RUSH: Muskegon, Michigan. Bruce thank you, sir, for your patience and hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my call. Last night I was listening to the news and then I heard that the Social Security is now insolvent — which is about seven, eight years sooner than what they had previously been predicting, I guess, based on our economic situation. You know, we all know the way that government’s running Social Security is bigger an any Ponzi scheme that Madoff could have ever dreamed up and my question to you is: How do we get the Congress to produce legislation that will — as painful as it might be — put Social Security back on the road to — to being solvent?
RUSH: Well, you remember that George W. Bush tried it. George Bush, immediately after his reelection in 2004, said he was going to use some of his political capital to reform Social Security. And he used the word ‘privatize,’ and it was a good plan. It was an excellent, excellent plan — and it would not have touched current retirees. It would not have affected them at all, but the Democrats demagogued it. Basically what Bush… I don’t remember the specifics, but a portion — not all, a portion — of the payroll taxes deducted each pay period from an employee’s paycheck would be put into an investment fund where it would grow independently of whatever the Social Security lockbox did. See, the dirty little secret here is that the federal government has been living off Social Security for years.
Social Security was taking in more than it was paying out and they used that to make it look like the deficit was lower than it was. This has been going for decades, not just recently. Now you’re right: We’ve reached the point where Social Security is spending, paying out, more than it’s bringing in. The only way that this is going to be reformed is to do a number of things: Raise the retirement age — and by the way, in order to get this done you’re going to have to exempt from the reform changes to any of the current retirees. If you don’t, they’ll stop it. They will stop it dead in its tracks. Social Security, you’ve heard it referred to as the third rail, meaning: You touch that and you’re dead. And it is. It still is. The Democrats don’t want any reform whatsoever, and Obama clearly doesn’t. He loves deficit spending. He loves debt!
He loves wrecking the engine that produced the golden goose. He loves killing the golden goose! But this is going to have to be reformed and everybody’s been warning of this for 20 years and we’ve had these stopgap little ‘bipartisan’ fixes, and all they’ve done is buy a little time toward the day of reckoning — and at each one of these fixes the people that were engaged in the fix (or involved in it) are no longer around. Elected officials, I mean. They’re no longer around. But it’s going to have to be privatized. The Democrats were able to demagogue what Bush wanted and point to a falling stock market and say, ‘Do you want your Social Security money in that account? Look what’s happening to the stock market! Do you want big-time Wall Street people making a profit on your Social Security contributions?’
They demagogued it all the way from here to hell just because of the word ‘privatization,’ and the reason they were successful on that is the word ‘security.’ Social Security. ‘Secure. You don’t have to be worried about it. It’s always going to be there.’ Then ‘privatization’ came along. That permitted Democrats to suggest that it wasn’t going to be secure anymore, and they demagogued Wall Street just as Obama is doing now. It’s like the same old playbook. This is why, frankly, I get so damn frustrated, folks, with people not understanding what liberals are and what they believe and what they say and how they lie to people. The Democrats can’t pay for any of their programs now! The people that have come along and tried to reform this get killed politically. They get destroyed. Yet the Democrats are taking this country off the cliff!
Liberal Democrats are taking the country off of the cliff. This young 15-year-old boy called us yesterday, ‘What can I do to secure my future?’ Focus on grassroots. Get rid of every Democrat. The only way this country is going to be restored to the country you think it is and it always has been, is to get rid of Democrats in power. Get rid of them at the ballot box, get rid of them as a majority in any elected place — and it’s gonna take a while to depopulate the federal bureaucracy of all these career-appointed libs who are in there working against the expressed wishes of the elected representatives of the people if they’re not oriented toward liberalism. It is a huge, huge fight — and the future of the country as you and I have known it, is what hangs in the balance here.