Politics & Power Quote by Mitch McConnell

McConnell’s sentence is engineered like a closing argument: assign blame, declare insolvency, identify a villain, then wrap it all in a jobs flag. The intent isn’t to debate budget line items; it’s to pre-load the audience with a moral frame where Democrats are reckless spenders, taxpayers are unwilling victims, and any new revenue is borderline theft. Even the scale word “trillions” does double duty: it signals catastrophe while sidestepping the granular question of what was funded, what was prevented, and who benefited.

The subtext is a familiar Washington move: redefine “big government” as something imposed on “most Americans,” then redefine “small business” as the authentic national heart. “Most Americans didn’t ask for” is a claim about legitimacy, not polling; it implies that elections, coalitions, and crisis governance don’t count as consent. “Which we couldn’t afford” smuggles in inevitability, treating fiscal policy as household budgeting while ignoring that debt, stimulus, and tax policy are choices about timing and distribution, not simply moral failure.

Context matters: this line fits the post-crisis/post-stimulus, debt-ceiling-era script where deficit panic becomes leverage against spending while tax increases are painted as anti-growth. The final clause, “small businesses create the majority of new jobs,” is less an economic footnote than a rhetorical shield: if you can fuse taxes to job loss, you don’t need to win the argument on equity or arithmetic. You just need the listener to picture a neighborhood employer getting shaken down.