RUSH: Here is Neil in Denver. Neil, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush.
RUSH: Oh, and after they do all that, then they’re gonna legalize marijuana in more and more states so you’ll have all kinds of way to pass away the time you don’t need to spend on the job. Yes, Neil?
CALLER: Happy Friday.
RUSH: Same to you, sir.
CALLER: Let’s not talk about last Sunday, please.
RUSH: Fine with me. That was one of one of the dullest football games I’ve ever seen.
CALLER: You got it. I’d like to link what I believe are some of the factual things about income inequality and also things that are simply statistical. First of all, I’m gonna go back to immigration, which you started off on earlier today. Immigrants typically wind up in the service economy, and out here a lot of national builders employ them with significantly lower wages.
What this does is it not only lowers the income per family, but it also means — more often than not — displacing American workers, and that subsequently means that they go off the books. Around here, at least, the underground economy is estimated to be $900 billion, which is a huge number. So that affects household income, which is really what they’re talking about when they talk about income inequality. So besides immigration, the other factors to me are education and divorce — which is more statistical — and dual income families. With education, the two fastest growing segments of the population — according to the New York Times, I think, in a the 2010 study — 61.5% of all blacks graduate from high school, and 63% are Hispanic. Now, whites are 81.1%.
RUSH: Neil, if I may, I need to know what we’re talking about here.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: I mean, you’re listing these stats —
CALLER: I’m sorry. That’s unfair to you, and I apologize.
RUSH: No, no, just… No, no. Don’t apologize. I may not get it. I need to understand what your theory is that all this supports.
CALLER: Okay. Income inequality, in many ways, is due simply to the lack of education. You can’t get a higher income if you only graduate below 60% of the two fastest growing segments the population.
RUSH: No, no. See, that may be true to you and me and traditional Americans, but that’s the problem. Income inequality is because of greed among the rich. Income inequality is because the people that have the money will not share it and the people who hire will not pay people enough. The reason for income inequality is injustice and immorality of this country.
You get all the statistics you want, because the Democrat Party is going to tell these people that 61% graduate, and that have no education, or that have no qualification. They’re gonna tell them that they are more qualified to have as much money as anybody else because they’ve been shafted. It’s not their fault they’re not educated. They’re not educated because there are people that don’t want them to be educated.
They’re victims. They are total victims of an unjust — socially unjust, morally unjust — country. The Democrats are their allies mean to get even with the people that have been mean to them, and this is what we’re up against. Now, your numbers are exactly right, and in the traditional American — no, the human way of thinking, income inequality is precisely due to people’s qualifications, effort, ambition, you name it.
But the Democrats are not gonna win any votes acknowledging that. Income inequality, as they talk about it, is the result of mistreatment, injustice, unfairness, and all that, and so their solution to it is not to solve it. They’re not gonna solve income inequality. They’re gonna punish the people who have more than others.
CALLER: Okay, fair enough. Let me move on to two statistical things which, in my opinion, are large enough to matter. Again, remember: Obama, no matter what we say, will have the BS to overcome it. We have to live with that. But the divorce statistics in the United States are about 7.4% per year, but in total of every married couple, 50% have been divorced. That has risen clearly and statistically from the low twenties in, say, 1960 to ’65, all the way to roughly 50%.
So what happens with the divorce statistic is, you have two people, one earning. Say the family is one. It’s a numerator and no matter what the problem — and, yes, maybe that’s too heavy for Obama. But you have one family has an income of $100,000 in one household, and they get a divorce. Roughly it’s split. You can pick the numbers, but let’s say it’s split 50-50. You now have $50,000 per one household, but you double the denominator or the number of households. That is not insignificant if you work out the numbers. Now, another strictly statistical —
RUSH: But it’s irrelevant. Who are you gonn…?
CALLER: I disagree. I respectfully disagree. Let me explain why.
RUSH: Name for me the candidate you want saying what you just said and winning votes doing it.
CALLER: I don’t see any candidates on the horizon that I would jump up and down for, so…
RUSH: Well, my point — if I understand what you’re saying — is you are offering hard, cold statistical facts to explain societal differences, economic inequalities and so forth. All right? And just to let you know, some of the most brilliant scholars I know — Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson — have been writing about this for as long as I’ve been doing this show, and you know how much impact it’s had? (raspberry)
Because the only people that read it are other scholars, and it remains an abstract subject to have over cocktails at the Harvard Club. It may all be true, but you put those words that you just uttered in Mitt Romney’s mouth in the 2016 or 2012 presidential campaign, and I ask you: How many people are gonna say, ‘Yep, that’s the solution?'” (interruption) Well, no. No. Okay, we got a problem, and it’s divorce.
Divorce is causing income inequality. There’s no question that that’s true. Single-parent families, lack of education, dropout rate, all of that’s true. Any time any of that’s mentioned, whoever does it is gonna be called a racist or a sexist or a bigot, and the Democrat Party is gonna be right there defending the insulted and claiming to protect them and say, “Just because you’re divorced or just because you’re stupid and just because you dropped out doesn’t mean you’re not entitled to Obamacare!
“Or a job, if you want it, and a car and what have you. It does not mean that. You are just as worthy and just as qualified as anybody who didn’t drop out.” Because the way they’re going to solve that inequality is not by giving the people who are educated an education. They are not gonna keep the people dropping out in school. They’re gonna punish the people doing better. They’re gonna equalize everybody down.
That’s called sharing the misery equally. Everything that Charles Murray has ever written is dead-on right. Everything that James Q. Wilson has written is dead-on right. But in the modern whatever you want to call it — culture, society — all that gets portrayed as blaming the victim. It doesn’t persuade anybody except the people who read it. In fact, Charles Murray even got beat up in a chapter of one of his books on the bell curve.
There’s no less racist human being in the world than Charles Murray. He was tarred and feathered as a racist simply for reporting factual statistics on marriage, divorce, education, dropout in minority communities. All he did was tell the truth. So your contention is that every stat that you mentioned, every fact — and you had facts — is relevant. There was a time in this country where it was.
But now, the Democrat Party has succeeded in taking us to a position in life, culturally, where all of that is the result of oppression, mistreatment and victimization brought on by the majority — which is “mostly white,” of course — and so they have to be punished. The uneducated don’t have to be educated. The poor are not gonna be made middle class. No, no, no, no, no! The oppressors are gonna be punished.