By MARSHA MERCER
What if it hadn’t been a cliff that Ben Bernanke
conjured up last February?
The Federal Reserve chairman used the phrase “fiscal
cliff” to describe the drastic effects on the economy of automatic tax increases
and spending cuts that will take place after Jan. 1, if Congress and the White
House fail to agree on a deficit reduction plan.
He could have said, as some liberal Democrats do
now, fiscal slope or curve or hill. Progressives hope downplaying the danger of
the cliff will give President Barack Obama more spine in negotiating with the
Republicans.
Bernanke’s use of cliff in testimony on Capitol Hill
seemed fresh, but it was a 1970s retread.
Ben Zimmer, the language columnist for the Boston
Globe, tracked fiscal cliff to a Dallas Morning News editorial on June 16,
1975: "Who hasn't looked with horror at New
York City's financial plight? The nation's biggest, richest city is about to go
over the fiscal cliff if the state and federal governments don't lend a helping
hand."
Zimmer
found other newspaper writers had climbed the fiscal cliff in the 1980s to
describe their local budget battles.
With his visit to the cliff, Bernanke endowed with
horror the prospect that Washington again will fail to deal with the nation’s
economic problems. Naturally, the phrase caught on. It’s our own Mayan end of
the world.
Nobody imagined we’d still be staring
into the canyon nine months later.
Calling it a curve instead of a cliff might not make
reaching compromise in Washington any easier, but a more benign metaphor might prevent
a sense of rising panic in some Americans.
The stock markets are nervous, and some people reportedly
were so anxious about the looming consequences of cliff diving -- recession and
unemployment over 9 percent – that they stayed home on Black Friday. Friends, that is no way to jumpstart the economy.
For many of us, fiscal cliff evokes the last scene
in the movie “Thelma and Louise,” only now, 21 years later, we’re in the back seat
of the Thunderbird, about to sail into the abyss.
We stand by helplessly as talking heads say that the
president and the House speaker again today did not meet face to face. The
countdown continues to cliffageddon.
The fiscal cliff is
the latest in a series of cinematic terms with political impact. Ronald Reagan
brought us welfare queens, Barack Obama the bitter people clinging to their
guns and religion, and Mitt Romney the 47 percent on the dole who see themselves
as victims.
It’s possible the fiscal cliff won’t disappear with
the New Year’s confetti. The president and Congress could do just enough to get
us through the crisis and resume negotiations on the debt ceiling and tax and
entitlement reforms next year.
Speaking of entitlement reform, Republicans say
Democrats must embrace cuts in safety net programs to reach a budget deal. Only
a few months ago, though, the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee urged
GOP candidates to steer away from the very words entitlement reform.
“Do not say ‘entitlement reform,’ ’privatization,’
‘every option is on the table,’” the campaign committee advised in an email in
August, shortly after Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman,
as his running mate, Politico reported. “Do say: ‘strengthen,’ ‘secure,’
‘save,’ ‘preserve,’ ‘protect.’”
The goal was to distance Republican candidates from
some of Ryan’s “reforms” of Social Security and Medicare, which were unpopular
with older voters.
This week, Drew Altman, head of the Kaiser Family
Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank on health policy issues, suggested that news
organizations resist using the phrase entitlement reform, even though
politicians do.
The phrase makes any changes in Medicare and
Medicaid that Democrats and Republicans agree on “sound more palatable and
forward thinking,” Altman wrote on his blog.
Altman, a former welfare commissioner of New Jersey
who worked on state and national welfare reform, said he’d been pleased years
ago when reporters wrote of “welfare reform.”
“Welfare ‘overhaul’ would have been a much more
neutral description but I admit that when I was selling my welfare reform
program…I was more than happy for the media call it reform,” he wrote.
Words do matter. Now, can we reform the cliff?
© 2012 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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Ms Mercer is so right. Words do matter and if congress and the president can reach an agreement to reform the cliff or whatever, we all will be winnners.
ReplyDeleteExcellent job Ms. Mercer, your column is timely and on-the-mark.