Wealth & Money Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

O'Rourke’s joke works because it compresses a whole political argument into a bait-and-switch about identity. “The rich will pay for everything” is the soothing promise politicians make when selling expensive policy: the bill won’t land on you. Then he snaps the trap shut: the state’s definition of “rich” is elastic, and in a mass democracy it inevitably expands until it reaches the median taxpayer. The laugh comes from the speed of the reclassification, the moment you realize you’ve been drafted into the villain role.

The intent is less to litigate a specific Obama-era tax table than to mock the rhetoric of redistribution as a marketing strategy. O’Rourke is allergic to moralized economics: “rich” isn’t a neutral bracket, it’s a scapegoat label that makes tax hikes feel like justice rather than cost-sharing. His subtext is that government sells spending by promising pain-free revenue, and that the category of people who “deserve” to fund it is always someone just above the listener.

Context matters: during the Obama administration, debates over the Bush tax cuts, the Affordable Care Act, and “taxing the 1%” made “the rich” a cultural character - a shorthand for Wall Street excess and recession-era inequality. O’Rourke, a libertarian-leaning satirist, flips that populist script: the joke implies that “soak the rich” politics is ultimately a middle-class policy with better PR. It’s cynicism with a calculator hidden inside.