RUSH: Yeah, right here it is, that Annenberg Survey from the University of Pennsylvania: 40% of Americans cannot name a single right or freedom in the First Amendment. Not a single one. Thirty-three percent were unable to name even one of the three branches of government. That’s exactly why we do the Rush Revere Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans book series for young people. That’s exactly why. This stuff is not being taught. Can you believe that 40% of Americans can’t tell you…?
I mean, this confirms it for me but it didn’t need confirmation. Here’s another one. (chuckles) This is from the U.K. Independent newspaper, but it’s about American students. Are you ready for this? Nearly half of American Millennials… Millennials are between 18 and 34, basically. It might be 17 and 33, 19 and 35, but it’s within that range. “Half of all Millennials in the U.S. would give up their right to vote in order to get rid of their student loan… Student debt has soared to a staggering high of $1.33 trillion according to the Department of Education…”
Who runs that program, by the way? Who took over that program? Barack Hussein Obama took over that program. It was a private sector enterprise. The government took it over. Now the government runs the student loan program, $1.33 trillion. This means that many graduates spend how many years after school just paying off their loan rather than getting ahead. What does that do…? I’ve mentioned this before. This is one of the biggest bugaboos I’ve got. This culture, our society for the longest time has been preaching, “College education! College education! College education!
“You don’t have a prayer, you don’t stand a chance, you’re nothing if you don’t have a college education,” and everybody believes it. Every mom and dad. It was their dream that their kids be able to go to college. It’s the focal point of a young person’s life as far as their parents are concerned: Getting them into college anywhere — junior college, major college, prestigious college. Getting them into college, saving for it, finding a way to get ’em a scholarship. It’s a focal point, because everybody wants their kids to do well, and everybody wants their kids to do better than they did.
Everybody wants the best for their kids. It’s entirely natural, and it’s the way it should be. Part of it, what has been drilled into people’s heads is, “The only way you can get there is with a college education.” Now, the roots of this are the Great Depression because back then it was true. The Great Depression was the formative experience in my mom and dad’s lives, that and World War II. Well, actually three things. Those and Khrushchev promising to kill and bury their grandchildren. But living through the Depression, the only way, the only people — and not everybody in this group.
The only people that had a chance were those with an education, and a college education doesn’t mean you know anything, but you get a piece of paper saying that you do. You get a piece of paper saying that you have undergone the rigors and the disciplines to become a college graduate. A college degree is one of the ways that companies use to just limit the number of applicants for a job. “You’ve gotta have a degree or you can’t work here.” That gets rid of how many applicants you don’t have to interview or talk to.
But in many cases it’s a relevant requirement at the same time. My point is is that for the longest time, I don’t know how many generations — at least since the Great Depression — this has been a fundamental objective of all parents, the education of their kids and going to college and graduating. Fine. Okay. Now, who has been running this program? Well, our betters. Academe is filled with a bunch of pointy-head intellectuals who think they’re smarter than everybody else. The people that push academe have much the same attitude.
The professors there need to be paid so that they can continue to inculcate and promulgate and propagate and propagandize the students. That’s why you never… Whenever you hear about major businesses price gouging — Big Oil, Big Labor, Big Box Retail, Big Pharma — you never, ever hear anybody complaining about Big Education. But they’re in there. They never cut tuition. They never lower their prices. They never accommodate for market circumstance. You pay it or you don’t get in. You find a way to pay it or the heck with you! And nobody puts pressure on ’em, and nobody shames them.
People do it because they’ve been told that the only way their kids or they are gonna have a prayer of mattering and succeeding is if they go to college. Now look what they’ve done to it. The same people behind this and the people running the student loan program and all of these education advocates. You can’t turn on the television today, you can’t watch a cable news show without some guest or some analyst complaining about education in America. It’s just routine. It’s a common subject. The specifics are not of interest to me right now.
My point is, it’s a subject that’s constantly out there. It’s a must; it’s a requirement. Look what they’ve done: $1.33 trillion in student loan debt! This means that all of these graduates are… Not all of them. Some of them are affluent and their parents can afford it or have other scholarships or what have you. But the people who have accrued this debt, because there is pressure to go to college… I should add I think there are a lot of people in college have no business being there.
You come out of college, and you have a debt of $40,000 or more. How long are you gonna have to work at whatever you got your degree in just to pay off that loan before you even start making progress on your standard of living, on your prosperity? The very thing a college degree is supposed to get you! Advantages in the job market, advantages in compensation, you’re gonna be at the upper end of all of these scales if you go to college. And then you come out and you have all this debt.
And it’s even worse if you are a graduate student and you go to law school or you become a doctor of some kind. Look at the debt those people incur! Look at how many years they’re paying off that debt before they even get to use their degree for the actual intended purpose, among many others, which is an increased standard of living and prosperity for their own families. And I think it’s just a mean… I don’t know would call it a trick. I’m not saying anybody purposely did this.
I’m just saying that there has been a lot of people that think they’re better than everybody else, and they’re really basically incompetents, and they’ve destroyed this program like they’ve destroyed a lot of things that bureaucracies touch. And now you get to the point that half of American Millennials would give up their right to vote to wipe out their student loans. “Half of all millennials in the US would give up their right to vote in order to get rid of their student loan, new research has found.”
We’re gonna choose to believe this. I know it’s a polling company and it’s iffy. I’m gonna acknowledge it could be all wet, but I’m gonna take the opportunity here to choose to believe this because it facilitates in making a point. “Student debt has soared to a staggering high of $1.33 trillion according to the Department of Education, leaving millions of Americans struggling under the burden of repayments. According to a new survey from personal finance website Credible, 50 per cent of 18 to 34 year-olds questioned in the US said they would sacrifice their vote at the next two presidential elections in order to wipe the slate clean on their college debt.”
Now, it’s not hard to see what might happen here. I mean, the Democrats are already talking about tuition-free college, right? Tuition-free college, there won’t be any debt. Not for the students. Crazy Bernie is out, he’s the Democrat front-runner, he’s running on socialized medicine. Crazy Bernie will admit that the cost for his health care plan is $32 trillion. Do you know what the national debt is from the beginning of the founding of the country to today? Twenty trillion. Crazy Bernie admits that his health care plan will cost 32. We don’t have it. But it doesn’t matter to Crazy Bernie. He’s still out there proposing it and pushing it. And he’s serious!
I’ll tell you what I expected Hillary to do. I was wrong about something. I’m gonna own up to it. I fully expected Hillary or Obama during the 2016 campaign to promise the forgiveness of student loan debt. Sort of like an October Surprise or some late-breaking campaign promise, in order to get the votes and get the turnout of the Millennial voter. And I still think somebody’s gonna do it down the road, because of this.
But, you know, I pointed out this Politico story earlier in the week, the free tuition thing is not selling among liberals. And you know why? Because of the student loan debt. “Oh, wait a minute, now you’re gonna give it away after we have all this debt? Screw you, Democrats,” is what the action is on that. It’s backfiring on them. And so will this free income business that the tech guys are proposing because they want to put robots everywhere, including in your bedroom. Did you know that? Sex robots.
So they think there aren’t gonna be any jobs because there are gonna be robots everywhere and we’re still going to need to keep people from marching in the streets and burning down our estates, and so we think the government should give everybody a guaranteed national income. That’s what Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, the rest of these wizards of smart are all suggesting that. Everybody’s talking about giving money away.
Meanwhile, the student loan people are not being given anything, and they’re offering their right to vote in the next two presidential elections. Now, given Millennials don’t vote Republican, maybe Trump said, “You know, you’re on. You’re on. Throw something else in the deal.” Anyway, it’s a staggering, staggering statistic, and it’s a telltale sign of what’s really going on in the minds of people that you don’t know about because it never makes news media.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to that Politico story we had earlier in the week that told about every Democrat attack on Trump backfiring. There is this little reference to college education. It’s in the18th paragraph of the story, so you wouldn’t have seen it, nobody reads that far. They don’t even know what the First Amendment is or where it is.
Now, there’s probably a little amplification, but the Democrats think that these are hayseeds, these are hicks, the Democrats, working-class voters that Obama decided not to appeal to back in 2011. The Democrats want ’em back, going out and talking to ’em, and the Democrats are saying, “Look, we’re the party that can help your kid get to college. We’re the party that can help your kid help you afford college and have a better life.” And they’re finding working-class people who think it’s not good, gthat college is overblown, and they have a disdain for people that have gone on college. I can understand that. Obviously a lot to explain there and unpack.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jennifer is next. She is in Minnesota. Jennifer, great to have you. Thank you for calling and waiting.
CALLER: Hi. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: I just wanted to say, I am one of those people. I’m a Gen Xer, and I’m one of those people that when you comment that there’s a possibility that your loans could be forgiven, my ears start to perk up. I go, “Huh?” That is looking at people like me, because I was pushed into going to college because that was the be-all, end-all, and it didn’t matter what degree you had, it didn’t matter where you went to school, it just mattered that you went.
CALLER: And so I did that, and it didn’t do me any good at all. And here I sit with a hundred thousand dollars in loans, and, yeah, I can totally understand the appeal. So it goes even further bang than the Millennials for as many issues as they’ve got, we’ve certainly got ours, and Gen X too. And I’m one of those people.
RUSH: I didn’t quite understand. You would get mad if other people’s student loans are forgiven or if there was — if tuition was made free? Is that what you said?
CALLER: I wouldn’t get mad; I would totally understand. I understand the appeal of that.
RUSH: Oh. Okay. Yeah. You’d want in on it?
CALLER: I don’t like it and I feel bad for even feeling that way, but I totally would want in on that.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: I feel like if those people get their little bit, I could get any little bit, too.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, a lot of people don’t think it’s going to work that way. If free tuition all of a sudden becomes a campaign promise or a government policy, people who have not been given free tuition and have all these student loans say, “Wait a minute. What about us?” Because nobody’s talking about forgiving student loans yet. They’re only talking about making tuition going forward free. But somebody’s going to. You can make book on it. It’s getting to be like health care: Nobody can afford it. So what do we do?
Well, we’ll have a government program where it’s free! The same thing’s gonna happen. Of course it isn’t free. But same thing’s gonna happen in education. It’s getting unaffordable. You can’t do it without incurring a lifetime amount of debt. So we’ll have an education insurance program or some such thing. You can make book on it. This is the future. It’s a made-to-order issue for certain kinds of politicians. Anyway, I appreciate the call. Thank you so much, Jennifer.
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RUSH: So I just checked the email during the break, as I do each and every break — well, pretty much every break. I’ve made no secret of the fact over the many years of service to humanity on this program that I am a college dropout. I dropped out in my second semester the first year. I didn’t want to go in the first place.
You know how you watch a sports event and the star of the game very happily, celebratory, makes reference to the fact that he’s first in his family to go to college? I’m the first in mine that didn’t, and I may be the only to this day to not graduate. I knew what I wanted to do when I was age 8, and I looked at all of those requirements as roadblocks. I was impatient. I was eager. I just wanted to get to it. I wanted to get in and get it.
Everybody told me in high school, “When you get to college, you’re on your own. They don’t call roll and all that. You show up or don’t show up, they don’t care. But when it comes time to take a test, you better pass it.” Well, I found it just the opposite. They did take roll, and they treated us much more like kids in college than they did in high school.
But then when I saw a required physical education course was ballroom dance, and it was taught by a former drill sergeant in the Women’s Army Corps, I cut it. I didn’t go. And the college knew I wasn’t going and they called my mom and dad. “Do you know that your son is skipping out on ballroom dance?” Of course they were humiliated, to have the college call the parents and say the son’s skipping out.
Anyway, people know this that have been listening a long time. So I get this email: “Do you regret it? Is there anything that not having a college degree has prevented you from doing?” And you know, there is. Yeah, there’s lots of things. Now, arguably not having a degree has not been a negative in terms of my success, however you define it. I’m not gonna advocate people not go to college. I do believe it’s not for everybody. If you don’t know what you want to do by the time you get there it’s probably a good place to go park for a while, because you will learn some things, and I’m not against education at all. I am all for education.
Most of what I know did not come from a classroom. Although I did absorb a lot in high school, junior high, so forth. But the point is, yeah, there are all kinds of things that I will never be able to do or accomplish ’cause I didn’t go to college. And I knew that would be the case. I wasn’t stubborn. I wasn’t saying, “I’ll show everybody’s wrong.” I knew, for example, that certain clubs, jobs, whatever, that have it as a requirement, that I would never be able to do those things or be included in those things.
But to me it was worth it. You make a value judgment. And I’ve always, kind of like Groucho Marx, they said he wouldn’t be a member of a club, any club that would actually have him as a member. Do you know what he meant by that? Some people don’t understand, “What do you mean, you wouldn’t join?” It’s because if I have to conform to what a bunch of other — I wouldn’t join the place. If somebody deigns me to be acceptable, screw them. I don’t want to put myself up to have to be judged by a bunch of — that’s what he meant by it.
But there are no surprises. I mean, I haven’t found something denied to me that I thought would be opened up to me, even though I didn’t go to college. But I have zero complaints. But again, I’m not advocating this, just like during the hurricane, “I’m not a meteorologist. Don’t treat what I’m saying as gospel.” And when it comes to education, you know, everybody is different, and everybody has different interests, and I would never say don’t go to college. I believe education is key.
My worry is that we have so many people educated that haven’t been taught anything. They’re not taught to think anymore. Thinking is dangerous. You might come up with something other than what people want you to believe if you start thinking. There’s so little critical thinking taught. I actually think that not going to college might have actually benefited my career in some ways. Who knows how college would have shaped me. Arguably, it wouldn’t have, but you never know. You never know.
Not that I would have become a raging commie bastard, but who knows what can happen. Anyway, I didn’t subject myself to that possibility. I just think learning is the key, and however you can do that is what you should do. ‘Cause it’s actually fun. And there’s no substitute for knowledge. Because knowledge brings confidence, and there’s no substitute for confidence. If you have confidence, I don’t care what it is, you’ll be able to do much more. Confidence combined with desire.
“Son, it has been determined by professional educators that a well-rounded education is exactly what you’re getting.” I understood that. But at some point don’t I become an individual instead of some mass produced sardine? I mean, if I’m showing an aptitude and a real interest in something, why can’t I go get it? Why do I have to take all this stuff? “Well, because this is what the university says you must take. You must take ballroom dance.”
I flunked speech three times ’cause I didn’t outline them. I already knew how to do speeches. Anyway. Yes, yes. Not having a college degree has resulted in certain doors not being open, but none of them are a surprise. And I don’t regret it. I don’t sit around and lament it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Dave in Buffalo. You’re next on the EIB Network. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Rush, thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: So being here in wonderful New York, we have an awesome governor, Mr. Cuomo, who thinks it’s a great idea to give everybody free college. So if you make under $125,000 a year, you are entitled to free college.
RUSH: How long ago did he propose this? Because I have a vague memory of this.
CALLER: This happened within the last six months, and it is a green light. It is good to go. They are doing this.
RUSH: What happens if you make…? So if you make $30,000 a year, you don’t get free education, free college?
CALLER: No, you get free education. Anybody under $125,000 a year.
RUSH: Oh, you said $125,000? Oh, I misunderstood. You said under $125,000?
CALLER: Yep. Any household, annual household income, both mom and dad, if mom and dad makes under $125,000, you get a free education.
RUSH: Here’s the thing. People will say, “This is never gonna happen.” Folks, you may think it will never happen within but they’re seriously about it, and they want you to think they’re serious about it. It’s their solution to everything, just give it away. It’s tough to run against Santa Claus, and that’s what they want people to believe that they are.
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