I’m on a short fuse, and you start telling me that we’re not taxed enough, we’re not paying enough, I’m going to explode on you. Here’s the telephone number: 800-282-2882, the e-mail address Rush@eibnet.com. So I saw this. I don’t know, it was sometime recently; it might have been over the weekend although I, frankly, don’t remember watching any news over the weekend. So it might have been Friday during this program and I saw it up there. I don’t remember. It’s recently. It’s not the first time I have seen this. There’s some drug out there that is currently prescribed, but there’s no reason for it not to be available over-the-counter — except for one reason. If the drug is over-the-counter (long sigh) people will have to pay for it. As a prescribed drug, their health insurance pays for it, where of course they don’t think they’re paying for it. Remember, this happened with Prilosec when the makers of Prilosec upgraded it and came out with Nexium. Prilosec, as a prescribed drug, was pretty expensive. Prilosec was…uh, well, it wasn’t obsoleted, but they came out with an improved version called Nexium and they decided to take Prilosec over-the-counter. So you could go out and buy Prilosec over the counter, didn’t go to go to the doctor for it, didn’t have to get a prescription, didn’t have to mess with any of that, but, ah, it was going to cost people, and there was hell to pay. A furor erupted among people.
“What do you mean I have to pay for it?” And I’m sitting here, I’m about to blow a gasket then. It cost three times as much as a prescription than it costs over the counter, and people were mad because they thought for the first time they were going to have to be paying for it, and there’s some other drug. I don’t know what this drug does. It might be a cholesterol drug. It could be an impotence drug. I don’t know what the drug was, but same thing now — and knowing the anchorette that I was watching do the story was totally, totally sympathetic to the fact that people would have to be buying the drug for the first time in their lives and thought this was terribly unfair of the company to actually put it over-the-counter where it’s available to one and all. It’s a good drug, I guess. But what struck in my craw was this notion that somehow it is a crime. It’s an insult. It’s a conspiracy to force people to have to buy their own drugs! When did this get started? I know what it got started. Thank you, FDR. This whole notion that life is a free lunch got started with FDR and Social Security in our attempt to come out of the Depression, the New Deal — and of course the New Deal didn’t do anything but exacerbate the effects of the Depression. It wasn’t till World War II that we really rebounded, and now check this headline. Where is this from? Reuters. Figures.
“UN Report Urges Rich Countries to Double Aid.” Oh, this is a great day for me to see this! “More than 500 million people can be lifted out of abject poverty; 250 million people will no longer go to bed hungry and 30 million children can be saved from dying [italics added]if rich countries double development aid over the next ten years, a new UN sponsored report said today. In a 3,000 word report, some 265 experts came up with long term…” This is just like global warming.; We’re going to have this reported. Everybody is going, “Whoa, all these experts, 3,000! Why, it must be true.” This is gobbledygook; this is BS, and you know how I know it’s BS because we’ve been doing this for how many years? How many year have we been told, “If you just give a little bit more, we’ll wipe this out and we’ll wipe that out. Just give a little bit more,” and the more we give in our own domestic situation? The Great Society, the war on poverty has resulted now in over $6 trillion being transferred from the producers of this country to the recipients of the aid, and guess what? We still have the same people who authored the program complaining about the same problems. We still have abject poverty. We still have people going to bed in the country hungry. We still have children that are in dire straits, blah blah blah, despite six trillion dollars. What’s missing in this?
What’s missing in this is an adult admission that this isn’t the way to fix this. Self-reliance is the way to fix this. Capital is the way to fix this. If you want to fix Third World poverty, export capitalism to them, not just raw dollars which their Third World thug dictators are going to steal it all. Those Third World pimps, we’ve sent enough money over there. These people ought to be driving limousines and living in houses encrusted in gold for all the money the world has sent to the poor all over the world in all of our years. But no! The poor are still poor. They’re still dying in famines caused by communist governments or Islamofascist governments as in Ethiopia or now in the Darfur section of Sudan. If you want to save people, get rid of tyranny; get rid of communism; get rid of Islamofascism; get rid of dictatorships. Don’t prop ’em up with all this whining and moaning and bellyaching and false tears about how the rich aren’t doing enough, especially this country. I have about had it, folks, with this notion that we’re not doing anything. Listen to some of the stuff that’s in this report. (sniveling liberal voice) “Poor nations were to reorder priorities such as eliminating school fees and drawing up realistic development plans. Rich nations were to step up funds for specific projects, forgive debt, and promote trade, but few have lived up to their commitments.”
Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who probably hasn’t been in the real world in 30,000 years, was lead author of the report commissioned by Kofi Annan. Well, there’s somebody clean and pure as the wind-driven snow! You know how to make this money really count? I’ll make one concession. It will never happen so I feel free making this concession. Let’s go ahead one time to give them all the money they want but take the UN out of the equation. Get rid of the middleman so they don’t siphon 80% of it for Kofi and his corrupt son Kojo! Just get rid of the middleman. Why do we need a middleman? Why do we need to give away a dollar to somebody and have the UN take 78 cents of it? Why do we need to give a dollar to domestic welfare and have the Social Security administration take 78 cents of it? That was just five years ago. That was the administrative cost on every dollar of welfare was 78 cents meaning 22 cents of every dollar got to the poor and got to the needy and the intended. Well, hell’s bells, folks! Anybody wonder why this stuff isn’t working? Not only that it’s just enough to keep them poor, just to keep them in dire straits but nobody is teaching them how to get themselves out of it. Now we come to the Social Security problem, and what’s the liberal solution? Raise taxes! Raise taxes. “That’s all we need to do: raise taxes.”
No, the solution is go-to-get more people oriented to providing as much of their retirement as possible because current examples — go look at your average retiree who lives only on Social Security and ask yourself one question: “Is that how you want to retire?” and then this same person is going to say, “Hell, no!” So what do you do, if you want to have a better retirement than what currently exists, people have been relying totally on Social Security? You figure out a way to provide it yourself. “Oh, easy for you to say.” Well, I made this decision a long time ago that I was not going to be dependent. Does it make me silly, selfish or smart? The only downside is that everybody else wants to put their hand in your back pocket, so you have to turn into a little bit of a meany to say “no,” but nevertheless, it’s patently obvious here, folks, that we just cannot keep raising taxes and giving money away in numbers and levels that are going to promote people in a retirement that they would like to have, it simply isn’t there — not and fund everything else we’re going to fund. We can’t do that and give all these poor people in the world enough so that they can live and we can’t do that and win the war on terror and we can’t do that and all these other commitments that we’ve got.
We’ve got to give health insurance to the 43 million uninsured, all this stuff, all this money that we’re taxed, do you realize, the budget is $2 trillion now? The Federal budget is $2 trillion maybe higher. Is it three? $2.5 trillion? Do you have any idea how much that is? The adult population…? Forget the adult population. What’s the whole population of the country now, 280? Do some quick math. Divide 280 million into two and a half trillion and find out how much we could give every person in this country if it all just came back or better yet how much each person just in a purely average sense is being taxed. We know that most of them aren’t. I don’t think people have the slightest idea how much this is, and when anybody comes along and says, “We’re not spending enough and we’re not taxing enough”? I tell you what, it’s time for some of you people out there to stop just playing Simon Says and Follow the Leader and start thinking about some of this stuff. I don’t care whether it’s global warming or whether it’s the UN report urging rich countries to double aid. My whole life I’ve been hearing the rich don’t pay enough of anything. We’re not funding enough foreign aid, not funding enough domestic aid it. Got even worse than that: The rich get rich by stealing money from the poor, that’s what they said during the eighties. Brian, I just knocked the clock off and I didn’t even touch it. I’ve just been banging this desk so much that the vibration sent it tumbling to the carpeted floor. I’m sure it’s okay, but you better get it before I run around the desk and stomp on it.
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