RUSH: Here is Senator Cory Booker from New Jersey, and he’s at the Al Sharpton, National Action Network legislative and policy conference. And here is Senator Booker talking about America.

BOOKER: I believe if this country hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough. You don’t love her enough. There is injustice in our nation. We are dissatisfied because we live in a country right now where many communities kids can find unleaded gasoline easier than unleaded water. We are dissatisfied because we live in a nation right now that pays teachers so little that they have to get extra jobs just to make ends meet! We are dissatisfied in this country because on blocks like mine where a young man was murdered with an assault weapon —

RUSH: That is the exact kind of thinking that I’m describing, that we are assaulted with each and every day, and particularly liberal Democrats. “If this country hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough.” That’s gobbledygook, but, man, to some people, “Wow, that’s deep! That is really deep!” No, it’s gobbledygook. If this country hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough? What the hell is that? It’s gibberish.

“There’s injustice in our nation. We’re dissatisfied. We live in a country right now where in many communities kids can find unleaded gasoline easier than unleaded water.” BS, absolute and total BS! It’s just a made up piece of rhetoric that is an offshoot of Republicans don’t care about clean air and clean water, that Republicans don’t care if your kids get poisoned. And you’ve got this brain-dead audience here at the Al Sharpton convention just lapping it all up, soaking it all up, and applauding it. “We’re dissatisfied. We live in a nation right now that pays teachers so little they have to get extra jobs just to make ends meet.” They chose it knowing full well what it pays. Teachers that do good jobs, by the way, find ways.

And then of course the lament about assault weapons in his neighborhood. It’s your neighborhood. What are you doing about it? Are you maybe not pursuing the people using the assault weapons like in Chicago, Senator Booker? See, all of this is America’s fault, predominantly Republican America’s fault.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Paul in Bend, Oregon. You’re next. I’m really glad you waited, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Well, thank you for taking my call, Mr. Limbaugh. I’ve been a listener since 1990 and finally got the courage to try to call you and have a discussion, so I thank you for that. Earlier you made a comment about teachers, and you claimed — and you were right — if they wanted to work somewhere else, they could. But I also think you accepted the premise that they didn’t make enough money when I believe, when you take everything in consideration, they make a good living and do very well.

RUSH: Okay. Do you want to make that point?

CALLER: I just wanted to make that point with you. I don’t want say you made a mistake because I think you were right that you can’t always get a different job, but I think when you —

RUSH: No, no, no. No, no, wait. That was not my point. Let’s say you want to be any job where the salary is published and it’s known what it is if you get the job, and you seek that job, and you get it, and then a short time later start complaining about how underpaid you are, well, I’m just saying, you chose that knowing what it is. And to run around and say that you’re being mistreated or unfairly treated, maybe you are, but it’s a bit of a stretch.

I’m not condemning teachers here. I’m condemning Cory Booker. He’s running around complaining about what teachers are paid. He’s in the business of paying ’em. Government pays teachers, in many cases, or they decide it at the local level. But, I mean, it’s a common, ordinary complaint. Nobody teaching is being fooled or short-changed. They’re not getting what they were promised, are they?

CALLER: No, no, I agree with you. I’m certainly not gonna agree with Booker, I don’t agree with much of what he says. But the problem is they’re always asking for school bonds to get more money. And as taxpayers, we assume they’re gonna pay the teachers more, and so we support it. And then what happens is, that they give the administrators more and the teachers get paid less —

RUSH: Well, now, that’s true. That’s true. But that is the nature of bureaucracies.

CALLER: Yeah. No. But to accept that when they — I just get so fed up with it. My daughter’s a teacher. She works for a Christian school. She makes a good living. I made a good living doing it. And then they sit and they complain about — I don’t even think it’s the teachers so much. I think it’s the bureaucrats wanting more tax money so they can spend it on things they want to spend it on.

RUSH: I remember when I was living in New York and I found out how much in New Jersey they were spending in public education per student, and I forget the amount. It was outrageous. It was almost six figures per student. But the teachers weren’t getting it. It was so much money that you could have hired limousines and taken the kids in a New Jersey public school across the river into Manhattan, given them lunch at 21, taken ’em back across the river to school, and still had money left over. The teachers were not getting the money. More and more administrators are being hired, which is the nature of bureaucracies.

But, look. I’m glad you called out there, Paul, ’cause my purpose here was not to be snarky or critical of teachers by any stretch. How old is the argument, “Look at what we pay these dumb jock athletes versus what we pay the teacher.” Well, in an economic sense, I can explain that, but it’s not gonna satisfy people who are unhappy about the disparity. But I can, you know, for a football player or baseball player that’s making $15 million a year, I can probably show you how it is justified. I can show you how it’s being earned.

But when you get into subjective discussions of worth and value, well, yeah, how much value is there to a society where somebody can hit a baseball? Four out of five times he goes up or four out of 10 times and can hit it 350 feet, what’s the value of that versus somebody teaching the youths of America? That’s a subjective thing. And it is incidental to the economic discussion of who is worth what. And in the bottom analysis, the final analysis, you are worth what somebody will pay you, and that is up to you.

That’s another thing that I’ve always marveled at is the employee mentality versus the entrepreneur or self-starter mentality. Not a criticism. Please do not misunderstand. Most people are raised, I was, with the employee mentality. Anybody whose parents survived the Great Depression was gonna be taught that your employer is the most important person in your life, and you better do everything you can to keep your employer happy, including volunteering to do work that you don’t get paid for. Whatever it takes to keep your employer happy, because getting fired in the Great Depression was the worst economic thing that could happen to anybody.

Well, that’s no longer applicable today. But it was for my parents who grew up in it. So that’s how in couple of ways my brother and I were raised. But the employee mentality is that which most people have, and therefore there are automatic limits, limits to what anybody thinks they can earn, based on what kind of job they’re gonna have and what the pay scale or pay level is in that job. And then it’s up to, okay, you chose it, you like it, you do it for that reason. If you love what you do, it isn’t work. And as long as you’re paid enough to have a decent living, fine, everything’s fine.

What people would love to do is to be paid an exorbitant amount of money for their hobby. Well, a lot of people have pulled that off. It’s a matter of how you want to go about it. But the bottom line is you’re worth what somebody will pay you. So in that sense, nobody is overpaid. ‘Cause somebody is agreeing to pay whoever is making whatever you think is an exorbitant amount of money.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: New Jersey spends $18,000 a student. New York spends $21,000 per student. And the teachers are not getting the lion’s share of that, and that is unfortunate.