海角大神

You can聽tell when Congress and the President have tough choices to make. That鈥檚 when they trot out the euphemisms鈥攁ll aimed at making what they are about to do sound as benign as possible. 聽Case in point: the impending fiscal cliff.

If you listened to President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner鈥檚 radio addresses last Saturday, you got an earful of these weasel words, ranging from the merely misleading to the truly Orwellian.

Here are just a few:

Closing tax loopholes:聽This is a favorite of both parties, but these days it is being used聽mostly by Republicans who are looking for an alternative to raising tax rates on high-income households. The phrase appears regularly in Boehner鈥檚 presentations.聽

It is true that the tax code includes loopholes that should be closed. But these are narrow and usually unintended gimmicks that allow a handful of sophisticated taxpayers to avoid tax.

Congress will need to raise more than half-a-trillion dollars over a decade to protect top-bracket taxpayers from Obama鈥檚 plan to let their tax breaks expire without adding to the deficit. To get there, it will need to cap popular, broad-based tax preferences, such as deductions for mortgage interest, charitable giving, and state and local taxes. It isn鈥檛 going to get far by closing a few loopholes.

Entitlements:聽When politicians use the word entitlement, they really mean Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. At least two of those programs, Medicare and Social Security, are enormously popular. So nobody talks about slowing the growth of these senior health care and pension programs. 聽鈥淓ntitlement鈥� carries with it a sense of privilege and greed. So much easier to cut en entitlement聽than to trim promised Social Security benefits.

Shoring up entitlement programs.聽聽This is another Boehnerism. 聽It is not enough, it seems, to say entitlement instead of Medicare and Social Security.聽 Now, pols insist they are 鈥渟horing up鈥� these programs when they really mean they want to trim promised benefits. For programs that are funded through trust funds, such as Social Security and Medicare Part A, 鈥渟horing up鈥� has some meaning (assuming you believe in the trust fund concept at all). But for the rest of Medicare and all of Medicaid, there is nothing to shore up.

These programs are funded through general revenues or, in the case of Medicare, general revenues plus premiums and co-pays. By spending less than government currently expects, you don鈥檛 strengthen them. 聽They are being shorn, not shored up.

Making people like me pay a little more:聽This was an Obama favorite in the campaign. And it never seems to go away. The Tax Policy Center聽estimates聽the top one percent of households (who make an average of about $1.7 million) would end up paying almost $94,000 more in taxes under Obama鈥檚 2013 budget, or about 6 percent of their income. I know these folks make a lot of money, and probably can manage this higher tax bill, but a nearly six-figure tax hike is a tad higher than 鈥渁 little more.鈥�

And it is worth noting that there聽are not very many people who make Obama-like money. 聽In 2012, there will be only about a half-million households in the top two tax brackets (out of nearly 160 million).

All of this rhetoric is intended to make deficit reduction sound painless. Somebody else will pay鈥攐r Congress is not聽really cutting at all. That mush may have been useful in campaign season. But lawmakers have some obligation to prepare voters for what will be some tough decisions over the next few years. Honest talk is a good way to start.