and his promise to give $2 million to the DNC if Bill Clinton's budget didn't ruin the national economy.
From a 2011 article, "When Rush bet $2 million that Clinton would ruin the economy", in Salon magazine, by Steve Kornacki (yes, that Steve Kornacki!):
LIMBAUGH: "I will put $2 million officially on the table, that if this plan sees the light of day as it came out of the Senate Finance Committee, or the House version--and there's going to be a compromise. It's going to be a--it's going to be a conference between the House and Senate on this. And whatever version it is, if it's anything at all like this, the economy is going to be in worse shape. The deficit's going to be up and employment is going to be down. Interest rates--tough to tell, but they'll probably be down and--and inflation's going to be up. And Clinton's approval ratings are going to be lower than they are now."
Well, he was right about the approval ratings (at least for the next 18 months or so). But nothing else. The unemployment rate was 6.8 percent when Congress approved the budget. It fell to 6.5 percent by the end of '93, 5.9 percent by September '94, and 5.4 percent by early 1995. Toward the end of the decade -- after years of sustained growth -- it even dropped below 4 percent. Nor did inflation take off, as Rush claimed it would. And deficits: They fell steadily from the moment the plan was passed; by 1998, the country was running a surplus. (Maybe the DNC should have accepted Rush's wager, instead of ignoring him...)
The standard revisionist claim from the right is that the prosperity and balanced budget of the 1990s was a product of the Republican Congress, not Clinton's budget. But their revisionism misses the point: The claim -- pushed by Rush and echoed by every Republican in Congress -- was that Clinton's budget, because it raised taxes on the wealthy, would make recovery impossible. It didn't do that at all -- and all of the economic indicators that Rush said would get worse actually improved between the time the plan was passed and when the Republicans took control of Congress in '95.
In other words, we have a decade's worth of compelling evidence that raising income taxes on the wealthy can reduce deficits and (at the very least) not inhibit sustained economic growth. And yet, Limbaugh is still telling his listeners -- in rhetoric that Republicans on Capitol Hill are still parroting -- that this has "never worked."
https://www.salon.com/2011/04/20/limbaugh_clinton_taxes
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