Politics & Power Quote by Jim Ramstad

The stumble in “all to expensive” is almost beside the point; it accidentally underlines what Ramstad is really doing here: making complexity feel like an everyday injury. “As American taxpayers know too well” is a neat piece of political ventriloquism. It assumes a shared frustration, drafts the audience into a we, and pre-argues the case by treating the conclusion as common sense. If you already “know too well,” disagreement starts to look like tone-deafness.

Ramstad’s specific intent is coalition-building around tax reform by shifting the conversation away from who pays what and toward the process itself. “Incredibly complex” is less a technical description than a moral indictment: the code isn’t just intricate, it’s unreasonable. The phrase “compliance” does quiet work, too. It frames ordinary filing as a burden imposed by the state rather than a civic routine, recasting taxpayers as rule-followers forced into costly rituals.

The subtext is classic small-government persuasion, but with a populist glaze. Complexity becomes a proxy for unfairness: the more baroque the system, the easier it is to imagine loopholes for the well-lawyered and headaches for everyone else. That contrast invites anger without naming winners and losers directly.

Context matters: late-20th and early-21st century tax politics leaned hard on “simplification” as a bipartisan-sounding goal. It’s an argument designed to travel, letting reformers push cuts, credits, or restructuring under the soothing banner of relief. The line isn’t about arithmetic; it’s about legitimacy. When compliance is “too expensive,” the state starts to look like it’s charging admission to citizenship.