Wealth & Money Quote by Diane Feinstein

Feinstein’s line lands like an offhand aside, but it’s really a compact argument about who the state is built to serve. “It is my belief” is doing political work: it softens the claim as personal conviction while signaling a broader, experience-based certainty. Then she moves to a blunt distinction that voters immediately recognize even if they can’t diagram the tax code: credits and carve-outs tend to reward people already positioned to claim them. The phrase “making money” is tellingly unsentimental. Not “working families,” not “job creators” - just earners, the already-sorted winners of the system.

The subtext is a critique of tax policy as hidden redistribution upward. Tax credits are sold as relief or incentives, but Feinstein’s punchline - “and they generally keep it” - punctures the moral narrative that these benefits circulate back into the public good. It hints at a quiet unfairness: the government forgoes revenue in the name of growth or fairness, yet the foregone money behaves like any other windfall. It sticks.

Context matters. Feinstein governed in an era when the Democratic Party was constantly triangulating between technocratic pragmatism and populist anger at inequality. This sentence speaks to that tension: it’s not a sweeping anti-capitalist manifesto, it’s a budget-chair realism about who has accountants, who itemizes, who can wait for a credit, who even has enough tax liability to benefit. It’s a politician’s way of saying the obvious thing policy language often hides: tax breaks are spending programs with better branding, and the branding usually favors the people least in need of a subsidy.