Wealth & Money Quote by Jack Kemp

Kemp’s line is a political magic trick: it turns a controversial wager into an apparent law of nature. “Every time in this century” is doing the heavy lifting, a sweeping claim that dares you to dispute the record rather than the philosophy. It’s not framed as ideology, but as empirical inevitability: cut taxes and the government gets richer. That reversal is the sentence’s hook, and it’s why it became a staple of supply-side rhetoric.

The phrasing also quietly rebrands tax policy as moral psychology. He doesn’t say “capital gains” or “top marginal rates.” He says “employment,” “saving,” “investment,” “risk-taking” - a catalogue of virtues. Taxes, in this frame, aren’t a means of funding public goods; they’re a penalty on good behavior. Lower them, and you don’t merely change incentives, you liberate the economy’s better angels. It’s a story in which entrepreneurs are the protagonists and the state is a drag coefficient.

The context is late-20th-century Republican economics, when Kemp helped popularize the Laffer Curve logic that growth can outrun rate cuts. The subtext is electoral as much as economic: you can promise tax cuts without admitting to austerity. Deficits and distribution fade into the background; “revenues went up” is meant to preempt the accusation that tax cutting is fiscally reckless.

What makes the line work is its confidence and compression. It’s a memo, a mantra, and a preemptive rebuttal all at once - built to survive complexity by refusing to acknowledge it.