Politics & Power Quote by Andy Rooney

Rooney lands the punch with a weapon he loved: the plainspoken sentence that smuggles a blade. "Taxes are important" is a faux-neutral throat-clearer, the kind a reasonable uncle might say before carving the roast. Then he pivots into a parody of bipartisan virtue: "leave no rich person behind". It’s an acid rewrite of the Bush-era slogan politics that wrapped policy in feel-good moral branding. The phrase exposes the rhetorical trick of selling upward redistribution as compassion, as if the wealthy are a vulnerable group in need of rescue.

The subtext is less about tax brackets than about American self-concept. Rooney’s sharpest move is in the last line, where he indicts not only the administration but the audience: voters "approve" of helping people they "wish they were one of". That’s aspiration turned into consent. He’s pointing at the psychological bargain at the heart of certain tax-cut coalitions: you vote as a future millionaire, not as your current self. It’s satire aimed at a culture that treats wealth as identity rather than outcome, and treats government as a concierge for that identity.

Context matters: Bush’s early-2000s tax cuts were marketed as broad-based relief but delivered disproportionate benefits to top earners. Rooney’s intent is to puncture the marketing, but also to shame the spectator sport of inequality - the way voters can be recruited to cheer for someone else’s gains because it flatters their dream of joining the winners.