RUSH: I’m not sure how you pronounce your name, in Los Angeles. How do you pronounce your name?

CALLER: Palabo.

RUSH: Palabo! Great to have you, Palabo. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Hey. I’m really happy to be here. Mega unemployment Dittos from California, the only place where they still have unemployment because they have overregulation. Hey, listen, I’m calling you as a survivor. I survived the great government shutdown of 1994-95. I survived the 1990 shutdown, the ’95 shutdown, the 2013 shutdown, the 2018 shutdown. I survived them all. The government shutdown, there’s only a slowdown, a government slowdown of 16% of the government. And it’s very survivable.

RUSH: You know, this —

CALLER: — stop calling it a shutdown and start calling it a slowdown —

RUSH: I like the way you’re thinking, you know, because 70% of the government has been funded all the way through all of next year. Seventy percent’s already paid for. But I love this. “I survived the government shutdown.” That’s a great perspective on this because the actual portrayal of a government shutdown is panic and chaos! And some people might not make it. Some people are going to incur such difficulty, such chaos and may suffer real harm. That’s the image that goes behind these government shutdowns. You can’t get by without your government up and running.

The fact that these threatened shutdowns seem to have that kind of political benefit really frosts me. The idea that people can’t get by when the government’s not open, I mean, what are government working hours anyway? The fact that the government gets shut down so many times during the course of a year, they shut themselves down if there’s a couple inches of snow, for crying out loud, and nobody panics then.

But you get the Drive-By Media backing up the Democrat Party in one of their political agendas and the government shutdown could mean end of life for certain people, it could mean end of benefits for certain people. Speaking of which, a story here on how we have really curtailed the food stamp rolls. And I’m gonna tell you. Here’s the headline: “3.5 Million People Drop Off Food Stamps Under Trump.”

This is the kind of thing that not that long ago would be really heralded, it would be really celebrated, it would be something remarkably good to have happened to people in the country. Three and a half million people no longer needing food stamps would translate into three and a half million people finding work, becoming productive, becoming self-reliant and undertaking daily responsibilities of life and benefiting from citizenship in the United States of America, three and a half million people no longer needing food stamps.

It’s a shame, it’s too bad that we now cannot celebrate things like this. Now we can barely get it mentioned. I mean, in a political sense this is really bad news for the left, so nobody’s gonna know about it. They’ll do all they can to get power and reverse the trend. They don’t want people dropping off food stamps! This is not good news for them. But I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t that long ago that a headline like this would have made people stand up and cheer, feel great about their country.

One of the objectives was to get people off of welfare, to get people off of the government benefits. Your life is much better when you’re providing for yourself, when you’re not dependent on people you don’t even know. Now it’s a story that’s buried even in my Stack. I have to make a specific point of finding it. But it used to be not that long ago it would have been tremendous celebratory news and a political benefit for whichever administration was in office when it happened.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Don in Carrollton, Georgia. Back to the phones we go. Great to have you, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Rush, it’s an honor. I appreciate the analysis that goes into your program each and every day.

RUSH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that, sir.

CALLER: Yes, sir. In every high level budget discussion there’s always that discussion of where are you gonna get the money to pay for this, but yet Congress, and especially the Democrats, are never asked the question, where are we gonna continue to get the money to pay for each and every illegal that’s in the country.

RUSH: You know, not only is that true, it’s true about everything. We don’t have any money. We have a national debt of over $20 trillion. We run an annual budget deficit of multiple hundreds of billions of dollars. We don’t have any money. We print money. We borrow money. It’s amazed me. In fact, when Obama took office and the first thing he did was announce this gigantic Porkulus spending bill called a stimulus, and it was almost $800 billion and we didn’t have $800 billion laying around. There was no way it was gonna stimulate anything because we didn’t have the $800 billion without going and getting it from someplace else first.

And that someplace else was out there in the economy. So Obama’s gonna take $800 billion from the economy and then redistribute it to other places in the economy and is gonna call that a stimulus. Didn’t stimulate anything. All it did was basically end up funnel some money to the Democrat National Committee via keeping union people employed during a recession. The vast majority of the stimulus went to unions and places that employ them. But there wasn’t any economic stimulus to it.

You can’t stimulate the economy unless you have money that’s not already in it injected into it. And we don’t have that. So all of this talk about a government shutdown, not funding the government, the government’s so far out of any kind of fiscal sense of balance that it’s all academic. And it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think anybody cares anymore.

You know, it used to be that we had to balance budget every year. If we didn’t all hell was gonna break loose, and if we didn’t get control of the national debt then all hell was gonna break loose, a massive debt that’s gonna have to be repaid and some future generation somebody’s kids or grandkids are gonna get saddled.

I’ve been hearing this my whole life, and yet Washington just keeps spending money because they have a printing press. States can’t, but the federal government can, and there isn’t any discipline at all. We can’t spend $5 billion on a wall, but like Don here points out, we can spend half that allowing illegal immigrants into the country and funding their health care and their education and whatever else is needed to make them loyal Democrat voters.

And that cost is never mentioned, never calculated because it’s considered to be a compassionate expenditure. But five billion — do you realize five billion, what percentage of the federal budget that is? It’s a rounding error. It’s an asterisk. People say we can’t afford it, we don’t have it, it’s not a proper expenditure. It’s just absurd.