RUSH: Steve in La Palma, California.  It’s great to have you with us.  How are you, sir. 

CALLER:  I’m great, Rush.  Decades of dittos from sunny southern California. 

RUSH:  Thank you very much.  I appreciate your call. 

CALLER:  Thank you.  I address liberals with two main points.  One is that the liberals have changed how we argue.  They say constitutionalists are right-wingers.  But the thing is, the Constitution is the foundation of all law.  Therefore, it should be the foundation of all political measurements.  We are not right-wingers.  We are constitutional centrists.  They seized the center, which helps them in the schools, you know, just discussing politics and such.  So we gotta bring the Constitution back.  Second thing, why is everybody forgetting about the horrible debt we’re leaving to the children?  Everything Hillary proposes leaves more debt to the children.  And I call it fiscal child abuse because these kids are gonna have to pay for all these votes that the Democrats are paying for.  We’ve gotta bring this to the front. 

RUSH:  Trump made a big deal in the debate about the national debt and how much it has grown under Obama.  I’m gonna mention this again.  From the moment I was old enough to know what I was hearing, I remember my parents and grandparents warning about the national debt.  I remember all the adults warning about the national debt

back when it was barely a trillion dollars.  And they said the same thing.  And I’m going back 50 years, folks.  I’m 65 years and probably even before I was 15 I started paying attention to this stuff, and knew what I was listening to. 

So for 50 years I have heard people warn about the ramifications of running up this debt, that it is going to provide just a horrible, horrible burden for children and grandchildren.  And throughout the 50 years, I don’t think anybody can dispute that the economy has grown, that up until about 15 years ago wages were increasing and wealth was advancing.  Now, I don’t want to get into an esoteric conversation here about economics.  I’m not making the case for big national debt.  I’m saying that all my life I heard how it was gonna be the end of me, and it hasn’t been.  

I think it’s a tough argument to make.  I think you can make it better on how irresponsible it is and how we don’t have the money, but that doesn’t seem to deter anybody from taking it.  The Democrat Party is Santa Claus and they don’t care how much in debt the country is because they don’t see it hurting them.  If you look at the number of people in this country who receive some kind of government check, they take it, they take it happily and if it’s increased they take that.  They’ll take as much as they can get, and they’re not worried.  They don’t see themselves as paying anything about it.  They don’t see themselves as bearing any burden at all.  

All they see is a government check coming in for this or for that, earned income tax credit, Social Security, disability, straight on welfare, whatever it is, there are a lot of people on the public dole.  And I don’t see any of them refusing it because we can’t afford it and it’s gonna be too big a burden on our kids.  So in the big scheme of things making an argument like that as a central theme of the campaign, I think it falls flat.  It’s clearly important, and at some point it is going to wreak havoc, and some would say it is now.  And the case could be made.  

We have a stagnant economy.  We’ve reached the point where the government is so much of the economy and it doesn’t produce anything that we’ve become stagnant.  And it’s slowing down, it’s not providing great career opportunities like it used to, college educations are more and more worthless because of the curriculum and what people are majoring in. Then you add the debt they have when they graduate, which sets them back 15 years.  They’ve got 15 years of debt before they even start progressing on their own accumulation of wealth.  

Making the argument doesn’t seem to change the way people look at it or vote.  The country, everybody gets up every day and those who want to go to work, do, those who want to try to find a job, do.  Those they can’t find a job have plenty to eat.  Those who can’t find a job have a cell phone. Those who can’t find a job have a car, gasoline in it, they’ve got cell phones.  So I’m strictly speaking here as a campaign issue, I don’t know how effective it is.  We can all devise our own ideal campaign.  I think we’re sitting on it, and it’s staring us right in the face:  the status quo.  

The only people that are just excruciatingly happy are for the most part liberal Democrats, and they’re happy because they’re enjoying the fruits of political power.  But we don’t live in a country that is unified and has a sense of contentment or even joy.  There’s angst everywhere.  Trump calls it out, and people say, “I can’t believe he paints such a negative picture of this country, it’s dire and dark and so forth.”  It’s the exact picture the Democrats paint every election.