Wealth & Money Quote by Austan Goolsbee

Goolsbee’s line is built to puncture a familiar Washington ritual: treating tax cuts for the wealthy as a kind of economic defibrillator. The sentence is almost aggressively specific, and that’s the point. By stacking concrete numbers ($100,000 a year; more than a million in income), he drags the debate out of the foggy realm of “job creators” and into an arithmetic reality that sounds, to a median voter, like a giveaway wearing a lab coat.

The intent is technocratic but also quietly moral. He’s not denouncing rich people; he’s indicting a policy claim. “Not an effective way” is careful language from an economist and public servant who knows the fight is over empirical credibility, not outrage. The subtext: if your goal is short-term stimulus, you target households likely to spend, not those likely to save or park gains in assets. In other words, this isn’t about envy; it’s about marginal propensity to consume, said in plain English.

Context matters because the sentence reads like a rebuttal crafted for a recurring moment in U.S. politics: recessions or sluggish recoveries when policymakers reach for broad tax cuts as an all-purpose tonic. Goolsbee’s framing anticipates the counterattack (“class warfare”) and preempts it with numbers and modesty. He doesn’t claim tax cuts never work; he claims this version is a bad tool for this job. That narrowness is its rhetorical power: it forces opponents to defend not tax cuts in general, but this specific transfer upward as “economic ignition.”