Greedy Democrats Have Used Medicaid Since 1993 To Take Your Assets, Now It Ramps Up Under ObamaCare

Signing up for Medicaid may be signing away everything you own.

From the story here:

The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1993 [under Bill and Hillary Clinton and a Democrat Congress] requires states to pursue Medicaid asset recovery from persons who receive benefits at age 55 or older. At first, this applied mainly to nursing home benefits, but at state option, it could now include any items or services provided under Medicaid. ... A potential for greatly expanded use of estate recovery was created in Obamacare, as pointed out in an anonymously authored, well-documented article distributed by economist Paul Craig Roberts. Obamacare increases the number of people eligible for Medicaid by dropping the asset test for enrollment (Page 162 of Obamacare). ... Medicaid, supposed to be a program to help the poor, has become a cash cow for multibillion-dollar, managed-care companies, who milk federal and state taxpayers. Expanding Medicaid to persons with modest assets will enable estate recovery to become a cash cow for states to milk the poor and the middle class.

Global Public Debt Is Up 72% Since 2007, Just Six Years Ago

Have Households Started To Borrow? Probably for cars.

PragCap thinks so here, but it's only been up $169 billion year over year. The monthly rate of vehicle sales annualized is up 1.6 million units over the same period. Could be that. Subprime, loan to value in excess of 100% and longer terms are all up in the space, according to Reuters here just in recent days.

Vindictive CNSNews.com blames Speaker Boehner for $3 trillion jump in total public debt

Here:

Thus, all spending and borrowing by the federal government are the de facto and de jure—n.b. constitutional—responsibility of the House of Representatives that John Boehner leads.

Well, yeah, and the Bible says "Judas went and hanged himself" and "go and do thou likewise".

The author of the posting, Terence Jeffrey, never once places the spending and borrowing in their broader historical context of the economic depression which ensued in 2007, long before John Boehner took the reigns as Speaker of the House in 2011.

Never once does Mr. Jeffrey mention the revenue side, which dried up like an old prune in consequence of the panic which saw home prices crash and a record 29.5 million people file first time claims for unemployment in 2009. Nor does he bother to mention the deliberate, bipartisan decision taken to reduce revenues to relieve the American people in this situation by temporarily cutting their Social Security taxes by 33% for back to back years in 2011 and 2012 when nothing else seemed to be working to revivify the economy. Revenues constrained by declining tax receipts due to depression-like conditions all over the economy coupled with these tax cuts, after peaking in fiscal 2007 at $2.568 trillion, for the next five fiscal years never once got above that level after reaching their low in 2009 at $2.105 trillion. What did Mr. Jeffrey expect to happen given that, the debt to decline?

One suspects Mr. Jeffrey isn't interested, however, in any of the facts and their context, only in slamming John Boehner. Otherwise he'd have mentioned them, and that Boehner's predecessor Democrat Nancy Pelosi increased the debt at a rate 63% faster in 2009 and 2010 than Boehner has in his nearly three years as Speaker.

Really bad form, old boy.

Total Public Debt Owed Jumps $328 Billion After Debt Ceiling Extended

click to enlarge

Lefty Peter Beinart Calls Republican Surrender A Victory

Here:

If this is Republican surrender, I hope I never see Republican victory. ... Let’s pause for a moment to underscore the point. In early September, a “clean” CR—including sequester cuts—that funded the government into 2014 was considered a Republican victory by both the Republican House Majority Leader and Washington’s most prominent Democratic think tank. Now, just over a month later, the media is describing the exact same deal as Republican “surrender.”

Ted Cruz And Mike Lee Aren't Heroes. They Hung John Boehner Out To Dry.

During his non-filibuster filibuster, Sen. Ted Cruz had called defunding ObamaCare a matter of life and death: 

“In a football game we all cheer for our respective teams. I cheer for the Houston Texans. It’s a good thing to cheer for your team…This isn’t a team sport. This is life and death. There is a fundamental divide between the government and the people."

Presumably a matter of life and death means you'd do anything to stop ObamaCare, including block the raising of the debt ceiling to accomplish that.

That's what could have happened yesterday afternoon if Cruz, or Lee, or Rand Paul or Marco Rubio or any of the other senators opposed to ObamaCare in the Senate had moved to delay, which any of them easily could have. Then the deadline set by the US Treasury would have come and gone, and all hell would have broken loose.

Yes, within a day or two the bill in the Senate still would have been passed and sent to Speaker Boehner, who, being perhaps another man by that time, might have refused to bring the bill up for a vote in the US House, throwing down the gauntlet once and for all.

We'll never know, but no Republican in the Senate gave Mr. Boehner any political cover to take such a courageous stand and desperate action to stop the single biggest assault by government against free enterprise in this country in its history.

Speaker Boehner for his part received a standing ovation from the Republicans for his leadership in this affair because he went to the mat for members with whose views he personally disagreed, views they shared with Cruz and Lee. Too bad Ted Cruz and Mike Lee didn't go to the mat for him.

The Far Left Also Realizes Boehner Won. Too Bad Republicans Don't.

The Nation, here:

Because the deal only includes minor concessions, the Beltway consensus is that it represents a resounding defeat for Republicans, who “surrendered” their original demands to defund or delay Obamacare. In the skirmish of opinion polls, that may be true, for now. But in the war of ideas, the Senate deal is but a stalemate, one made almost entirely on conservative terms. The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

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Boehner, last August, who got exactly this, despite having to try the so-called Tea Party gambit of defunding ObamaCare, which failed because of all the RINOs in the Senate, and was destined to fail from the beginning for that very reason, if only people like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee had bothered to check their voting records:

“When we return, our intent is to move quickly on a short-term continuing resolution that keeps the government running and maintains current sequester spending levels,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said on a conference call with GOP lawmakers, according to a person on the call.

“Our message will remain clear,” Boehner said. “Until the president agrees to better cuts and reforms that help grow the economy and put us on path to a balanced budget, his sequester — the sequester he himself proposed, insisted on and signed into law — stays in place.”

Boehner Actually Wins Again Despite Himself: His Position From August 22nd Was A Clean CR Keeping The Sequester, And That's What The Senate Compromise Is Going To Provide

The Washington Post reported, here, at the time:

House Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he plans to avert a government shutdown at the end of September by passing a “short-term” budget bill that maintains sharp automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester.

“When we return, our intent is to move quickly on a short-term continuing resolution that keeps the government running and maintains current sequester spending levels,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said on a conference call with GOP lawmakers, according to a person on the call.

“Our message will remain clear,” Boehner said. “Until the president agrees to better cuts and reforms that help grow the economy and put us on path to a balanced budget, his sequester — the sequester he himself proposed, insisted on and signed into law — stays in place.”

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Well, that's what we're getting from the Senate at the very last minute after a two-week government shutdown: a short term continuing resolution which keeps the sequester cuts for that term.

It was libertarian Republicans who found this unacceptable and forced Boehner to try the shutdown gambit, which was incredibly stupid given the optics of the government running out of funding on September 30th and ObamaCare launching on October 1st. Clearly no one in Boehner's opposition was watching the news stories predicting problems with the internet exchanges, nor reflecting on what powerful weapons they were putting into Obama's hands when they've had five years' worth of examples of Obama usurping powers, acting unconstitutionally, and generally acting "out of character" for a president.

The president continues to go outside the experience of his enemy, but the enemy still hasn't figured that out. Now that they know how far Obama's willing to go, his enemies need to be more careful next time.

Boehner Knew The Political Danger Of A Shutdown. Republicans Should Have Listened To Him.

As always, Republican disunity becomes the Democrat opening, but Boehner deserves blame for not insisting on his preference and for letting someone else set the agenda, which unfortunately is his habit. The speaker of the House must assert the co-equality of it.

Politico, here:

Boehner allies strongly reject the idea that the speaker could be damaged by this latest debacle. After all, it was Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who was setting the terms of this debate, not Boehner. The Ohio Republican wanted to pass a clean government-funding bill more than a month ago, while organizing a tidy negotiating process around the debt ceiling. Instead, everything became one big mess, where House Republicans were unsure what they were asking for, what they should be seeking, and for what price.

How Rep. Paul Ryan Is Just Like Sen. Ted Cruz

Here in The Wall Street Journal on October 8th, Rep. Paul Ryan says he is willing to swap sequester cuts for cuts to mandatory spending:

If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.

And the reason is there's more to be gained over the long haul from cuts to the mandatory side, which is 60% of annual outlays anyway:

These reforms are vital. Over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office predicts discretionary spending—that is, everything except entitlement programs and debt payments—will grow by $202 billion, or roughly 17%. Meanwhile, mandatory spending—which mostly consists of funding for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will grow by $1.6 trillion, or roughly 79%. The 2011 Budget Control Act largely ignored entitlement spending. But that is the nation's biggest challenge.

But just why Republicans like Paul Ryan expect us to believe they can negotiate cuts to mandatory programs from Democrats who have just rammed a new one called ObamaCare down our throats is quite beyond me. It's as unrealistic as Senator Ted Cruz thinking libertarian Republicans could get Obama to defund that program without unity in the party on the subject in the first place. Cynics quickly decided Cruz was just fundraising for 2016. And Rep. Ryan could just as plausibly be trying to re-establish some street cred with conservatives after his involvement with the Facebook-financed immigration amnesty debacle.

There's plenty of unrealism to go around in the Republican Party, which still hasn't figured out that Obama and the Democrats are the enemy, which is surprising since that's how he views them. But that seems to be a particularly libertarian penchant, expressed as it is in interminable losing electoral challenges throughout the country which do nothing but help elect Democrats. Maybe Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz are just libertarian spoilers on the national stage, for whom success is keeping Republicans from succeeding.

Figuring out how to proceed when your country has been taken over by a hostile foreign power without having fired a shot remains the central problem for an opposition which doesn't realize it is one, especially when your own ranks have been infiltrated by an enemy.

Where are the non-libertarian economic conservatives? 

Without Issuing New Treasury Securities, Something Would Have To Give After Just 22 Days

How long can the government pay all its bills without selling any additional Treasury bills, notes or bonds? The answer is really about only 22 days.

The suggestion that the answer is indefinitely is completely wrong. The Sean Hannitys of the world who otherwise protest incessantly that we borrow 40 cents of every dollar that we spend are in denial about this.

Consider revenues in the last fiscal year: $2.712 trillion, or $226 billion per month.

Then consider outlays in the last fiscal year: $3.6849 trillion, or $307 billion per month, or $10.233 billion per day. So revenues will last about only 22 days, after which we'll need to find another $81 billion somewhere, or not pay some bills.

The monthly shortfall of $81 billion adds up to $972 billion over a year, or 26.4% of all outlays in the last fiscal year.

Discretionary spending in the Obama 2012 budget request was $1.510 trillion. Slashing that $972 billion across the board represents a 64.4% cut to discretionary spending.

By agency that means, for example, defense spending would have to be cut by $429 billion and Homeland Security by $35 billion, and the EPA by $5.9 billion and Agriculture by $17 billion.

That's why just about everyone in both parties wants to see the debt limit increased: no one can stand it that they'd have to take such a huge hit to live within our means. It's really all about that, not about "default" per se. Interest on the debt runs to only $34 billion to $35 billion per month. There's plenty of income to allocate to that. So we won't default, but spending cuts would of necessity be nothing short of draconian.

The squealing of the pigs continues.

Why Money Market Funds Are Especially At Risk If The Government Defaults

the one-month T-bill settled at .27 after spiking to .32

Money market funds invest in ultra short term securities like T-bills with average maturities under 60 days. These came under pressure yesterday, as reported here:

The one-month U.S. Treasury bill yield spiked to a multiyear high on Tuesday amid mounting concerns that the U.S. may not fulfill its payment obligations to short-term bond holders. The yield on the one-month T-bill traded as high as 0.322 percent, levels not seen since the fourth quarter of 2008, before settling at 0.273 percent, according to data from Thomson Reuters. The yield stood at 0.083 at the start of the month. ... 

"If the U.S. was to default, T-bills are under real threat of not being paid... and the risk premium in the bond yields is reflective of that fear," said Evan Lucas, market strategist at IG. A large portion of demand for T-bills comes from institutional investors, such as money market funds. "Ten-year bonds [by comparison] are relatively unaffected by the shutdown and debt ceiling as coupon payments will flow over the life of the instrument and one or two missed coupons can be recuperated," he added.

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To put the fear in perspective, a 2-year Treasury yields only 0.373% this morning, so the spike in the one-month to 0.322% shows how seriously the bond market can react to the prospect of debt default.

Be Careful, Default Is A Venerable Old Liberal Democrat Specialty, Exponentially Imitated By Liberal Republicans

The Atlantic stumbles into the truth, here:

In 1933, President Roosevelt devalued the dollar against gold. That violated the so-called gold clause, which required that all public debts be paid in gold coin of a fixed weight. (America’s overwhelmingly pro-Roosevelt Congress simply declared all gold clauses null and void.) The 1933 devaluation effectively amounted to paying off debts with devalued currency, which is widely viewed as a default. In fact, in her exhaustive research on sovereign debt, economist Carmen Reinhart clearly classifies the 1933 devaluation as a domestic default.

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Imagine waking up on a Monday morning only to find out you now needed almost 15 more greenbacks to get back the same ounce of gold which on Friday the government basically confiscated from you for 20 of them, and they wouldn't let you. That's the legacy of the Roosevelt Democrats.

30 million ounces of gold were handed over to the government in exchange for $600 million, and then the price of that gold was effectively raised to $1.05 billion.

The price of gold was kept close to $35 an ounce for 31 of the next 38 years, when at length Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 when gold averaged about $45 an ounce.

Since then dollar devaluation to date has come to an additional almost 97%.

Total dollar devaluation since 1933 as of this very hour now comes to 98.43%.

Obama Wants A Debt Default To Discredit His Opposition?

So suggests JT Young, who makes a plausible, although strictly political argument, here, for why Obama might want a debt default:

[T]he last time Obama faced Congressional Republicans in a debt limit fight, he lost enormously. ... However the roots of the administration's non-negotiating stance may run deeper than just that last defeat. It is not just a repeat of the past it must avoid, but a continuation of the present. ... Obamacare is hardly the worst of the administration's PR problems. According to a Bloomberg News national poll released 9/25, Obama's approval rating on the economy is negative, with 38% approving to 56% disapproving. On the federal deficit, it is -32% (29% to 61%). On the recent Syria sidetrack, his rating is 31% - 53%. ... It is clear that nothing the administration wants is likely to move over the next three years. Historically, the president's party generally loses seats in midterm elections - particularly second midterms - so the president's legislative situation is only likely to worsen. Should it do so, the president's political fortunes and popularity are sure to follow. In sum, there appears to be no variable that will change the chessboard. ... [T]he president's only hope appears to stake everything on a single move. In this case, it appears the move is to goad Congressional Republicans into a dramatic loss in a high-profile - and ideally prolonged - budget battle. That means a shutdown or worse, default, to discredit his opposition - in his best case scenario, to such an extent that he reverses the trend of normal midterm losses and the rapid decline of second term presidents' political relevancy. With his second term initiatives dead early, fighting a continuous rearguard action on his signature achievement, anticipating the loss of additional Congressional seats, and with lame duck status just over a year away, the White House may see little to lose by betting large. If so, America could find itself with quite a lot to lose, as this budget fight gets nastier, longer, and more dangerous than anyone anticipated.

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But what if the non-negotiating stance is more than just political in the conventional sense? What if it's ideological in a more sinister way? What if Obama really means to transform the country not just by eliminating Republicans, who are the political representatives of the middle class, but by eliminating the middle class itself? And capitalism in the process? And using the crisis of a default to install himself permanently at the head of the government? Using the impressive means now at his disposal with surveillance capabilities, militarized police who care nothing for the Fourth Amendment as we saw in the Tsarnaev affair, drones, the Department of Homeland Security generally, and the TSA in particular to control travel? And a de-Christianized, paganized military loyal to the commander in chief?

As all students of communist revolution know, it is the middle class which is the greatest enemy of the communists because being more numerous than the upper class the middle class stands in the way of the revolutionaries' attacks on the rich and on private property as a concept. "Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods. The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order", wrote Bela Kun in 1918.

Make no mistake. This has been a transitional period in the mind of Obama, who is trying to transform the country in a number of ways which are not in keeping with America's past. For example, despite growing public opposition since March 2010, Obama continues to insist that ObamaCare must be implemented even though he himself has underscored its unpopularity by unilaterally and unlawfully altering and delaying key features of it. The Supreme Court itself has validated its compulsory basis, which the regime constantly trots out as authoritative as any teaching bearing Pontifical imprimatur. But at what cost to the middle class whose numbers continue to shrink? The best estimates show that ObamaCare will force 16 million heretofore middle class Americans into Medicaid, the healthcare system for the country's poor which already has 70 million participants, dramatically reducing their numbers by transforming their condition to dependency on the government. Fully 93% of American wage earners already make less than $100,000 a year, and 75% bring home less than $50,000 annually. Between the two extremes lie barely 30 million people. This week's posterchild for ObamaCare, for example, was a law student who got cheaper healthcare through Healthcare.gov, ObamaCare's new web portal which just opened, because it shunted him into Medicaid because his income is too low to qualify for a subsidized ObamaCare compliant health insurance plan. This was widely viewed as a positive!

The truth is Obama has done nothing to help the middle class even though he claims to be their champion, just as the Affordable Care Act will neither provide care nor be affordable. In fact, one might say Obama has been exacting revenge on the middle class. Even though he's been in charge of the government going on five years, Obama has done nothing to improve middle class incomes, which have instead headed in the other direction under his watch. Annual household income has been reduced by over 5% since June 2009 alone.

Similarly the hallmark of middle class membership, the home ownership rate has been reversed to the 1996 level after 5 million homes have been repossessed by the banks. During Obama's tenure in office the ranks of those not in the labor force have soared above the 90 million mark as the longest unemployment recession in the post-war period appears to have no end in sight nearly 6 years since it began, driving college graduates back home with their parents and dramatically reducing family formation. The credit expansion of the post-war economy upon which home ownership was based has hit a brick wall since 2007 while the powers that be have claimed to fix it while enriching only the bankers and the richest investors. Total credit market debt outstanding is up less than $8 trillion in the interim when by all rights it should be up $25 trillion. We even have so-called right wingers who both applaud this decline of home ownership and enthusiastically agitate for the elimination of the home mortgage interest deduction. They are as much useful idiots to Obama's pinched leftist vision as have been Republican free-traders who helped the investor class get rich by shipping American jobs to cheaper labor markets abroad, gutting American exceptionalism long before Obama came along.

As if all that isn't bad enough, unprecedented financial repression of the savings of the middle class is the official policy of Obama's Federal Reserve through Zero Interest Rate Policy and Quantitative Easing, arresting the basis of the gains which customarily accrue over time from compounding and destroying the incomes of the already retired.

Its main sources of wealth in employment and earning power, housing and savings already severely punished under Obama, the middle class is just an inch away from losing it all in a debt default. And once they are out of the way, there will be nothing standing between Obama and finally spreading the wealth around of the 2-3 million at the top who hold it.

Total Public Debt Outstanding Kept At $16.738 Trillion By Treasury Dept. For Four Months!

I can't show you all of the data because the format is too long for me to capture it all in a single screen shot.

All of June, all of July, all of August, and now all of September at $16.738 trillion, despite the fact that federal revenues are estimated to be running at $226 billion per month in fiscal 2013.

See for yourself here.

The World Has Learned Nothing Since The Crisis: Global Public Debt Is Up 63% 2008-2013

2008 global public debt $32 trillion

Global public debt, the amount owed by the world's governments, has risen by almost $20 trillion in the five years since the panic of 2008, an increase of nearly 63%.

Note the main offenders, none of whom has been practicing austerity in any sense of the term: America, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, The UK, Europe, India, China, Japan and Australia. Spendthrifts all.

See the data and charts, here.

2013 global public debt $52 trillion

None of this is ever going to be paid back. Chaos awaits.

American Businesses Have Saved $2.8 Trillion In Last Four Years Due To ZIRP

In the form of lower borrowing costs, according to this story from Bloomberg:

America’s companies, from Apple Inc. (AAPL) to Verizon Communications Inc., are saving about $700 billion in interest payments with the Federal Reserve’s unprecedented stimulus. ...

Savings of about $700 billion represents the difference between what companies that have sold bonds since Sept. 17, 2009, are paying annually based on an average maturity of nine years for securities in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. Corporate & High Yield Index, versus what they might have paid before the crisis.

After rising as high as 11.1 percent on Oct. 28, 2008, it wasn’t until Sept. 17, 2009 that yields fell below the pre-Lehman average of 6.14 percent, the Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.

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Just another reason corporate profits after taxes have skyrocketed to another record seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $1.83 trillion for Q2 2013.

Charlie Gasparino Gets It Right: America Lost Its AAA Because Of Debt, Not Debt Ceiling

Charles Gasparino for The New York Post, here:

In fact, economic growth is barely existent on [Obama's] watch; millions of Americans have stopped looking for work and the country lost its Triple-A bond rating because debt isn’t the settled matter Obama pretends it is.

Rush Limbaugh: The Big Boob On The Right

 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.