RUSH: President Obama hijacked the daily press briefing today, took it away from Gibbs. Obama is under pressure. He hadn’t had a press conference in, what, seven months now? Since July. He hadn’t
I just noticed that a reporter in there actually asked my question: ‘President Obama, small businesses say that they aren’t hiring because they don’t know what’s coming. They don’t know how much it’s going to cost to be in business with your health care bill (if it passes or not), whatever tax increases you have planned, cap-and-trade legislation. They’re holding back.’ And Obama said, ‘No, no, no. That’s not right. It’s because they can’t get loans.’ So I just want you small business people that did not hear this to know. A reporter actually told the truth in a question: You aren’t expanding or hiring anybody because you don’t know what you face down the road expense-wise. You don’t know what the cost of doing business is going to be. And Obama said, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not at all it! They can’t get loans.’ Every small business in this country needs to hear that answer.
Every one of them, because Obama’s basically now telling you, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ and this guy has never operated a payroll or a small business. He wouldn’t know the first thing to do if a small business fell into his lap. His inclination is to tax every one of them out of business and take away every bit of profit, and then you stay in business with zero profit. That’s what his objective is. Let’s go to the sound bites. Obama says he’s open to new ideas. In a surprise visit to the White House Briefing Room, Major Garrett of Fox News: ‘After meeting with you, John Boehner came out and told us that the House cannot pass the health care it once passed, the Senate can’t pass the health care bill it once passed, so why would we have a conversation about legislation that can’t pass? As part of that he said that you and your White House congressional Democrats should start over entirely from scratch on health care reform. How do you respond?’
OBAMA: I’ve got these goals. When I was in Baltimore talking to the House Republicans, they indicated, we can accomplish some of these goals at no cost. And I said, ‘Great. Let me see it,’ and, eh, eh, eh… You know, I have no interest in doing something that’s more expensive and harder to accomplish if somebody else has an easier way to do it. So I’m going to be starting from scratch in the sense that I will be open to any ideas —
RUSH: Oh, my God.
OBAMA: — to help promote these goals.
RUSH: He’s open! (laughing) He’s willing to start from scratch if somebody can tell him how his ideas can be made to work, which is not ‘starting from scratch.’ The next sound bite is the president adding to his previous answer.
OBAMA: What I will not do — what you don’t think makes sense and I don’t think the American people want to see would be — another year of partisan wrangling around these issues —
RUSH: Stop the tape. I can’t. There hasn’t been any ‘partisan wrangling.’ The wrangling has all been within the Democrat Party. The House Democrats are saying ‘no’ to the Senate Democrats and verse vice-a. The Republicans, up until Scott Brown just a couple weeks ago, had no say in this and they were treated as such. There hasn’t been partisan wrangling! Folks, you Republicans, do not fall for this. Do not fall for this bipartisan garbage. It’s a trap. Get the word out of your lexicon. ‘Bipartisan’ is a code word for you caving to Democrat and Obama ideas. The American people have voted at the polls for Scott Brown and in Virginia and New Jersey. They don’t want bipartisanship. They want to stop this! You have to become the ‘just say no’ Republicans and wear that proudly. The ‘hell no’ Republicans! Don’t be afraid of it. Trust me. (sigh) Scott Brown said he’s the 41st vote against it, and look what happened: They lost the Kennedy seat! Do not be timid! Ahh! A little Howard Dean impersonation. Here’s the next of this worthless sound bite.
OBAMA: — another six months or eight months or nine months’ worth of, uh, hearings in every single committee in the House and the Senate in which there’s a lot of posturing. Let’s get the relevant parties together. Let’s put the best ideas on the table. My hope is that we can find enough overlap that we can say, ‘This is the right way to move forward, even if I don’t get every single thing that I want.’
RUSH: Well, that’s BS because he’s not going to move forward unless he gets every single thing he wants. That’s what this whole exercise is about. He wasn’t through.
OBAMA: But here’s the point that I made to…uh…John Boehner and — and Mitch McConnell. Bipartisanship can’t be that I agree to all the things —
RUSH: (yawns)
OBAMA: — that they believe in or want and they agree to none of the things I believe in and want —
RUSH: That’s exactly what it is!
OBAMA: — and that’s the price of bipartisanship.
RUSH: That’s exactly what it is!
OBAMA: Right? Eh, eh, eh — B-but that’s sometimes the way it gets presented. I’m willing to move off some of the press conference of my party in order to meet them halfway, but there’s gotta be some give from their side as well.
RUSH: What give? They don’t… (sigh) This is solely about your plan. Oops, sorry. You don’t have a plan. This is solely about two competing Democrat plans, of which the Republicans played no role in crafting. There’s nothing for the Republicans to give up. The only option is for them to join you in this, which is the trick, and they better not do it. This is not going to fool people. I am not going to let this fool people. This is just pathological. This is Saul Alinsky. Now, the last bite here, unidentified reporter: ‘Are you saying, are you saying…?’ This from the press CORPSE. ‘Are you saying that the bill can’t pass?’
OBAMA: What I agree with is that the public has soured on the process that they saw —
RUSH: No!
OBAMA: — over the last year.
OBAMA: That actually contaminates how they view the substance of the bills. This gives an opportunity not just for the Democrats to say, ‘Here’s what we think we should do,’ but it also gives Republicans a showcase before the entire country to say, ‘Here’s our plan, here’s why we think this will work,’ and, you know, one of the things that John Boehner and — and Mitch McConnell both said is they didn’t think that the status quo was acceptable, and that’s right there promising.
RUSH: (laughs) The status quo is your stupid two bills! The status quo is not ‘the process.’ This is a trick. This is an often-employed, Democrat trick to get the Republicans to cave in — in this case to nonexistent pressure from the American people who ‘just want everyone to get along.’ The era of McCain is over, not the era of Reagan.
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RUSH: We have two more sound bites from President Obama as he hijacked the White House press briefing this afternoon, and here is the question I mentioned to you. It is from Jake Tapper of ABC: ‘According to business leaders, they say there’s an uncertainty what they need to plan for because of the energy bill, because of health care, that’s what they say. I’m not saying it’s true or not, but that’s what they say. What do you say when you hear that?’
OBAMA: The biggest uncertainty has been we just went through the worst recession since the great depression, and people weren’t sure whether the financial system was going to melt down and whether we were going to tip into an endless recession. So, let’s be clear about the sources of uncertainty in terms of business investment over the last several years. A huge contraction, trillions of dollars of losses in people’s 401(k)s, people have a lot of debt coming out of the previous decade that they still haven’t worked out, the housing market losing a whole bunch of value.
RUSH: There you go, blaming Bush, Jake Tapper says, look, these business guys are not expanding because they don’t know what’s coming at them down the road, what do you say to that? Blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush. And so Tapper said: ‘A small business, not affected by the regulatory reform, a small business. You have proposed, you would acknowledge, a bold agenda, and a small business might wonder, I don’t know how the energy bill will affect me, I don’t know how the health care reform bill will affect me, I better hold off on hiring.’
OBAMA: The small businesses I’ve talked to and I’ve been talking to a lot of them as I have been traveling around the country, their biggest problem is right now they can’t get credit out of their banks, so they’re uncertain about that, and they’re still uncertain about orders. You know, do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more? It’s looking better at this point, but that’s not the rationale for people saying I’m not hiring. Let me put it this way. Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory and sell to those customers, they will do so.
RUSH: Oh, man, you don’t borrow money to make payroll. He really does not have a clue. He is absolutely clueless. Of this I am certain. It’s dangerous because he’s got these people in his crosshairs but he is clueless, small business people — I want to play this again. Recue it, Mike. Let me put it this way. ‘Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit –‘ No, they don’t. Where in the world does this come from? ‘– and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory and sell to their customers, they will do so.’ You don’t borrow to meet payroll except as a last resort. You lay people off. This is dangerously naive, ignorant. Coupled with his overall view of business anyway, he doesn’t like profit. Folks, the sheer ignorance combined with a cockiness and an arrogance is just unbelievable. ‘The small businesses I’ve talked to and I’ve been talking to a lot of them, they can’t get credit out of their banks,’ and then later on he says they can get credit to boost payrolls. Here listen to it again, I mean you small business people, you need to hear this. This is a guy who’s telling you, you don’t know what you’re doing. This is the president of the United States saying, no, you’re wrong. It’s not that you’re waiting to see what punitive policies of his come down the pike, no, you just think you can’t get credit. Here it is again.
OBAMA: The small businesses I’ve talked to and I’ve been talking to a lot of them as I have been traveling around the country, their biggest problem is right now they can’t get credit out of their banks, so they’re uncertain about that, and they’re still uncertain about orders. You know, do they just have enough customers to justify them doing more? It’s looking better at this point, but that’s not the rationale for people saying I’m not hiring. Let me put it this way. Most small businesses right now, if they’ve got enough customers to make a profit and they can get the bank loans required to boost their payroll, boost their inventory and sell to those customers, they will do so.
RUSH: Some do. I mean, some have enough customers to make a profit, but most don’t. And you don’t borrow money to make payroll. That’s business 101. That is tough to get a loan to do that. I mean you go into the bank, ‘I want to expand the payroll, can you get me a loan?’ the bank will say, ‘No, no, no, that’s not how it works. Grow your business and let your profits pay for new hires.’ I am aghast. I mean this is sheer unadulterated, undisguised idiocy. This is promoting, folks, the same tactic that put us in the mortgage crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis. Borrow money to make payroll and then go on the road to put yourself out of business and not pay the bank back, or loan money to people who have no hope of ever paying it back in the form of a mortgage because a government regulator is telling you you must and Janet Reno is promising you you’ll be investigated if you don’t, and then Barney Frank and Chris Dodd come along and say you better do this, this is affordable housing. And Obama wonders why the value of houses has plummeted, so many people are underwater, it’s because so many people, God love ’em, who had no business getting a mortgage, got them.
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RUSH: New York state, we have Carol on the phone. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: Well, I just wanted to call in and say that I’m in agreement with the sentiments that small businesses are concerned about moving forward. I’m a small business owner, I’ve been in business for about the past ten years, and now I’m finally starting to realize some growth and potential, and I’m afraid to actually make the move that would make that enhanced because of the punitive measures that I may have to deal with down the line, and I don’t know if I could survive those punitive measures. So you question whether or not you should go out on a limb and stick your neck out.
RUSH: All right. Have you heard the sound bite from President Obama we played about 20 minutes ago, 25 minutes ago?
CALLER: Yes, I heard it a couple times and that’s what caused me to call.
RUSH: Okay. Because he says that what you just said, you don’t know your own business, it’s because you can’t get loans. He’s talked to people like you. If I were you, I would be livid. This level of ignorance, lack of understanding or whatever it is is just appalling, and it’s really dangerous. Here you are on the cusp of growth and you’re afraid to do it because of what’s coming down the pike!
CALLER: Well, it certainly gives you pause. I’ll probably do it anyway because that’s what it’s about to live in this country. But I certainly — I’m not doing it without having a squishy feeling in my stomach. No one has ever talked to me or asked me about, you know, my opinions on these matters from any political party. I will say that I am nervous, but I’m going to probably have to put that aside and do my best. I know that I can get a loan. The loan is not the problem. It’s the concerns that are the problem.
RUSH: So are you going to try to build in some policies to dictate how you’re going to run the business if the worst happens or if 50% of his agenda happens, or are you just going to go in and deal with it as it happens?
CALLER: I don’t think you can completely prepare because no one knows yet exactly how this will all play out. You do your best to respond and be as nimble as you can be, but still the whole object here, if you’re an entrepreneur, is to grow, it’s not to recede and run away, and that’s what I’ve dedicated myself, I’ve given up so much over the years, there’s so much deferred income so much, you know, the grains of sand through my hourglass which are my life, and to think that they’re going to be ultimately redistributed else-wise is so horrible for me.
RUSH: Join the club. You’re right on the money. You said you’re on the cusp of expanding. What is expanding? Is it hiring more people? What is it?
CALLER: It’s hiring more people and buying a much larger facility to operate my business out of, and that would be the smart thing to do. And I probably will have to do it nonetheless. But I certainly am not doing it without wondering is this the noose that will hang me in the end because the expense of doing that will be something that will have to bear, in addition to whatever else may come along.
RUSH: And you are going to have to take out a loan to do it?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: But that’s not a problem?
CALLER: No, no. We’ve always been extremely careful. I have no real debt, of any kind. We’ve always paid our own way all the way along and denied ourselves the income that you could pay yourself if you leveraged yourself more, in the hopes that when we finally were where we needed to be we would get that return back. Then to think that after all that time of being careful, not being risky, methodically denying ourselves when the point really came that we could grow that this would occur, it seems so punitive.
RUSH: I know. I know. God bless you, best of luck to you. Keep us posted on how things go once this agenda settles in and realize there are a lot of people doing everything they can to stop it.