, not at all. And Wednesday night before Christmas a company called Arrow Trucking out of Tulsa, 1,300 drivers lost their jobs and ended up stranded pretty well around the United States when they closed their doors. And that’s pretty scary. You don’t hear those stories.
RUSH: What, they just shut down the company?
CALLER: Yep. Yep. Told the guys to take their trucks to the nearest dealership or terminal and they’d give them a bus ticket home and some of those guys had been buying trucks through the company and got kinda left holding the bag.
RUSH: Well, I know. This is a disaster. This is a man-made disaster out there, and I said at the top of the program, where does the buck stop with jobs? I want to tell you something, folks, when people realize that this has been on purpose for the express desire Obama has to set up his massive redistribution, which is what the health care thing is all about. I was talking earlier about how Pelosi loves to run around and say that we’re going to reduce costs. There’s no way. But costs and price are a different thing. And the use of the word ‘cost’ is, therefore, intentional, as opposed to price. The price of health care is not going to come down because of this bill. The price that people pay isn’t going to come down, but costs to some people will. Because some people, I think it’s a family of four earning less than 80K and a single family earning less than 42K, it’s somewhere in those two ranges, will be exempted from having to buy insurance. They’re going to be subsidized by the government, which is us. Everybody not being subsidized is going to have to pay for this. Our costs will go up. The prices are going to go up. There are tax increases on people who have supposed Cadillac health plans.
Now, you can look at the subsidy in this thing as simple redistribution. There are a lot of families that make a under $80,000 a year, there are a lot of families of four that make under 80. They’re going to be totally subsidized. This is redistribution. Everybody else is going to be paying for those people not to pay. And we already have the S-CHIP program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and you’re a child in that program up to age 29, I think. And you’re paid for. Already being subsidized. So that’s transfer of wealth. When people figure out, when enough people figure out that all of this pillaging of the private sector, which is what it is, this bankrupting of the country, when they figure out it’s been on purpose and when they see the majority of the slush fund called the stimulus plan, which most of it hadn’t been spent, it was supposed to kick in this year, remember, that’s what they started saying toward the early fall into the late fall, I think it was Christina Romer, it wasn’t supposed to kick in until 2010, and then she said, well, we’ve probably gotten our bang for the buck out of this, we may have to do a second one. And at that time they’d only spent 20% of it. It’s a slush fund for Democrats’ reelection efforts. That’s what it is. And that’s what TARP was. That was a slush fund for Goldman Sachs. But that’s a longer story.
Now, ‘One in five working-age American men does not have a job, according to the latest federal employment numbers, an all-time high.’ Twenty percent of working-age men do not have jobs. It ‘illustrates the extraordinary toll this recession has taken on male-dominated professions in particular. Men are more likely to work in sectors like manufacturing and construction,’ I’m thinking of trucking 
here with our most recent call, and these are areas ‘that are more sensitive to economic downturns. But this downturn has been particularly brutal on those industries, leading some observers to call it a ‘mancession.’ Only 80.3 percent of men age 25-54 had jobs in December — the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting that data in 1948.’
Now, I want to put this in perspective. Only 80% of men 25-54 had jobs in December, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting data in 1948, the lowest. This is after a $1 trillion stimulus plan that the Obama administration said was going to keep unemployment at 8%. This is after bailing out the banks and some financial institutions and Goldman Sachs. This is after Obama’s best stab at this. But of course no stimulus can ever work. There is not a pile of money that’s not being used that the government can infuse into the private sector. In order to put a trillion dollars into the private sector they gotta take it out first, or, in this case, borrow it, which just runs up debt. There’s no stimulus. It’s not possible. And it’s proof because it hasn’t happened.
BREAK TRANSCIRPT
RUSH: Lynette in Charlotte, Michigan. It’s great to have you here on the program.
CALLER: Oh, thank you. This is really an honor.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Okay, I’ve got a question about this health care nightmare.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: We are sending enormous amounts of money to Washington for three years. Now, this part may be an oxymoron: What trustworthy individual in Washington is keeping track of this money and not spending it?
RUSH: What she is referring to, for those of you in Port St. Lucie and Rio Linda is the health care bill. The new taxes will start (snaps fingers) immediately. There are 14 tax increases alone in the Senate bill and pretty much the same in the House. Those taxes start immediately. But the so-called benefits, the actual reform to the health care system, will not start until 2014, maybe 2013. The reason for this is they needed to play a budget gimmick. They needed to have a ten-year number that shows up under a trillion dollars because the war in Iraq cost a trillion dollars, they say, and so health care reform had to come in under a trillion dollars. So you got three years of tax increases or four, and then six years of spending. If you did ten years of spending, ten years of taxes, the total cost is $2.5 trillion. And what Lynette here is asking is: Are three years of taxes going to be put aside to pay for all the spending and the health care three years down the line? Of course not, Lynette. There is no way that that is going to happen. No way in hell it’s going to happen, just like it long ago stopped happening in Social Security.