A Reaganomics Reality Check for Rush

by Bert

It's laughable to think that any human could be as perfect as right-wingers make Ronald Reagan out to be. But I feel less like laughing when their hero-making also mangles history. Rush Limbaugh declared Tuesday that "Reagan was truly a hero" for lowering tax rates on the wealthy. For evidence, Rush painted a rosy landscape of the time in which we all lived under Reagan.

". . .but of course as we all know, the eighties was a boom time. It was a boom economy; the bottom didn't fall out."

Anyone from here in the Midwest who is on the far side of 45 years old can remember those days. This is when Allis-Chalmers closed in West Allis, when Parker Pen began to die in Janesville, and when dozens of other factory towns took a body blow to their prosperity. Farmers outside the collapsing factory towns also could see no sign of a boom back then. Remember the Jessica Lange movies, the Farm Aid concerts, the news photos?

Rush and other talking gasbags have tried many times to turn our memory of the 1980s into something it wasn't. Farmers who survived those times would call that putting lipstick on a pig.