Wealth & Money Quote by Dick Cheney

Cheney’s line is a master class in political inoculation: take a messy ledger, point to forces no one controls, and recast fiscal policy as an aftershock of national trauma. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Frankly” signals candor while preempting suspicion. “One of the reasons” lowers the bar for proof; it’s not the reason, just a plausible component. The most telling move is the pileup of causes - “economic slowdown,” “terrorist attacks,” “what happened after” - a rhetorical fog that blends cyclical downturns with a once-in-a-generation catastrophe, making the deficit feel less like a set of choices and more like weather.

The subtext is accountability management. This is early-2000s Washington, when the Bush administration pursued large tax cuts, increased defense spending, and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Cheney’s sentence doesn’t deny those decisions; it dilutes them. By emphasizing that “a significant chunk was taken out of the economy,” he frames deficits as the inevitable price of resilience and security, not the predictable outcome of a policy mix.

It’s also an attempt to lock in a moral hierarchy: after 9/11, questioning the financial cost of the response can be painted as small-minded or even unpatriotic. The deficit becomes a symbol of collective endurance, not a political trade-off. In that sense, the quote isn’t just explanation; it’s narrative control, designed to make the balance sheet feel like a memorial rather than a referendum.