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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Rush on Stimulus and GDP

We are not growing.  The debt is growing.  We do not have GDP growth.  One percent, two percent, it's nothing.  The private sector is shrinking!  It's being torn apart.  The private sector's being taken over by the Obama regime.  Twenty percent of it, gone.  They now took health care away or are in the process of it.  Twenty percent of the US economy has just been transferred to Obama.  The US national debt is about 73% of gross domestic product.  This from the CBO last Tuesday. Seventy-three percent of the GDP is the national debt. 
The percentage of debt is higher than any point since World War II.  Twice the percentage it was at the end of 2007.  The percentage of debt is not going down.  It's skyrocketing, and precisely because of taking on new debt like the stimulus, for which we got zilch.  But it was not possible to get anything but zilch from the stimulus.  The only way, I'm gonna 'splain this again.  It's not hard and I don't mean to sound condescending, it's just frustrating.  They take simple stuff and make it so complicated that people can't understand it so they don't try and they just:  "I don't want to hear about it, I don't want to hear about it.  I know it's bad." 
If we had a trillion dollars somewhere that we didn't have to pay for, that we didn't have to take from somewhere else, if we had a trillion dollars laying around that we could put in a syringe and inject it into the economy, then that would definitely be a stimulus.  But there's a problem.  We don't have a trillion dollars anywhere.  We are in debt $17 trillion.  Even if we borrow a trillion dollars, even if it is at zero percent, the long-term interest rates are not zero percent.  We can't borrow money and not pay it back.  We're not going to be able to borrow money from anybody at zero. 
You think the ChiComs are going to lend us a trillion dollars and say, "Just pay us back a trillion dollars in 20 years"?  What kind of nonsense is this?  There's no free money.  As such, there was no way to stimulate the US economy, because essentially if we're going to put a trillion dollars into it, we have to find that trillion, and it isn't laying around idly.  It's somewhere.  Essentially what we did is we took a trillion dollars from the US economy and put it back in and said we are stimulating, but we didn't.  We didn't change it.  We didn't grow the economy a penny.  In fact, the stimulus shrank the economy because it artificially pumped money into places that otherwise would not have had it, union jobs and so forth. 
We were lied to, left and right, about what the money was for.  It was not to rebuild infrastructure.  It never was for that.  It was a money laundering scheme to end up some of the money in the Democratic Party, others to guarantee union jobs.  It expanded the baseline of the US budget so that every budget from there on after expanded by about half a trillion dollars.  That's the way the baseline budgeting works.  There was no free money out there that wasn't being used.  The only way, folks, you can stimulate something is if you've got free money not being used.
If you earn $100,000 a year and you're in debt and somebody comes along and says, "Here's 75 grand," and it doesn't cost you anything.  There's no tax.  There's no borrowing.  That would be a huge stimulus for you.  There's no question.  But that doesn't happen, does it?  When's the last time somebody gave you 50 grand?  It doesn't happen with countries either.  If you wanted to go borrow $50,000, you would not be stimulating your overall economic circumstance.  Now, you might be able to go out and buy a bigger house or new car or whatever, but you're still faced with paying that back and it's going to cost you much more than what amount you borrowed. 
This Keynesian stuff is smoke and mirrors.  It just doesn't work.  So this guy called, and he's obviously been reading Paul Krugman and Thomas Loopy Friedman and they're the ones running around saying:  "You know what, Obama goofed.  He should have done what FDR did.  He should have doubled the stimulus.  He didn't do enough." 
If that stimulus had been $2 trillion, we would be worse off than we are now.  There would not be any genuine sustained new economic activity.  It's like Clinton's 10,000 cops program or whatever the number was, Clinton got into trouble so he devised this program.  The federal government was going to pay for new cops to be hired in local communities.  The 100,000 cops program.  It was an offshoot of Midnight Basketball.  Remember that?  Midnight Basketball to keep the drug guys off the streets.  So they just did their drug stuff in the daytime, played basketball at midnight.  Didn't change a thing other than sleep patterns. 
The 100,000 cops program.  The federal government paid local communities whatever it took to hire two or three new policemen for the first year.  The second year, the local communities had to kick in 30% of the new cop salary.  The third year 60% and by year four the federal government was out of program and the local communities had to pay for the cops or the cops were gone.  And what happened?  After three or four years, the cops were laid off because the local communities couldn't afford it in the first place. 
There was no stimulus.  There was an artificial rearranging of assets brought on by the 100,000 cops program.  But it was not genuine.  The money behind it was not produced by genuine economic activity.  The government picking and choosing who gets money and where it comes from is not genuine economic activity.  It is artificial.  It's picking winners and losers and there's no substance behind it.  And there was no substance to this stimulus.  It never had a prayer.  The fact is, and the real fraud is, that most of the people behind it knew exactly what I just told you, that it wouldn't work.  It was nothing more than a political play coming out of a manufactured three-year recession. 
Then the financial crisis hits and that was real for all intents and purposes.  So Obama comes along, "I'm gonna save it. I'm going to pump a trillion dollars in the stimulus on roads and bridges." 
"Yay! Yay! He cares!"  It didn't matter if they ever saw a penny of it.  Obama cared.  Bush didn't.  Obama's trying to fix things.  Obama likes us.  He loves us.  He's trying to fix this.  Obama would go out and do his town hall meeting.  "Hey, bro, when are you going to build my new kitchen?"  Obama said, "See my assistant when we're all finished here."  That's what people thought Obama was, or was going to do, that he had a stash.  There is no stash, folks.  We don't have a single dollar sitting around not being used that we can use to pump up other economic activity.  This Keynesian stuff, it's never worked.  It does not work.
For those of you shouting: "New Deal, New Deal."  The New Deal didn't work.  The New Deal exacerbated the recovery from 1929.  The New Deal delayed the recovery for the exact reasons I'm giving you.  It was all artificial and the purpose of the New Deal was to cement Democrat Party power in perpetuity.  Santa Claus, paying people not to work, whatever you want to call it.  That's what the New Deal was.  It was World War II that finally brought us out of the Great Depression.  It was not the New Deal. 
There's not one arrow in Obama's quiver that can change this economy the way he's using it.  All he's doing is adding to the debt, shrinking the private sector, slowing down whatever economic activity remains in the private sector.  There isn't any growth.  There isn't any exuberance.  There isn't any excitement.  There isn't anybody feeling up and positive about anything.  Everybody's still scared to death not knowing really how health care is going to shake out.  They don't really know yet when what's going to get implemented and for how long.  They don't yet know how they're going to be taxed or punished or what have you. 
College students coming out of college can't find a job.  They've got all this debt.  They don't know what to do.  There isn't any unified sense of national purpose in any of our economic activity.  There is an absolute total malaise out there.  And if Obama's stimulus was two trillion, it wouldn't have mattered because it was artificial.  It was money that didn't exist.  There isn't any money hanging around we're not using that can be thrown at economic activity and actually cause it to grow.  Not possible.  You can't do it in your personal life.  Governments can't do it.  Nations can't do it.  Ask Greece. Ask these clowns over at the European Union. That's what they've been trying for 30 years and they're a collective joke. 
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH:  "So, Rush, what would you do?"  Look it, we've got a blueprint. We've got a blueprint that both parties are scared to death of and want to erase from your memory and pretend that it never happened.  And a blueprint is Ronald Reagan.  We were coming out of exactly where we are now.  Jimmy Carter, this is Jimmy Carter's second term.  We're actually in a little worse shape now, the misery index with Carter was higher.  But Jimmy Carter was a doddering, bumbling fool. This guy that's the president now is doing this on purpose.  That's the difference.  I mean, he's on a mission.  Jimmy Carter was just doing his standard ordinary everyday liberalism, taking his orders from Zbigniew Brzezinski, talking to David Rockefeller and the Trilateral bunch and they're going around doing their business.  I'm just kidding about the latter part.  I'm sorry, I can't help myself. 
But there's a blueprint here.  You lower tax rates.  You free up capital.  You leave it in the private sector and you come up with policies that are going to grow the pie.  You want more people working, that leads to more tax revenue for government coffers.  You want to lower people's tax rates, inspiring them to work harder to earn more money.  It works!  There's a blueprint for this and it led to two 49 state landslide victories for Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party, and they still try to distance themselves from it. 
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2014/02/18/caller_thinks_stimulus_wasn_t_big_enough_asks_what_rush_would_have_done

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/02/the-obama-stimulus-at-5-did-it-work-on-humility-and-high-causal-density/

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