Wealth & Money Quote by Al D'Amato

It’s the sound of late-20th-century politics trying to rebrand economic upheaval as common sense. D’Amato’s line doesn’t promise that every community will be fine; it tells you, briskly, to move. “You have to go to where you can make money” frames labor as mobile and individual, as if the central problem isn’t deindustrialization, wage stagnation, or corporate offshoring, but workers failing to follow the money to its new zip codes.

The cleverness is in the soft coercion. “Have to” is a moral imperative dressed up as advice, shifting responsibility from policymakers and employers onto people whose lives are rooted in family, housing, and local identity. It’s also a selective empathy: the sentence acknowledges anxiety about jobs, then routes that anxiety toward “service” and “technological” sectors without grappling with what that transition costs. Training, credentialing, age discrimination, childcare, transportation, and the simple fact that not every displaced factory worker can or wants to become a tech worker vanish behind “those are the areas where we’re going to create jobs,” a soothing collective “we” that obscures who exactly is doing the creating.

Context matters: this is a politician speaking from inside an era that treated the shift to a service-and-tech economy as destiny. The subtext is faith in growth industries and skepticism toward protecting declining ones. It works rhetorically because it offers a map during uncertainty, but it’s also a quiet capitulation: the economy will change; the burden of adaptation will be privatized.