Politics & Power Quote by Robert Orben

Washington, in Orben's telling, is a topsy-turvy funhouse where the people in charge have lost their internal compass and the only thing with reliable direction is the cost of living. The gag works because it turns civic dysfunction into spatial confusion: politicians "don't know which way is up" suggests moral vertigo as much as incompetence, a city so disorienting that even basic orientation gets scrambled. Then comes the punchline’s hard pivot: taxes absolutely do know where they’re headed, and it isn’t down. That contrast is the engine of the joke - leaders are allegedly clueless, yet the system they run is brutally efficient at extracting money.

Orben, an entertainer by trade, isn’t offering policy critique so much as a crowd-pleasing diagnosis of a permanent mood: suspicion that government can’t manage itself but can always manage your wallet. The line flatters the listener’s cynicism. You don’t need to track budgets or legislation to feel "gotten"; the joke hands you a simple, satisfying narrative of asymmetry.

The subtext is less partisan than cultural. It’s Washington as a symbol: not a city of public service but a machine with incentives misaligned toward growth - of bureaucracy, of revenue demands, of self-preservation. The era matters too: Orben’s mid-to-late 20th century comedic voice lands in a long American tradition of mistrust in centralized authority, especially as taxes and federal reach expanded. The joke survives because that friction never went away; it just got new talking points.