Leadership Quote by Tim Bishop

The line is a politician's way of putting a moral halo on redistribution without saying the scary word. Bishop frames prosperity as something that often comes with collateral damage: someone loses a job to a trade deal, a neighborhood gets bulldozed for a highway, a factory closes after "efficiency" improvements. The key move is the phrase "bearing the cost that made it possible". Growth isn't treated as manna from the market; it's treated as a project with winners and losers, and the losers aren't incidental. They're the enabling condition.

That framing does two things at once. It reassures beneficiaries that they can keep "some of the increased benefit" (not all, not even most) while insisting that decency requires a rebate to those who got cut out of the deal. It's a moderation tactic: justice, but calibrated. He doesn't invoke rights or entitlement; he invokes "morally... decent", a softer civic standard that aims to recruit even people allergic to big-government language.

The subtext is an argument against the shrug that often accompanies modern policymaking: the idea that disruption is regrettable but necessary and the displaced should simply "adapt". Bishop rejects that as insufficiently adult. If society knowingly cashes a check written on someone else's stability, it inherits an obligation. In context, it's the classic social-contract pitch for unemployment insurance, retraining, regional investment, or targeted safety nets - not as charity, but as the maintenance fee for an economy that prides itself on dynamism.