Billy Did Not Love the 80s

RUSH: Billy in Fort Worth, I’m glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the program

CALLER: Hey, hello, Mr. Limbaugh. How you doing?

RUSH: Fine.

CALLER: Okay. (laughing) First of all, I wanted to say that… I called in to talk about this race, but I want to say: ‘Hey, you’re true to what you do,’ and you know what that is?

RUSH: Uh, what is that?

CALLER: Hey: Try to destroy the Democratic Party. Hey! But hey, this is America, okay? (unintelligible) I called to talk… You said, you know, the Republicans and Reagan administration so great in the past, but hey, I lived through that area — that era, and, hey, the decline of middle-class families often gets to Reagan. Under Mr. Carter, under Mr. Carter, I made enough money to stop paying Social Security in November.

RUSH: You were the one, huh?

CALLER: Well, I was union. I was in the union. You know what Mr. Reagan believes that unions ask for outrageous wages, and the way he upped his unemployment rate, well, he added the military to employment. Am I right or wrong?

RUSH: Well, you’re wrong, but I understand why you have the perception.

CALLER: How can you…?

RUSH: No, you’re wrong, but I understand why you have the perception that you have. We had four years of absolute economic destruction under Jimmy Carter. They weren’t fixed overnight. The Reagan tax cuts didn’t happen ’til 1982, and that’s what started everything going. We were in a mess. Reagan inherited a huge mess. It took a long time to get the engine rolling, but it is still purring today. The eighties got rid of all of that misery in the late seventies during the Carter four-year term. They were so successful, Billy — I’m just shooting you straight here, my man. They were so successful that the Democrats have been writing and revising history over the Reagan years ever since, because they cannot allow history to get it right, because it means there’s no need for Democrat policies. The frustrating thing to people like me, Billy, is that people in my own party don’t want to try to learn from what happened during the 1980s and continue to implement the same principles applied to today’s issues.