Wealth & Money Quote by Jello Biafra

Austerity always seems to vanish when there’s a ribbon-cutting and a luxury box.

Jello Biafra’s line isn’t a polite policy suggestion; it’s an ultimatum disguised as a budgeting truism. The framing is deliberately blunt: “you can” do one thing or the other. No technocratic fog, no “stakeholders,” no pretend scarcity that only kicks in when the poor ask for shelter. It’s punk rhetoric at its most effective, turning municipal finance into a moral choice you can’t unsee.

The subtext is a critique of how American cities launder priorities through “development.” Stadiums and golf courses are presented as civic assets, but Biafra points at what they often function as: prestige projects, public subsidies for private gain, and photo-op monuments to leaders who want a legacy you can see from the freeway. Housing the unhoused, by contrast, is unglamorous, slow, and politically inconvenient - it doesn’t flatter donors, and it forces a community to admit who’s been pushed out and why.

Context matters: Biafra comes from a scene that treated hypocrisy as the real enemy, and he’s speaking in the long wake of Reagan-era cutbacks, “quality of life” crackdowns, and urban revitalization schemes that meant higher rents and fewer places to land. The quote works because it collapses all the fancy justifications into an either/or that hits like a lyric: if we can afford entertainment infrastructure, we can afford dignity. The rest is PR.