Politics & Power Quote by Eric Cantor

Cantor’s line is built to make policy sound like sorcery. By repeating “magically” and pairing it with the old New Deal phrase “prime the pump,” he frames stimulus spending as a kind of superstitious ritual: pour in taxpayer money, hope the economy awakens. The intent isn’t subtle. It’s to delegitimize the president’s economic program not by disputing a spreadsheet, but by ridiculing the very logic of government-led recovery as wishful thinking.

The subtext is ideological triage. “Taxpayer dollars” is a coded alarm bell, shifting the audience from macroeconomics to household morality: your money, taken from you, shoveled into a system that won’t work. Cantor’s syntax also does quiet work. “Somehow” implies the administration can’t explain itself; “just continue” suggests mindless repetition; “we’re going to see” casts the promised recovery as a mirage always over the horizon. He’s not only arguing that the plan fails; he’s arguing that believing in it is naive.

Context matters: this comes from the post-2008 crash fight over stimulus, deficits, and who gets blamed for a slow rebound. Republicans were positioning themselves as the party of fiscal realism and private-sector discipline, while Democrats defended emergency spending as necessary triage. Cantor’s rhetorical move is to convert a technical debate (multipliers, liquidity traps, job creation timelines) into a character test: are you the kind of leader who deals in hard constraints, or the kind who sells fairy tales?