Wealth & Money Quote by Richard J. Codey

Codey’s line lands like a one-liner, but it’s built for a very specific political job: to tell the truth about fiscal danger without lighting the public square on fire. “The good news” performs reassurance before the audience can panic; “we’re not bankrupt” draws a bright, legally charged boundary that calms markets, voters, and bureaucracies. Then he yanks the floor back. “The bad news” signals candor and seriousness, and “we’re close” compresses a slow-moving budget crisis into a cliff edge you can picture.

The craft is in the calibrated contradiction. By pairing a technical term (bankrupt) with a colloquial proximity (close), Codey translates balance-sheet complexity into a gut-level warning. It’s also a preemptive defense: if painful measures follow - cuts, tax hikes, emergency controls - he can claim he didn’t sugarcoat it. The sentence is a bridge between accountability and permission.

Subtextually, it spreads responsibility without naming villains. “We’re” is inclusive, a softening pronoun that invites shared sacrifice while quietly blurring who steered the car toward the guardrail. That ambiguity is useful in a statehouse where budget blame is always contested and often bipartisan. The joke-like structure makes the message more repeatable on the evening news, which is the point: urgency that travels.

Context matters because “bankruptcy” is the nuclear word for government finances. Codey is leveraging it to raise the temperature just enough to justify extraordinary action, while still insisting the house hasn’t burned down yet.