RUSH: I have a 16-year-old on hold here who is calling from his lunch break at school. I want to get to him, but I’m gonna expand on our previous caller after I finish with Chris who’s in St. Louis. Hi, Chris. I’m glad you took time from lunch break to call us. How are you?
CALLER: I’m great, Rush. It’s an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Yeah, well, I was just calling, and I was telling your call screener that one of the biggest reasons I think Republicans don’t get younger voters — you know, I can’t vote yet, but a lot of my friends are hitting that age, and I’ll be eligible in 2014, and I think they have a problem with explaining how the economy exactly works and exactly what it is that conservatives are trying to fix. And I think that’s the big problem that they have with conservatives not getting the votes of the younger voters, you know what I’m saying?
RUSH: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re saying. Basically what you’re saying is there are two things. I learned how the economy works in a number of different places. I got a bit of a foundation of it in school, but I really learned when I got out and started working. But it wasn’t until — I mean, I really began to understand economics 101 and to be able to explain it to people — it wasn’t until I was 31, 32 years old living in Sacramento, and I met, became a good friend with an agricultural economist who has now become an expert in telecommunications, to whom the subject was as easy as two plus two equals four. You know, economics is nothing more than basic common sense. But, you’re right, there’s never a foundation laid for it.
CALLER: Exactly. This next generation has grown up with all the government regulations and government interference and they’re being told that that’s not the problem, so they don’t understand —
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: — how it works without all that.
RUSH: They believe that’s normal. Washington is the center of the economy. Washington’s where the economy happens, and, sadly, that has been taught, in and not just in economics. I’m sure you’re having that taught to you at every level that you’ve been at in school so far. You go to a public school?
CALLER: I actually go to a private school.
RUSH: Well, then you’re a little ahead of the game.
CALLER: Yeah, and growing up with my dad who’s a big conservative, anytime I would hear something, I’ve always been politically interested and I would ask him questions and he’s always been real good with explaining to me, “Hey, this is how it works,” and gives examples of how it works, and then I figure it out on my own, too, you know? I think that’s what we need, is people that will be able to explain it to this next generation of younger voters and be able to show them that, hey, this isn’t normal to have this much government interference and that’s the real reason why we’re having the problems —
RUSH: You are really putting your finger on something, because they’re growing up learning that all of this regulation and all of this taxation and all of this government involvement in everything is what is normal. And people your age happen to be growing up in an economic downturn, and the things that they are being told to fix it will not, but —
CALLER: Are the things that have caused it in the first place.
RUSH: Exactly. It’s a fascinating thing to me, a fascinating subject. Economics, it really takes the right person to explain it to you. Chris, thanks for the call. I will never forget when I learned how lowering taxes raises revenue. Now, when you first hear something like that, “I don’t think it’s possible. The two don’t go together. Cut and raise? How does that work?” You are automatically predisposed not to accept it. ‘Cause it doesn’t make any sense. You need somebody to explain it to you. And once somebody can, it makes total sense. It makes undeniable sense, but it’s all intertwined. Lowering tax rates is not something that takes place in a vacuum. There’s economic activity going on all around you.
But if your introduction to it is that Washington runs it all, and should, you are behind so much in ever learning what the truth of economics is. And this is, by the way, why it is corrupted this way in education, because these people doing the teaching want government to be considered as the beginning and the end of all economic things, and it’s the government that assigns economic success. It’s the government that punishes economic abuse. It’s the government that does everything, and there’s a political party that’s seen to that. And, in the process, rugged individualism and entrepreneurism and self-reliance are assaulted, successfully so, and they’re attacked. And therefore the whole concept of wealth is not understood.
It’s gotten to the point now — and this is a dire consequence — that the source of prosperity is not even understood by a majority of people, certainly low-information voters. Maybe not a majority yet, but certainly low-information voters do not know where prosperity comes from, do not know how. They suspect it, in fact,. Prosperity is something to be suspicious of when some people have it.