Wealth & Money Quote by Rick Perry

The joke lands because it pretends to be about paperwork and is really about power: who gets to define “fair,” who gets to look competent, and who gets to be the punchline. Rick Perry’s postcard-tax line is classic campaign-season populism, packaging a sprawling ideological project as common sense you can hold in your hand. “Flat, fair and simple” is a rhetorical triple-play: flat signals a preference for lower, less progressive taxation; fair borrows the moral high ground without specifying winners and losers; simple flatters voters as the grown-ups in a room full of technocrats.

The Geithner swipe is the knife twist. In 2011-2012, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was dogged by a tax-payment controversy, so Perry frames complexity as not just annoying but corrupting: the system is so byzantine even the nation’s top finance official can’t navigate it “on time.” That’s less a policy argument than a character argument - a way to delegitimize the Obama administration as both elitist and inept.

It’s also a neat inversion of expertise. Geithner, the credentialed insider, becomes the cautionary tale; the “postcard” becomes a symbol of democratic accessibility, as if smaller forms guarantee cleaner governance. The subtext is that resentment can be a governing philosophy: simplify the tax code, yes, but also simplify the story - ordinary people versus bureaucrats - and you win the room before anyone asks what a flat tax actually does to their bill.