Politics & Power Quote by Marty Meehan

Meehan frames 2005 as a moral ledger the public will someday audit, and he wants the balance sheet to indict his opponents. The line is built to sound like memory and conscience, not policy: “I don’t want to remember” performs restraint while smuggling in a threat of historical judgment. It’s a neat political move. By staging the argument as a fight over how the year will be remembered, he shifts the terrain from technical budget disputes to a story about who got hurt and who cashed out.

The phrasing “heaped unnecessary burdens” borrows the language of everyday family stress - bills, childcare, gas - translating abstract fiscal decisions into domestic strain. Then he sharpens it into class warfare with a prosecutorial rhythm: “Stealing from the poor and middle class and giving to the rich.” “Stealing” is deliberately incendiary, implying not just unfairness but illegitimacy, as if redistribution upward isn’t an outcome but a crime.

The kicker is the deficit clause. Meehan anticipates the predictable defense (“tax cuts spur growth”) and preemptively brands it as irresponsible because it violates the conservative ethic it claims to serve. That’s the subtext: the governing coalition in power isn’t merely cruel, it’s hypocritical - using the rhetoric of fiscal discipline to justify policies that widen inequality and blow a hole in the budget.

In 2005, with Bush-era tax cuts, war spending, and looming fights over entitlement reform, the quote reads as a mid-2000s Democratic attempt to fuse pocketbook populism with budget hawkishness: compassion plus arithmetic, aimed squarely at suburban and working-class voters asked to carry the tab.