Leadership Quote by Geoff Davis

A tidy bit of political jujitsu: Geoff Davis takes a word people hate - taxes - and swaps in one they can nod along to - taxpayers. The line isn’t really about revenue policy; it’s about moral framing. “More taxes” sounds like government appetite. “More taxpayers” sounds like growth, jobs, and a bigger middle class. Same fiscal reality, different villain.

The specific intent is to signal a pro-growth, anti-tax posture without sounding nihilistic about the state itself. He’s not promising to starve government; he’s promising to widen the base. That’s a classic conservative pitch: prosperity as the painless alternative to hard choices. It implies that the problem isn’t underfunded services or structural deficits, but an economy not producing enough earners. The subtext is also disciplinary: the ideal citizen is someone who pays in. Nonpayers - whether because they’re poor, unemployed, retired, or using deductions - become an implicit out-group. “Taxpayer” doubles as a badge of legitimacy.

Contextually, this is a post-Reagan rhetorical heirloom that played especially well in the 2000s and early 2010s, when “job creators” language and Tea Party-era tax skepticism made growth-centric messaging politically efficient. The line also dodges the uncomfortable arithmetic that lowering rates while waiting for growth to do the rest is a bet, not a plan. It’s optimistic branding for an austerity-adjacent politics: a promise that we can have smaller pain without naming who loses when the numbers don’t cooperate.