Wealth & Money Quote by Ric Keller

The line reads like a data-driven victory lap, but its real purpose is defensive: it tries to preempt anxiety by flooding the room with numbers. Ric Keller isn’t simply arguing that the economy is “strong”; he’s attempting to close the case before objections can surface. “Well” signals rebuttal, the verbal equivalent of clearing your throat before correcting the record. The cadence is classic stump-speech reassurance: short declarations, then a tidy stack of metrics designed to feel incontrovertible.

The job figure (5.4 million) functions less as information than as a prop of competence. It implies managerial authorship: jobs weren’t created by a sprawling system of businesses, consumers, central banks, and global conditions; they were created by “we.” That pronoun is the giveaway. It blurs personal credit, party credit, and national momentum into one convenient brand.

The comparison to the 1960s through 1990s is doing quiet rhetorical laundering. Averaging four decades flattens the drama of recessions, booms, oil shocks, and globalization into a single benchmark that can be beaten. It’s a move aimed at audiences who remember the past as a haze of “harder times,” not a sequence of specific cycles. “Better than the average” also lowers the bar: it avoids the more perilous claim that today is better than the best moments of those eras.

Contextually, this kind of statement typically appears when voters feel unease despite headline indicators. It’s not just persuasion; it’s an attempt to overwrite lived experience with macroeconomic framing. The subtext is: trust the dashboard, not your wallet.