Politics & Power Quote by Mike Pence

Pence is selling a tidy moral: tax cuts are not a trade-off but a kind of civic cheat code. The phrasing does a lot of work. "Well, I think the reality is" sounds conversational, even modest, but it’s a rhetorical soft reset: dissenters aren’t merely wrong, they’re ignoring "reality". Then comes the name parade - Kennedy, Reagan, Bush - a bipartisan-to-partisan lineage meant to confer inevitability. It’s not just that tax cuts can work; it’s that serious presidents already proved they do.

The subtext is aimed at a very specific anxiety in American politics: the suspicion that conservative economics is just redistribution upward with nicer branding. Pence counters by claiming the opposite direction of flow. Tax cuts "generated economic growth" and even "expand tax revenues", a formulation designed to neutralize the usual objection - that cutting rates starves government services or balloons deficits. If revenues rise, the policy isn’t austerity; it’s abundance.

Context matters because each of those episodes is still politically contested. Kennedy’s cuts came alongside Cold War spending and a different tax base; Reagan’s era paired rate cuts with deficit expansion and later tax hikes; the Bush cuts were followed by war spending, recession, and widening fiscal gaps. Pence collapses that complexity into a single causal arrow. The intent isn’t to litigate economic history; it’s to produce permission. If growth is the natural result, then opposing tax cuts becomes not prudence but pessimism - a failure of faith in the American economy.