JASON: This is really what this program is all about. I want to reiterate this: We’re gonna continue with this for some time. Rush’s wisdom and words and these clips as they are pertain to present-day news are going to be around on this program, the Rush Limbaugh program, for a long time to come, and you are welcome to join us each and every day at the very same time Rush aired to tune in and still hear his thoughts and conversation and ideas on the issues of the day.
We’re gonna be staying on top of current events and topics just like we have today. We’ll keep you informed. We’ll take some calls while also revisiting Rush’s wisdom, and this is why I said last hour, “It’s the best of both worlds.” So don’t be fooled. We’re sticking around right here with remembering Rush on the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.
Nowhere did Rush’s acumen shine through more than on fiscal matters. We are in a world of hurt when it comes to federal spending. We are ramping up a debt that the next generation will not be able to service. If the 10-year Treasury keeps going up, we will have a sovereign debt crisis in this country. Rush understood that intuitively, and here’s what he had to say about unending federal spending.
RUSH: I’ve always believed that whatever I wanted was my responsibility to buy, and certainly whatever I needed was my responsibility to buy, that there was a vast difference between need and want. But I was raised that it was not anybody else’s responsibility, no matter what it was. I’ll give you an example. We’ve all got stories like this. When I started working in radio… Actually, my first job was shining shoes in a barbershop, and I made $50 in three months, and my dad took it.
He said, “If you’re gonna earn money, then you’re gonna start paying to help here in the household.” So he took it. I said, “Fine. I don’t need it. I’m 13. What am I gonna do with cash?” Then I started working at the radio station when I was 15 for like 75 cents an hour, and eventually after three or four years later I’m making a buck and a quarter. I was living at home. So he took it.
When I hit 16, I decided I wanted a Ford Mustang, so I started telling my dad, “I want a car.”
He said, “Well, what are you gonna do about it?”
I said, “Well, can you get me one?”
“No. Why am I supposed to get it for you?”
“Well, I’m 16. It would be a great birthday present. You’re my dad.”
“Well… (sigh) It doesn’t work that way.”
So I started cutting out pictures of Ford Mustangs in every magazine and strategically locating them around the house where he would see one wherever he went — bathroom, kitchen table — just trying to drop hints. Anyway, when I turned 18, my father gave me every dollar I had given him since I was 13. He had put it in the bank, and it had become something like $3500 or $4,000. With that, I bought my first car — with my money, that I had earned.
He took it from me ’cause he didn’t think I woulda saved it, and he was trying to teach me to save it and so forth. So that’s just how my brother and I were raised. “If you want something, you buy it, and if you can’t afford it, you don’t get it.” Therefore, I didn’t have things I couldn’t afford.
And there were a lot of things I wanted for most of my life that I just couldn’t afford. My point with all this is that at some point, the Democrat Party started assuming the role of provider for people’s needs, not just wants, and that was the beginning of the end.
It destroyed the initiative of those people, and it then created expectations among those people that the government would pay for things, to the point now where we have, in this Obamacare business, the price of prescriptions is just… It’s senseless. It’s so out of proportion. The price of health care itself has just ballooned.
It has no basis in reality.
It has no basis in any free market economic reality. The reason is it isn’t priced for the consumer to pay for it. It’s priced for third parties to pay for it, governments who don’t care what it costs. Insurance companies who get reimbursed who don’t care what it costs. So people at early, impressionable periods in their lives, begin to believe that they don’t have to buy their own prescriptions.
There’s something that happened in health care where, after a while, practically everybody began to assume that somebody else should pay for it because it’s either a right or something that, “They give you a lawyer. Why not give you a doctor? The Constitution gives you a free lawyer if you can’t afford it. Health care is a right! You know, why should it cost anybody?”
These bastardizations of economic law took over. Now we’ve gotten to the point where all of health care and now prescriptions are priced with no basis in reality. They’re priced in such a way that 99% of people country cannot afford them, and so the expectation is that somebody else should pay for it, be it an insurance policy or government or a political party or what have you.
If taxes hadn’t gotten so high and people’s disposable income was so small because the government, state and local, are taking so much of what people earn, they would be able to buy things for themselves, as we used to be able to do in this country. But the Democrat Party has successfully changed the way most people think, and that is that somebody else ought to buy stuff that we want or need.
I don’t know how you roll it back. My only point is, we’re trying to close the barn door after the horses have escaped. I am convinced that Obama won election, as much as anything, because he’s seen as Santa Claus, and I don’t know anybody who can beat Santa Claus in an election.
Obama’s an adult Santa Claus where adults still believe in it, and the bastardization of our economy, in so many areas, has occurred precisely because the Democrat Party — starting with FDR and the New Deal — assumed the role of provider for people. In the process, they destroyed the black family.
They’ve destroyed many family institutions by assuming the role of provider, husband, father, leaving the men free to go out and be whatever they want and not pay attention and be responsible for the kids they’ve procreated. It’s just an abject, total mess. Had the Democrat Party not been involved and their policies not prevailed, none of this bastardization and destruction would have occurred.
I’ll never forget. Speaking of my dad, one of his best friends was a pediatrician, a family friend, Jim Kinder. I remember them sitting around, I’m 12 years old, and Medicare and Medicaid are getting started, and I’m listening to them complain and warn me, “Son…” I’m 12 years old, and my dad and Dr. Kinder are warning us what’s gonna happen if the government succeeds in socializing medicine or nationalizing it.
Of course, I’m 12; what do I know? I believe my dad. H.R. just asked me, “When did you realize you’re getting mugged by the government?” I had to stop and think. Probably age 28 is when I became aware of what taxes were doing. Yeah, ’cause 28 is when Reagan got elected 1980, ’81. I was 30, and that’s when I started becoming sensitive about what was happening with Reagan talking about tax cuts and so forth.
Then I started reading National Review and Bill Buckley and that was my tax education. So I was around 28 or 30. His point is, it took me ’til age 28 to realize I was being mugged by the government, and that an unfair, unrealistic percentage of my income was being taken. Young people are discovering earlier how they’re being mugged than I did at age 28.
It’s just a passing little note of some interest. But really, it does amaze me, the millions of Americans who have been corrupted by the Democrat Party, who now actually do believe that providing for themselves is laughable, that this sense of personal responsibility is by the wayside. I try to think back what my life would be like if I…
I can just tell you this. If I had lived most of my life with the belief that whatever I wanted was not my responsibility, I wouldn’t be doing this program today. I wouldn’t have become anywhere near successful enough. I wouldn’t have gotten close to being doing this program, and that’s my point.
This stuff just kills people’s ambition and their desire, and to know that there’s a political party capitalizing on it, promoting it — and all the while they’re claiming that they’re the ones with compassion and concern and care for people? They’re destroying people, in the sense that they’re destroying their integrity, their ambition, their future.
JASON: Boy, you know, that is so on point. I had the same conversations with my father. How fortunate Rush and I were to have fathers who cared like that — and moms, of course, who cared — because you don’t get the other side in our institutions in America today. Now to his point, a $4 trillion… Don’t fall for $3 trillion.
When you include the tax deductions and credits like for electric vehicles continuing depleting the Highway Trust Fund, the infrastructure bill Biden is proposing is $4 trillion. Now, get this to Rush’s point: It’s a $4 trillion infrastructure bill, right? Then why does it fund climate initiatives, health care, prekindergarten schooling, tuition for community college, and child care subsidies?
Hmm.
It’s not like we’ve got a massive debt.