"It is clear that the economy has not gotten better for everyone"
About this Quote
A politician doesn’t say “not gotten better for everyone” by accident. Costello’s line is engineered to sound like a plain statement of fact while quietly assigning blame and inviting a moral verdict. “It is clear” front-loads authority, implying the evidence is so obvious that disagreement is either dishonest or out of touch. Then comes the real move: not “the economy is bad,” but “has not gotten better for everyone.” That framing concedes headline improvements while spotlighting distribution - who captured the gains, who got left behind.
The subtext is a critique of the victory-lap narrative that often follows GDP growth, stock market highs, or falling unemployment. It also functions as political inoculation: if someone cites positive macro numbers, he’s already granted them, then pivots to the lived experience of wages, healthcare costs, housing, and job security. “Everyone” is deliberately expansive. It compresses a range of constituencies - working-class voters, renters, people in deindustrialized towns - into a single implied community of the shortchanged.
Contextually, this is the language of the post-1980s American economy, where productivity and corporate profits can climb even as median wages stagnate and the safety net frays. It’s also classic Democratic rhetoric from an era when globalization and financialization made “the economy” feel like a separate planet from everyday life. The sentence works because it’s hard to refute without sounding callous: to deny it is to argue, implicitly, that the people still struggling don’t count as evidence.
The subtext is a critique of the victory-lap narrative that often follows GDP growth, stock market highs, or falling unemployment. It also functions as political inoculation: if someone cites positive macro numbers, he’s already granted them, then pivots to the lived experience of wages, healthcare costs, housing, and job security. “Everyone” is deliberately expansive. It compresses a range of constituencies - working-class voters, renters, people in deindustrialized towns - into a single implied community of the shortchanged.
Contextually, this is the language of the post-1980s American economy, where productivity and corporate profits can climb even as median wages stagnate and the safety net frays. It’s also classic Democratic rhetoric from an era when globalization and financialization made “the economy” feel like a separate planet from everyday life. The sentence works because it’s hard to refute without sounding callous: to deny it is to argue, implicitly, that the people still struggling don’t count as evidence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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