TODD: We’re having a conversation earlier today. Ali, who is — I don’t know her specific teaching title. I’m pretty sure at this point it’s a senior fellow at the Limbaugh Institute where the education continues. Joe Biden’s dementia had said that — what did he say? — dogs and cats making over $400,000. I mean people, and he corrected himself a few times. They are not gonna pay more taxes. Oddly, oddly, there’s lots of ways to be taxed.

One of them is to watch the price of everything that is happening. Of course, everything’s prices are going up because government is getting more expensive by the minute. And there’s only so many $6 trillion handouts you can have before businesses notice this. And taxes on business is going up. But businesses just simply don’t pay taxes.

And now there’s the talk of the universal tax rate, a floor, a global minimum tax to outlaw competition, to outlaw efficiency. By some readings of some of the recent legislation that’s come out of Joe Biden’s dementia, it’s illegal for states to lower your taxes if they want federal monies — and I’ve been watching over this weekend as I’ve seen, you know, gas prices up six cents. You see the cyber attack?

Oh, wait ’til you hear Rush on this. Wait. You want to know another example of why he was so special? You wait ’til you hear his analysis that we’re going to take from the Apple incident and apply this to the cyber attack on this fuel pipeline. Wait ’til you hear that. It’s unbelievably salient. That’s coming up. We’ve seen higher consumer prices in everything.

Over the weekend, on Mother’s Day, like you, I hung out with my mom, whom I love — and my wife whom I love — and we went out a bunch of places. Everywhere we went, save one super-successful restaurant, everybody was begging for employees, begging for employees. I talked to three separate business owners who looked me in the eye and said, “No one wants to work.”

There are states like Washington where with the average now benefits, you can get $41,000 bucks per year for not working. The average income in Washington state is around $43,000 to 47, depending on how you calculate it. There’s no reason for people to work when there’s this universal basic income being installed on people, and what will happen is happening now.

When you have to pay 25 bucks an hour as many small towns to have people work in a restaurant, there aren’t going to be small restaurants. They can’t afford that scale. So you’ll end up with mega restaurants where the food is developed out of a lab, overseas, shipped over here and heated up in microwaves. Mmm, mmm. Mmm. Mmm, mmm, mmm.

Oh, really fancy places where they can afford to pay that. That’s what we’re gonna see. So Rush said it then and it applied every day. Democrats, they don’t care what the American people pay for gas or anything else. They only care that the left can use it to harm Republicans.

RUSH: Republicans cannot win with these gas prices, while the Democrats have an inexperienced, arrogant, condescending, moron elitist who doesn’t understand why anybody would object to continually rising gas prices — which is going to drive up the cost of everything — then they are the latter half of dumb and dumber. This is a gold mine opportunity. You’ve got a Democrat Party presidential nominee — we can get the tape — who has said the only thing that bugs him about four-dollar gas is how fast we got there.

He didn’t like the speed and the rapidity with which the price went to four dollars. Well, the Republicans continue to tell us that they can’t win, that this isn’t their year. That’s BS. This year is served up on a silver platter. Now we’ve got the Democrats wavering and caving on this because they see the reality. People vote with their pocketbooks. Democrats are on the wrong side of the biggest issue since 9/11. This is a huge, huge opportunity. There isn’t anything else right now.

Republicans ought to be all over the radio with this. Everybody in a car who has a radio is a potential target, because a car is what takes gasoline, and people in their cars are listening to radio. That’s why the Republicans need to be on the radio. How mad do you get every time you pull in, how mad do you get when you see the price? And you know that there are people who are standing in the way of doing anything about it within the economic laws of supply and demand.

You don’t expect a magic wand, but you do expect some responsibility. Then you realize it’s the Democrats who want you mad; it’s the Democrats who want you suffering; it’s the Democrats that want you mad and suffering ’cause they think you’re going to blame Republicans and elect them. Every gas station owner is a potential Republican voter. Every cabdriver, every trucker, everybody that owns a boat, anybody who drives anything is a prime target here for Republicans.

All this doom and gloom and this apocalyptic stuff about their chances from the Republicans is insane. Why run around and create your own negative self-fulfilling prophecy? I understand, “Rush, they’re just trying to lower the expectations.” Screw the expectations. Where is an aggressive campaign on offense about this? I mean, to me, ladies and gentlemen, I’m venting the obvious. But it just seems to me the Democrats ought to be the party on the run here.

TODD: And in Walmart parking lots in front of restaurants, in front of any establishment right now, Republicans should be there saying, “Do you see the price increase?” and handing out a picture of Joe Biden’s dementia, communicating to people who are still going to work. Folks, there are people in our states around this country pulling in 40 grand a year, working hard in their careers.

They live next door to people who are pulling in $40,000 a year in this form of this back-doored universal basic income, and they’re doing the math. It doesn’t make sense for them to work. We can only carry so many people on our backs. It is a good thing to be charitable. We should be charitable, and we are as a people. But when you put weight on the back of the people who can be charitable, they’re going to break down.

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TODD: There should be a name for the dynamic where the media gets to say, “An unexpected lowering of expectations in jobs… Unexpected cut in…” No, it’s not “unexpected.” There’s this funny dynamic that exists. When you tell people (Fauci impression), “Look, if you go to work and — and you happen to run into coronavirus, it may rip the skin from your body and then celebrate it by deep frying it and feeding it to your children.”

Or you could stay home and bring home 40 large a year for not working. There’s a weird dynamic where people go, “Let’s see. The entire technocrat state is telling me that this is the most deadly virus known to man — and at the same time, the figurehead — Joe Biden’s dementia — is saying, “Hey, listen, don’t be a chump. Here’s a bunch of money for not working.”

It’s funny how people will put that together and say, “Maybe I won’t work,” and so you have this unemployment report that is, in a sane world, catastrophic. And then you have the individuals, the business owners who are watching their business model be stomped into the ground by a new floor on income — and here’s the unfairness of this. What’s going on that began in March of last year when there was no Great Reset?

Because that was a “conspiracy theory,” even though we have Joe Biden’s dementia saying, “We’re gonna build back better!” It was BuildBackBetter.gov, when he doesn’t screw it up by saying “Build Back Barter” or “Build Back Buttress,” but actually says build back better, that’s what he says. We’re installing this UBI. We’re watching jobs sink. We’re watching no comeback from the technocrat-enforced, medically useless, deadly, politically advantageous lockdowns.

And we’re seeing the market change. And here’s unfairness to this. Now, think about this, please, just I beg you to think about this. What is…? What is the minimum wage for a business owner? What is it? It’s zero, and sometimes it’s less than zero. What do I mean? Oh, you still have to pay for your building and your vendors and your power and your legal and your taxes. Sometimes income means the opposite of income.

Here’s another way to look at this. What is the minimum effort an employee must commit or contribute to get a minimum wage? In all of humandom, there is no dynamic where minimum effort isn’t required for something. You might need to commit the effort to get off your couch and change the channel if you lose your remote. That’s the minimum effort. Sometimes that’s really hard for people.

If you want to lift weights, you’ll have to lift the weight. It won’t lift itself. But only in the realm of economics do we pretend otherwise. So Gina Raimondo, she is the commerce secretary for Joe Biden’s dementia, and at last week’s disappointing jobs report (which “fell short of expectations”), Republicans pointing to the enhanced unemployment aid, they say this disincentivizes people to go back to work. But the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, claims there’s no data to support that argument.

RAIMONDO: People are still telling us the number one reason they’re not going to back to work is fear due to the virus, and more people were looking for work last month than the month before.

TODD: Oh, I have an idea. (Fauci impression) “Well, really, I’ve been lying for some time about the — the — the idea that this virus is deadly to everybody. It’s really just people in their eighties who are vitamin D-deficient and obese. For most everybody else this is less deadly than the common flu. So look, listen, my bad. Let’s chalk it up to I like to be on the teevee.” That would be a refreshing moment of honesty.

“[P]aying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market,’ Neil Bradley, the [U.S. Chamber of Commerce]’s executive vice president and chief policy officer, said in a Friday statement. … ‘One step policymakers should take now is ending the $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit. … Based on the Chamber’s analysis, the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.'”

Ring. “Hello? Office of Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley, U.S. Chamber of Commerce.” “You backed Biden!” “Uh, that’s mean.” “You backed Biden. You begged for socialism. Now you’re going, I don’t think I like the socialism. Take the socialism off me!” ” No, it’s just a leech. It’s good for the blood,” right? Funny! Unexpected consequences. Now, you know this. (chuckles) You know, Rush said this all along, didn’t he? As you’ll hear in this here sound clip. He said it all along.

RUSH: Folks, there is this sad reality here that there are a number of Americans who are, quote-unquote, “earning” more on welfare, unemployment, whatever you want to call it, than they were working.

And some of them are making the decision that they would rather do that than go back to work and earn less. Now in one way (chuckles), it makes common sense. If you’re gonna pay somebody $60,000 a year to not work and their job pays them 40 or 50, what do you think they’re gonna do? We don’t know how many that is. But what we do know is that that disincentive to work has to be fixed.

The federal government simply cannot be responsible for providing incentives for people not to go back to work in this circumstance, when we need the economy rebounding and fast. That is what the Democrat Party stands for. That’s what Joe Biden wants to do. Biden, Pelosi, all these Democrats — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whoever you think — Crazy Bernie.

Whoever the leaders of the Democrat Party are, that’s what they believe in: Paying people not to work. It’s even worse. Listen to me. Do not doubt me on this. What the Democrat Party, what Pelosi specifically is attempting to do… Folks, this is really hideous. With their proposal of a $3 trillion extension COVID-19 support package, what they are trying to do is convince as many voters as possible that socialism works, that you never have to work again, that your government can give you plenty enough money where you can have a decent life.

They can give you $60,000 a year without you ever having to work. That is one of the lying premises of socialism, that everybody can be rich, that everybody can be comfortable, and that everybody can be the same, that nobody will have more than anybody else, that it can be a quasi-utopia. Well, that can’t be done in perpetuity, and the Democrats know it, and they wouldn’t do it in perpetuity. This is one of the most disingenuous, misleading, cruel things that I think they have ever tried.

And that is the attempt to convince as many voters that the government can provide everybody $60,000 a year for not working. That’s what they’re gonna try to convince people. It is hideous, ’cause it’s not possible, folks. But to a bunch of people that have been ill-educated all their lives and do not know the truth of Marxism, socialism, communism? People in their twenties and thirties who believe that socialism is utopia, it’s a panacea, and the Democrats are gonna finally make it happen?

TODD: If you’re a business owner, just please try this. Please try this, particularly if you have equity or an ESOP, Employee Stock Option Pool. Give people the option of having the same minimum wage as you — and make it voluntary, if you’re a business owner. And tell them, “We will have the same minimum wage, okay, and I’m gonna involve you in equity. We’ll have a similar upside capacity,” and that’s gonna sound really good to them.

You can say, “Look, if we build the company up and it’s really large and we sell it for a lot of money, this could be world-changing, life-changing money for you. This could be millions and millions or more for you, and we’ll have the same minimum wage.” I will guarantee you that 90% of the people, if they have been employees their whole life, they’ll say “Wow, the upside!

“I didn’t know that’s the word for it. Okay, I want this upside. What is your minimum wage?” Tell them, “It’s zero, and sometimes it’s less than.” In fact, open the books a little bit. I know that seems a scary move. It really does. But look churches do this, responsible churches open their finances. Open the books a little bit and share with them, “You know, last month I had to dig into my pocket. I didn’t make money.”

There really is this belief, this veneer that all business owners are rolling in money. And part of that is, it’s hard to say to your employees — and sometimes you don’t want to do that ’cause you’re gonna start looking for other work. (Snort!) Well, now they don’t need to. They just take the government checks. I think it’s a humanizing thing to let them know.

“We had to dig into our pockets to pay this stuff this month,” and I think it changes this dynamic so that when they hear the left and they hear Biden’s dementia and his people demonizing business owners, they will fall along with that — although they’ve stopped doing that. Have you noticed?

All of a sudden for the left, there’s no more “filthy rich billionaires.” You noticed that? Because all the filthy rich billionaires are rolling up to the SJW slop wagon. Give us some of that pasty SJW slop money. We’ll come back and talk more about socialism, more about experiments in freedom.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

TODD: I want you to listen to this clip of Joe Biden’s dementia from May 7, 2021, and I want you to ask yourself a question, cognitive. Really think about this as you hear this. Does anyone believe Joe Biden’s dementia knows what it’s actually saying here?

BIDEN: Most Middle Class, working-class people that I know think the way my dad did. He used to say — and I know I’m repeating myself but I gonna continue to because I think it’s critical. “A job is a lot more than a paycheck,” he’d say, “Joey. It’s about your respect, your dignity, your place in the community. More than a paycheck, is people’s pride. It’s about being able to look a child in the high eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s gonna be okay.'” I’ve never forgotten that. I’ve never forgotten those folks I grew up with. I think about them every day as president.

TODD: And I think about them particularly as I am destroying 40% of small businesses. Well, I mean, 40% of small businesses have been destroyed in the medically useless, deadly, political advantageous to the left lockdowns, selective lockdowns. Now this assault continues by a false floor on income. That false look at on income paying people money to not work creates an economic distortion.

That economic distortion has people whose life savings are predicated upon logical, predictable growths in the minimum wage, and in return for value. That has been utterly, utterly distorted. They can’t sell sandwiches for 16 bucks. Well, look, I know that an iced tea… You think I’m lying, and I’m not. An iced tea in Beverly Hills at the Beverly Hills Hilton 15 years ago was $16 bucks. I’m not kidding. I stunned. People there can pay that. They can’t pay that in the actual United States. So look here. Let the Maha explain it to Joe Biden’s dementia.

The universal basic income they’ve used the covid flu to install cannot compete with a merit-based economy.

RUSH: Plugs is out talking about jobs. Let me find the tweet. He’s tweeted out something that Democrats always say about jobs, and it’s pathetic. It’s about we support jobs with dignity and here’s Plugs’ tweet: “A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. A job is about dignity. It’s being able to look your kid in the eye and say everything is going to be okay — and mean it. Too many people today can’t do that. We have to build an inclusive middle class and restore the dignity of work.”

They have been spewing garbage like this for 40 years. It’s a bunch of tripe that doesn’t mean anything. On the other hand, Trump is action. These guys sit around, and they’re nothing but eternal promises, eternal promises of utopia. So we’ve got the greatest jobs report that Plugs has ever seen in his lifetime, including many of us could say the same thing, and he’s a gotta talk (impression), “Well, well, you know, it’s about a lot more than a paycheck.

“It’s about dignity, it’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘Kid, I got a job for you in Ukraine that’s gonna pay you a million and a half dollars a year, and you don’t have to know anything about the business.'” I’m sorry. “It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say everything is gonna be okay and mean it,” like everything’s not okay now? Like Trump’s jobs have no dignity? Like parents are scared to face their kids because the jobs don’t have dignity.

TODD: Did I tell you? Does Biden’s dementia even know what he said with this kid getting the no work, no show, $100 million gig from the Ukraine? What if we could talk to a real live business owner who has no minimum wage? Hey, we can.

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TODD: Let’s talk to Chris in , Michigan. Chris, you’re on the Rush Limbaugh program. Todd Herman, your guide host this week. I’m glad you waited, Chris. Welcome to Rush’s program.

CALLER: Thanks, Todd. Todd, I want to have a very serious discussion about something I’ve heard you talk about a dozen times and I have routinely – called in hoping that I could have this specific conversation with you. And that is the 99.99% of other public official positions, public offices out there that people need to really, really need to run for. I’ve heard you talk about this, all the zoning boards, all your downtown development authorities, school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, all those positions.

I am a former councilman here in Lincoln Park, and I have ran for office four times in the last 10 years. Won a few races, lost a few races, filled an unexpired term. So everybody out there, this is very, very significant. Yes. We do need to clean up every in D.C., trust me. I mean, throw everybody out there and put in new people. But the other 99.99% people out there, I’ve talked to so many people and I say, ‘You know, you’re pretty smart; you ought to run for office.”

And I get the same excuse, Todd. “Oh, I’m too busy.” No. That’s an excuse. You don’t even know what busy is until you’re a part-time councilman with a full-time job trying to put in 30 hours a week actually working on the detailed plans of trying to turn your city around or your county around or your school board, and this nation needs hundreds of thousands of new people in public office it all these levels. And I’ve heard you very passionately talk about this before.

TODD: Yeah, this is so important, Chris. I want to thank you for sticking your neck out there. Let’s just take this job by job and let’s just take it dynamic by dynamic. The “sexual left” is buying your children through comprehensive sex education. They’re buying their mental health, and they’re guying their sexual health. They’re buying their physical health, for gosh sake, through wrong-sex hormones in little kids.

That’s a school board thing. Your governor can say, “Oh, we’re gonna make sure this happens.” You on the school board can raise holy heck and say, “No, we can fund our own sex ed. We’re gonna do that. No, we’re not gonna have a Planned Parenthood clinic in our school.” You, as a school board member, have the authority to…

You don’t have the authority, you have the ability to go knock on a door and say, “I’m on the school board. I’ve seen the curriculum. This is what they’re wanting to do to our kids. You can stop that. You can forestall that.” That’s just school board. Zoning boards. The left plays this game here so brilliantly. Take a state like Oregon. They want to carbon copy Portland into eastern Oregon, guys.

So they’re looking for the density that allows them to do that, because density invites corruption. How? Because when you’re building density, now you get to make the arguments for buses and choo-choo trains and all the things the left likes. What does that do? It comes along with moneys for the unions. And those monies for the unions elect Democrats, even in what you thought were solidly red states.

My friends, there are no solidly red states. Everything is in play. Zoning commissions can forestall that. Right? Development, people want to sell land — and, gosh bless ’em, they’ve spent their lives building it up — and they split it into these little subzones, et cetera, you know, these apartments where there were homes. People need places to live, but we don’t need to change the completes dynamic all of state overnight, which is what these things do.

You go from neighborhoods of self-sufficiency and people who have built up to be that. They didn’t always have the money for a 10-acre plot. But changing it overnight changes the voting in your states overnight. It changes all of this. Those jobs that Chris mentioned, those elected jobs may well be the thing that stops the expansion of leftism as we work on election integrity, et cetera, at the federal level.

They don’t have the bandwidth to cheat on all the local elections. They just don’t. That is something we must do. Thank you, Chris, and for sticking your neck out there and bringing that up.

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TODD: Let’s talk to Chris in Bend, Oregon. Chris, you’re on the Rush Limbaugh program, Todd Herman, your guide host this week. We’ve got about 90 seconds together, Chris. I’m glad you called. Welcome to Rush’s show.

CALLER: Yeah. Thank you so much for having the opportunity to join your show. I just wanted to follow up to the former city councilor as I am a former city councilor here in Bend. We must continue to have people to serve at the local level so we can create a greater impact at the state level and at the federal level. My comment today is that here in the state of Oregon, I have started a discussion about the inappropriate continuation of the $300 bonus of unemployment.

It is impacting jobs.

It is impacting our industries across the state.

It is creating a labor shortage.

And here in central Oregon, I just am calling to, one, advocate on behalf of all small- to medium-size businesses to really push like Governor Gianforte’s doing up in Montana to have a discussion about ceasing the $300 allowance, and creating more of an incentive for workers to come back to work via the employer. And currently we have State Senator Dan Bonham that is gonna be proposing this on the floor. But we are seriously seeing an impact on this, and it’s not right right now. We need to get the labor force back, back into work.

TODD: Yep.

CALLER: Businesses that are able to reopen can’t reopen.

TODD: Absolutely.

CALLER: Because they don’t have the staff.

TODD: Absolutely. And Chris, maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that doing some research back in the day, I heard once before that disappearing the middle class from a country, that’s sort of bad. Sometimes that turns out poorly like, you know, scapegoating an entire race of people. So maybe we should reverse that.