Wealth & Money Quote by Howard Dean

Dean’s stutter-step phrasing (“when you - when you -”) is doing more than buying time; it’s a rhetorical reenactment of frustration. He’s describing an economy that can’t quite get its footing because too much of its energy is trapped in paperwork and financial churn. The jab at “pushing paper around” isn’t subtle. It’s a populist shorthand for a sector that extracts value by moving symbols rather than building things, and it carries an implicit moral ranking: real work creates jobs; paper work skims.

The intent is political triage: name a villain (finance-as-shuffling), sketch a remedy (venture capital aimed at “job-creating things”), and link it directly to recovery. That last move matters. Dean isn’t arguing that finance is distasteful; he’s arguing it’s macroeconomically obstructive, slowing the return to broad employment. “Still going on today” widens the indictment from a crisis moment to a structural critique: this isn’t a one-off scandal, it’s the business model.

The subtext borrows from post-2008 anger without needing to cite a single foreclosure. He’s channeling a familiar American bargain: capitalism is tolerated, even celebrated, when it looks like risk-taking tied to production. When it looks like insiders trading paper with other insiders, it stops reading as innovation and starts reading as toll-taking.

Contextually, Dean is also laundered through his own brand: a Democrat comfortable scolding Wall Street while keeping the solution within market logic. He doesn’t call for nationalization or revolution; he calls for re-routing incentives. The critique lands because it offers outrage with an exit ramp: not anti-capitalist, just anti-parasitic.