Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Weyrich

The line is a shrug dressed up as a sneer: a permission slip to waste money, issued only so the speaker can frame the other side as inherently wasteful. Weyrich isn’t arguing policy as much as staging a morality play. “Liberals” becomes a single, undifferentiated character type; “tens of millions” is big enough to sound scandalous but vague enough to evade verification; “down the drain” does the real work, turning public spending into sewage. The closing clause, “I have no problem with that,” performs a confident indifference that’s meant to read as superiority: go ahead, prove my point.

The intent is twofold. First, it primes an audience to treat certain government initiatives not as debatable investments but as self-evident boondoggles. Second, it shifts the terrain from outcomes to optics. Even if a program succeeds, the language pre-buries it as waste, making defenders sound like people arguing for clogged pipes.

Context matters because Weyrich was a key architect of modern conservative infrastructure, fluent in the tactics of message discipline and coalition maintenance. This is the rhetoric of the movement-building era: simplify the opponent, harden the in-group, and make “taxpayer money” feel personal. The subtext is strategic defeatism: let them spend, because their spending will delegitimize them. It’s not a plea for fiscal prudence so much as a bet that cynicism wins elections.