Wealth & Money Quote by Barack Obama

In that blunt little phrase "further hole", Obama is doing two jobs at once: sounding like a professor of macroeconomics and a pragmatic manager who hates unforced errors. The intent is clear Keynesian triage. In a recession, consumers and firms already pull back; raising taxes then is portrayed not as moral failure or ideological sin, but as bad timing that drains demand when demand is the scarce resource.

What makes it work rhetorically is the way he strips the argument of partisan perfume. "The last thing you want to do" frames the point as common sense, not doctrine. "Suck up" is deliberately un-elevated language for a president, signaling impatience with abstract belt-tightening metaphors. He turns "taxes" into a vacuum cleaner aimed at spending power, and he makes the victim concrete: "businesses" pushed into "a further hole". That metaphor does quiet political work. It recasts the usual left-right fight (taxes versus growth) into a rescue narrative: you don't increase the load while the patient is bleeding.

The subtext is also defensive. Post-2008, Democrats were trying to sell stimulus while being accused of fiscal recklessness. Obama’s formulation anticipates the charge: he’s not saying taxes are always bad; he’s staking a situational claim about sequencing. Fix the collapse first; argue about revenue later. In that era's bruising debates over stimulus, deficits, and "confidence", the line is a bid to own the language of growth and to make opposition to tax hikes feel less like ideology and more like basic economic hygiene.