"The tax relief package enacted in 2001 was central to pulling the economy out of the post 9-11 recession. It's the reason we've got low unemployment and have created more than two million jobs in the last year"
About this Quote
Credit-claiming dressed up as economic inevitability: that is the core move here. Hayworth collapses a messy, post-9/11 landscape into a clean before-and-after story where one legislative act becomes the master lever of recovery. It’s political narrative engineering, not economic history. By framing the 2001 tax relief package as "central" and then leaping to "the reason" for low unemployment and two million jobs, he converts correlation into causation with the confidence of a campaign slogan.
The intent is twofold. First, to sanctify a policy preference (tax cuts) by tying it to national trauma. "Post 9-11 recession" isn’t just a timestamp; it’s moral ballast. If the economy was wounded in a moment of collective vulnerability, then the policy that "pulled" it out becomes more than debatable fiscal strategy - it becomes a kind of patriotic remedy. Second, to preempt criticism: if today’s jobs numbers are the product of yesterday’s tax cuts, opponents aren’t merely wrong, they’re threatening the conditions of prosperity.
The subtext is a quiet argument about who deserves credit and who deserves trust. "We've got low unemployment" invites listeners to join a successful "we", but the implied authorship belongs to the tax-cutting faction. Context matters: early-2000s politics leaned hard on supply-side rhetoric, and the claim smooths over other forces - Federal Reserve policy, global cycles, deficit effects, and uneven wage growth - that complicate the tidy victory lap.
The intent is twofold. First, to sanctify a policy preference (tax cuts) by tying it to national trauma. "Post 9-11 recession" isn’t just a timestamp; it’s moral ballast. If the economy was wounded in a moment of collective vulnerability, then the policy that "pulled" it out becomes more than debatable fiscal strategy - it becomes a kind of patriotic remedy. Second, to preempt criticism: if today’s jobs numbers are the product of yesterday’s tax cuts, opponents aren’t merely wrong, they’re threatening the conditions of prosperity.
The subtext is a quiet argument about who deserves credit and who deserves trust. "We've got low unemployment" invites listeners to join a successful "we", but the implied authorship belongs to the tax-cutting faction. Context matters: early-2000s politics leaned hard on supply-side rhetoric, and the claim smooths over other forces - Federal Reserve policy, global cycles, deficit effects, and uneven wage growth - that complicate the tidy victory lap.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by D. Hayworth
Add to List
