Leadership Quote by George W. Bush

The line is Bush-era supply-side politics dressed up as folksy common sense, and it’s also an accidental self-own. Bush is trying to frame his first-term economic agenda as egalitarian: tax cuts for "everybody", not just the wealthy, with the homespun qualifier "who paid taxes" tossed in to sound practical rather than ideological. The phrasing matters. "Cornerstone" signals foundational seriousness, a pillar holding up the whole project. "When I first got elected" subtly invites nostalgia for the post-9/11 unity moment, when big legislative moves were easier to sell as national necessity.

But the sentence’s real work is in its narrowing definition of "everybody". "Everybody... who paid taxes" quietly excludes large swaths of low-income Americans, retirees, and people whose tax burden falls more through payroll taxes and fees than income taxes. It also sidesteps the distributive question: cutting taxes can be universal in form while still being wildly unequal in impact. In the early 2000s, Bush’s tax cuts were marketed as broad relief and growth fuel, yet critics argued they disproportionately benefited higher earners and ballooned deficits.

The subtext is political inoculation. By insisting the cuts were for all taxpayers, Bush pre-buts the charge of governing for his donor class. The awkward syntax exposes the tension: a populist pitch stapled to a policy framework that, by design, rewards those with the most taxable income. That gap between rhetoric and arithmetic is the tell, and it’s why the line lands with unintended irony.