"Well, the taxes that everyone else is paying are supporting lots of programs that were in place prior to Obama's new spending. So new spending has too be paid for by new taxes, or by eliminating existing tax breaks. And Obama wants that burden to be borne exclusively by the rich"
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D'Souza frames fiscal policy as a zero-sum morality play: an inert, legitimate baseline of government ("programs that were in place") versus a suspect surge of "Obama's new spending" that must be financed, inevitably, by extracting more from someone. The sleight of hand is in the word "new". It quietly absolves the existing state of controversy while casting the current administration as uniquely profligate, even though budgets are always a mix of inherited commitments, discretionary choices, and shifting economic conditions. By treating the pre-Obama apparatus as already paid for, he smuggles in the conclusion that any expansion is a deliberate act of redistribution rather than a response to recession, war costs, healthcare inflation, or structural deficits.
The sentence construction does the ideological work. "Has too be paid for" (with its air of hard-nosed necessity) positions D'Souza as the adult in the room, the accountant of realism. Then comes the sharper pivot: "exclusively by the rich". That adverb is doing heavy lifting. It converts progressive tax policy and the closing of loopholes into something like punitive targeting, even if the underlying argument is about marginal rates, tax expenditures, or who captured gains in prior decades. The subtext isn't just that Obama's policies are expensive; it's that they're motivated by resentment, a politics of envy dressed up as policy.
In context, this is early-Obama culture-war economics: stimulus, bailouts, and healthcare reform reframed as class aggression. It's less about balancing ledgers than about mobilizing a constituency to see taxation itself as a kind of moral demotion.
The sentence construction does the ideological work. "Has too be paid for" (with its air of hard-nosed necessity) positions D'Souza as the adult in the room, the accountant of realism. Then comes the sharper pivot: "exclusively by the rich". That adverb is doing heavy lifting. It converts progressive tax policy and the closing of loopholes into something like punitive targeting, even if the underlying argument is about marginal rates, tax expenditures, or who captured gains in prior decades. The subtext isn't just that Obama's policies are expensive; it's that they're motivated by resentment, a politics of envy dressed up as policy.
In context, this is early-Obama culture-war economics: stimulus, bailouts, and healthcare reform reframed as class aggression. It's less about balancing ledgers than about mobilizing a constituency to see taxation itself as a kind of moral demotion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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