CALLER: My comment is that I agree with the sugar tax due to the expense and damage sugar does. I feel all sugary items should be taxed, just like alcohol is regulated, like hard drugs are illegal and so forth.
RUSH: Well, now that’s just mind-blowing.
CALLER: Well, as I said, um, sugar has been proven to kill more Americans every year than hard drug abuse. I see nothing wrong with making it less affordable and harder to get.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Sugar kills more Americans than what? Than drug abuse, hard drug abuse?
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Wait just a second now. So you advocate taxing oranges?
CALLER: No, I advocate taxing anything that has white sugar in it.
RUSH: What?
CALLER: Pastries, pies, sodas, cookies.
RUSH: Orange is full of sugar. Grapefruit, full of sugar. Grapes are full of sugar. Most fruits are full of sugar!
CALLER: I advocate taxing anything with refined sugar.
RUSH: It doesn’t matter.
CALLER: Fruits are not full of sugar. They’re not refined sugar.
RUSH: No, no, no, no, no. Refined sugar, brown sugar, natural sugar, fructose, corn fructose syrup, it all does the same thing metabolically.
CALLER: (silence) Well…
RUSH: It doesn’t matter.
CALLER: As I said, though, to take — to make the refined sugars harder to get would take over half of the sugar consumption off the market.
RUSH: Lillian, let me try this a different way. What business is it of yours if somebody wants to drink a Gatorade or a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi-Cola? What difference is it of yours? Why should those people have to pay a tax? Why punish them, if they like it? It’s their life! It’s their business. What business is it of yours?
CALLER: That’s the famous saying: What business is it of mine if someone abuses cocaine?
RUSH: No, it’s different. Totally different. Nobody loses a job because they have sugar. There’s no such thing as a sugar addiction per se in this sense in that it’s mind altering. People do not destroy their own lives with sugar. They don’t destroy their families’ lives like they do with heroin or cocaine. They don’t commit crimes to get it.
CALLER: Sugar is addictive. People experience withdrawals. This has been documented by several scientific studies. People do ruin their lives.
RUSH: Lillian, you’re just wrong.
CALLER: Someone 100 pounds overweight —
RUSH: You’re reading a bunch of gobbledygook from a bunch of nannies who want to manage and control everybody’s lives, and it’s nobody’s business. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that we need to ban water because it can drown people if it’s not used correctly.
CALLER: No, I do not believe that. But did you know that sugar only became rampantly used and abused in the last 50 to 75 years? Before that, people hardly ever ate sugar, only on a special occasion, rather than two or three pounds a day.
RUSH: They ate sugar every day if they had fruit. Practically everything you eat has some sugars in it.
RUSH: It doesn’t matter.
CALLER: Refined sugar!
RUSH: Lillian, it doesn’t matter. Sugar is sugar in terms of the metabolic effect. (pause) I’m still optimistic, folks. I’m still optimistic! I was teetering there for a minute, but I’m still optimistic.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I don’t know about you, folks, but most of the time I see people drinking Diet Coke they’re way overweight — and the people drinking regular Coke, Pepsi are just skinny as a rail. I mean, that’s been my experience. By the way, what do we…? Gatorade is loaded with sugar. Have you checked the ingredients? And those people that drink Gatorade, they’re out exercising, doing what Obama thinks they should do. Are we still going to tax ’em? And there’s another myth, that eating sugar leads to diabetes. It does not. Eating sugar is not a direct correlation to getting diabetes. There are many, many other factors. But look how people can be fooled into this.
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RUSH: During the break, I went and did some research on sugar. There are very few times, ladies and gentlemen, where I think — and have thought, in the 20-plus years I’ve hosted this program — that I’m wasting my time. But I’m on the brink of thinking, ‘If I’ve got to explain sugar to people, I’m wasting my time,’ and then I realized, ‘No, you’re not wasting your time,’ and that’s even more depressing. I found a piece here by a blogger named Laurie Beebe at EzineArticles.com, Ezine Articles.
At any rate… ‘ When did sugar start getting such a bad rap? Unlike many herbs and supplements which are touted for being ‘safe and healthy because they are natural’, people forget that sugar comes from the sugar cane plant, or from sugar beets…’ Sugar is as natural as your favorite herb. ‘In a survey where people were asked ‘How many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar?’ the answers went as high as 200 calories or more.’ Do you know how many calories are in a teaspoon of sugar? (drumming fingers) Sixteen. (snorts) How the hell did you know this, Snerdley? You knew it? Rachel knew it. There are sixteen calories in a teaspoon of sugar. ‘So how did it get a reputation for being fattening, causing diabetes, and contributing to the obesity epidemic?
‘Well, many people do not use sugar — or many other foods for that matter — in moderation. In fact, a teaspoon of sugar on your morning cereal or grapefruit, another in your coffee, and a third in your iced tea at lunchtime will add up to less than 50 calories. How can that be a hazard to your health?’ And people start to think, ‘Well, doughnuts! Don’t start talking about this. Doughnuts!’ The sugar in doughnuts is not what’s fattening. It’s not where calories come from. It’s the fat; it’s the grease. Doughnuts are fried. It’s not the sugar. But the idea that sugar leads to diabetes — if you eat too much sugar you’re going to get diabetes — that is another one of these myths. Diabetes results from a problem in the pancreas resulting from insulin, and there are many different kinds.
I remember once when he was diagnosed (I think it was type 1) when he was in his mid-fifties, and he was having to shoot up insulin. His pancreas just wasn’t making it. It didn’t matter what he ate. Eat anything, and your blood sugar is going to skyrocket. Certain things you can’t eat, and so forth, but a lot of things that get broken down as sugar you can eat as a diabetic — and everything does get broken down into one form of a sugar or another, in the whole metabolic process. But one of the problems he had was regulating his insulin. If you inject too much insulin, you go into insulin shock. Have you ever seen somebody in insulin shock? Well, they start shaking and coughing and you think they’re going to die, and you know what the cure for it is?
A glass of orange juice, which is loaded with sugar! Orange juice from the tree, loaded with sugar. Drink that, and you’ll nullify it if you happen to take too much insulin. Look, I’m not a doctor on this stuff. I just know that anything is getting a bad rap. But the reason we’re talking about this is because the United States Senate is going to start taxing drinks that have sugar in it, and this is nothing more than the left’s attempt to establish guilty behavior. The reason they’re going to tax sugar, they tell you, is because they want to improve your lifestyle. They want you to stop eating it so you get healthier. That’s not why! It’s because sugar is in everything. And once you start taxing Coke and Gatorade and Pepsi and 7-Up and Sprite and all these other things, then you can start taxing doughnuts and everything else that’s got sugar in it.
Everything in the world is going to kill us! Do you understand that every day we get up and something’s going to kill us, as though we’re never going to die? Do you realize, folks, we would live forever if we didn’t do all these horrible things the left warns us against every day. We’d all live forever! That’s the logic that they put forth. Everybody’s gonna die. Your time comes. I know people who have exercised. They have done everything that they have been told to do. They have exercised. They have moderated their diet. They eat roots and berries and trees, and they had a miserable life — and then all of a sudden they had some pain on the right side of the body. They went in there and they found a benign polyp or tumor on the liver. Alllll the exercise and allllll the eating the berries and the roots and the garbage — the bland crap that was supposed to keep you healthy — did not stop the tumor.
In fact, we’re now learning that drinking coffee might stave off type 2 diabetes. I got the story in the stack today. ‘Three cups of coffee might reduce your chance of getting type 2 diabetes by 50%.’ I think that’s BS, too! Who the hell knows? They can’t know, but this is the kind of stuff we live with every day. We are now told also that caffeine’s the enemy, but caffeine is only 2% of coffee. Coffee has thousands of different biological organisms in it that’s good for us. And coffee can also, maybe, prevent Parkinson’s disease. Alzheimer’s, too. Now, how many of you have been told that coffee is going to kill you because it’s going to do something to your blood vessels and cause you to have a heart attack? Remember the jogger Jim Fixx? Here’s a guy did everything right. He ran around.
He ran! He ran and he ran around. He worked hard, he played hard, ate all the right stuff, drank all that stupid papaya juice, all that rotgut crap that nobody likes that they convince you to eat, and he plops over from a heart attack at, what, age 49! Did everything right. (new castrati impression) ‘That’s just one example! That’s — that’s a rare example, exception to the rule, Mr. Limbaugh!’ No. No. It boils down to: we’re all different, and we are all made different. We all have different make-ups. Our DNA is the same, but we all have something that’s going to get us. We are not the same. We cannot be made uniform, and they’re trying to make everybody uniform. They’re trying to make everybody the same. It irritates me to no end, especially when people get…
It’s like coconut oil and popcorn. It’s like these clowns, these two anorexics at the Center for Science in the Public Interest who have a fax machine. Have you ever seen these people on TV? They need to put them in a horror movie with no makeup. And these people are out there giving us lectures on this and that’s going to kill us, and they actually succeeded in getting products banned. And one of the products they got banned from commercial use was coconut oil because it was supposedly going to clog your arteries more than anything in the world would. And they later found out, ‘No, no. Coconut oil is actually a very healthy oil, much healthier than trans fats, in fact.’ Coconut oil. You know why coconut oil was used in popcorn? There were two reasons. Well, tasted good. When you walked in the movie theater in the old days it was the coconut oil that made it smell the way it smelled.
Something in coconut oil holds the popcorn. And the people who are in business to provide quality and service, I mean, they’re not doing this… It’s expensive stuff. They’re not doing this simply out of altruism because they want to. They’re doing it because they want you to be satisfied with the product. Now, I know they put a little bit too much salt on it so you go buy a $25 Coke at Yankee Stadium while you’re eating the popcorn, but still, it holds the popcorn. These people that come up with these things do it for a reason. It actually saves expenses when you can pop a bunch of popcorn. You don’t have to guess how much to eat every night and throw away what you don’t use. It might rain. The crowd might not be as big. The movie might stink; people might not show up. What do you do with the popcorn?
You can’t pop it to order. People would be standing at the concession line all day. There are so many things that have happened in this country for good are just based on good, old-fashioned trial-and-error common sense — and here come a bunch of people that could no more run a movie theater or run a car business or run the health care business, telling us they have fixed it in two days. A guy who’s done nothing but organize a bunch of radical, malcontent protesters in his whole life in Chicago — a guy whose records in school will not be released, a guy who’s not managed one thing, a guy who can’t even keep his own White House military office from taking Air Force One out on a joyride — we’re being told is going to fix health care in two days, fix the car business, fix the banks, fix the credit cards! It’s all going to be fixed.
And after that we’re going to save the freaking planet! And we’re going to make sure the sea levels stop rising. This is going to be done inside of a year. Meanwhile, all of the people who really have expertise in this are being scared to death into shutting up and going along. It’s like the Chamber of Commerce guy. Get this quote, LA Times: ‘Chamber of Commerce, Health Care Groups Join Obama at Negotiating Table.’ Well, the Chamber of Commerce, which is not known for going along with a bunch of pantywaist liberals. If you don’t get in this game, then you’re on the menu. Meaning, if you don’t get in there and say, ‘Okay, I’ll play with you, Mr. President,’ then the president’s going to eat you. The president’s going to destroy you. You’re on the menu. So to protect your interests, you have to go in there and play ball his way, ’cause nobody’s got the guts to stand up to the guy. Two trillion dollars in savings? Please, where is your natural skepticism? How much money were you going to save on your cable bill? How much money were you going to save on all these other things the government got involved in to make it right?
There was a column yesterday in The Atlantic by Megan McArdle: ‘Obama’s Magical Mystery Tour of Health Care Savings — Obama got [the unions] and various corporate entities involved with health care provision in a room and got them to promise to slash 150 basis points from the annual rate of increase in health care spending. How will we achieve this? Whitehouse.gov has a fact sheet which outlines the concrete proposals that came out of this meeting,’ da-da-da-da-da. ‘You may recognize these proposals; they are recycled from the Obama budget. Estimated cost savings listed: $215 billion over ten years. That leaves just $1.785 trillion for the ‘stakeholders’ to find.’ In other words, the $2 trillion in costs are not spelled out, because there won’t be any $2 trillion in savings! I don’t know how many times people running the government have said, ‘We’re going to reduce the cost here! We’re going to reduce the cost there. Social Security, we’re going to fix that.’ Nothing ever gets fixed. It only gets broken worse!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Nick, 19 years old, Allegany, New York. Hi, Nick, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: I just want to get back to the sugar tax.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: I think it’s just totally ludicrous that they’re taxing like even healthy people that can afford to intake the sugar.
CALLER: Yeah, but then you see all the people walking around that are skinny as whatever and they can drink all the sugar they want, you know?
RUSH: Exactly. It’s just an excuse to tax people. Take the sugar out of it and they’re coming at it the same way they come at everybody — I’ve been watching some idiot on television just now during the break, ‘Yes, we must raise this tax on sugar so that we make people healthier and lower our health care costs.’ Well, of course, who doesn’t want lower costs on everything and who doesn’t want healthier people? Okay, fine, so we’ll just raise taxes. It’s just increases in taxes, and they’re going to find ways to increase them left and right no matter where you go and what you do. And they’re going to justify it at every turn on making it better for you, you don’t even know what’s good enough for yourself, but these people care about you, and they’re going to make it better for you to live in America. These people are trying to take away as much liberty and freedom as they possibly can to control as much of your life as possible. Nick’s got a good point here, a lot of healthy people eat a lot of sugar and yet they’re going to get taxed on the basis that they’re unhealthy. Next is gonna come the salt tax.
Now, you want to talk about something — now, there’s something that’s related to high blood pressure — they say — and water retention. He-he-he. We know a lot of people don’t like water retention, don’t we? We have to deal with that often, don’t we? Oh, it just ruins the day sometimes when there’s water retention. Salt can do that. And we have a lot of other things that can be said to be unhealthy.