Wealth & Money Quote by Bob Taft

“Frozen in time” is doing the heavy lifting here: it casts the existing tax code not as a set of contested choices, but as a relic - something inert, irrational, almost un-American in a culture that worships reinvention. Taft’s line is engineered to make reform feel like common sense rather than ideology. Who wants to defend being stuck?

The specific intent is to build a bridge between two emotionally loaded ideas: jobs (security, dignity, political credit) and taxes (pain, suspicion, culture-war shorthand). By yoking “tomorrow’s jobs” to “yesterday’s tax system,” Taft smuggles a deregulatory, pro-business agenda into a future-oriented frame. The implied logic isn’t proven; it’s asserted through time metaphors. If the economy has evolved, then the tax system must “evolve,” too. Anyone asking “evolve into what, for whom?” is positioned as the person insisting on ice.

Subtext: change is inevitable, and resistance is both naïve and costly. The sentence suggests that job creation is being held hostage by outdated policy, quietly shifting responsibility away from corporate strategy, wages, or global competition and toward government design. It also appeals to a bipartisan civic virtue: pragmatism. “We” invites the listener into a shared project, while the real target is a legislature and public wary of tax cuts, credits, or shifts in burden.

Contextually, Taft’s brand of GOP governance - Midwestern, business-friendly, managerial - often sold tax restructuring as modernization, a way to stay competitive against other states. The genius of the phrasing is that it makes the future sound nonnegotiable, and the tax code sound like a museum exhibit blocking the exit.