RUSH: Jody in Brighton, Michigan, it’s great to have you on Open Line Friday. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Thank you. Be patient with me. I’m really angry and I’m nervous, and I’m calling because hopefully you can tell me if I’m right or if I’m wrong.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: All this money that has been put into stimulus packages and all this talk about, you know, helping small businesses. I am retired from GM. I’m a salaried person, not UAW, but I’m retired from GM.
RUSH: Oh, you’re the enemy, then, yeah.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Most definitely. But who is going to prop up our small businesses? Who’s going to go out and buy from small businesses when practically all of our middle-income people’s jobs have been taken away? Manufacturing has been shoved overseas.
RUSH: Right. Who’s going to go buy a house when they don’t have a job?
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: Who’s going to start a business or expand one if they don’t have any customers?
CALLER: And I guess the other thing… I mean, it just seems like this vicious circle here. You know, I actually retired from GMAC. We were the financial arm for GM and now they’ve sold off GMAC. They are now outsourcing our jobs at GMAC overseas.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: And they’re taking away decent-paying jobs, and you want to talk about the health care for this country? What do you think GM does? I mean, what of these poor people in this country and other countries that they’ve moved these jobs to that they pay $5 a day to that they say with both these dealers’ contracts, ‘Here’s a contest. You book so many contracts and you’re going to get a case of Coke.’ This is the kind of stuff that’s going on. They don’t provide them health care insurance.
RUSH: Who is ‘they’?
CALLER: GM.
RUSH: Who?
CALLER: GM.
CALLER: And then why is it that these UAW members and that the UAW back these Democrats?
RUSH: Well, do you want…?
CALLER: They have created laws to force the manufacturing out of this country.
RUSH: Do you want me…?
CALLER: Instead… Just in a minute. Instead of… You know, here I am working a little job couple days ago a week in Howell for a small business lady and I go to work and they’re ripping up perfectly good roads and redoing it with stimulus money.
RUSH: That’s the first I’ve heard of that.
CALLER: Well, the signs were up (laughing) and, you know, I walked into work that day and I said, ‘I cannot believe this.’ They’re tearing up roads that are, you know, are not that bad, and here’s the sign, you know, that this is all due to the stimulus money.
RUSH: Well, do you want me to try to answer some of this?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: I want you to really tell me I’m wrong, that I’m not on the right track.
RUSH: Well, no. You’re not wrong. You do have some cliches about things. Manufacturing has not totally left the country. But there ain’t a whole lot of any activity going on in the private sector right now so you’re essentially right. There’s outsourcing going on all over the place and that’s not going to stop. It simply isn’t going to stop. It’s the nature of things. You know, water seeks its own level and so do wages, labor costs, and so forth. In free markets, this is what happens. But the thing here that you have to understand all of this, the flaw in it — your discussion of the stimulus and they’re tearing up roads to build new roads and so forth, what you have to basically understand here — is that the government is broke. It doesn’t have a dollar. We’re running a one-point whatever percent, $1.4 trillion deficit this year. We don’t have any money, Judy. So there’s nothing to ‘stimulate’ with. There is no stimulus. You can’t take money out of the private sector and then put it back in and say, ‘Ooh, we just stimulated the economy!’ You can’t take a jar of peanut butter out of your cabinet and put it back in and say, ‘Ooh, we just added peanut butter to the cabinet!’ This all is a sham.