Fiscal Euphemisms - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

Fiscal Euphemisms - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily: "Now we have 'budget cuts' which are not cuts, but rather substantial increases over the previous year's expenditures.
'Cut' became subtly but crucially redefined as reducing something else. What the something else might be didn't seem to matter, so long as the focus was taken off actual dollar expenditures. Sometimes it was a cut 'in the rate of increase,' other times it was a cut in 'real' spending, at still others it was a percentage of GNP, and at yet other times it was a cut in the sense of being below past projections for that year."

"government economists have been doing their part as well to try to sugar-coat the pill of tax increases. They never refer to these changes as 'increases.' They have not been increases at all; they were 'revenue enhancement' and 'closing loopholes.' The best comment on the concept of 'loopholes' was that of Ludwig von Mises. Mises remarked that the very concept of 'loopholes' implies that the government rightly owns all of the money you earn, and that it becomes necessary to correct the slipup of the government's not having gotten its hands on that money long since."

"Feldstein is claiming that, in the categories of how the federal government spends money, the big ones are the military, Social Security, and Medicare. But after those whoppers, the bulk of 'government spending' — according to Feldstein and endorsed by Mankiw — are things like tax deductions on mortgage interest, or tax credits based on how many children a person has.

In other words, Feldstein is completely obliterating the distinction between (a) the government handing Paul $1,000 that it has previously taken from Peter, and (b) the government refraining from taking $1,000 from Paul that he earned. Either way, from Feldstein's viewpoint, that is a government expenditure."

"It is an abuse of language to say that a tax hike is 'equivalent' to a spending cut. With equal justification, Timothy Geithner could defend the hated TARP bank bailout as an $800 billion 'tax cut.' Or, proponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could refer to them as trillion-dollar-plus tax cuts. After all, Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, and other major corporations ended up with more money than they otherwise would have had, so these programs were basically tax cuts, right?"