Wealth & Money Quote by Michael Steele

“Pro-growth” is doing a lot of ideological lifting here. Michael Steele’s line is less an economic diagnosis than a political frame: growth is treated as the only legitimate goal, and the policies he prefers are positioned as simple, common-sense fuel for that growth. The colon-and-examples structure matters. By naming “making tax relief permanent” and “repealing the death tax,” he converts an abstract, widely agreeable value (expansion) into two very specific, high-stakes Republican priorities, then smuggles them back into the category of national necessity.

The subtext is coalition maintenance. “Tax relief” is branding: it presumes taxes are an affliction and that cutting them is a neutral kindness, not a trade-off. “Permanent” is the tell. Temporary cuts invite future bargaining and fiscal scrutiny; permanence turns a policy choice into a baseline entitlement. It’s also a message to donors and anti-tax activists that the party’s commitments won’t expire with the next budget cycle.

Calling the estate tax the “death tax” is the classic rhetorical pivot: rename a narrowly targeted levy on inherited wealth so it sounds like a universal punishment for dying. That populist language masks who benefits most from repeal, while letting politicians claim they’re defending family farms and small businesses, whether or not those edge cases drive the policy.

Contextually, this sits in the post-2000s GOP economic playbook: equate tax cuts with growth, cast government revenue as drag, and make distributional politics feel like moral hygiene. The genius, and the cynicism, is how it treats “growth” as a moral alibi for shifting the tax burden upward-to-downward without ever saying that part out loud.