Were the Bailouts Necessary?

RUSH: Here’s Jordan in Daytona Beach, Florida, 16 years old. It’s great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you, Mr. Rush. How are you doing, sir?

RUSH: Very well, sir. Thank you.

CALLER: Okay. I’m going to get right to the point. I’m not going to waste any time telling you about me. My question is: Which bailouts do you view as necessary to help the country stay afloat and which bailouts do you view as a waste of taxpayers’ dollars?

RUSH: Well, interesting question. My instinct is to say both of them were unnecessary in the size and scope that they were taken. We still have unspent stimulus money, and we still have $200 billion to $300 billion in unspent TARP money. The TARP bailout was $700 billion and that, we were told, was necessary to virtually save the financial system of the world, because we had to save ours. It cost $700 billion, and there’s still $300 billion of it left. The original purpose of that $700 billion, Jordan, was to enable lending institutions to start loaning money, and it was also to buy up all these ‘toxic assets.’ It turns out that TARP has not been used for that at all. TARP was used to buy General Motors. TARP was used to buy Chrysler. The TARP money was not used for its original purpose. There’s something else out there, Jordan, you need to know. The Federal Reserve, before the TARP bailout, made loans totaling $2 trillion and they will not tell us to whom.

We don’t know who got the money. Whether the Fed loans it or the government prints it, it’s our money. So you can talk about the $700 billion TARP. You can talk about the $787 billion stimulus. That’s nothing compared to the amount of money that the Federal Reserve lent people at the same time: $2 trillion. We don’t know where it went and they will not tell us. But I would say, based on the fact that there has not been one positive economic uptick as a result of either of those bailouts (and the fact that there is still over half of each allotted bailout left or close to it) my logic says that neither were that necessary. That’s just me. That’s just me. And there’s no mad dash to use that money. There’s no mad dash to use the stimulus yet (because it’s going to be used for re-election campaigns for Democrats in November) and there’s no mad dash to use the TARP money. So I’d say none of it was necessary.