Politics & Power Quote by Kristi Noem

Noem’s line is less an economic diagnosis than a moral sorting mechanism: “government” becomes an intrusive referee, “businesses” the aggrieved protagonists, and the economy a body struggling to stand. The phrasing is engineered to convert a technical debate about stimulus, regulation, and pandemic-era relief into a gut-level story about fairness. “Picking winners and losers” borrows the language of rigged games, implying corruption or incompetence without having to name a specific policy. It’s a flexible accusation: it can mean bailouts, shutdown orders, spending packages, or even public health rules, depending on what the listener already resents.

The intent is to reframe the last “year and a half” (read: COVID governance and early Biden-era interventions, though the timeframe can also rope in late Trump-era measures) as a continuous overreach. By treating a crisis period as proof of a permanent tendency, she turns emergency tools into ideological evidence. The subtext is that markets are neutral and self-correcting, while state action is inherently distorting. That’s a convenient simplification, because many “winners” in modern capitalism are picked through tax codes, contracts, and subsidies that conservatives often tolerate when they align with preferred industries.

The rhetoric works because it offers a clean villain and an easy fix: step back and prosperity returns. “Reinvest” is the key verb: it casts corporations as would-be caretakers of recovery, blocked not by demand shocks, labor churn, or supply chains, but by bureaucrats. It’s a campaign-ready translation of libertarian economics into grievance politics.