RUSH: Patrick in Reading, Pennsylvania. He’s a high school senior. Great to have you here, Patrick. How are you?
CALLER: I’m quite well. Yourself?
RUSH: Great. Thank you.
CALLER: So I had a question. I’m in an AP government class, and my teacher over the last couple of days has been ragging on the Trump tax plan, saying that it’s going to hurt the middle class and it’s only going to help “big corporations.” How do you respond to that?
RUSH: Your teacher is saying that?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Okay. What I would say to that is, first thing — I really would say this — “What’s wrong with that? Corporations are not our enemy. Corporations provide products that we like, and they hire us, and corporations invest in things. Corporations are people, and they’re not inherently evil, Madam Teacher. Number two: It’s a matter of competition. We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world among industrialized nations at 35%.
“It is why Apple has over $125 billion or $150 billion overseas not brought back to the U.S. because it would make no sense to bring that money back and tax it at 35%. Reducing the corporate tax rate will cause some of that money to be repatriated. That money will be put into the U.S. economy as Apple and other corporations bring it back.” I would start with the premise. I would tell her… See, I’m not there, and you might not want to be this bold. But I would challenge her on her premise that corporations are evil, that they are the enemy of the people, and that somehow corporations “benefiting” hurts us.
And then I would tell her, “Ma’am, corporations don’t pay taxes at the end of the day anyway. Whatever taxes they owe are built into the prices we pay. So it’s possible, Madam Teacher, that prices could come down as corporate tax levels come down. The corporations might have more money to invest in growth and hiring more people. It’s a win-win. But that’s not gonna do anything, Patrick, if your teacher is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist who has been trained her whole life to despise and hate corporations.
The left thinks pharmaceutical companies want to kill their customers. They think the oil companies want to destroy the earth with global warming, climate change. They think Big Retailers like Walmart want to kill unions. It’s irrational and it’s wrong, and if I were you, I would tell her, “Stop teaching us this stuff ’cause you’re poisoning our minds with a bunch of lies.” But you probably can’t do that. Hang on here, Patrick.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. We’re back with the advanced government studies class student. His name is Patrick, Reading, Pennsylvania, senior in high school. You didn’t get a chance to react to my answer to your question, which I thought was unfair, so I wanted to give you a chance to react to it.
CALLER: Well, thank you. My teacher actually used to lobby for a big corporation and left, quote, because she realized she was doing something evil.
RUSH: Because what? Why did she leave?
CALLER: She thought she was doing something evil by lobbying for this big corporation. Not sure which corporation it was but —
RUSH: She thought she was doing something evil by lobbying for a corporation?
CALLER: Correct. So she does definitely have a bias against corporations. I’m not gonna say she’s a socialist but she definitely is a Keynesian, so she teaches that as part of the AP gov course.
RUSH: I’ll guarantee you, if she has an animus toward corporations, that’s part and parcel of socialists who want to control them, an independent corporation, it’s one of the reasons they’re constantly attacking them. But look, Patrick, I’m actually glad you called me about this because this is one of my bugaboos or pet peeves. The hatred that people have of corporations is irrational, and this irrationality is driving way too much of policy.
All of this stuff on net neutrality, you know, we’ve only had net neutrality for two years. Prior to that, we had no meaningful, massive regulation of the internet, and it grew and expanded, and fortunes were made. You could find any opinion you wanted, no speech was infringed, any business could start and give it a shot. It was the wild west, and it was amazing. And customers had a smorgasbord of choices. Whatever they wanted, they could get it.
You could learn more than you could ever learn. Everything you wanted to learn was somewhere online, if you learned how to search for it. And companies and providers started doing everything they could to put even more up there and attract even more customers. It was only the last two years of the Obama administration we had net neutrality. But today there was a bomb threat at the FCC that delayed for a while the vote on getting rid of Obama-era regulations.
The last two years of the internet have not been any kind of a panacea. But these people that oppose a free and open internet, these people that want the government regulating the internet hate corporations. I read tech blogs, and these are young, little Millennials, and they have a visceral hatred for cable companies, for internet service providers. They have a hatred for anybody that charges them money. And I’m not exaggerating. They literally have a hatred for it and because so much of the internet, when it started, was free. The New York Times was free. Anything you wanted was free.
It was so new that people were pressured to put their content up there, but they didn’t know how to monetize it. It was wonderful. And the process evened out as people learned more, and more people were getting information online, they learned how to monetize it, they tried various ways — pay walls, subscriptions for one week, one month, one year, until they got it right. And now many of them are making a lot of money with subscriptions, which irritates people.
But it is the hatred and the distrust of, quote, unquote, corporations that drives much of liberal social and political policy. And it’s irrational. If you look at the Democrat Party’s enemies list, it’s every major industry, not just individual corporations, but it’s every major industry.
And they have co-opted people like your teacher into believing this pap that all of this stuff is injurious, that corporations will kill their customers unless the government regulates ’em. And corporations will drive their customers into poverty unless the government regulates them. It’s just silly.
And it’s typified when they say corporations are not people. When the Supreme Court legalized campaign donations from corporations, the left nearly went insane by saying, “They’re not people. They shouldn’t be allowed to contribute in politics. They’re corporations.” Why not? They’re people. They’re individuals. They’ve got vested interests just like anybody else does, just like any individual does. And they have shareholders and they’re interested in making money and making profits and so forth. But all of that, to people like your teacher, is evil.
Your teacher probably thinks that nothing should cost more than what it cost to make it, that there should be any money made with a corporation selling something to somebody. Especially if it’s health care, it shouldn’t be a profit. That’s obscene. It’s ignorant. It’s the pursuit of profits that cause these people to go into business and provide these products and services in the first place. They compete with others that do it. It all works if you leave them alone.
And of course there are bad actors. We have laws that deal with the bad actors when they act bad. The idea that we cannot have a functioning economy without people like Barack Obama with their hands on it regulating every day is obscene. Barack Obama has never run a business. Barack Obama doesn’t know anything about health care. Neither does your teacher.
But they sit there and claim that they know these people are evil and they’re screwing customers and they’re screwing America and they’re destroying the planet and all this horrible stuff. It’s just obscene. You’ve hit a little sore spot with me here today, Patrick. I’m sorry for yelling at you. I’m not yelling at you. I just get passionate about this stuff.
CALLER: Understood.
RUSH: What did you tell her?
CALLER: Oh, I’ve told her before that corporations should be considered people because it helps people to not go bankrupt. The corporations they’re part of goes bankrupt. So I’ve definitely —
RUSH: (impression) “Oh no. See, that’s where you’re wrong. Don’t you realize the big banks want their customers to go bankrupt? The big banks want their customers not to be able to pay back the loans so they can take their houses away from ’em! Because these banks are evil! Yeeees, Patrick, these banks are really bad. They loan money to people, and they hope they can’t pay the money back so they can take their homes away. Why, they’re all a bunch of Mr. Potters from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. That’s what they all are.”
You know why we had the subprime mortgage crisis, Patrick? That’s because the government came along and told banks that they had to lend money to people to buy homes who would never be able to afford to pay ’em back. That started it. Bill Clinton, Barack Obama forced American lending institutions to lend money under the concept that the American dream was being denied some people who couldn’t afford it. So the administrations told the banks, “You make them affordable. You give ’em a loan!”
The banks said, “What do we do? They can’t pay us back.” So they created a bunch of phony mortgage obligation packages that they sold to other banks that didn’t know what they were buying until it all backed up on everybody. People in politics have no business running anything in the private sector. None of ’em ever have. They’re all lawyers or worse, academics who deal in theory all the time and have never had to put any of their cockamamie theories into real practice.
And when they get that chance, we see what Obama did to the health care industry. The know-it-all Barack Obama, who knows better about how to run a hospital and nurses and doctors than the people who do it. And that’s another presumption. They’re all criminals and they’re all incompetent, and only liberal Democrats know how to make all of this fair. The idea that corporations are evil is an offensive premise. I’m so glad you called. I don’t know that you are, but I am. I appreciate it, Patrick.