Wealth & Money Quote by Alan Ladd

A tax break is the kind of consolation prize politicians love: abstract, delayed, and easy to quantify. Alan Ladd’s line punctures that logic with a single, brutal question. It’s not an argument about marginal rates; it’s a demand to name what’s being traded away. The phrasing forces a moral audit: if the cost is lifelong injury, the “benefit” isn’t merely insufficient, it’s grotesque.

Coming from an actor, the power is in the plain-spoken staging. “What good” has the cadence of everyday frustration, not ideology. “Crippled for life” (a period-typical phrasing that reads harsher now) drags the listener from the clean spreadsheet into the body: pain, limits, dependence, time. The subtext is that policy debates often treat human damage as externalities, while offering financial perks as if money can retroactively reassemble a life.

The likely context sits in mid-century America’s recurring bargain with risk: wartime sacrifice, industrial labor, car culture, even the postwar sales pitch that prosperity can compensate for almost anything. Ladd’s question refuses the transactional script. It’s also a shrewd piece of rhetorical jiu-jitsu: he takes a supposedly pro-worker, pro-growth talking point and flips it into a pro-safety, pro-dignity indictment.

What makes it work is its narrow focus. No grand theory, just one person insisting that the baseline of a decent society isn’t a slightly lighter tax bill; it’s not being broken in the first place.