Wealth & Money Quote by Cathy McMorris

“Small businesses” is doing heavy lifting here: it’s a folk hero, a moral shield, and a policy shortcut. Cathy McMorris’s line isn’t just advocating tax relief and deregulation; it’s translating a contested economic theory into a story of common sense. If you’re for cutting taxes and rules, you’re for jobs. If you’re skeptical, you’re implicitly against the neighborhood employer trying to make payroll. That’s the intent: collapse a complex argument about who benefits from tax and regulatory changes into an instantly legible pro-worker posture.

The subtext is coalition management. “Tax relief” and “reducing regulations” are red-meat signals to business lobbies and conservative donors, but the sentence studiously centers “our small businesses,” not corporations. It’s a rhetorical decoy that borrows the trust people feel toward local shops and applies it to broad, often blunt policy tools. “Backbone of our economy” is a warm, familiar metaphor that discourages follow-up questions like: Which regulations? Relief for whom? What trade-offs in consumer protections, labor standards, or public revenue?

Contextually, this sits squarely in late-20th/early-21st-century Republican economic messaging: supply-side economics repackaged as populism. The language is engineered for sound bites and floor speeches, where the goal is less to prove causation than to set a default moral frame. “Leads to” is the quiet power move: it presents a debatable outcome as a reliable chain reaction. The quote works because it offers a clean, hopeful mechanism - unclench government, unleash opportunity - while keeping the costs offstage.