"We've suffered a war, and one thing we know: Whenever our nation's faced war, whether it was in the 1980s when we were winning the Cold War or in the 1940s during World War II, the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war"
About this Quote
Mehlman is doing a neat bit of rhetorical laundering: turning a partisan fight over deficits into a patriotic reflex. By calling the post-9/11 moment simply "a war" and pairing it with the 1940s and the Cold War, he grabs the moral clarity of existential conflict and drapes it over a very specific policy argument: keep spending, stop asking hard questions about how to pay for it.
The line "the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war" flips the usual fiscal morality play. Borrowing, typically framed as recklessness, becomes duty. That inversion is the point. It preemptively rebukes critics of debt-financed tax cuts or ballooning budgets by casting them as naïve accountants fiddling while the nation fights. In this framing, prudence is almost un-American.
The subtext is even sharper in the choice of examples. "Winning the Cold War" in the 1980s is a partisan coded phrase, a nod to Reagan-era mythology: strength, spending, victory. It quietly implies that borrowing is not just tolerable but historically vindicated when conservatives do it in the name of security. World War II is the unimpeachable anchor, the one comparison that makes dissent look petty.
Context matters: Mehlman, as a GOP strategist in the Bush era, is speaking into a moment when the administration wanted to fund wars and domestic priorities while resisting new taxes. The quote isn't economic history; it's permission structure. It tells the public that debt is not a tradeoff, it's a weapon - and questioning it is a failure of resolve.
The line "the responsible thing to do has been to borrow money to win the war" flips the usual fiscal morality play. Borrowing, typically framed as recklessness, becomes duty. That inversion is the point. It preemptively rebukes critics of debt-financed tax cuts or ballooning budgets by casting them as naïve accountants fiddling while the nation fights. In this framing, prudence is almost un-American.
The subtext is even sharper in the choice of examples. "Winning the Cold War" in the 1980s is a partisan coded phrase, a nod to Reagan-era mythology: strength, spending, victory. It quietly implies that borrowing is not just tolerable but historically vindicated when conservatives do it in the name of security. World War II is the unimpeachable anchor, the one comparison that makes dissent look petty.
Context matters: Mehlman, as a GOP strategist in the Bush era, is speaking into a moment when the administration wanted to fund wars and domestic priorities while resisting new taxes. The quote isn't economic history; it's permission structure. It tells the public that debt is not a tradeoff, it's a weapon - and questioning it is a failure of resolve.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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