Wealth & Money Quote by Martin L. Gross

A polite sentence with a knife inside it, Gross frames tax policy as a class artifact: not a neutral set of rules, but an authored text written from comfort, for comfort. The word “written” matters. It doesn’t accuse the rich merely of benefiting from the system; it suggests they are the system’s ghostwriters, shaping loopholes and thresholds with the casual authority of people who will never feel the pressure those numbers create.

The subtext is less “the wealthy are greedy” than “they’re insulated.” Gross lands his sharpest blow with “little understanding,” a phrase that reads like understatement but functions as indictment. Ignorance here isn’t accidental; it’s structural. If your life is managed by assets, accountants, and appreciation, you don’t have to perform the daily arithmetic of wages: hours, bills, emergencies, the thin margin where a single fee becomes a crisis.

Contextually, the line sits in a late-20th-century American argument about who government is for, when tax codes ballooned into labyrinths accessible mainly to specialists, and policy debates increasingly treated “tax relief” as a moral good without naming for whom. Gross anticipates a now-familiar populist critique: legitimacy erodes when the rulebook is drafted by people who don’t live under its consequences.

It works because it turns taxation from abstraction into empathy test. The phrase “make ends meet” is deliberately domestic and unglamorous, dragging fiscal policy down from spreadsheets to kitchens. That’s the real provocation: if lawmakers can’t imagine the wage-earner’s month, they’re not just misdesigning policy; they’re governing a country they don’t actually know.