Politics & Power Quote by Mary Bono

Mary Bono’s line is engineered to make a policy dispute feel like a family-level moral offense. By pairing “what they earn” with “passed on to a loved one,” she collapses the estate tax into a simple story of double punishment: work hard, pay up, die, and the government reaches into the grieving household for seconds. The phrasing “not only...but” does rhetorical heavy lifting, turning a technical levy on large estates into an intuitive fairness test. Most listeners won’t parse thresholds, exemptions, or the difference between taxing income versus taxing accumulated wealth; they’ll hear a basic violation of common sense.

The intent is clear: delegitimize the estate tax by renaming it as a kind of “double taxation,” a phrase that works because it sounds like cheating. The subtext is even sharper. “Those assets” sidesteps the messy question of how big those estates are, and whether the beneficiaries did anything to earn them. “Loved one” is strategic sentimentality, inviting the audience to picture a widow, a child, a family business - not heirs to a nine-figure portfolio. It’s populist language in the service of a policy that, in practice, primarily benefits the wealthy.

Context matters: Bono, a Republican former congresswoman, spoke in the long-running post-Reagan campaign to shrink taxes on wealth transfers. The quote is less an explanation than an inoculation: if you accept the premise of “taxed again,” any defense of the estate tax can be framed as bureaucratic cruelty rather than redistribution or revenue policy.