Author Topic: The Republicans Don't Need to Do Anything; Obama Has to Learn to Prioritize Spen  (Read 1187 times)

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The Republicans Don't Need to Do Anything; Obama Has to Learn to Prioritize Spending to Avoid Default
July 11, 2011



BEGIN TRANSCRIPT



President Obama on Tax Cuts and Unemployment Extension


RUSH:  Everybody's wondering what happened, everybody wants to know, I mean the Washington establishment, the media, and on the Democrat side, everybody's wondering what the hell happened between Friday and Sunday with Boehner.  What happened?  They can't figure it out.  Nobody has the slightest idea.  What happened?  AP can't figure it out.  AP twice can't figure it out.  Reuters can't. Rupert Murdoch doesn't even know. 

Greetings, my friends, welcome.  Rush Limbaugh, the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.  Great to have you with us.  We are here at 800-282-2882, as always.  Our e-mail address is ElRushbo@eibnet.com. 

Man, this is gonna be fun today.  There's lots of stuff out there.  Just finished an Obama press conference. It was boring, it was repetitive, there was no teleprompter.  He was at a loss for words.  He either thinks we're stupid and speaks slow so we can keep up, or -- yeah, he actually comes up with this, what was it, time to pull off the Band-Aid and eat your peas, we all have to eat our peas.  That's mother talk, for crying out loud. That's not even daddy talk.  That's mother talk.  Is that what Michelle says to him when they eat dinner in the residence quarters?  Time to shut up, Barack, eat your peas.  For crying out loud, when's the last time you heard that, folks? 

Anyway, did you notice if you watched it, if you listened to any of it, the suddenly different tone Obama took at today's presser?  This was intended to be a do-over for his last really ugly press conference, wasn't that long ago.  That was the tough guy approach, if you recall, tough guy.  It must not have polled too well.  So now we got the nice guy Obama today, and folks, I think he ought give up this showing up every day, every other day, make a speech, do a press conference for 45 minutes, for an hour.  Just go the full dictator route and just show up as Castro, do one eight-hour speech once a month and be done with it.  This is not thrilling.  He's not converting anybody here.  It's almost like he was trying to evoke sympathy from his own base and supporters about how mean the Republicans are and about how recalcitrant -- that may work, but I don't think anybody wants to feel bad for him.  If that's what he's trying to do is make people feel sorry for him, and I fully wouldn't be surprised by that, either.  I mean narcissists and people like that think that everybody else thinks about them all the time like they think about themselves all the time. 

This is funny, AP: "A debt-busting deal on the scale that President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner had talked about would have all but guaranteed that people on Medicare would feel at least some of the pain. But on Saturday evening, Boehner said he wouldn't seek the $4 trillion deficit reduction deal, but would seek $2 trillion in reductions. The exact effects of that shift by Boehner weren't immediately clear."  Well, they were to us.  He-he-he-he.  And they were to any of you who listened to this program on Friday. It was patently obvious, was it not? 

Number two.  "Last week, Boehner and Obama had private talks that led Democrats to believe the House speaker was willing to entertain revenue increases as part of a full overhaul of the tax code later this year in exchange for Democrats agreeing to stiff curbs on the growth of Medicare and lower increases in Social Security cost-of-living adjustments. But Boehner recoiled and abandoned the idea Saturday night in a move that rattled the talks."  And they're scratching their heads out there, the AP trying to figure out, what happened?  What went wrong?  What changed?  We thought we had this guy ready to give us everything we wanted, including Obama's reelection, and then all of a sudden, bam, a total stop and even a reversal. 
So Obama's out there pushing this magic August 2nd deadline to get this thing done.  That's because Ramadan starts August 1st.  (laughing)  Well, it does.  I looked it up.  Yeah, I'll tell you one thing is clear, and I don't think this is a surprise to anybody.  Any real change in the right direction for the country is going to be impossible without a real change in the White House.  I mean that's what this boils down to.  Let me put this in perspective for you.  Even the big deal, even this giant, major, really rolling up the sleeves and getting serious about it $4 trillion deal.  Come on, that's over ten years.  We are running an annual deficit of one and half trillion dollars.  Until you amortize it over ten years, then you realize that this big deal that everybody's talking about, this really tough, I mean man, unprecedented big deal would be $400 billion a year in cuts.  We ought to be insisting on $1 trillion a year in cuts if we're serious about this, and a lot of people are.  Referring to voters, I am.  A lot of people are very serious, $400 billion a year doesn't sound like much, does it, when you've got a deficit of one and a half trillion, but four trillion over ten years, whoa, wow, man, four trillion, 4,000 billion.  Holy cow.  It's $400 billion a year, and over ten years, it means the cuts in nine of those ten years never happen because you do a budget every year. 



And the dirty little secret -- and of course all of this, folks, I got details, I'm giving you little headlines here what's coming the balance of the program.  The dirty little secret here -- and I mentioned this on Friday, I said really Boehner is not under any pressure, not from his voters.  Boehner's not under any pressure from his base to do this deal, particularly on Obama's terms.  And the dirty little secret here is the Republicans don't have to seek any kind of deal with the Democrats.  They can sit back and they can do nothing except vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling.  Now, everything I read over the weekend, even some Republicans say at some point, oh, yeah, we gotta raise the debt -- it's going to happen, it's just a matter of how they get there.  But they don't have to.  They don't have to.  They don't have to seek any kind of deal with the Democrats.  They can sit back and they can do nothing except vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling.  It is Obama and the Democrats that are gonna have to figure out how to prioritize payments so the interest on our debt gets paid, but that's their problem.  We don't have to do anything. 

It's up to Obama whether that debt gets paid, whether it gets rolled over and paid or not.  I'll explain that as the program unfolds, but it's up to the Democrats and Obama to do that.  That's only fair because it's mostly their debt in the first place.  We don't have to help them out of this.  I'm not even engaging in hard negotiation talk.  I'm just giving you facts.  The Republicans really don't have to do anything here.  Now, when I say Boehner's not under pressure from the base, but he is under pressure.  My God, you got the media, the Sunday shows, I mean the whole mind-set is, we gotta do something, we gotta do something.  They always gotta do something in Washington.  Geithner on the Sunday shows, oh, oh, oh, it's gonna be worse, oh, the American people have no idea how bad it's gonna be, oh, it's horrible.  Gotta do something. 

No, we don't.  Don't doubt me.  Republicans don't have to do anything.  Obama and the Democrats have to figure out how to prioritize payments.  Now, the Democrats and the media, some of the leftist schlubs are out there saying, "Hey, wait, the 14th Amendment, there's a little clause in there that gives Obama the authority to spend money without Congress saying anything."  No, it doesn't.  No, it doesn't.  It's another trick.  They're taking one line out of context.  I will explain that as the program unfolds.  But let me tell you how the only way the country goes into default is if Obama does not prioritize the debt, and that would only happen if he let it happen, which would mean that he wants the country to go into default, 'cause it's very easily avoided.  He may not want to avoid it, I don't know.  But it's easy to avoid going into debt.  And we explain this in great detail on Friday.  The debt service is simply the bonds, not paying down the debt, not paying down the deficit, not paying down the national debt is simply servicing the bonds, that's all we're talking about here, and we can do that with existing revenue.  It's plain and simple. 
I'm watching the press conference, it's Groundhog Day.  I'm saying, "Didn't I just hear this?  Didn't he just do this press conference?"  There were parts of this I was confused 'cause I thought Obama told us for years that government spending was stimulus, but now, if you listen closely to this press conference, it's bad.  We've gotta do something about it now.  It's the same old thing.  He gets to sit around and spend all the money, and then after the fact act like a spectator and say, "Now we gotta have fiscal responsibility.  This has been out of control for much too long."  It's like he hasn't been president for the last two and a half years.  So all of a sudden now government spending is bad.  Two months ago it was stimulus.  A year ago it was stimulus.



By the way, couple of stories, this is hilarious.  And I think the stories are honest.  That they're depressed and frustrated and really beaten down in the White House.  They say they've tried everything.  There's nothing left.  There aren't any other options.  There's nothing else we can do.  They've tried it all, and it hasn't worked and they are depressed as hell.  I have two stories on this.  That's why they're depressed, that's why the libs are mad.  This is their opportunity for utopia, panacea, this was where all the magic was gonna happen, and all they've done is make it worse by compound of two or three, and so now, oh my God, there's nothing left to do.  They think they cut taxes in December, see, by leaving the Bush tax rates the same, they think they cut taxes, just like they used to think West Wing really was the government, the TV show.  They think they cut taxes by leaving the Bush tax rates alone in December.  Which, by the way, Obama back in December, "We can't raise taxes. Not in this economy."  Now six months later, "We gotta raise taxes.  We gotta raise taxes to be fair."  What's changed, other than things have only gotten worse?  And we couldn't raise taxes in December. 

We told you what this was all about.  In December Republicans held all the cards even though they had not been sworn in as the majority in the House of Representatives.  So the Bush tax rates remained the same through 2012, and it was the predictable, we said so, that beginning shortly after January this year he would start campaigning for 2012 to please his base, to try to get 'em back for ticking them off, leaving the Bush tax rates the same, tax increasing would be his campaign theme.  And he's doing it.  He's simply following through on what we and a lot of other people knew he would do after leaving the Bush tax rates alone, saying we couldn't afford, our economy could not withstand new taxes last December.  That ticked off the base.  So now he's going to the wall for massive tax increases on everybody.  He even included best-selling authors in his complaint today.  Where is that?  Yeah.  He says he doesn't want hedge fund managers and best-selling authors to get away with not paying their fair share.



Now, what best-selling author do you think he had in mind?  Himself. (interruption) What, you're thinking Vince Flynn?  (laughing)  I was, too, when he said best-selling author. I was thinking Vince Flynn or Ted Bell or Jim Patterson or any number of these, 'cause I've been reading so many good books lately I can't even remember all the names.  James Huston, Marine One, five o'clock in the morning book.  Yeah.  Marine One, James Huston.  And then Steve Berry, The Jefferson Key, another five o'clock in the morning book.  Novels are escape for me.  I love reading them.  I'm downloading books continuously on my iPad, and that's where I read 'em.  There's a lot of them out there.  So he says he doesn't want hedge fund managers and best-selling authors to get away with not paying their fair share.  Oh, and Roy Spencer, our official climatologist, has a new book out, or coming out, he sent me a copy of it.  Ann Coulter's book is out, and it's doing great.  He could have been talking about Coulter, but he's talking about himself.  He can't resist bringing himself into the conversation.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I just want you to hear Obama saying this. Ben Feller, the AP White House correspondent during the press conference says to Obama, "On your no short-term stopgap measure declaration, if it came down to that and Congress went that route, I know you're opposed to it, but would you veto it?"

OBAMA: I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension. That -- that is just not an acceptable approach.

RUSH: Of course not!

OBAMA: And if we think it's gonna be hard...

RUSH: Yeah.

OBAMA: -- if we think it's hard now --

RUSH: Yeah.

OBAMA: -- imagine how these guys are gonna be thinkin' six months from now i-i-in the middle of e-election season when they're all up. It's not gonna get easier; it's gonna get harder. So we might as well do it now. Uh, pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas. Uh, eh, y-you know, now's the time to do it.

RUSH: "Eat our peas." The president of the United States talking in this manner is mother talk. It's mother talk. So hedge fund managers, best-selling authors, gotta make sure that they don't get away without paying their fair share. Now, hedge fund managers get a bonus at the end of the year. This is the carried interest that I described to you last week. It's carried interest, because they're the early investors and they get paid first, the hedge fund managers. Well, not first. They actually get paid near the end, but Obama wants to do away with carried interest, which would tax their income at earned income rates rather than capital gains.

And, by the way, that's thanks to Chris Dodd and a bunch of other politicians, Democrats, who wrote the law that way! They created the carried interest business. Now Obama wants to go in and wipe it out, but authors do not pay taxes at the capital gains rate; they pay the top marginal rate, which is 35%. I don't know if he knows that or, as I say, is just a narcissist and has to include himself in the conversation like Clinton. (impression) "Yeah, I've done well since I left office. Hillary and I (chuckles) ever since I met Burkle, you know, I've done great."

By the way, speaking of Burkle, the New York Post had a story where Ron Burkle said the worst thing ever happened to him was hiring Clinton for his investment company, Yucaipa. Berkeley, a billionaire grocery store guy, hired Clinton. He flew Clinton around in his private jets. There were some really obscene names for Burkle's jet when Clinton was flying around on it, by the way. Not Air Force One, but "Air [Pfft!] One" was what that plane was known as when Clinton was on it, and Burkle said: Yeah, my reputation's kinda gone south ever since that happened, since I hired Clinton. It's "the dumbest thing I ever did." So, okay, imagine how hard it's gonna be when these guys are up for reelection.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  By the way, Dr. Spencer's new book, he's our official climatologist, Roy Spencer, the new book is Fundanomics: The Free Market Simplified.  It's not available at Amazon.com.  It's only available at Fundanomics.org, and it was released on July 4th.  Fundanomics: The Free Market Simplified, Dr. Roy Spencer.  It's just another one of the excellent books that's out there.

So imagine how hard it will be with these guys when they're up for reelection, doing this budget deal and a debt ceiling deal, he's up for reelection.  That's part of the problem.  Imagine how hard it's gonna be for him.  That's what he doesn't want to be the reality.  He's trying to grease his own skids here.  Imagine how hard it's gonna be for him.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Remember, now, Obama goes out, last December, when he extended the Bush tax cuts, he said it would save a million jobs.  I've got that sound bite.  Here it is, December 6, 2010, Eisenhower Executive Office Building.  This is Obama speaking about a compromise to extend the Bush tax rates, cuts, if you will, and this a little bit of what he said.

OBAMA:  The American people didn't send us here to wage symbolic battles or win symbolic victories.  They would much rather have the comfort of knowing that when they open their first paycheck on January of 2011, it won't be smaller than it was before, all because Washington decided they preferred to have a fight and failed to act.  Make no mistake.  Allowing taxes to go up on all Americans would have raised taxes by $3,000 for a typical American family, and that could cost our economy well over a million jobs.

RUSH:  That's last December.  My jaw hits the floor when I listen to that, and then listen to his press conference today or anything he said in the last three months, six months, whatever.  The economy was weak at the end of last year, and it's worse today than it was then.  And he said if the Bush tax cuts were not extended it would trigger the loss of a million jobs.  Now he wants to what?  Trigger the loss of a million jobs.  He wants to end the Bush tax cuts.  You know, I live in Realville.  The mayor, also the dogcatcher.  There are not too many of us here.  Town council president, I'm it.  Police chief.  I feel so alone in Realville.  What do we need to do here?  Six months ago he says we can't raise taxes; it would cost a million jobs.  Americans would find their tax bill go up $3,000 for an average family.  Today I want a million jobs lost.  We need to trigger a tax policy that will cost a million jobs and will cost you an additional $3,000 in federal taxes.  Talking about the same people here.

It was those big tax increases on those making over $250,000 a year that would cost jobs.  The president knew it, Bill Clinton joined him at the podium, by the way, last December.  Clinton was in full agreement.  Now, the economy is even weaker today.  So my question is why will Obama's tax increase on job creators today not trigger the loss of a million jobs?  Why would it do so in December but not now?  No, Snerdley, this is one of these questions we're not supposed to ask.  This is one of those statements we're not even supposed to remember.  We're not supposed to remember this.  I mean there's no rational reason to raise taxes.  There's no rational reason to demand tax increases when 14 million Americans are out of work.  And using his own words, Obama's own words, his own logic, if you can call it that, the tax increase that he demanded today and over the weekend will put an additional one million Americans -- Boehner, Cantor, all you've gotta do next negotiating session, go in and play this back for him, put it on your iPhone and take it in there.

Put it in your iTunes, I'll show you how to do it if you don't know how.  I'll send you the MP3 file of the bite. I'll send it to Boehner, I'll do that, I'll send it to him.  Load this on your iPhone or BlackBerry.  No, I'm not gonna send him an iPhone. That's probably a violation of a gift law, some such thing.  Regardless, just go in the room and play this.  You know something else I'd do?  I'd go public with what's being said in there.  Yeah, Obama gets to hide behind the privacy, then at the same time demanding transparency.  Who's really saying what in these meetings?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT



RUSH: What Boehner ought to do, go play golf at Obama's favorite course, tell him, "Look, when you're ready to cut spending, you let me know.  Otherwise it's automatically gonna go into default on August 2nd."  And, by the way, that's the point.  Cutting, big cutting occurs automatically on August 2nd.  The debt gets serviced first and the rest of the government's cut.  That's what happened.  "You want to talk seriously, fine.  'Til that, we'll just keep teeing it up out here at your favorite course, and I'll invite Limbaugh." That'll speed it up, I guarantee you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: My favorite part of the press conference today was Chip Reid.  We're preparing it now.  Kokos Junior and The Third are working on it even now, but Chip Reid basically said two-thirds of the American people oppose raising the debt ceiling. They think the country's headed in the wrong direction.  Why are you persisting?  The answer is priceless.  I mean it's the definition of tone deaf.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is that sound bite that I referred to earlier.  Chip Reid, I'll read the question.  Chip Reid said to Obama, "You said that everybody in the room is willing to do what they have to do, wants to get something done by August 2nd.  But isn't the problem the people who aren't in the room, in particular Republican presidential candidates, Republican Tea Partiers on the Hill, the American public?  The latest CBS News poll showed that only 24% of Americans said that you should raise the debt limit to avoid an economic catastrophe.  There's still 69% who oppose raising the debt limit.  So is this a problem that you and others have failed to convince the American people that we have a crisis here, and how are you going to change that?"

OBAMA:  Let me distinguish between professional politicians and the public at large.  You know, the public is not paying close attention to the ins and outs of how a Treasury auction goes --

RUSH:  Stop tape.

OBAMA:  -- they shouldn't.

RUSH:  Obama is saying people are too stupid to know the ins and outs.  They're too stupid to understand how all this works, Chip.  Your question is idiotic because the voters that you're talking about in your poll don't know what they're talking about.  He goes on to say they're too focused on their own lives to pay attention to this, the ins and outs, and they're depending on us to solve this.

OBAMA:  Chip, they're worried about their family, they're worried about their jobs, they're worrying about their neighborhood.  They've got a lot of other things on their plate.  We're paid to worry about it.  I think, depending on how you phrase the question, if you said to the American people, is it a good idea for the United States not to pay its bills and potentially create another recession, they could throw millions of more people out of work, I feel pretty confident I could get a majority on my side on that one.  And that's the fact.  If we don't raise the debt ceiling and we see a crisis of confidence in the markets and suddenly interest rates are going up significantly, and everybody is paying higher interest rates on their car loans, on their mortgages, on their credit cards, and that's sucking up a whole bunch of additional money out of the pockets of the American people, I promise you, they won't like that.



RUSH:  Stop the tape a second here now.  If you ask the American people is it a good idea for us not to pay our bills, that's not going to happen.  Somebody on the Republican side needs to sit there and say, "We are not going to default on Ramadan."  DeMint has been saying it.  Yeah, in fact I think I've got a bite of DeMint saying that.  But there needs to become a Republican chorus.  Now, what Obama is saying here -- and I'm not gonna play the rest of, because it's nothing different. It's just (mumbling,) and (mumbling), and -- by the way, you know where that started?  John Edwards.  You know, I'm a speech pattern expert, because I'm an impressionist, I like to mimic people.  And I noticed that John Edwards said that a lot, every time I listened to him speak when he got into the presidential sweepstakes, started showing up at these debates, he'd look out, (imitating Edwards) "Hey, hey, are you poor?  How long have you been poor?"  And he'd start talking about "aaaand, aaaand."  And it wasn't long after that Obama started saying "and" in the same way.  Here, listen a little more, you'll see I'm right.  Listen to a little more of this.

OBAMA:  Now, I will say that some of the professional politicians know better, and for them to say that we shouldn't be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible.  They know better.  Aaaand, you know, this is something that, you know, I am, uhhh, am making up, this is not something that Tim Geithner's making up, we -- we're not out here --

RUSH:  What he's saying here is where the hell is my teleprompter?

OBAMA:  -- use this as a means of doing all these really tough political things, I'd rather be talking about stuff that, you know, everybody welcomes, like new programs or, you know, the NFL season getting resolved.

RUSH:  New programs?

OBAMA:  You know, unfortunately this is what's on our plate.  It's before us right now, and we've gotta deal with it.  So what -- what -- what you're right about --

RUSH:  Well, he's not saying it there, but you'll notice it in the future, he says "aaaand."  I notice these things, and they irritate.  But that's essentially the way he chose to answer the question, exactly what David Plouffe said, by the way.  The American people aren't gonna be worried about unemployment numbers and the status of the unemployed.  The American people aren't gonna care about that.  When 2012 comes around, they're not gonna worry about the unemployment rate or what's happened to their neighbors.  They're only gonna be worried about what's happening to them.  He starts talking about all this stuff that's gonna suck money outta people's back pockets.  What the hell does he think tax increases do?


END TRANSCRIPT

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