Daily Inspiration Quote by Jessica Savitch

A neat bit of deadpan that pretends to be about privacy while really being about power. Jessica Savitch frames salary not as a badge of merit or a workplace talking point, but as a matter of compliance: you and the IRS. The joke lands because it yanks the conversation away from the places where pay is usually negotiated, compared, and politicized, and drops it into the one relationship nobody gets to opt out of. In that move, she exposes how “private” money talk often is: not intimate, just controlled.

Savitch was a journalist in an era when broadcast news was becoming sleeker, more celebrity-driven, and more brutally conscious of hierarchy. In that ecosystem, salary is both a measure of status and a lever management can use to keep talent isolated. By invoking the IRS, she smuggles in a truth about institutions: they love transparency when it flows upward. The state knows your number. Your employer knows your number. Your peers are encouraged not to.

There’s also a journalist’s instinct at work: follow the paper trail, distrust the performance. Salaries are treated as personal morality tales (“deserve,” “earned,” “market value”), but Savitch reduces them to an audited fact. The subtext is almost a dare: if the most invasive bureaucracy gets the truth, why is honest pay talk among coworkers treated like bad manners? It’s a line that sounds polite, even prudent, while quietly indicting the norms that keep wages unequal and unchallenged.