Money Quote by Dan Bartlett

“The worst thing” is doing a lot of work here: it’s not an economic claim so much as a preemptive moral ranking. Dan Bartlett’s line takes a complicated policy question and collapses it into a single taboo, the way political messaging often does when it wants to shut down debate rather than win it. If raising taxes is framed as the absolute catastrophe, then every alternative, even cutting services or ballooning deficits, starts to look responsible by comparison.

The grammar matters. “Raises taxes” (instead of “raising taxes”) gives the sentence a slightly off-kilter, off-the-cuff feel, which can read as authenticity in TV-era politics: a person speaking plainly, not a technocrat reciting caveats. That casual tone pairs with a sweeping certainty. “It would only hurt the economy” is the clincher, because “only” erases the possibility that taxes might fund demand, stabilize budgets, or pay for public goods that businesses quietly rely on. The line isn’t arguing about trade-offs; it’s denying that trade-offs exist.

The subtext is coalition management. Bartlett (widely known as a Republican communications strategist in the Bush era) is signaling fealty to an anti-tax orthodoxy that unites donors, activists, and voters under a single, easily repeated axiom: taxes equal pain. Contextually, this kind of statement thrives in moments when leaders want to justify spending cuts, resist fiscal pressure, or shift responsibility for economic anxiety onto government itself. It’s a sentence built for soundbites, not spreadsheets.