Wealth & Money Quote by John Sununu

“Real wealth” is doing a lot of political work here: it’s not just money, it’s a moral credential. Sununu frames prosperity as something that becomes legitimate only when it’s individually made, not distributed, not buffered by the state, not complicated by collective obligation. The verb choices are telling: “let” implies individuals are already capable but restrained by policy; “empower” borrows the language of social justice and redeploys it as market freedom. The pitch is libertarian populism dressed in family values.

The emotional center is inheritance. “Something that they can leave for their children” narrows the horizon from society to lineage, from public good to private continuity. It’s a classic conservative move: attach economic deregulation to an almost unarguable parental impulse. Who’s going to argue against providing for your kids? The subtext is that taxes, regulation, or redistribution don’t just cost you dollars; they interrupt a sacred intergenerational story.

Context matters: Sununu’s brand of Republican governance comes out of late-20th-century battles over the size of government, union power, welfare policy, and tax rates. In that landscape, “create real wealth” implicitly contrasts “real” producers with alleged dependents or bureaucrats - the old maker/taker frame without naming it. The line also dodges structural questions (monopoly power, unequal starting points, inherited wealth) by treating opportunity as a simple switch policymakers can flip: stop interfering and growth will take care of itself.

It works because it compresses ideology into a parental promise: economic policy as an act of protection, not politics.