Wealth & Money Quote by Steve Chabot

Fiscal contradiction dressed up as discipline: Chabot’s line tries to sell a paradox as prudence. On its face, it’s the familiar conservative syllogism - budgets are out of balance, therefore we should cut taxes - then the pivot: tax cuts will “help limit spending.” The intent is less about arithmetic than leverage. If you shrink revenue, you can force austerity later, not by persuasion but by constraint. That’s not a bug; it’s the strategy often called “starve the beast,” a way to make the budget itself do the arguing when Congress won’t.

The subtext is a quiet admission of political reality: cutting spending is unpopular in the abstract and brutal in the specifics. Voters like the idea of “fiscal responsibility” until it names their program. Tax cuts, by contrast, are a clean, crowd-pleasing gesture. So the quote reframes a choice (raise revenue or cut services) as an inevitability (“limit spending”), shifting the moral burden downstream. Today’s vote becomes tomorrow’s necessity.

Context matters: this is the language of a party that often campaigns on balanced budgets while tolerating deficits when tax cuts are on the table. The phrase “at this time” functions like an escape hatch, suggesting the imbalance is temporary or incidental rather than a predictable outcome of the policy being endorsed. It’s a line designed to keep two promises alive at once: smaller government, and the refusal to say out loud what gets smaller.