RUSH: As we learned from a caller in our job summit in the previous hour who was self-employed, self-employed people do not get unemployment benefits. They don’t get unemployment compensation. In a sense you could say that they are targeted. It’s all part of the war on
Here’s something really laughable. At the top of the hour I’m sitting here and I’m looking at the television. I was in Snerdley’s office looking at television and I was watching MSNBC, and they’re talking to the governor who was the architect of the highest unemployment rate in the country: Jennifer Granholm in Michigan. The Michigan unemployment rate is 15.1% (probably a little higher than that, even, if you count the U6, people that have given up looking). Now, what is the architect of the largest, highest unemployment state in the country doing at that jobs summit? What in the world can she tell anybody up there about creating jobs? Oh, I forgot! Robert Gibbs said job creation is not what this is about. No, this job summit is not about that. You know what this is about is putting more demands on the private sector. That’s what this is about. These people, these academics and these Ivy Leaguers who have no experience at all in the private sector are going to figure out ways to target all this on the private sector and blame them for what’s happening. You watch. That’s what’s going to be the end result of this. Let’s go to some audio sound bites. Suzanne Malveaux, CNN this morning. The infobabe talking to her said, ‘What exactly is today’s event all about? We’ve been waiting for it. It was announced a while ago, and today’s the day.’
MALVEAUX: We’re getting new details from the White House about this event. We know that the president and the vice president are going to be meeting with some CEOs of some top companies — Google as well as FedEx — but also union leaders as well as academics, all of them basically getting in a room together, breaking up in smaller groups as well to talk about some things that the government can do to help the private industry create more jobs for the American people. The president is actually going to talk in individual groups to some of these leaders. He’s also going to take questions, we are told, from the audience later in the afternoon; open up the floor to questions so he can actually see if they can generate some ideas. No major announcements, Heidi, that we’re expecting out of this jobs forum today. Really it’s more like kind of a talking session, if you will.
RUSH: All of these things are just a show conference. This is just a show. This is what community organizers do. They sit around, they have these little focus groups, and after two or three hours they come out and admit the problem’s solved. At the top of the list you heard liberal professors and union leaders — with their historic record of creating jobs. Union leaders and academics. You know what they shoulda done? A test for potential experts, one simple question: Would you increase jobs for any inner city teenagers by increasing or decreasing the minimum wage? But the correct answer to that doesn’t fit the mold of what Obama wants to do, so that question would not be asked. Moving on with the audio sound bites, Valerie Jarrett — who is bad news. This woman is the alter ego of Barack Obama. She was on the Today Show today. Meredith Vieira said, ‘You’ve heard the critics say this is just another forum. The president has held a lot of these since taking office and it’s nothing more than a PR stunt. What specifically can this forum do to create jobs?’
JARRETT: We would welcome the critics to come down and help us with constructive ideas as well. I sent out a broad e-mail a couple of days ago inviting everyone who has constructive ideas just work with the White House. I think what’s good about today is it’s clear that government alone can’t solve this problem. It has to be a partnership with the private sector. Long-term, sustainable growth is going to come from businesses investing in our country and growing the economy — and we’re very optimistic, Meredith, that today will be a productive day.
RUSH: Do they think that we are idiots? They do! They must think that we’re idiots. This is not what she believes. Or they would not have wasted all this money in the stimulus and told everybody that the government is… It was Obama himself that said government’s the only place capable of dealing with this, and that was one of his selling points before getting the stimulus passed. And now she’s out there, ‘Well, we’re seeing government alone can’t solve the problem.’ Obama doesn’t think that. She doesn’t think that. And, by the way, there aren’t any ‘critics’ in there. They’re not letting the Chamber of Commerce in there. They’re not letting the National Federation of Independent Business in there. They’re not letting private sector in. They have a couple of CEOs for show. One of the CEOs is a big leftist anyway, the Google guy. So on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Valerie Jarrett showed up over there, too, and got this question here: ‘Part of the tone of anger is the disconnect between how players on Wall Street and Main Street: Big profits and bonuses of the Goldman, a quarter of the children in the country on food stamps. Does the president believe those profits are a necessary evil to get the economy on track? Does he regret the amount of money made on Wall Street?’
JARRETT: Is it important that we have a healthy banking industry in order for Main Street to thrive? Absolutely. That’s why the president was so supportive of the steps that we took. And look, Bank of America: Paying us back in full, paying us over a couple billion dollars of interest which go to the benefit of taxpayers. Were those steps necessary? Yes. Now! As the stocks of those banks have gone up and as the general economy is rising, people’s 401(k)s are increasing in value, too. I have senior citizens as parents who watch (chuckles) their 401(k) every single day.
Isn’t it interesting how we get scientific tables in anything? Scientific tables in politics, scientific tables in economics — and it’s all bogus. ‘But as millions of Americans now know all too well, Zandi was very, very wrong. President Obama’s stimulus has completely failed to create any jobs and instead has witnessed more than 4 million jobs lost in 2009. Commenting on the state of the US economy, Zandi now tells USA Today: ‘It’s getting increasingly unusual that we’re not seeing a hiring kick set in.” Increasingly unusual? It’s like curiouser and curiouser. It’s ‘getting increasingly unusual we’re not seeing a hiring kick set in.’ Now, ‘If Zandi and his allies on the left want to figure out why the economy is not creating any jobs, they need to put down their failed Keynesians formulas and talk to real business owners and executives,’ which is what we’re doing today.
‘Executives like Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, who told the Wall Street Journal: ‘Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.”’ In other words, Obama could go a long way to creating jobs if today at the summit he said, ‘I am halting all talk and legislation on health care and cap and trade as of this day. It is all off the table.’ If he did that, if he just said, ‘You know, we’re going to delay it. I’m going to stop action on this until we get our economy going again.’ If he just said that, you would not believe the business attitude and climate change that there would be — and if there was talk of a few tax cuts for small businesses, the same thing would have happened. Now, ‘These businessmen have every right to be worried. As we’ve detailed before, the Senate Health Bill currently being debated in the Senate would be a disaster for the US economy: …
”All told, the Reid Bill raises taxes by $370.2 billion over the next ten years with many of those taxes starting to be collected this year with unemployment at 10.2% and rising. Worse, the bill includes a job killing employer mandate which taxes companies for hiring people. Specifically, companies with more than 50 employees that do not offer a health plan approved by federal bureaucrats will be forced to pay a $750 per employee job tax. … The Reid Bill acknowledges it is terrible public policy for small businesses and tries to address this problem by including a ‘small business tax credit’ to minimize the impact of the job killing employer mandates and regulation-caused increases in private health insurance premiums. But the tax credit only lasts two years and largely excludes small business owners, small businesses with high-average payrolls, and firms with 25 or more workers.’
So ‘Essentially, after all exclusions, the only eligible firms are those firms with 10 or fewer workers as well as those with low-income workers — the least likely to offer coverage even with a significant price reduction. … The Reid Bill’s employer mandate is especially punitive on poor families. Firms that hire an employee from a low-income family who qualify for an insurance subsidy are charged a tax penalty of $3,000. So a company could save $3,000 by hiring, say, someone with a working spouse or a teenager with working parents, rather than a single mother with three children. Worse, companies only have to pay $750 an employee instead of $3,000 if one quarter of employees are low-income.’ This is absolute nightmare! There’s no way anybody’s going to be able to keep up with the complexity of this.
Everybody is going to be in violation of the law once this bill is passed and signed into law, if it is. It’s 2,000 pages in the House. It’s 2,000 pages in the Senate. Nobody knows everything that’s in it. Well, nobody voting on it knows everything that’s in it. The people at the Heritage Foundation have combed through it and they know everything that’s in it, and by the time to finish it, the conclusion is: You are going to be in violation of the law somehow, somewhere. It’s not going to be possible to avoid being in violation of the law. There’s simply too much for everybody to know here, and ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. So businesses sitting around — and believe me, folks, the people who are entrepreneurial enough, energetic enough, ambitious enough to want to start a business based on a passion that they have, are also smart enough to try to figure out what’s ahead of them on the road.
People that run businesses try to fix as many long-term costs as they can. That’s why they make long-term deals with suppliers, long-term deals with employees and unions, ’cause they need to have a handle on their fixed costs for as long as down the road as they can. It’s the only way they can operate and make an attempt at showing a profit and with all this going on now, the health care, the cap and trade, and who knows what else — you know, income taxes are going up; the Bush tax cuts is sun-setting — the inheritance tax going up, all kinds of new taxes, carbon taxes, whatever they are, nobody can get a handle on the lay of the land. Nobody knows what’s ahead of them. And this jobs summit today is not going to clear up anything because it’s not about clearing anything up. It’s a show designed to make people who look to government as their salvation and solution, designed to make people look at Obama as working hard for them, trying to get them a job. When it is Obama and his policies and the entire legislative agenda of the Democrat Party which is destroying the private sector, and bringing to a stand still any effort at growth.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: According to CNNmoney.com, here are some of the leading ideas under discussion at the jobs summit at the White House today: ‘Offering a payroll tax holiday that would temporarily suspend the 12.4% tax on people’s first $106,800 of income.’ Snerdley, anybody think at the end of this summit we’re going to get a payroll tax holiday? Ain’t no way. ‘Creating a new jobs hiring credit.’ Let me tell you how that’s gonna work. In fact, this is already in the stimulus bill, or at least it was. I don’t know if it made the final cut but it was in the early stages when they were writing it. They want to offer small businesses a $3,000 tax credit for hiring new employees. Big whoop. So you get a $3,000 tax credit for going out and hiring somebody, what are you gonna pay them, 35, $40,000, plus their health benefits package. That’s an incentive to hire somebody? And then when they don’t do it, that allows Obama to point fingers at the private sector, ‘Hey, we offered ’em tax cuts to hire, and they wouldn’t hire. We’ve done everything we can.’
Would somebody explain this to me? You gotta be talking government jobs here, not private sector. What the hell, help the states close their budget deficits is going to help the private sector how? And then finally: ‘Offering public service employment.’ So now we get to what the real objective here is, is the expansion of government. That’s what the labor leaders are going to suggest, that’s what the academics are going to suggest. Let the government hire people. Let’s expand public sector employment, that’s exactly what this is about, and make no mistake, and then there’s this, the piece de resistance of the story: ‘One measure that is more likely to be enacted is an extension of unemployment benefits. One million people could lose unemployment benefits in January if Congress does not lengthen the deadline to apply for federal aid beyond December 31st.’ (gasping) Oh, so the job summit is gonna end up expanding public sector job opportunities and extending unemployment benefits.
By the way, speaking of the self-employed, not only do the self-employed not get unemployment benefits, they still have to pay the tax that funds unemployment benefits. Well, partially funds because we’re not paying for anything we’re doing. Obama spent three-and-a-half trillion dollars this year, folks, and we’ve got a budget deficit this year alone that is going to be one-and-a-half trillion dollars. We don’t have any money, and yet we’re going to expand public sector hiring? This whole thing is just a gigantic trick. ‘The US Chamber of Commerce on Monday sent a letter to the president with seven policies that it said are crucial to job creation. Its suggestion include expanding infrastructure investment by removing regulatory and other requirements, as well as better preparing American students for future jobs and lowering tax rates on entrepreneurs,’ the risk takers. And that’s another aspect of the greatness of America, American exceptionalism, risk-taking. And now they’re trying to take all of that out.
We gotta get rid of the risk because Obama and his boys believe that risk is what gave us the financial crisis. You know, Valerie Jarrett said earlier that we want to work in partnership, the government alone can’t great jobs, we know that. Well, Obama didn’t say that. Obama said only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy, where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs, which leads to even less spending, wherein inability to lend and borrow stops growth and leads to even less credit. Only government can break the vicious cycles. And in his view, it is risk-taking on Wall Street that led to all this.