RUSH: Let me put this in perspective for you, folks. The Democrats and the media put forth this challenge: ‘What are you gonna cut? You say you’re gonna cut spending. What are you gonna cut? What are you gonna cut?’ and then we hear that the City of Berkeley is gonna start paying for addadictomies, sex-change operations. And they ask what do we want to cut? (laughing) I ask you: What do we want to cut? How ludicrous is this? The City of Berkeley is gonna start adding sex-change operations, paid for! No charge to the… Well, I can’t say ‘recipient.’ Yeah, the recipient! It’s an addadictomy. There’s no charge to the recipient here. There’s a charge to everybody else. And they say, ‘What are you gonna cut? Where are you gonna find all this money to cut?’
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Look, folks, I want to talk about spending here for just a second. My patience is wearing out and it’s good this is happening ’cause I find myself occasionally not saying things, because I think so many of you already know it, understand it, get it, and I’m always looking to move forward. But this question, ‘What would you cut? What would you cut? Are you gonna cut Medicare? Gonna cut Social Security?’ We don’t have to cut any of that to achieve what we want to achieve. You don’t have to cut any of it, certainly not the first. I’ll give you the explanation here in just a second. But you know what my answer would be? If I were John Boehner — and of course I’m not John Boehner — if I were John Boehner and I was constantly being peppered by the press corps, ‘What are you gonna cut? What are you gonna cut?’ You know what I would say? ‘We gotta pass the bill first to find out what’s in it.’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ ‘Well, that’s what Pelosi said about health care. You guys didn’t care a whit about what was in the health care bill.’
The Republicans said, ‘What’s in this thing? It’s 2,000 pages.’ Pelosi said, ‘We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.’ And everybody, ‘Whoa, okay. Well, fine. Republicans have a budget cut bill, we’re not gonna tell you what’s in it ’til we pass it. How does that feel? You like doing business that way when the Democrats ran the show on health care, how about for spending cuts? We gotta pass the bill first before we’ll tell you, before you can find out.’
Let’s look at it this way. Let me just give you an off the top of my head ballpark list of things to cut. We’re gonna cut Obamacare. That’s gonna save several trillion. We’re gonna cut the EPA, which has had a budget increase of about 130% over the last two years, and the EPA is getting in the way of the private sector. The EPA now has dictatorial powers over carbon dioxide emissions and the FDA is getting close to having that kind of power on drugs and the things that they oversee. So cut the EPA, not eliminate, just cut it. We’re gonna cut the number of bureaucrats by 20%. We’re gonna cut their salaries to bring them more in line with the private sector. We’re gonna cut government across the board by at least 10%. We’re gonna abolish the FCC, and the reason we’re gonna abolish the FCC is because the FCC’s getting into the control of free speech business, and that’s not their charter. We will abolish the Federal Election Commission. There’s nothing more worthless than the FEC. They deal with complaints after the fact, and if anything a slap on the wrist happens, all the policing power, all the intimidation that they claim to have doesn’t intimidate anybody into anything. Besides that, the FEC seeks to control political free speech, so you get rid of that.
We’ll abolish all of Obama’s czars. They’re not even constitutional. We will abolish stimulus spending and TARP. We’ll sell off 20% or more of the federal landmass that the federal government owns. The federal government owns about 25% of all the land in the United States. I’m just getting started. Imagine what somebody who’s familiar with all the ins and outs of the federal government could do? We could cut the number of government vehicles by 25%; cut government office space by 20%. Don’t tell me there aren’t places to cut here. There are responsible, reasonable, certainly excessive places to cut. The biggest savings of all would be getting rid of Obamacare. Cut the EPA, you get rid of the FCC, any number of things. All you need is the guts to do it. And I’m gonna tell you this. If the Republicans would simply announce specifics and then be prepared to deal with the stuck-pig reaction that they’re going to get, they would win this next election in the biggest landslide there has ever been.
If they would just say they’re gonna do this stuff, stick to it, and start trying right now, they would win in 2012 with the biggest landslide ever. This is exactly what a majority of the American people voted for. The American people voted against all of this new spending. They voted against an overpowerful, overinvolved federal bureaucracy. This is what’s bugging the American people. Everywhere they turn in life there’s a government obstacle that has to be overcome someplace, many of them. Get rid of a few of ’em, just to start. Don’t get tied down in this, ‘Where you gonna cut, Social Security, Medicare?’ all that rotgut. They’ll try to steer us there but screw it, there’s any number of places, let’s get other people in the panic here besides the usual suspects of Social Security recipients. Those people aren’t getting cost-of-living increases anyway, ’cause the government’s not reporting any inflation, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
I don’t know, to me it’s not that tough, but again I’m not a politician. I don’t have to get votes. But I still think, doing something like this, announcing it, stick to it and there would be such an overwhelming support on the part of the American people. There would be opponents, and they would be loud, and they’d be panicked, and there might be blood in the streets, who knows. You gotta expect that to happen. I mean the Democrat Party has led people to believe that their lives are dependent on all of this. But we can’t sustain it. For crying out loud, $14 trillion in debt, I’m only half joking here, they run around, these mealy mouths in the press, ‘What are you gonna cut? What are you gonna cut?’ and we hear that Berkeley is gonna start paying for addadictomy operations. Really, is that a budget priority here? You know, we had a slogan, ‘Just say no,’ right? Change it. ‘Just say cut.’
Bill, Cincinnati. You’re next on the Rush Limbaugh program. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, mega dittos to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I want to nominate you to be the mayor of Literalville.
RUSH: (laughing) I’m one of few residents.
CALLER: I’m getting sick and tired, Rush, of the media bombarding us with, ‘This is Obama’s finest hour.’ I mean especially since they got shellacked at the last election —
RUSH: Well, saying that something’s Obama’s finest hour is not necessarily untrue. You just have to look at the baseline. It doesn’t say his finest hour is great. You’re making the mistake, is this Obama’s finest hour? Yeah, compared to what? Bankrupting the country? Destroying the private sector? When you talk about his finest hour. What, a speech?
CALLER: Well, when they start comparing them to the ones that Lincoln made.
RUSH: It’s a crock. Obama’s world is a governed by the aggressive use of speeches, and the ruling class, the educated establishment class loves that kind of stuff. Doesn’t get anything done, but they have their own version of orgasms. They don’t really have orgasms in the ruling class. I don’t want to try to describe what happens, but they don’t deign to get down to that level.