Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1 Labels and Consequences: The Failure of Our Fiscal Language
- Part 2 The Why and How of Long-Term Budgeting
- Part 3 Labels and Policies across Budget Categories
- 7 Benign Fictions? Describing Social Security and Medicare
- 8 Tax Expenditures
- 9 Welfare, Cash Grants, and Marginal Rates
- Part 4 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Tax Expenditures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1 Labels and Consequences: The Failure of Our Fiscal Language
- Part 2 The Why and How of Long-Term Budgeting
- Part 3 Labels and Policies across Budget Categories
- 7 Benign Fictions? Describing Social Security and Medicare
- 8 Tax Expenditures
- 9 Welfare, Cash Grants, and Marginal Rates
- Part 4 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.
– Juliet, in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet[S]ometimes you need to conceal a fact with words.
– Niccolo MachiavelliNames versus Structural Terms
The dispute over what to call the “privatization” or “personalization” of Social Security was simply about a name. While some names for rules or policies may be more accurate, or alternatively more misleading, than others – “Clear Skies,” for example, is not an honest name for a proposal to allow more air pollution – in the end, names are a matter of convention, like words generally. Thus, consider the recent renaming of the “estate tax” as the “death tax.” While the new name is less accurate than the old one, given that estates are the tax base and that death alone does not trigger the tax, still, if “death tax” becomes the accepted usage, then “death tax” it is, just as a dog is called a dog because, when you use that word, other people know what you mean.
For fiscal language that is associated with a specific empirical content, by contrast with the use of names, convention is not enough. Thus, as discussed in Chapter 2, once we define the “size of government” to reflect what people have in mind when they discuss it, the question of whether some set of policy changes will result in a smaller government is empirical.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006