Bi-Polar World

George Orwell’s super-states came to mind as another paragraph on the Greek bailout was penned yesterday. Europe’s negotiators broke off talks with the Greeks. The story in the New York Times this morning reported this Greek reaction: “Greece, meanwhile, has suggested that it could turn to Russia or China for help if its talks on debt relief and a rollback of austerity measures break down.” The Russians and Chinese might review Virgil’s famous saying, but with a slight edit: Beware of Greeks even when they’re seeking gifts….

Piling it on: Another Orwellianism

It startled Brigitte yesterday to hear, on a rebroadcast of a hearing by the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth, tax exemptions and loopholes defined, by various high-level witnesses as, tax expenditures. This morning she asked me to define “tax expenditures.” Okay. That sounds like a rather weird question, but I knew she was going somewhere interesting. So I began in my usual down-to-earth way saying: “Well, checks the government writes to pay soldiers, buy tanks, Social Security, pay its bureaucracy, maintenance of national parks…” Brigitte stopped me. And she told me what people, like one-time Fed Chairman Greenspan, and others, defined as “tax expenditures.” The things she included did not sound like expenditures to me.

“It’s another of your Orwellianisms,” she said.

I went on a hunt. Sure enough. I found the matter explained on Deliberately Considered (link). Here is the relevant paragraph:

Are tax expenditures an entirely different matter? The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (Public Law 93-344) defines tax expenditures as, “…revenue losses attributable to provisions of the Federal tax laws which allow a special exclusion, exemption, or deduction from gross income or which provide a special credit, a preferential rate of tax, or a deferral of liability.” That is, in plain English: tax expenditures are lost tax revenues caused by special exceptions to tax laws. By law, a list of “tax expenditures” must be included in the President’s budget in a section titled “Analytical Perspectives,” prepared by the Office of Management and Budget. The list for 2012 includes 173 “tax expenditures (p 241 – 251),” which total over one trillion dollars for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2011. As objective as this may sound, the list and estimates of “cost” is actually quite subjective, because analysts posit the starting point of the tax baseline.

Congress was dominated by the Democrats (both houses) in that year. The motivation behind this phrasing could, presumably, be pinned down sharply with lots of research. But never mind that. Here is a simple case of using a word to mean roughly the exact opposite of what it has traditionally meant.

You cannot expend, meaning spend, money you don’t actually have. To view as expenditures money that you have not collected—and have not collected because laws in place prevent you from collecting them—that is not a tax expenditures.

Behind this lies some kind of really strange logic, certainly intended in some ways to confuse. That is the issue, always, when the meaning of words is arbitrarily changed by those with authority enough to make the concept stick more or less.

Still Struggling to Learn Newspeak

I learned today that Nigeria is another state that I must begin to dread. The New York Times headlines “Islamist Threat in Nigeria Grows With Qaeda Help” (no less). I also learn that “Bashing E.P.A. Is New Theme in G.O.P. Race.” Ah. A former Shining Knight turns Darth Vader? That one starts getting personal—in that I labored some years at that agency. To be sure, that then (and still) tiny lop-off from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (those days) wasn’t exactly the darling of the Nixon administration either.

Reminds me of lessons I learned quite early in life in books titled Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the first George Orwell’s generic and the other his specific description of his times. I’d read these books in the 1950s, a time when individual authors could still be heard. The noise was still quite low. In 1984 I learned that that there must always be an enemy, that the enemy can change overnight, and we must immediately shift attention, when Big Brother nods, and hate the one we loved the day before. Having made peace with Communism, the shift came to hate Islamism—which new hate is still unfolding nicely. But hating the EPA, the new internal enemy, why that one will be a bit of a wrench for me, a lesson in learning self-loathing. The effort is daunting. I think I’ll start after the brief vacation on which we start today ends again next week.