RUSH: Joseph in Pottsboro, Texas. Hey, Joseph, nice to have you on the program, sir.
CALLER: How you doing?
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: Let me try to close the loop on two subjects. One, you’ve been talking about, one I think might be new. Why did the corporations in the United States buy the government for the Democrats, and what will the new super tax be? First of all, the corporations want to dump the unfunded liabilities in pensions and health care on the federal government and get out of the benefits business because the unfunded liabilities are an overhanging monstrosity to their profits.
RUSH: Not only that, you have a lot of big business that’s really not opposed to illegal immigration. Cheap labor, you know, one of the primary objectives of business is as low labor costs as you can get. But you’re right, they would love to get rid of their health care plans. They don’t want to have happen to them what happened to General Motors and Chrysler.
CALLER: When I was servicing the General Motors pension fund in the early nineties, the General Motors unfunded liability was over $22 billion.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: It’s now over $42 billion, and that’s one corporation. Now the more important part, Rush, is the super tax. How in the world are we going to sell Treasuries to fund the deficits which are going to be behind carrying the unfunded pension liabilities and the health care Medicare costs? Right now we tax income in this country. The federal government, in my opinion, will have to also tax wealth, and that means eventually, as you and I know it, confiscate savings, IRAs, and pension plans, liquidate them, and buy Treasuries, and there’s your source of funds for the deficits. It’s a massive training in the way we —
RUSH: That still isn’t going to work. I’m not saying they won’t do it. I have been paranoid about a wealth tax for decades, for 20 years, but you can confiscate all that wealth only one time.
CALLER: Hm-hm.
RUSH: And that’s it, it will never exist again because the people who went about creating it are not going to waste their time.
CALLER: Well, that’s why I’m in retreat, and I don’t think these guys, in the long run, are going to succeed. And the devastation will be —
RUSH: Oh, they can’t succeed. No, that is what’s so devastating about this. It can’t succeed. You know, I hope Obama fails, it’s not a question of hope, he will. This just can’t work. It will not work.
CALLER: It hasn’t worked anywhere else around the world.
RUSH: The further we go down the road trying to make it work the deeper the well we dig for ourselves, the deeper the pit and the harder and longer it’s going to be to get out of it. This shift of the Masters of the Universe, the corporate elite from around the world, this shift of theirs leftward is made up of many things. It is made up of, yeah, they would love to off-load all their unfunded liabilities, the health care plans that they have and pension plans, what have you. But they’re also, many of them, as time has evolved, they’re Democrats, they’ve come out of business schools, and they’re liberals, they’re Democrats. It’s another myth that big business is a bunch of fat cat Republicans. Plus, you add to this, now, that these people are running scared of every government, they’re just running.
Obama is making it clear, I mean if you ran a bank, if you ran any kind of business today that this administration thinks is a problem, Obama has just made it very clear, if he wants to, he can come claim your business, and he can fire you, and he can tell others what people that work in your business are going to make. When things like this happen, a lot more people than you would realize become cowards, rather than standing up and fighting it, they just slink away, try to go along with it, take care of themselves, not make any waves so as not to aggravate the beast that’s out there breathing fire and brimstone at others, ’cause you don’t want the fire and brimstone being breathed on you. So you don’t say anything, you go along with it. In my 58 years, I have never had the sense that so many people are so genuinely afraid of their government, from all walks of life, as they are today. And, believe me, that is being exploited by people who love us being afraid of them.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Remember I was just talking about how the leftward tilt of corporate America and the corporate world and they’re just frightened? Plus a lot of them are liberal Democrats anyway coming out of MIT, Wharton, the Harvard Business School and so forth. But here, Wall Street Journal today: ‘Citigroup Inc., soon to be one-third owned by the US government, is asking the Treasury for permission to pay special bonuses to many key employees,’ These are the famous retention bonuses. ‘The request comes as Citigroup is grappling with broad government pay restrictions that could break apart its legendary energy-trading unit. People at that unit, Phibro, are threatening to leave because of pay caps,’ caps on their pay, ‘tied to the US bailout of Citigroup. Phibro has been the source of hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for the bank, and has paid out hefty compensation, including a roughly $100 million windfall last year for the unit’s leader, Andrew Hall.’
Now, uhhh, I understand. If you’re going to take federal money, they’re going to have common stock and they’re going to own it, but I have to tell you.,I have to tell you, folks, as a good old-fashioned red-blooded American, I cringe. It just rubs me the wrong way for a bank to be asking Obama — asking Treasury or asking Obama — for permission to pay bonuses. Good Lord! Citibank is a big bank. I know the government’s going to own a third of it. That’s not a solution; that’s an objective. But they have to call the Department of Treasury and ask for permission to pay bonuses to keep key people? That ought to embarrass everybody. And after it embarrasses you, it ought to make you mad. And you might be saying, ‘Well, they ought to have to ask permission, Mr. Limbaugh. They have screwed us blind! They have raised our credit card interest rates. They are unkind, charged us ATM fees.’ Alright, fine. You sit back and let this happen, and pretty soon it isn’t going to be long before you’re going to have to call the government for permission to go to the bathroom and use a certain kind of toilet paper.