Wealth & Money Quote by David Broder

Broder’s line is a scalpel disguised as a scold: it doesn’t argue policy so much as it indicts a worldview. The phrase “Something got screwed up” lands with deliberate plainness, the kind of newsroom vernacular that signals impatience with euphemism. He’s not inviting a seminar on marginal tax rates; he’s telling elites their moral compass is busted.

The sentence is engineered as a forced choice. “Dividend tax” is technocratic, bloodless, and implicitly upper-income; “11 million kids” is concrete, human, and vast. By stacking the abstract against the counted and vulnerable, Broder compresses an entire critique of Washington’s incentive structure into one comparison. The number matters: it refuses the comfortable dodge that we’re talking about a niche problem. The kids are not an anecdote; they’re a constituency bigger than many states.

Subtextually, he’s calling out a familiar Beltway ritual: treating redistributive questions as “values” (debatable, partisan) while treating tax cuts for capital as “economics” (inevitable, pragmatic). Broder’s jab flips that hierarchy. If the system’s “priorities” elevate investor returns over child welfare, the problem isn’t a spreadsheet error; it’s a political culture that mistakes what’s easy to lobby for as what’s urgent to fix.

Contextually, it fits the early-2000s fights over dividend taxation and the Bush-era tax-cut agenda, when “pro-growth” rhetoric often crowded out social provision. Broder, a centrist institutionalist by reputation, leverages that credibility here: this isn’t lefty sermonizing, it’s the mainstream press’s conscience clearing its throat.