RUSH: Bismarck, North Dakota. Boy, it’s been a long time since we had a call from North Dakota! It’s good to know that they haven’t all moved out of there. Mike, it’s nice to have you on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I know you say you don’t get mad, and I gotta tell you, I’m mad, I’m disappointed, and I’m frustrated. This coming from a 37-year-old man with a 35-year-old wife, middle class family, I would say. I’ve been working for 14 years since college. On average we probably make about $42,000 a year. We have four kids, one on the way in April. Yes, we’re going to have a kid during the New Great Depression, and I guess I’ve always been told that the American dream is working hard and making good choices.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Now we have no mortgage. We have no debt. We live, I think, pretty comfortably because we’ve managed our money and lived well within our means.
RUSH: Hang on a minute. You’ve lost people. People need to hear what you’re doing here. Did I hear you correctly that you and your wife on average make $42,000?
CALLER: Yeah, on average over the last 14 years, yeah.
RUSH: Last 14 years, since college.
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Do you have a home, a house?
CALLER: Yeah, I have about a $165,000 home.
RUSH: And you don’t have a mortgage?
CALLER: I have no mortgage.
RUSH: You have no debt on that house?
CALLER: I have no debt at all.
RUSH: Now, this is fabulous. Don’t misunderstand here, but people are going to wonder how in the hell you did that.
CALLER: We lived way beneath our means.
RUSH: You’ve got $165,000 house. You paid cash for it, or you paid it off?
CALLER: We e paid it off.
RUSH: Oh, you did have a mortgage. You just paid it off?
CALLER: Well, I haven’t had a mortgage for over two years.
RUSH: Okay. All right, and all of this on $42,000 a year for the last 14 years?
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: On average. All right. So the reason that’s important is… I know you’re in North Dakota, and things are, you know, they cost less there that in other states, but still, that’s amazing that you can do that.
CALLER: Well, just back up a little bit. We moved from the state of Michigan out to North Dakota in 2006. So we did this while living in the state of Michigan, too.
RUSH: Damn! I don’t understand that. No, I guarantee you there are people asking, ‘How does he do that?’ This is a combined income for you and your wife, 42 grand a year, in Michigan?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And you paid off your mortgage on your $165,000 house two years ago.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Whew!
CALLER: My question is —
RUSH: Wait, the house in Michigan or the house in North Dakota?
CALLER: Well, we pretty much had the house in Michigan paid off. When we moved down here it cost me some money to move out here and housing wasn’t as cheap out here as we had anticipated, because housing out here is going —
RUSH: Okay. I get it. All right. I’m sorry for interrupting you, but I’m sure people were curious about that. So you, you’re 42,000, you have four kids, did you say?
CALLER: Four, and one on the way, yep.
RUSH: Four and one on the way, and you started to say you’ve worked hard, you’ve done the American dream, you followed the rules, but you’re mad?
CALLER: Yeah, ’cause I… You know, I’m confused. I’m extremely confused. I thought I was educated and I thought I was doing things right, and no one’s talking about me and my wife doing a good job and recognizing us, but we’re recognizing everyone now everybody else who’s made poor decisions and we’re going to help those folks out because we feel bad for them. I know that’s a little bit sarcastic, but I’m confused.
RUSH: Well, I understand your confusion. Well, actually no. What are you confused about? Why are you confused that we have a government of majority Democrats who want to make as many people victims as possible and prop ’em up? Why does that surprise you? That’s been going on for a lot of years.
CALLER: I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. It just frustrates me that when you do things the right way and you try to live the American dream, there’s really no kudos to you for doing the right thing.
RUSH: Well, to certain people, that’s right. To many liberals, you playing by the rules and prospering, that’s not fair, because there’s so many people who haven’t. This bailout, this stimulus — whatever you want to call the porkulus bill — it’s from people like you that money is going to be taken to pay the people who have failed, the businesses propped up which have failed and so forth. You’re not alone in your anger here. How about the guy still paying his mortgage and he’s barely making the payment, and yet people who can’t pay are being told, ‘The house can’t be foreclosed on; they’ve gotta stay there.’ How do you think those people feel, while the value of their home has plummeted at the same time!
CALLER: Well, again, you gotta make good choices. Maybe they’ve made bad choices and maybe they move out.
RUSH: Well, no, assuming they made the right choices other than maybe who they voted for, is the point. There’s some people who want to change the rules you play by in the middle of the game. But the notion of propping up… Dick Gephardt said it: ‘People who won life’s lottery,’ meaning success like yours is just good luck, and that’s not fair, because some people have had bad luck. They want to pick the winners and losers. You know, I’m frustrated, too. The thing that frustrates me is that what’s right in front of everybody’s eyes — the destructive nature of liberalism — somehow isn’t seen. And it’s really nothing more than public relations. Liberalism wins the PR battle, as compassionate and caring and so forth; and conservatism is seen as mean-spirited, cold-hearted, cruel. That kind of thing is partially why we’re where we are now, everything being 180 degrees out of phase. It’ll change around, but it’s still, ladies and gentlemen, going to have a profound impact before they overreach and get thrown out and replaced. So batten down the hatches.
Mike in Foxborough, Massachusetts. It’s great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. It’s a pleasure.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I guess it’s thermal underwear-wearing dittos here from chilly Foxboro, Massachusetts —
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: — home of the New England Patriots, and go Steelers!
RUSH: Yeah, my sentiments are with you, pal.
CALLER: Okay, well, look, on the side, I started… I’m looking for my 20-year chevron on here for listening to you, a former employer of mine had turned me on to you. You were on an obscure western Massachusetts station, back in I think I was like ’88 — ’87 or ’88.
RUSH: I remember that obscure western Massachusetts station. It was near Amherst. I went up there and did a Rush to Excellence Tour at some point. I forget what the station was.
CALLER: Oh, excellent. That’s correct.
RUSH: It might even still be on that station. With me on it, it is no longer obscure.
CALLER: Oh, boy, I’ll tell you it took a lot to pull it in. (laughs)
RUSH: Well, of course you’re in Foxboro. You’re all the across the state. It was a low power radio station. I think it was thousand watts, or maybe 5,000. But at least you made the effort, see. That’s what Coach Dungy was talking about. You reached up from common status and you became uncommon by doing what you could to pull in that signal from the obscure station in the western part of the state.
CALLER: Oh, God love you. (laughing) Well, look, as I spoke with Bo, which was also an honor; I want to talk about the great economic news that we received today, which I read this morning in the Wall Street Journal.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: And that is that China is not going to buy our paper and that —
RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Just a second, Mike. You have to remember that there are Obama voters listening here, and they had no clue what you mean, ‘The Chinese aren’t going to buy our paper.’ What paper? What he means, folks, is that the Chinese are no longer going to buy our Treasury bills and invest in our national debt.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: These Obama people might think you’re talking about the New York Times, and that would upset them.
CALLER: (laughing) Oh, you got me there. Well, as an update, everybody should read that the Chinese are taking a hard look, they’ve made a lot of investments in this country — and also it’s time to reexamine Alan Greenspan’s statements to Congress about ‘irrational exuberance’ and in that same time frame, he did talk about the amount of debt that the Chinese were buying from the United States.
RUSH: A lot of people have been concerned about the ChiComs and the level of our debt that they hold because if they decided to call it, we’re up a creek. Now, they won’t. They wouldn’t do it because they’re too dependent on this economy thriving. We are a consumer of Chinese goods. Cheap, expensive, lead-filled or not, we are a consumer of Chinese goods, cars and televisions. They’re getting into all kinds of things: computer parts, computers, many iPhones made in China. Milk products. Milk, eggs. There are a lot of high-end shoes and so forth are made in China. I wouldn’t worry, Mike, because nobody, nobody is buying all of this debt. We are printing some of this debt! There’s nobody buying all this, except some of the debt’s being purchased, of course. But the ChiComs have gotten out of the game. We’re printing this, and I’m amazed that inflation hasn’t ticked up yet with all this. It has to at some point. It has to, and when that happens, whew! They gotta somehow do what they can to tame that, because that’s the biggest wealth killer that comes down the pike and that’s another one of the ancillary effects of this, all this spending, that you don’t even want to contemplate.