It's Monday and you know what that means. If Rush Limbaugh is talking about numbers on a Monday he's going to slaughter them.
I counted two major instances today of getting it totally backwards.
The first, on Janet Yellen, is totally missing from the transcripts. He had said she will completely reverse the Bernanke policy and tighten when everyone knows she'll do no such thing. Someone must have called him to correct him, and then he reversed what he had said previously, and corrected it (
here) to avoid looking like the total boob that he is:
I was misinformed by a self-professed market expert. Anyway, my bad. I got 'em reversed. That's why the market's doing well today. It is because the priming of the stock market pump is scheduled to continue unabated if this Yellen woman ends up being the chairman of the Fed. Now, I'll give you the stats on all this quantitative easing. It's basically $85 billion a month. What it is, is they're not really printing the money.
In other words, the man with the golden EIB microphone doesn't have the brains to discern the one position from the other, nor is any real knowledge about the subject he may possess anything but completely derivative. He relies on what other people whom he trusts tell him, and can't reason it out for himself, not even by checking the stock market before he goes on the air. And for that reason what he says is no good to his audience. He's just quoting an authority figure. But what is really shameful is that he simply blamed his error on someone else when the privilege of holding a microphone going straight into the ears of millions should be viewed by him as a great responsibility which rests on him, not on his sources. Instead he treats his public position, and his hearers, with contempt by blaming someone else.
The second major blunder was that Rush stated that the US created $18 trillion out of thin air during the financial crisis, when that figure is the estimate for global borrowing, and certainly is not money printing:
The overall amount of priming that the federal government and the Federal Reserve along with several other central banks all over the world have done, the amount of money that they put in to the global economy... What was it I heard? It's $18 trillion, and that's just the US number. That's what it is. It's $18 trillion all told for $1 trillion worth of growth. So in order to get $1 trillion of economic expansion in the past five years, the Fed has spent $18 trillion. It's been classic Keynesian economics. ...
The bottom line was, folks, that $18 trillion was created out of thin air -- $18 trillion. I mean, this doesn't even get lopped on to the national debt because this is not money authorized by the federal budget by US Congress. This is just the Federal Reserve just decided to print money wherever they wanted and send it wherever they wanted, all ostensibly to save the world economy. All it did was bail out the best and the brightest from the mistakes that they had made.
Then during a break another panicked phone call comes in from the trusted source and Rush again quickly corrects himself, putting the $18 trillion figure on the global effort, not on the US alone, and designating it as "borrowed" not "printed":
It's $18 trillion. The G7 nations borrowed $18 trillion since the financial crisis and have only $1 trillion in economic growth to show for it. That's it. That's what it's bought us. There was $18 trillion borrowed, and a lot of it's gonna be forgiven and not have to be paid back. By the way, if you want to know what happens to that money, say hello to tax increases down the line.
I'm sure by this time the rubes are completely confused by their hero. There's no point in explaining any of this to Rush because he gets this stuff wrong no matter how many times it is explained to him, which just shows he has no desire to learn it or simply lacks the mental equipment.
In which case he ought to just shut up about it. Spreading falsehoods is bad for the country and bad for the cause.
