Editorial

George Bernard Shaw is credited with saying that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. The same can be said of Americans and their legislators.

Legislators speak the mother tongue, but in a dialect we don't always understand.

In the vernacular of the kitchen table, a budget cut equates to a spending cut. When the bills add up to more than your income, you spend less so your accounts balance. You make do with what you have and hold the line. The words hold different meanings for legislators and bureaucrats.

Take Oregon, for instance.

Throughout the legislative session, which ended last week, the solons toiled over the biennial budget. With the economy in the tank and tax revenues flagging, the state faced fairly serious money problems. Each department made plans to cut their budget. The governor and the legislature talked about budget cuts and touted the need for additional taxes and fees to forestall even larger cuts.

Hard times call for hard measures. No one was happy with the outcome. Some wanted more cuts and no taxes. Others wanted no cuts and more taxes. It appeared to end up somewhere in the middle. But, we were assured, cuts were made.

It sounded like the state planned to spend less money in the next two years than it spent in the last two years. That's not the case. It plans to spend $4.6 billion more. It would have spent even more had the administration and the legislature not "cut" the budget.

In setting its budget, the state starts with a number it calls its essential service level -- the amount of money it would take to continue providing services at the current level. Increases in wages, benefits and other costs are factored in.

To be sure, some state workers are losing their jobs and some programs are being curtailed. But state spending is still increasing 9 percent over the next two years. Less is more? That's not a cut as most farmers and ranchers understand the term.

Oregon's budget has increased each of the last 20 years or more, in good times and bad, by a greater percentage than the per capita income of the citizenry. A lot of us will be scratching our heads trying to interpret the meaning of that as the talk of all that belt tightening still rings in our ears.

The Democratic leadership also sought to reinvent the language in other ways.

When questions are put before voters through ballot initiatives, a "no" vote has traditionally meant the voter was against the action in question. "No" is also the default vote of many voters who are either against everything, or who assume it's safer or cheaper to vote no than yes in most cases.

Mindful that their plan to increase taxes would wind up the subject of a voter initiative, the leaders pushed a bill that would have required ballot language that equated a "no" vote with support of the legislature's action.

No means yes? Only at the Mad Hatter's tea party. Luckily, common sense prevailed and Webster's definition will remain in common usage.

Oregon is not alone in these kinds of linguistic slights of hand.

It is time that taxpayers, governors, legislators and bureaucrats come to a common understanding about budgets, taxes and difficult times. If what's being done or proposed can't be described in straightforward fashion, it doesn't deserve the support of the taxpayers.

A little more honesty will serve the peoples' interest. In the end, that's the interest the government is obliged to serve.