David Limbaugh: The Great Destroyer

David Limbaugh joins Coach Pete to discuss The Great Destroyer and the research behind his book. This June 2012 interview presents Limbaugh’s perspective on government spending, employment, and the political debate of that period. Call 800-661-7383 or text PLAN to 600-700. Transcript Automatically transcribed from this episode; timestamps are approximate. 00:00 In this FinancialSafari.com interview from mid-June 2012, Coach Pete interviews author David Limbaugh. And welcome back into the Financial Safari. This is the time of the show, folks, where we get a national author, someone you've heard about, maybe seen on TV, maybe even read the book. We're lucky, very lucky this week to have Mr. David Limbaugh joining us. His new book is called The Great Destroyer, Barack Obama's War on the Republic. David, welcome in. Hey, thank you. How are you? Good. I'm doing great. Now, David, we are all over the nation. We're on almost 100 stations right here. So folks across the nation are hearing about this book, and it's generating a lot of interest. Explain what caused you to write the book and what you found out in your research on writing 00:46 the book. I wrote the book because I had written Crimes Against Liberty, and it came out in the summer of 2010. And it chronicled Obama's abuses of power and war on the nation from the time of his inauguration until that time. And then I wanted this book, The Great Destroyer, to pick up where that left off, continue the saga and explain exactly what he's doing to destroy the nation in various categories. And I've talked about his war on the economy, war on domestic energy and oil, his war on our national defenses, on our values, and seriously, on our financial picture overall. So in a comprehensive encyclopedic history, current history, I've tried to itemize and discuss everything he's done. 01:32 Literally. I mean, it's chock full of stuff. Charles Krautheimer has said that politics is fought between the 40-yard lines. And again, a lot of decisions happen there. But when we get down to the goal line of things, it does come down to, in the financial aspects of everything, conservative and liberal. And conservatism here, to me, is making sure that you have fiscal responsibility. You've uncovered a lot of cases where that's not the case in the administration. Well, it's pretty stark. In two chapters, I take on the economic issues, chapter five and six, and I show exactly what Obama's record has been and what his prescription is for the future and how he's blocking attempts for us to rein in our spending. Let me just give you a few stats. And you may be familiar with them. He said he would be judged on his performance. 02:19 That's what he said earlier, and that Bush was immoral for the debt he was mounting up. He said if he passed his stimulus bill, if the Congress passed his stimulus bill, he would keep unemployment below 8% by the end of 2012. And in fact, it never, it rarely, if ever, got below 8%. It's been hovering between 8 and 10 ever since. He said he would create three, save or create 3.5 million jobs. In fact, he lost about 4.1 million, which is a 7.6 million difference between what he promised versus what he produced. His stimulus cost something like $278,000 per job. Think of that astronomical figure, $278,000 per job that he did create. It had a net negative effect on GDP. We've had the longest stretch of high unemployment since the Great Depression. We are experiencing the worst recovery since World War II. 03:08 In every other recovery, we had returned to our level of pre-recession level of employment within four years. This recession started December 2007. In December 2011, we were four percentage points below that in our labor employment figures. So every year, I mean, he's now added $5 trillion to the debt, plus it will be $6 trillion before his first term is over. He'll double it if he gets re-elected. And he is refusing to do anything to control spending. His own budget, his last budget, every one of his budgets, he's had $1 trillion plus in his deficit. And in his most recently proposed budget, you'd think he would apply a little austerity. But instead, his own figures show that he would add $750 billion a year over the next 10 years. That's $7.5 trillion. 03:55 The CBO rescored it. It's actually closer to $9.5 trillion, about a trillion a year. What's even worse than that, he claims, Timothy Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, claims he's stabilizing the situation over the next 10 years. In fact, he's not. He's adding a trillion a year. But then after that, Paul Ryan says, well, then it shoots up. It just goes vertical. You do nothing to control entitlement structuring and our unfunded liabilities, which are now almost $100 trillion, increasing at the alarming rate of $10 trillion a year. These are the unfunded liabilities. Ryan has put forth a plan, and I put this in Chapter 6 of The Great Destroyer, and contrast it with Obama's non-plan. Ryan brings us into solvency. Geithner, Obama, and the rest of the administration knuckleheads refuse to do anything about entitlements, 04:42 and they just say, well, we don't like your plan. We're not going to offer our own. We just don't like yours. Why they don't like it? They could offer their own, regardless of whether they like ours. But what they don't like about Ryan's plan, they say, is that it doesn't protect seniors and the middle class. In fact, Ryan's plan specifically carves out special protection for those two groups. So they're lying about that. Who knows what their end game is? I mean, a lot of people have suggested that they are deliberately destroying the country and the economy. I think that's a reasonable inference based on their policies. But I don't go that far. I just say what they are doing is intentionally implementing policies that will necessarily destroy the country, take us into bankruptcy. That much is intentional. Whether they view the end game as destruction is another question. 05:27 I think Obama and his liberal utopians see that as a wonderful conclusion where everybody is equal in outcomes and not equal opportunity. We're no longer the strongest nation in the world. We defer to international bodies in some blissful transnationalistic phase. And so I think that it's a completely different America that you and I grew up in and that you and I want to preserve for our children. Folks, we're talking to David Limbaugh. He's author of The Great Destroyer and several other books. But that's a good book to talk about now since you just wrote it. Inside your book, you talk about in July 2011, Eric Holder, who's been in the news a little bit lately, hasn't he, ordered banks to relax the mortgage qualifications for the poor. That's the same insane policy that led to the housing crash in the first place, David. 06:15 Yeah. It's just mind-blowing that these do-gooder liberal policies that were supposed to get everyone in affordable housing and force banks to lend money to people whose loans weren't creditworthy and they had no ability to pay it back was one of the primary causal factors that led to this housing crisis. And instead of learning from it, they want to double down on it, just like with the stimulus. The stimulus didn't work, $868 billion thrown at the economy, didn't do any good, just got us further into debt. And Obama's answer, $50 billion more for infrastructure, high-speed rail. Now he won, then he next won at $447 billion on Stimulus Jr., his new jobs bill. So I think they're unteachable, they're incorrigible ideologues, mainly Obama, the people he surrounds himself with. 07:02 It's horrifying. I don't know at this point how anyone can reasonably vote for him. I really don't. I don't know why they're supporting him, the people that are. Mr. Limbaugh, what is the true goal here of the war on the economy that Obama and his ilk seem to be waging right now? He sees a different America than I do, than conservatives do, than red-blooded patriots do, than the Tea Partiers do. He sees Tea Partiers and people who believe in rugged individualism and entrepreneurism and the profit motive as bitter clingers, people that are stingy and selfish and don't want to share. He wants to use the offices of government, the power of government, to coerce people out of their money and redistribute it to people he thinks are more deserving. 07:48 Well, this has never worked in history. Liberals think it's compassionate, and they're always patting themselves on the back for confiscating other people's money and giving it to people they want to give it to. It has a deleterious, damaging effect on the economy. It constricts the pie. It reduces GDP and growth, and everybody ends up having less. You can see the malaise that covers the country now, the feelings of pessimism, the fear, the unwillingness of businesses to hire, because they're so unsure of what's going to happen in this climate of uncertainty, of unprecedented regulations that Obama has imposed on the country. And by the way, he has amassed federal regulations at an unprecedented pace. He's dwarfed those of Bush, and those of Bush were bad enough. If for some reason, somehow, if Obama is elected for another term, where do you see the country here in the next ten years if Obama serves a second term? 08:40 Well, it's a bleak picture. And as much abuse of power as Obama has engaged in, as much as he's issued executive orders to get around Congress, as much as he's unleashed his unaccountable administrative agencies to do their mischief, when he faces the prospect of being defeated in an election for re-election, just think about what he would do if he was a lame duck for four years and didn't have to worry because it was his last term. He could become even more lawless, exceed his authority even more, and there's no telling the kinds of things he could do. I mean, he's already imposed draconian rules through his EPA. So, for example, his CAFE standards, doubling his CAFE standards so that car mileage required goes from 30.2 to 55.4 or whatever, just completely unattainable, 09:29 will send us all into battery-powered cars going two miles an hour or whatever it is. He has passed a rule, the EPA has passed a rule concerning coal that they can't emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. It requires them to cut in half almost the amount they're emitting into the atmosphere, which is virtually impossible. It's unsupported by science. And in no time at all, it will shut down, if it's effective, shut down new coal plants. Basically shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility, again, based on no science, but just his policy of wanting to curtail nukes, because if you don't have a safe storage facility, you can't really develop nuclear power. And so, despite Congress having spent $12 billion, he's nevertheless at war against nuclear energy. 10:15 Same thing with oil. You saw him impose the moratorium using the Gulf oil spill as an excuse, manipulating the data, lying about the possible damage that the leak, that the spill would cause, and that imposing these regulations would cause, and a moratorium would cause, and then understating the amount of damage that his moratorium would cause. And he's actually manipulated a report that came out from some experts on this in order to achieve the result that he wanted to achieve. When the federal court lifted the ban, saying that the drilling had to begin again, he just had his Secretary of Interior, Ken Salazar, rewrite the rules to get around the court order. And then, when the moratorium was finally about to be lifted, he imposed new, very stringent rules to get permits. 11:00 And so, when he finally announced the ban was being lifted, the newly revised ban, the newly drafted ban, was lifted, open for business. Well, in fact, it was very cynical because he wasn't, as a practical matter, open for business because he had issued such strict regulations that we ended up having a de facto moratorium or permatorium, as some people were calling it. So, he's basically shut down oil drilling to the extent that he could, too. So, it's on and on and on in The Great Destroyer. I document how he's been at war with all aspects of what you and I would consider great and good in this country. Well, David, this war on energy is confusing to me because they always try to push people to the battery-powered devices, but do they not realize it takes energy to recharge those batteries? Yeah, that's another good point. I don't know how these eggheads would have us get around that. 11:48 But I don't know. I don't know what they're thinking. What was the guy's name that had the novel he was chasing the windmills around there in the old Portuguese novel? Don Quixote. It's sort of like a Don Quixote novel. They want windmills everywhere, and that's not going to work. They don't want them in their own yard, though. Yeah, exactly. And I do refer to them as Quixotic quite often. Folks, his name is David Limbaugh. The book is called The Great Destroyer, Barack Obama's War on the Republic. And one final question, David. Is your brother Rush proud of you for this book? It seems to be. I mean, he mentioned my book for several minutes on his show, and then he interviewed me for his upcoming Limbaugh letter. So, yeah, we work very closely together, and we're mutually supportive. Yeah. Now, this book is climbing the bestsellers list. I mean, folks can get a hold of this by going to Amazon, all the bookstores. 12:35 Anywhere else they can get a copy? Yeah, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the bookstores, as far as I know, are carrying it. It's out there pretty much in pretty big numbers. Again, folks, the name of the book, The Great Destroyer, the author, David Limbaugh. David, thanks for your time today. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for listening to this interview on The Financial Safari. Remember, folks, if you have any questions about this interview or your financial situation, you can email the team from The Financial Safari at comments at financialsafari.com.