RUSH: I’ve thought of a way that I want to try to explain to people the problem with an oversized public sector. You know, we sit here, ladies and gentlemen, and we talk about the public sector (government) and the private sector; and I speak oftentimes about how it’s not good the public sector gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger because they really don’t produce or make anything, and everything that’s used to pay them has to first be produced and then taxed in the private sector.
They really don’t make anything, other than the Chevy Volt, which is the first thing they’ve made in a long time. Over last 50 years there’s been a steady and creeping love and appreciation for government. The media and the left have done a pretty good job of making people think the government should be the central things in their lives. The government is about benefits: If you don’t have what you want or have what you need, the government will get it for you and that you’re entitled to it because you’re an American, and it’s just built and built and built. So I asked myself: How could I explain this to, say, people in Rio Linda or Port St. Lucie, where if you go to McDonald’s and they don’t have any McNuggets you call 911?
How to explain the people in Port St. Lucie the problem with a massive public sector when, if they don’t have any McNuggets, they call somebody in the public sector? 911! Or in Rio Linda, where they may not call 911 when there aren’t any McNuggets but similar things happen. So the challenge is: How to explain it? So I’ve come up with an analogy that would explain it, the oversized public sector and the problem? I thought of it. Maybe this will help. It’s the unbalanced load in a washing machine. Have you ever heard of a top-loaded washing machine with an unbalanced load of clothes? (interruption) How do I know about it? Because I used to do laundry, and I knew when the machine started making a loud, lapping, crap-tap, ‘What is that?’ I had to learn. My experience was it was an unbalanced load.
So I could… (interruption) Yeah, I could relate. Now, remember, I’m trying to explain why a growing public sector is bad to people who have been conditioned to look at the public sector as a panacea, as their solution. So I thought the unbalanced load in the washing machine. Because if you’re in Port St. Lucie and Rio Linda and places like that, you know intimately about an unbalanced load in a washing machine. If there’s a couple of heavy towels on one side, the machine is gonna get loud and it’s going to shake violently and it’s going to shut itself down and you’re going to think it’s going to blow up. When I read articles about public sector pensions bankrupting states or articles on the Obama trillion-dollar budget deficit, I wonder: ‘What’s the best way to help people like Port St. Lucieans or Rio Lindans understand that the public sector is too big and if we don’t correct it the economy will shut down?’
Well, they put too much in the washer and it overloads on one side, the thing shuts down — and what do they have to do? What do you have to do to fix the unbalanced load? You have to take some stuff out of it. Or rearrange it, but the… (interruption) No, no, not redistribution. The best thing to do is take some stuff out of it. If you leave the same amount in there, eventually it’s gonna unbalance to one side, and you have to take some stuff out of there anyway. So maybe the way to convince them — and these people are going to have to be made to understand this if we’re going to eventually beat this back — will be to explain that a bloated private sector (underfunded teacher pensions and all that) is the same thing as your overloaded top loader.
Even at the laundromat. You don’t even to have one in your house. It can happen in the laundromat. Sometimes a washing machine load becomes unbalanced and it can cause problems in the spin cycle. (interruption) Yeah, but you can’t do it in the front loaders. If you have a front loader you have a stink problem. If you have a front loading washer, you don’t want any… We took ours back. You had to take the lining out of the door. It stunk. The front loader — and typical, typical! The front loader came about because the environmentalist wackos said it was going to be more efficient. It was going to save money, use less water, and get the same job done. But it stinks up the room! It stinks up the clothes and stinks up the washing machine. (interruption)
You have to leave the door open? Well, it’s worse than that. You have to clean the lining after awhile. I’ve seen it in the staff memos. So we ditched it, and we went back to the top loader. But even with the top loader sometimes you end up with an unbalanced load in there. If the load is made up of smaller items, they move easily around in the water during the wash cycle, and they rarely end up unbalanced. But when you are washing heavy items, one or two heavy items they can end up on the same side of the tub at the end of the wash cycle and you hear that large thumping sound coming from your washing machine, and you gotta run in there and turn it off as fast as you can. You have to stop it. So think of the bloated public sector as an unbalanced load in your top loader. Or if you’ve had a front loader and you don’t like it, think of the public sector as a front loader: It just stinks and you have to leave the door open to air the thing out, and it takes you much longer to get the job done with less efficiency.