WMP | Flash
Audio clips available for Rush 24/7 members only -- Join Now!BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Carl, Elizabethtown, Kentucky, welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hello.CALLER: Hey, Rush, you know, I'm a member of the Millennial Generation, I'm 24 years old. Everybody says we're gonna be paying higher taxes because all this debt we're accumulating, but when I look back and I see all this spending, a trillion dollars for ten years for tax cuts to the very rich, it's two unfunded wars, it's Medicare Part D package, all that from the previous administration. I think if you're gonna cut spending you should start there. Start with corporate welfare. Start with these corporate tax loopholes and --
RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho. I have to take a break, and I really want to talk to you.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: You are 24?
CALLER: Twenty-four.
RUSH: Can you hold on through the next break?
CALLER: Absolutely.
RUSH: Good. All right, cool. And you are from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, right?
CALLER: Elizabethtown, Kentucky, that's right.
RUSH: All right. You sit there, Carl, we'll come back and we'll continue right after this. Don't go away.
BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: Okay, we're back with Carl in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. You're 24 years old, and you're from the "Millennial Generation." I want you to start out exactly as you did. Speak a little slower so that I can chat along with you.
CALLER: Okay. Well, you know, as I was saying I'm 24 years old, member of the Millennial Generation and everybody says that all this debt we're accumulating will mean that folks like me will, you know, pay for it if the future.
RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. "People are saying that all the debt we're accumulating now means that people like you will pay for it in the future." That... Carl, I don't care whatever you're gonna say next.
CALLER: Well...
RUSH: Not only is that true, but people older than you are going to be paying for it as well. We already are.
CALLER: (pause) Exactly. So when you talk about cutting spending, you go back over the last ten years, and you see that we spent a trillion dollars on tax cuts for the very rich that haven't (garbled).RUSH: No, we did not. A tax cut is not spending money.
CALLER: A tax cut is denying the government revenue, Rush.
RUSH: Carl... No, no, no, no, no. I'm not... I'm seeking an opportunity here. I don't want to be condescending. I'm seeking an opportunity to reorient the way you have been taught. I want you to intellectually explain to me why you believe a tax cut is government spending. Explain to me what a tax cut is.
CALLER: A tax cut depletes necessary revenue needed to keep the government operational and functioning.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Giving tax cuts to the very rich and to corporations (garbled).
RUSH: Carl, that's not what a tax cut is. A tax cut is you work for a living, and you are paid X. At the present, you have a tax rate -- let's just pick one, may not be accurate -- of 30%. Which means that 30% of every dollar you earn goes to Washington, but the money starts with you. It's yours. You earned it. You did what was necessary to be paid that money.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: If a tax cut happens, and your tax rate goes to 20%, then all of a sudden you get to keep 80¢ of every dollar you earned rather than 70¢ of every dollar you earned. How in the world is that spending?
CALLER: Because when I spend that money out of my own paycheck, that's money that I spend on my own life. When the government spends my tax dollars, they're spending it on necessary infrastructure that's to keep the entire government running, to keep schools running, to keep teachers (garbled).
RUSH: No, no, no, no. Wait a minute. So are you telling me that you believe that it is more important for government to spend whatever money it has than it is for you to spend whatever money you earn?
CALLER: The government spending tax dollars benefits everybody, whereas me spending my own money benefits me.
RUSH: Wrong.
CALLER: So I pay my fair share to the government and (garbled).
RUSH: No. Carl, you are as wrong as you can be. I'm sad to tell you, but you are as wrong as you can be. You spending your money has far more benefit for you -- for your family, for your community, for people that come into your orb -- than the government spending your money. The government wastes your money. The government doesn't really have any money. We're $14 trillion in debt because of their mismanagement of the way they spend money. The government, if roads and bridges were what they do, how come roads and bridges are in such a state of disrepair? 'Cause it's not that they've had a shortage of money.
CALLER: Well, Rush, let me ask you: When Eisenhower was president we had a 90% top tax rate. We put a man on the moon. (sic) We built the Interstate System. We expanded Social Security, we're more prosperous than we have been in... y-years. I mean, that -- that 91% top tax rate (garbled).
RUSH: But we did not have a 90% tax rate. What we had was a series of multiple tax rates. The 90% tax rate was what the super rich paid on the last dollars they earned. However, Carl, they never paid the 90% because at the same time, there were numerous tax shelters in the law, written in the law -- investment opportunities where they could, quote, unquote, "shelter that money" and give it to charity, for example, or invest in real estate or whatever.
CALLER: Or hide it in the Cayman Islands and not pay taxes on it. That's happening right now.
RUSH: Uh, no. No, that's always been illegal. Who's teaching you this stuff?
CALLER: Uhhh, it's all over the news. It's all over. Th-there's plenty of information out there, Rush.
RUSH: I agree it's all over the news, but it's not true. Carl, what I'm trying to tell you is that you're being lied to about all of this. The Interstate Highway System was not built with a 90% tax rate on the American people. A 90% tax rate on the American people would have resulted in the American people stopping working.
CALLER: Mmmm, no. No, we were pretty prosperous during the sixties. That's when the top tax rate was 91%. (sic) Look at history.
RUSH: The number of people who paid... Nobody ever paid 90% on every dollar they earned. Nobody. Even when Reagan took office and the top marginal rate was 70%, nobody paid 70% on every dollar they earned. You have got to somehow get it out of your head that government spends money better than you do. You've got to get it out of your head that all money is government's. They are the worst. They don't produce anything, Carl. They don't create anything. All they do is confiscate from others and destroy wealth. The government does not create wealth. It's the private sector and entrepreneurism that generates growth and opportunity and prosperity for people. It is not the government. Now, you obviously have been taught along the line in school and wherever your news sources are that the government is godlike, the government is benevolent, and that government should have all the money. It is intellectually impossible to say that a tax cut is federal spending. I know Obama's talking about it, but for you to believe that, you must believe that every dollar that exists is government's, and that your salary is is what government decides you should have.CALLER: Well, Rush, my money is my own. I paid my fair share to the government so the government can keep teachers in school and cops working and firefighters who -- you know, working and government operating like it should be. That's why I pay taxes. That's why you pay taxes. That's what I'm saying.
RUSH: But it's --
CALLER: By cutting taxes for the richest Americans, you're creating deficits.
RUSH: But, Carl, see, here's the problem: It isn't working. The whole mess isn't working. We are about to destroy the economy of this country. Nobody is gonna have the ability to earn any money for the government to take it and do anything with it. Carl, you gotta promise me. You've got to promise me that you'll expose yourself to the opposite information, 'cause you are so wrong, you can't imagine -- and the damage you're going to do voting this way is gonna destroy this country if you don't fix it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Twenty-four years old and spouting the mantras. Twenty-four years old, saying things he doesn't possibly understand and saying them well.
BREAK TRANSCRIPTRUSH: Now, I wish I still had Carl from Kentucky on the phone. So much more to say to him. Now, some of you, I checked e-mail, which I always do during the break. "Rush, you wasted your time. He's a lost cause. Twenty-four-year-old kid, thinks he knows everything, why did you waste time? We don't want to hear a caller like that on this program." Oh, no. A call like that is a golden opportunity for me. Even if I blow it with that guy, there are people like him listening, and it was a golden opportunity. I wish I would have had more time. For example, I would have told him, "Carl, do you realize, since about February of 2009 the United States government has spent almost a trillion dollars on roads and bridges?" Highways, as he called them. And yet there hasn't been any change in the highways. No schools have been rebuilt. No roads have been refurbished. No bridges have been ensured against collapse.
I'm sure he would have had some BS answer that he's been taught, but the fact of the matter is we know that that $800 billion did not go to any of those things. That $800 billion was a Democrat Party slush fund and the vast majority of it went to states so that they could keep their state and local employees on the payroll while everybody else was falling prey to the unemployment figures, the unemployment circumstances, while people were losing their jobs, state and local officials -- teachers, the precious teachers. You notice they got to him, made him think who's crucially important: teachers, firemen, cops. None of them lost their jobs. They're starting to now because they're running out of government money because the $800 billion only had a certain life span to it. And I woulda said, "Carl, the $800 billion was spent specifically on keeping teachers and firemen and so forth employed if they were members of unions," and he would have said, "Why? I don't believe you, why?" Because those are all dues-paying members of unions that contribute to the Democrat Party.
So, in essence, the $800 billion to rebuild your precious roads and schools actually was a slush fund, the majority of the money went to Barack Obama and other Democrats and their campaign war chests. It was a money-laundering operation. I would love to have had the time to tell him. I would loved to have say, "Carl, in 1950-some-odd when Dwight Eisenhower was president, your precious 90% tax rate, Jimmy Carter became president in the seventies and somehow we reduced that top rate of 90 to 70%, and then when Ronaldus Magnus came along --" he would have said, "Who?" I would have said, "When Ronald Reagan came along, Carl, do you realize the 70% marginal rate when Ronald Reagan took office generated about $500 billion in revenue to the federal government. When Reagan left office in 1989, the top marginal rate was 28%, and the take, the revenue to the Treasury had nearly doubled, to almost $1 trillion." I would love to have told him this. I doubt that he would have been believed me. He's 24, knows it all and I'm this old fuddy-duddy old man, but I still would have loved the chance to tell him. Somebody's gotta put it in his head. I hope he's still out there listening. And I would have reminded him again, we spent $800 billion, almost a trillion dollars on your precious roads and bridges, and not a one of them was touched. You know, Ronald Reagan explained the 90% tax rate in his Hollywood acting days. He invoked this a lot of times. He said the actors would work six months and then stop because they'd lose 90 cents on every dollar they made over that on more movies. So once they had reached the 90% tax bracket they stopped working because they only kept a dime of it.
At the height of his Hollywood career, Ronaldus Magnus was making $400,000 a movie. With the top federal tax rate over 90%, Reagan used to tell his White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, he always chose to loaf around rather than make more than two pictures a year. Why should I have done a third picture? Even if it was Gone With the Wind, what good would it have done me? Ninety percent goes to the government. But the big thing, somebody's actually gotten to that poor man, young guy, and has actually convinced him that tax cuts are spending. And that's relatively new, that's a new oration from Obama. Well, I know, that, too, the reverence he had, the government always does best with money. He had a reverence for it. That is pure and simple indoctrination in schools, pure and simple. All money was government's to him, and that was fine. And anybody who disagreed with that, they are selfish, and they are greedy.
I get calls like that from young skulls full of mush, folks, I can't help it, I see an opportunity. I like to avail myself of the opportunity. I have no idea how we did with young Carl because we didn't have much time and he did, you know, the typical 24-year-old talking to somebody 60, I don't know what I'm talking about. He knew and knows it all. He was a nice guy, but clearly somebody had told him, "You call Limbaugh and you tell him the way it is. See what Limbaugh says. Listen to the lies Limbaugh tells you." I'm sure that's what he was prepped with. "You listen to how Limbaugh will lie to you and squirm," and all of that. I wonder if Carl's ever heard of JFK? You know, it was JFK that demanded Eisenhower's tax rates be lowered. We have the speech, young Carl, of Kennedy at the Economic Club of New York. In fact, it was the 90% tax bracket that ultimately turned Ronaldus Magnus to the Republican Party.
END TRANSCRIPT