RUSH: Here’s Marlon in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: Marlon?
CALLER: Hello? Hello?
RUSH: Marlon, are you there?
CALLER: Yes. Yes.
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: Rush?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: For years I’ve listened to, whether it’s debates or on the news, and is this too simplistic or…? Why do we argue about where we collect the taxes? Is there something
that I don’t understand? If we spend $10 or if the country spends $10 trillion, the people are gonna pay for it regardless where they collect it. Is there something more complex than that?
RUSH: No, but what is your point?
CALLER: Well, it seems to be on the news all the time for years and years that it’s not fair where we’re getting the tax money from, and it seems to me that it’s coming from all of us regardless where they collect it. Is there something else to it?
RUSH: Are you trying to say that whenever they run around talk about taxing the rich it’s actually everybody that pays it?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Yeah, you’re right.
CALLER: Where do they get their money from, Rush? It doesn’t come from the sky. Since Moses, nothing has come from the sky.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: Okay?
RUSH: What you’re saying is the government doesn’t have a dime until they take it or print it or borrow it?
CALLER: Well, the… Right. Okay, take the oil companies. Where do they get their money? So if you take all the taxes from the oil companies, they don’t bring more out of the sky and they didn’t get it out of the sky. They got it from us to start with, and they gotta keep getting it from us.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Remember that congressman or senator saying, “There’s too much consumin’ going on”?
RUSH: Yeah, it was Ernest Hollings.
CALLER: Yeah. If we’re alive and breathing then we gotta be the one that’s paying the taxes. Is that too simple? Why can’t they just return the question every time and say, “If you want to tax the oil companies,” just say, “Where do they get their money from?”
RUSH: Yeah. I see what you mean. What you’re saying is everything ends up at the consumer.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Everything is paid for by us. In other words, the oil companies don’t pay taxes.
CALLER: Right. They’re gonna get it from us.
RUSH: That’s right. Their taxes are built into the costs that they charge all along the line for their products.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: You’re exactly right. Well, you’re just illustrating the Democrat —
CALLER: Nobody —
RUSH: Well, no, you’re just illustrating the Democrat tax policy is all class envy. It’s not about substantive economics.
CALLER: (silence)
RUSH: I guess he’s dazzled, overwhelmed beyond being able to respond. That happens to me frequently. I don’t know about you. Patrick in Nashville, Tennessee, hi and welcome to the program.
CALLER: Yes, sir. My comment is just this: The number one problem with the US economy is simply the people and businesses have no confidence in Barack Obama.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: The handwriting is on the wall: He has been weighed in the scales, and he has been found lacking. Thank you.
RUSH: There you go! Brevity is the soul of wit.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to focus on the fair share. I’m curious, if the federal budget were in balance today, I’m curious if the wealthy would be paying their fair share. If we were in balance and the top tax rate, marginal rate, 35%, would the wealthy be paying their fair share in your mind? If so, then what would be fair for sticking them with the bill that the president and Congress run up?
My point here is this. If the budget were balanced, and the rich are paying 35, 36%, and all of a sudden here comes Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress, and they run
up $4 trillion in new debt, then is your definition of fairness sticking the rich with the bill for that? Because that’s what’s happening. We weren’t in balance, but we were nowhere near the mess that we’re in now. The very people that you are targeting, the so-called rich and so forth, had nothing to do with the mess that you’ve created, and yet they now are the villains. All those people who earn $250,000 a year and fly around in corporate jets, they have become the villain. They didn’t do anything. Or does that matter to the president? Is a 70% tax rate fair no matter what? Because that would level the playing field.
What does this fair share actually mean to you people? What is the president’s obligation to fair share? Does he have a share? I mean, meaning does he have an obligation to list programs to be eliminated to balance the budget? Does he have an obligation to chip in and pay for some of this spending that he’s writing checks for that he can’t cash? Let’s define what’s fair from everyone in the game. I mean it’s not fair. It’s totally unfair to waste money on pie-in-the-sky green technology. Nothing fair about that. It isn’t fair to pay off union political foot soldiers. It isn’t fair to pay off cronies like General Electric. It’s not fair to not publish a budget for over 800 days. It isn’t fair to go out and lie about the financial realities of Obamacare.
The Congressional Budget Office has a whole new way of looking at Obamacare since it was passed, and it isn’t fair to pretend it isn’t so. It isn’t fair to pretend that you, the president, have nothing to do with the trillions of dollars in debt piled up during your term in office, thanks to laws you either voted for as a senator or signed as president and supported as both. Why do we have to pay for it? How come all of a sudden you go nuts, you and the Democrat Party go nuts with all this spending, and how come all of a sudden Americans aren’t paying their fair share? How does that work? I mean intellectually, how does that work? What is our fair share? I mean it isn’t fair to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. It isn’t fair to refuse to develop America’s oil, gas, and coal natural resources just as it isn’t fair to deny Americans high paying energy sector jobs because you aren’t drilling for any of these energy sources. What’s fair?
What’s fair about shutting down the domestic oil business, and natural gas business, and then telling people, because of the resulting lack of revenue from income, that somehow they aren’t paying their fair share? Passing the buck isn’t fair, which is what you do. Billing taxpayers for campaign bus trips, taking vacations instead of even pretending to solve problems, that you say, Mr. President, are at a crisis level. It isn’t fair to confiscate private property when the president screws up. But that’s what happens. Piling up deficits and then accusing the wealthy of wrongdoing and greed? Uncontrolled irresponsible spending and then after it’s all done somehow Americans aren’t paying their fair share? Lying about temperatures around the world, lying about climate change and global warming. That’s more than unfair.
State-Controlled Media acting as the department of propaganda for Barack Obama. That’s not fair. Political libel aimed at people like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann. Nothing fair about that. You liberals, all you can talk about is fair share here and fair share there. You create all of these problems, then you run around and say the American aren’t paying their fair share and they’re not sacrificing enough. The bottom line is there’s nothing fair about who and what Barack Obama represents. This subject of fairness, if you want to talk about fairness, I’m open to it any day ’cause I think it’s one of the most maligned, misguided, misused concepts out there, because it actually doesn’t exist. That’s how journalists get around the whole notion that they’re not biased. “We’re fair.” No, you’re not. Not in the slightest.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Scott in Los Angeles. Hello, sir. Welcome to Open Line Friday on Thursday.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: Hey, I just filled up with gasoline and realized that there’s no — like, the government wants you to list all of your calories on a food package, but I want to see on a gallon
of gas a line item of all the taxes that I’m paying. Like a pack of cigarettes is seven bucks. How much does that pack of cigarettes really cost you, how much of it’s taxes, how much is that gallon of gas, you know, ’cause Obama wants you to hate Exxon Mobil because gas is four bucks, but how much of that four dollars actually gets to Exxon Mobil and what goes into the government’s pocket?
RUSH: That’s an excellent point, it’s an excellent point. And the federal tax is static.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But state gasoline taxes change, different from state to state. And some states show taxes, but most of them don’t.
CALLER: Right. Yeah, they don’t list the taxes that we have to pay to the federal government for what the breakdown is.
RUSH: I saw this the other day. It’s impossible to do on radio. It would take me four shows, just the state and local taxes in Florida. It is mind-boggling the taxes people pay. Nickel and dime stuff that’s in the phone bill, that’s in the utility bill, it’s all over the place. Taxes are like a cancer out there. And the idea that we are not paying our fair share is so absurd. The problem is, or the fault is the irresponsibility of the people managing all of it.