Wealth & Money Quote by Harry Hopkins

A cynic could mistake this for a campaign jingle; it’s closer to a confession. “We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect” compresses a whole theory of modern governance into a rhythm you can chant. The repetition is the point: politics as an engine that runs on revenue, converts it into visible action, then converts that action into votes, then uses the votes to justify more of the same. Hopkins isn’t arguing that taxation or spending are inherently corrupt; he’s exposing the self-reinforcing loop that makes them politically irresistible.

The line lands because it borrows the cadence of wartime resolve (“we shall…”) and swaps heroism for machinery. Tax and spend become not policies but verbs in a cycle, stripped of moral language. That stripping is the subtext: in mass democracy, motives get laundered into process. “Elect and elect” is especially sharp. Elections are supposed to be accountability; here they’re fuel, the payoff that turns public programs into permanent incumbency.

Context matters. Hopkins was a New Deal insider and later a Roosevelt confidant operating at the highest levels of crisis management. Whether he meant it as dark humor, a warning, or a bit of insider candor, the quote sounds like someone who has watched emergency measures become institutions. It also frames “taxing and spending” less as ideology than as political physics: once government learns it can translate money into legitimacy, restraint becomes the hardest policy to sell.