Art & Creativity Quote by Don Nickles

The power of Don Nickles's line is how casually it detonates. "Cooking the books" is a cliché, but in a politician's mouth it becomes a shortcut to shared suspicion: everyone knows what it means, and everyone knows it happens. Nickles isn't offering a technocratic critique of accounting practices; he's narrating a moral weather report. If the numbers are fake, reality itself is about to get expensive.

The conditional "If" does a lot of work. It implies the behavior is plausible, maybe already underway, without forcing him to allege a specific crime. That's the classic political posture: raise the alarm while keeping defamation at arm's length. Then he lands on "you're in trouble", a blunt, second-person warning that collapses distance between policymaker and public. It's not "the system is at risk" or "markets may respond". It's you. The voter, the taxpayer, the bystander who thought balance sheets were someone else's problem.

Contextually, Nickles came out of an era when fights over budgets, audits, and regulation were proxy wars over trust in government and big institutions. The phrase scans as a populist alarm bell aimed at bureaucrats and executives alike: when incentives reward rosy numbers, the rot spreads upward and downward. The subtext is less about arithmetic than accountability. A nation can survive bad news; it can't function when the scoreboard is rigged.