Wealth & Money Quote by Randy Newman

Randy Newman’s genius is that he can smuggle a political critique into a one-liner that also kneecaps the speaker. “I think the tax cut is ridiculous but so am I” works because it refuses the clean moral posture that political commentary usually craves. The first clause tees up righteous indignation: a “tax cut” (especially in modern American shorthand) is a proxy for lopsided policy, donor-class economics, and the ritual of selling inequality as freedom. Then Newman swerves. The punchline isn’t a clever statistic or a partisan jab; it’s self-implication.

That pivot matters. By calling himself ridiculous, Newman collapses the distance between critic and target. It’s an anti-heroic stance: the speaker can’t pretend to be above the system he’s mocking, or above the ego and absurdity that politics routinely feeds on. It’s also a sly defense mechanism. If you preemptively make yourself the joke, you disarm the predictable counterattack (“Hollywood elites,” “out-of-touch artists,” “hypocrites”) before it lands.

The line carries Newman’s signature persona: the unreliable narrator who says the quiet part out loud, then confesses he’s not clean either. Coming from a songwriter-comedian who’s spent decades ventriloquizing American attitudes, it reads like a meta-commentary on civic theater itself. Policy becomes another stage where ridiculousness is the price of admission, and the honest move is to admit you paid it.