RUSH: Don in Punta Gorda, Florida, great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, sir. Thank you very much for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I recently moved from Connecticut to Florida in pursuit of work, and after having no luck, I went back to college to complete my degree in business management. With Obama’s policies and agenda, I’m losing faith extremely in the chance of getting a decent job at all, and I’m college-educated, I’m hard working. I would love an opportunity, but I fear if conservatives do not take over the House or Senate — or hopefully both of them — that the traditional American goals will slip away. I feel the liberal agenda is crippling, and my biggest fear is that my generation is losing faith, considering a large government as possibly the only solution since things are going so badly. I keep trying to convince my friends to vote and register to vote, but the most common thing I get back from them is, ‘Obama needs more time, blah, blah-blah, blah, blah,’ and —
RUSH: Wait, let me stop you. I want to make sure I heard you correctly. You say that a lot of your generation is losing faith and beginning to think that a large government is possibly the only solution to, say, unemployment?
CALLER: Right, yeah. Most of my friends who are —
RUSH: How does a large government help with unemployment? We’ve got one now.
CALLER: Right. Personally I don’t understand it at all. But they’re college graduated and looking for jobs for two or three years and they are currently working at McDonald’s —
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: — and they are getting really depressed right now.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: I mean, they spent 80-90 grand going to college —
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: — to make seven bucks an hour.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: They’re just really going down.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: I’m trying to present to them, you know —
RUSH: Did you ever tell them the problem might be Obama?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely.
RUSH: Did you ever tell them the problem might be Harry Reid, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi? Did you ever tell them the problem might be Democrats?
CALLER: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
RUSH: I’m not yelling at you, but did you ever tell them the problem might be themselves?
CALLER: Well, that’s the question.
RUSH: — that they’re using as a crutch that they went to college? ‘I got a degree.’ Have they ever stopped to consider maybe they were lied to, that getting a degree was automatically going to get them a $300,000 house and a $250,000 car? Did you ever tell them to consider maybe they’ve been lied to by everybody?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely.
RUSH: And it’s not just handed to them? Did you ever tell them to think maybe they are actually going to have to do some work and that flipping burgers as a first job, there’s nothing wrong with that. It gets you into the market. You learn how things work? Did you ever stop to think that maybe they are not going to let you make any money when you’re 35 or 40? Did you ever stop to tell them maybe this is natural?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. This infuriates me totally but I just try to explain this to them and I’m just looking to maybe invite you to tell them that, look, you’ve got to relax and you’ve got to vote and you’ve got to make a change if you are not happy with what you’re going.
RUSH: I would love to talk to these dunderheads! You know, I’m all for great expectations. I’m all for having high expectations — of yourself. I’m all for expecting great things of yourself, but these people need to be talked to if they think there’s magic at the end of a college degree.
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RUSH: The only place in the world where ‘success’ comes before ‘work’ is the dictionary. It’s the only place where success before work, unless you don’t need work; you inherit it, but that’s not most people. (interruption) The kid probably thinks that I’m mad at him? No, I’m not mad at the caller. I’m not mad at the young man. I just… I’m sorry. There are parts of me today that are on edge. I don’t know if you’ve been able to tell, but some of these things, it doesn’t take much to ring my bell, to light my fire. And when I (sobbing), ‘I have a college degree, I don’t have a job and…’ I don’t have a college degree, either! And I have a job! I started working years before I got my college degree. I’m not putting down college degrees. Don’t misunderstand, but they’re not a ticket. We’ve been told that.
You know what? Part of this is all this talk about education all these years: ‘We need educational opportunities! Education this, education that. We’re not spending enough money on education. Education here, education there. Student loan here and there.’ It’s gotten to a point that people get a college degree and education and the world just opens doors. ‘Please come save us,’ the rest of the world says to college graduates, and how demeaning it must be to have to start out flipping burgers in McDonald’s or something because you went to college. Well, you who are just graduating from college, get in line. There’s 10% of the workforce ahead of you that’s unemployed because of Democrats and because of President Obama. There are people 35 and 40 years of age who have lost their jobs, who also went to college, and they’re out there competing and they already have families and they’re trying to get work, too.
Nobody is owed anything. The country doesn’t owe you anything because you’re an American or especially because you have a college degree. Now, if you think… If you are a college student and you’ve got a degree and you’re out there and you can’t find a job and if you think — if you agree with Obama that the Bush tax cuts ought to sunset — $700 billion ought to be taken out of the private sector and sent to Obama, then you deserve to be out of work for the rest of your life because that $700 billion taken out of the private sector could be used to grow businesses and hire people. If you support Obama in raising taxes on everybody, taking money out of the private sector and giving it to unions and giving it to government workers and giving it to himself and to ACORN, you deserve to be unemployed.
If you voted for Obama, you deserve to be unemployed. If you voted for Obama, you deserve to be in misery because that’s what he has in mind for every one of us. You’re out there thinking Obama was going to give you a new kitchen, a new car, a new house, pay off your student loan and you have to go flip burgers — maybe Burger King instead of McDonald’s, I don’t know; maybe working at a Taco Bell — you deserve it! Until you start voting the right way, including voting for yourself, you deserve to suffer the consequences of your actions. If you’re going to vote for a bunch of socialists who believe all money needs to reside in the state and they decide who gets what and they decide when you get a job, then live with it.
Life… has… consequences.
A college degree got Larry Summers a job. In college. You know, there’s a fine line these days between education and subsidized ignorance. It’s a very, very fine line. Now, I have nothing against college, but I’m going to tell you something. The one area of life that’s getting expensive out the wazoo and nobody ever criticizes it is tuition, right? Tuition, every year, goes up. Do you ever hear Democrats complain about it like the cost of a cancer drug or the cost of oil or the cost of a stamp or the cost of anything else? No, no. The cost of Walmart? No! But college tuition? Nobody ever complains about tuition costs going up and up and up. Nobody complains about the student loan rate. No, nobody complains about that. Why, I wonder why that is. Are we getting our bang for the buck? Are you paying for a college degree if you’re a kid? Are you getting your bang for the buck? College is fine for some people but it’s not an elixir. It’s not a guarantee.
So you get a college degree. Let’s say you major in… (sigh) What’s your average? I’m even stunned at some of the majors you can get in college these days. Like you can major in the mating habits of the Australian rabbit bat, major in leisure studies, uh… Okay, get a journalism major. Okay, education major, journalism major. Right. Philosophy major, right. Archeology major. I don’t know, whatever it is. Major in ballroom dance, of course. It doesn’t replace work. How about a major in film studies? How about a major in black studies? How about a major in women studies? How about a major in home ec? Oops, sorry! No such thing. The Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies makes free men out of the children of the regime. EIB is the great emancipator of the mind. Now, you might be hearing me as a typical fuddy-duddy parent here from the old days. ‘Well, that may have been how it was for you, Limbaugh. You had to go to work to get somewhere in the world, but it ain’t the way it is these days.’ Well, it’s never going to change, and it isn’t fuddy-duddyism.
Now, $7700 for a drug. Okay, we’ve got a disease called cancer. It’s incurable. We have been working since the creation of time to try to figure it out, create drugs to arrest it, to cure it, to stop it, but there isn’t any. We’ve gotten close. Tremendous progress is being made in all kinds of illnesses in drugs, cancers to extend life expectancy, quality of life and so forth. But a pure unadulterated cure is not there. Nevertheless, companies are investing in this because this is what they do. Everybody is searching for the answer to everything. So Roche happens to come up with this drug called Avastin that cost them an arm and a leg in research and development. Regulatory, too. Just dealing with the government to move every step of the way along the process here is expensive.
At some point, once the drug is approved, they have to be able to make back what it cost them or there’s no reason to stay in business. Roche is not in business so that you may live. You may live because Roche is in business, but that’s not why they started up. (interruption) What’s wrong with that, Snerdley? No, Roche is not in business so that you live. McDonald’s is not in business so that you don’t starve. General Motors is not in business so that you don’t have to walk. Roche has to pay for the drugs they tried to bring to market that didn’t make the cut, that didn’t work. We’re not talking about curing a hangnail or coagulating blood or the equivalent of stitching up a cut here. We’re talking about a drug that might extend a breast cancer life by five months. We ought to expect that that’s going to cost money.
But in our peasant society, it has now been assumed that if one person can’t have it, nobody should have it. I know this is a tough one to combat. ‘Why should only the rich be able to have the drugs that could extend their lives?’ Well, it’s not just the rich that do. Nobody talks about the charitable donations that Roche makes of the drug and nobody talks about all the medical foundations that buy the drug and make it available for people at less cost because of the charitable nature of the American people. But what we do know is that we have a government led by a bunch of people who want to make you think that everybody trying to improve your life is your enemy — be it Roche, be it BP, be it Big Oil, be it ‘Big’ whatever. For me I’m simply fed up with dealing with a political bunch of people who want to tell me that the people who improve our lives and our standard of living is our enemy.
I’m tired of their enemies list. Nobody alive ever gets everything they want. I don’t know, I’m guessing but I’ll bet you there are some people who have an allergy that if they could afford Avastin can’t take it. I’m just guessing, but I think I’m on pretty firm ground when I say that there’s not one person alive, not even David Rockefeller, who gets everything he wants because someday he’s going to die and I’m sure he doesn’t want to. I know Sinatra didn’t want to die, but he did. We’re all going to, including the polar bears. They’re going to die, too, no matter what we do. (interruption) Dawn is saying, ‘You don’t have to bring them into it, you’re really sounding mean.’ No, I’m just trying to… (sigh) Sometimes being realistic sounds, I just — I told the people in Philadelphia last night: As I get older, I am more and more in awe of humanity and life and all that is, and I also become less and less able to suffer fools. (interruption)
No, I’m not becoming a grumpy old man! I’m an inspiring old man. I submit to you that what I’m saying today is inspiring to people. Sadly, a lot of people are hearing this and saying, ‘Why, I never thought of that before.’ Yeah. Well, that’s why you’re here. We expand mental horizons here. So to take it back to the beginning. If you’re just out of college and you’ve got a degree, I don’t care what it’s in, and you can’t find work, well, join the crowd. There’s about 10 to 15% of the workforce that can’t, either. And they may have already had jobs. They got college degrees years before you did and they’re trying to find jobs, too. So you have a lot of competition. And maybe, maybe if you have to take… I mean, my first job — you know, this is going to sound old fuddy-duddy. My first job I shined shoes in a barber shop. I made $50 in three months. Now, granted I was 13 and lived at home, but I wanted to do it. I always wanted to work. I hated being stuck at home doing the student thing. I always wanted to work. And there’s nothing wrong with it. So you can take what you can get. And, you know, this, ‘Well, that’s beneath me. I have a degree.’ Put it aside for a while because reality is what it is. There are a lot of people having to do a lot of things that they think are beneath them right now because McDonald’s is not open to make sure you don’t starve. That’s your job. Your responsibility to make sure you don’t starve and your kids don’t starve and all the rest of it.
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RUSH: Hell’s Belles, folks. Obama, he had to start at the bottom and work his way up, and he can change sea levels, for crying out loud. It’s not just handed to you on a silver platter.