Politics & Power Quote by Ben Bernanke

Bernanke’s sentence is a technician’s scalpel presented as moral common sense: pay for disaster relief, but do it by cutting “wasteful, duplicative and ineffective” programs elsewhere. The phrasing is doing political work. “Every effort needs to be made” casts austerity as obligation, not preference. It’s a soft imperative that anticipates backlash and pre-emptively frames restraint as responsibility.

The key maneuver is the trio of adjectives. “Wasteful, duplicative and ineffective” is nearly unarguable in the abstract, a bipartisan incantation that lets listeners supply their own target programs. That vagueness is the point: it reassures deficit hawks without naming victims, and it signals to markets and lawmakers that the central banker is aligned with fiscal “discipline.” In the mid-2000s, with Iraq spending, tax cuts, and a growing unease about long-term deficits, the Federal Reserve chair could not be seen as cheerleading blank-check governance, even for catastrophe.

Context sharpens the subtext. Katrina and Rita were not just natural disasters; they were state capacity failures broadcast live. Saying the costs must be “offset” shifts the conversation from moral urgency to budget mechanics, subtly narrowing the range of acceptable responses. It implies that emergency aid competes with domestic priorities rather than, say, being financed through borrowing, progressive taxation, or a larger rethinking of public infrastructure and preparedness.

What makes the line effective is its managerial neutrality. It sounds apolitical while quietly steering policy toward cuts, treating the hurricane as a balance-sheet shock rather than a referendum on what government is for.