Wealth & Money Quote by David Plouffe

Fairness is doing the heavy lifting here, because it lets Plouffe turn a spreadsheet argument into a moral one. He’s not leading with marginal rates or revenue projections; he’s leading with a question about national identity: what kind of country are we? That framing is deliberate. It recruits the listener’s civic self-image first, then supplies numbers as proof that the current system violates it.

The statistic, "22,000 people making over $1 million", is less about precision than scale. It isolates a small, legible group - a tiny slice of winners - and implies the fix is targeted, not punitive. The phrase "effective tax rate in the teens" is the real indictment: not just that the rich pay less than some ideal, but that the system allows wealth to be routed around its own stated principles. "Effective" matters because it shifts the debate from what the law claims to do to what it actually produces after loopholes, capital gains treatment, and sophisticated accounting.

Invoking Warren Buffett is a strategic cultural shortcut. Buffett is rich enough to be unimpeachable and folksy enough to be trusted; his secretary anecdote is a parable that compresses complexity into a single, embarrassing image. Plouffe borrows that credibility to make inequality sound less like class warfare and more like basic rule-breaking. The closing, "That’s not right", is intentionally plain. It’s the language of a referee, not a professor - meant to make tax reform feel like restoring order, not redesigning the economy.