Time & Perspective Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s line isn’t really a policy argument so much as a pressure tactic dressed up as economic common sense: touch taxes and you’re personally responsible for the job market staying bad. The construction is pure cause-and-effect absolutism. “If you’re going to” sets a conditional trap, and “you’re going to slow down” turns a contested prediction into an inevitability. By the time he arrives at “serious mistake,” the listener has already been nudged to treat disagreement as recklessness.

The key subtext is who gets positioned as the hero and who gets cast as the villain. “Small businesses” functions as a moral proxy: not a category on an IRS form, but a symbol of grit, local community, and non-elite legitimacy. It’s a political shield. Argue for higher revenue or deficit reduction and you’re no longer debating numbers; you’re “raising taxes on small businesses,” a phrase built to make any nuance sound cruel or out of touch.

Contextually, this is Cheney in his natural habitat: economic claims deployed as governing ideology and campaign message at once. The unemployment reference is a rhetorical accelerant, tying tax policy to a crisis metric voters actually feel. It also narrows the field of acceptable goals. Long-term fiscal balance, public investment, or distributional fairness become luxuries; the only responsible timetable is “not now.” That’s the move: shift the debate from whether taxes should rise to whether anyone can afford to be the person who raised them, then.