RUSH: From Sunday morning ABC’s This Week Needs David Brinkley. This is during the panel discussion, George Will with Christiane Amanpour. Amanpour said, ‘We talk about symbolism, what the president needs to do. Politically he’s moved to the center.’ Typical. He hasn’t, Christiane, he won’t move to the center. Anyway, ‘He’s heeded the call of the people, so to speak,’ she says. ‘But when it comes to real solutions how do you kick-start and how do you make a dent in that 9.4% unemployment figure?’ And this is what George Will said to Christiane Amanpour.
WILL: I had lunch this week with Austan Goolsbee, who was your guest a few weeks ago, and he said, look, people seem to feel that in the basement of the White House somewhere there’s an enormous switch, you go down and throw it, and jobs are created. The fact is the terrible frustration in the White House must be that everything that really matters is beyond their control, which is how to create jobs. It’s not going to happen because of the government.
RUSH: George Will admitting that Austan Goolsbee is frustrated that the White House is powerless to create jobs. That’s good to know after how many trillions of dollars falsely spent on it. And who is it that believes there’s a switch in the White House that creates jobs? Who is it? It’s Obama. He’s the one that always thought there was a switch down there and that the Republicans would not pull the switch because they like people being in pain.
Raleigh, North Carolina, Lucas, nice to have you on the program, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. I just wanted to address the question of saved jobs, because I think you’ve asked rhetorically a number of times what a saved job is, and I was just thinking about emergency room doctors. Surely you aren’t saying that an emergency room doctor or EMT, you aren’t saying they don’t save someone’s life because the person hasn’t been declared legally dead yet. I mean emergency room doctors save lives even when the person comes into the emergency alive. So surely you can save a job. If a business was unable to get a loan and couldn’t keep someone employed, but they got some federal funding that allowed them to keep another employee, that’s as effective as creating a job and preventing one from going to China.
RUSH: You have missed the point, and I shall illustrate it by asking you a question. Name for me the emergency room jobs saved by President Obama.
CALLER: No, I was asking about the lives saved in the emergency room, it was an analogy, a metaphor.
RUSH: You said if you can save lives in the emergency room, you can save jobs?
CALLER: No. I was saying when an emergency room doctor saves lives, he’s saved a life. The analogy is saving a job. You don’t have to have the job die first to have saved one. We prevented jobs from going overseas —
RUSH: Right, so I’m asking you — (crosstalk)
CALLER: — that Obama made in the economy.
RUSH: Fine. So give me a list of the jobs — I don’t care what kind of jobs they are — give me a list of the jobs that Obama has saved, name one.
CALLER: Well, teachers jobs, people who would have been unemployed if the government had not provided money to the states to employ teachers and police officers.
RUSH: How many of those are there?
CALLER: I believe tens or hundreds of thousands at a minimum —
RUSH: You see —
CALLER: — I don’t know the exact numbers, I’m not an economist.
RUSH: Here’s the problem. Now, wait — (crosstalk)
CALLER: — would have had because my — (crosstalk)
RUSH: The — (crosstalk)
CALLER: — North Carolina would have had to cut teachers and police officers, but we did get some federal funding —
RUSH: You know, I’m gonna ban cell phones from this show. It is impossible to have a conversation with people on a cell phone. If you’re on a cell phone don’t call because it’s pointless, I can’t talk to you.
CALLER: I understood every word you said, Rush.
RUSH: Well, then you’re rude. You didn’t stop talking.
CALLER: I apologize. I thought I left plenty of room for a conversation. I’m trying to be polite.
RUSH: No, you didn’t. I was trying to ask you a question while you were speaking, and I don’t think you heard me. Not your problem. It’s a technical problem.
CALLER: Oh, while I was speaking. I’m sorry — (crosstalk)
RUSH: Yeah, like you can’t hear me now. (crosstalk)
CALLER: — talking for you. Okay.
RUSH: My point is I was trying to tell you that all that vaunted money to save teachers jobs, the teachers never got it. The states held the money or used it to pay down debt or some such thing. They didn’t get it. But anyway, my point about saved jobs is that Obama creates a category, a government category of saved jobs and then starts attaching a number to it. (imitating Obama) ‘We have created or saved 3.2 million jobs. And without us, why, we would have been through a depression.’ And that’s the kind of lie I’m talking about. There is no way to calculate a single saved job, particularly by the federal government, unless you’re talking about their own workforce, and only if they can show us where they plan to fire somebody and then didn’t. That’s it. Saved jobs around the country, there is no category, there’s no scientific or any other method for calculating a saved job, and there haven’t been any jobs created, otherwise we wouldn’t have a rising unemployment rate.
So you inadvertently swerved right into the point that we’ve always been making. This is smoke and mirrors. The sad thing is that you’re concocting ways for it to be true based on things that didn’t happen. New York Times, August 17th, 2010, by Motoko Rich: ‘Given Money, Schools Wait on Rehiring Teachers.’ Remember the story, Mr. Snerdley? They didn’t use the money to rehire the teachers and everybody kinda scratched their head, ‘Well, wait a minute, there was a specific bailout for teacher money, and the states didn’t use it for that. What happened?’ They used it on other things. Anyway, save a job now you’re gonna lose it down the road anyway unless there are genuine market forces that are behind the creation of jobs. That’s the whole point. George Will just said he talked to Goolsbee in the White House. Goolsbee can’t figure it out. There’s no switch down there to create jobs, ’cause they don’t, the government doesn’t, the White House doesn’t. You can’t create jobs. I expected you to say, ‘You know, that guy before me, George Will, kinda just took my point away,’ but you plowed ahead. Anyway, thanks for the call. Appreciate it.