Wealth & Money Quote by Anthony Weiner

The line doesn’t bother pretending the “jobs” argument is anything but a costume draped over a wealth-transfer fight. Weiner’s intent is prosecutorial: strip away the bipartisan habit of calling every tax cut “job creation” and force the listener to ask who, exactly, is being helped. He builds a sharp hierarchy of credibility: unemployment insurance and middle-class tax cuts are framed as spending power that actually hits the real economy; estate tax relief for millionaires and tax cuts for billionaires are framed as luxury goods for people least likely to turn extra dollars into hiring.

The subtext is a cultural one as much as a fiscal one: he’s attacking the Washington language game where policies are sold in the moral register of work. “New jobs” becomes a kind of civic incense, waved over legislation so it smells like shared prosperity. By saying “exactly zero” and “virtually none,” he’s not doing econometrics; he’s doing political demolition. The absolutes are meant to be memorable, repeatable, and morally clarifying: if the stated goal is employment, then the rich-first approach isn’t merely ineffective, it’s dishonest.

Context matters. This is the post-crisis terrain where austerity rhetoric collided with high unemployment and ballooning inequality. Weiner is staking out a populist frame inside technocratic debates: demand-side stimulus for ordinary households versus supply-side appeasement for the already-wealthy. It works because it refuses the comforting fiction that all tax cuts are the same policy wearing different suits.