RUSH: Hillary Clinton. She’s secretary of state. You know that. Hillary Clinton. But she went off the reservation yesterday in Washington at the Brookings Institution. She spoke about the Obama administration’s national security strategy, and a reporter asked her during the Q&A: ‘How do you think that we can manage the balance between fiscal responsibility — which is of course very necessary — but also attention to the most vulnerable, the poorest segments of both American population and worldwide population and the need still to strengthen this recovery, to strengthen unemployment, which remains a key issue?’ Now, do you want me to translate this question for you? Let me lead this question again. This is a reporter, and I want to read this question to you again. This is what passes for brilliant journalism.
(idiot reporter impression), ‘How do you think that we can manage the balance between fiscal responsibility — which is of course very necessary — but also attention to the most vulnerable, the poorest segments of both American population and worldwide population and the need still to strengthen this recovery, to strengthen unemployment, which remains a key issue?’ Do any of you know what this question means? Do you have the slightest idea what the question means? I’ll tell you what it means. ‘Mrs. Clinton, how can we manage the balance between fiscal responsibility — which of course we must be fiscally responsible — but then we’ve also got to make sure that the poor aren’t poor, both here and in the world. So how do we manage fiscal responsibility and yet bring people out of poverty while at the same time strengthening employment? Meaning, employment has nothing to do with bringing people out of poverty,’ and here’s her answer.
HILLARY: This is my opinion. I’m not speaking for the administration so I will preface that with very clear caveat. The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues, whether it’s individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are. And I go back to the question about Brazil. Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere, and guess what? It’s growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer but they’re pulling people out of poverty. There is a certain formula there that used to work for us until we abandoned it — to our regret, in my opinion.
RUSH: Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is important because we need to remind people how the Clintons have avoided paying millions in taxes through their ‘foundation.’ Now, it’s not the William J. Clinton Foundation at the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor. They have another foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation, and they have sheltered a lot of money in these foundations and have avoided paying taxes. So nobody — the rich, anywhere are not paying their fair share. Nobody in any country except in Brazil, and while the rich are paying higher taxes there than anywhere in the world, they’re still getting richer. This never has happened in history. And it’s not happening in Brazil. There you have it. Once a liberal, always a liberal, and liberals believe the same things over and over again, and they never change. ‘High taxes, people aren’t paying enough and we’re going to get you one way or the other.’
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RUSH: Okay, I went to the e-mail, checked the e-mail as I always do during the commercial breaks. And I can always predict what I’m going to get. ‘What do you mean? How can you say the Clintons are dodging taxes by funding a foundation?’ All right, let me explain it. I have nothing against foundations, ladies and gentlemen. But what’s the topic here is hypocrisy. Remember, Hillary said, ‘The rich are not paying their fair share.’ What does that mean? What she means — when any liberal says that, what she or they mean — is that individuals are not giving the government as much as they should be. Remember, government is god-d, and if you skip out on your taxes you are screwing god, you are screwing government, your taxes should be paid to government, and if you are rich, you should be paying even more. Now, what is a foundation? A foundation is a good thing. But you can shield all kinds of money, millions of dollars, from the government by putting it in a foundation.
Let me read you a story, give you an example. According to a 2007 Washington Post article, the Clinton Family Foundation ‘has enabled the Clintons to write off more than $5 million from their taxable personal income since 2001,’ and who knows how many more millions they have saved on their taxes since 2007. And they kept this foundation a secret. Everybody’s known about the Library and Massage Parlor foundation. But from the Washington Post article: ‘Clinton’s spokesman said her failure to report the existence of the family foundation and the senator’s position as an officer was an oversight.’ This only came out when Hillary decided she had better ‘amend’ her Senate financial declarations before she ran for president. The Washington Post article also noted Pelosi had a similar family foundation — and she, too, was allowed to amend her declarations without any penalty.
‘Tax records show the Clinton Family Foundation was created during Hillary Clinton’s first year in the Senate, when the couple gave $800,000 to launch the organization in early December 2001. The charity distributed no funds that year.’ Now, here’s the truth. Let’s say you have the kind of wealth the Clintons have. The way these foundations work, you set it up… I’ll use myself. If I wanted to set up a foundation, I set the Rush H. Limbaugh Foundation for Working Families of Pennsylvania. You can call it anything you want and let’s say I want to put $5 million in it. I can do that, and I get to write off that $5 million. I don’t have to pay taxes to The Government (which is god) on $5 million. I’m setting up the foundation to make sure somebody else gets the money rather than government. This is the hypocrisy! Mrs. Clinton thinks the government’s getting short-changed when she says, ‘The rich aren’t paying their fair share.’
She is The Rich! Now, it’s a charitable deduction and you get to take it all in one year. If I put $5 million into the Rush Limbaugh Foundation for Pennsylvania Working Families this year, then I get to deduct that five million bucks. I only have to pay out a bit. I forget what the number is. She didn’t pay anything, and that’s a violation. You have to distribute a small percentage. I think it’s 10% of it, maybe not even that. So to be legal, I could set up a $5 million Foundation for Pennsylvania Working Families, get a $5 million tax deduction (meaning that five million is shielded from going to government, god), it goes to whatever charity I want to give them. I lose control of the money, don’t misunderstand. I can’t use it to go out and buy a bunch of iPods or anything else. It’s gone.
I can only give that money to whatever I want to give it to, some charitable group, but you don’t have to give the five million away in one year. I can give away $50,000 — and the next year I can put another $5 million in and I only have to give away a hundred thousand. So in two years I’ve shielded $10 million in taxes at whatever my marginal rate is, from the government god. This is what the Clintons are doing. It’s what Nancy Pelosi is doing. So it’s not that they’re pocketing the money, don’t misunderstand. They are taking the money away from themselves. They’re just making sure that government doesn’t get it. They remain in control of it. Now, if you are the Clintons, and you have $5 million sitting around, what can you buy with that? If you want to run your foundations and say you want to donate X to some other politician’s charity, what will that politician give you in a quid pro quo?
If you want Joe Sestak to quit his bid for the Senate — it’s a figurative example here, of course — you might take some money from your charitable foundation and give it to something that Sestak cares about, like Pennsylvania working families and Sestak will owe you. Let’s just be clear about this. This is pure, unadulterated hypocrisy. I am not opposed to charity, and I think it’s a fine thing for anybody to set up a foundation. But make no mistake why people do it. It is not purely altruistic. It is to make sure the government doesn’t get the money. Do you know what you know you ought to do, just to have fun? Pretend that you have gazillions of dollars. Just do this. Pretend that you have gazillions of dollars and go, just for the exercise of it, to a family planning lawyer or somebody at your bank that does family planning services, and tell them why you’re there. You know, ‘I’m here because I want to make sure that upon my death the people I care most about benefit from my estate,’ and without exception, the first thing — the first thing — the family planning guy will tell you is, ‘Okay, we’ve gotta make sure the government doesn’t get it.’ That’s the objective. It’s normal. It is natural. The government sets up these legal foundation for the purpose. So it’s pure hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to run around and say the rich aren’t paying their fair share when she and her husband and Pelosi are short-changing their very government god that they claim we are not servicing enough, and that was my point.
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RUSH: Now, between 2001 and 2005 the Clintons seeded their family foundation charity with $5.16 million of their money. I got a question during the break in an e-mail: ‘If you fund the foundation with your own money, do you get to reap the rewards of the interest that it earns or whatever gains it makes, because you can invest it. You invest it in whatever you want to invest in. You know, get a financial manager, put it in stocks, bonds, whatever. You want it to grow. You do a golf tournament, you ask people to contribute to it.’ No. The money stays in the foundation. You have no control over it. All you’re doing is shielding it from the government and from taxes, and instead directing it to charitable causes that you believe in.
And when you’re a politician, ‘a charitable cause you believe in’ could be freaking groundhog. I mean, it could be anything. Now, Hillary, lest we forget, this is the same woman who took a four dollar a pop deduction for giving thrift stores their used underwear when they were governor and first lady of Arkansas. You remember that, Dawn? They would take stuff down to the Goodwill bin and they would write off $4 for dirty underwear. I mean, these people have long been into taking advantage of every tax deduction that’s out there. Now, one of the few things… They haven’t distributed a lot of money from the foundation. You don’t have to do that. It’s a minimal requirement every year. But one of the few things that the Clinton Family Foundation gave ‘grants’ to was a charity connected to the Arkansas businessman who helped Hillary Clinton make a hundred grand in the commodities deal.
That was Robert ‘Red’ Bone, I think. So many Arkansas names, I’ve forgotten them now but I think it was ‘Red’ Bone. I forget who it was. I remember Hillary turned something like a thousand dollars or $10,000 into a hundred thousand dollars in cattle futures, and she said she learned about that by reading the Wall Street Journal. But she gave that money. She gave a grant to a charity connected to that guy who ran what turned out to become Cattlegate, and all of this is in the 2007 Washington Post story. I mean, it’s all there. It was part of the run-up to Hillary’s presidential campaign. In any case, folks, it’s nice to see that the Clintons finally got around to paying off the gentleman who scammed them a cool hundred thousand dollars when they were earning a merely 30 grand a year when Bill was governor.
Remember, she was the big money winner. While he was making some paltry some as governor, 30 grand, she was the breadwinner at the Rose Law Firm. And I’m convinced that the Clintons went into Whitewater and all this because they really believed that people got rich, did it by scamming the system. They didn’t believe it was genuine hard work that got anybody anywhere. So the cattle futures scam and so forth. At least they have the class to pay off this guy in an indirect route from the Clinton Family Foundation which nobody knew about. They didn’t report that it existed because they didn’t want people to know they’re shielding another $5 million from government god. Make no mistake, folks. Make no mistake about this. These people are hypocrites from day one. When they start talking about the rich ‘not paying their fair share,’ they are at the top of the list showing everybody how it’s done.