Wealth & Money Quote by Terry Savage

Savage reaches for the most American kind of authority: the dashboard metaphor. Cars are a shared language of control and consequence, so the image does immediate work. Everyone understands the sickening logic of simultaneous acceleration and braking: motion without progress, heat without purpose, damage disguised as effort. It’s not just a folksy analogy; it’s a preemptive strike against nuance. By framing tax policy as basic mechanics, she implies the outcome is not debatable but inevitable.

The subtext is about discipline and coherence. “Vital parts” signals hidden fragility: systems can look fine right up to the moment they fail. Translated into fiscal terms, she’s warning that a tax code built on competing political impulses - placate the middle class while punishing a symbolic “rich” - creates friction that the economy absorbs as inefficiency, reduced investment, slower growth, and eventually, loss of capacity. The word “burnout” does double duty: it suggests both overheating (too much strain) and exhaustion (a system asked to perform under contradictory demands).

Context matters: this lives in the long post-1980s argument where “tax the rich” is treated not only as redistribution but as signaling - a moral gesture with alleged economic costs. Quotation marks around “rich” are the tell. They hint that the category is slippery, politically constructed, maybe even scapegoated. Savage’s intent isn’t to run the numbers; it’s to make the moral drama feel like bad engineering. If you accept her framing, progressive taxation stops being a value choice and becomes a mechanical error.