Wealth & Money Quote by Dennis Hastert

“Tort tax” is doing the heavy lifting here: a made-up fee with the moral authority of something you’d see on a receipt. Hastert’s intent is to reframe civil litigation not as a messy, case-by-case fight over harm, but as a hidden surcharge quietly imposed on every shopper. It’s a classic pocketbook move in politician-speak: translate a policy dispute about liability and accountability into a kitchen-table grievance about prices.

The subtext is sharper. By blaming “greedy personal injury lawyer[s],” the quote picks a villain that’s both culturally legible and politically convenient. It invites listeners to identify with “businesses and manufacturers” as beleaguered providers, while casting plaintiffs and their attorneys as parasites gaming the system. That framing launders corporate risk management into something noble (“cover themselves and their employees”) and turns the legal mechanism that compensates injured people into a kind of extortion racket. You’re meant to feel not just annoyed by lawsuits, but morally superior to the people who file them.

Context matters: Hastert’s era in Republican leadership was thick with “tort reform” campaigns, backed by business groups and insurers, selling limits on damages and tighter rules on lawsuits as anti-inflation policy. The rhetorical trick is flattening cause and effect. Prices rise for dozens of reasons; liability costs are easier to personify. “Just in case” is the wink: it suggests frivolity without evidence, converting uncertainty into suspicion. The quote works because it turns a complex legal ecosystem into a simple consumer scam - and hands voters a culprit they already think they recognize.