 In his famous essay, Politics in the English Language, from 1946, George Orwell referred to the mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence that is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose and especially any kind of political writing. Political speech and writing, according to Orwell, are, quote, largely the defense of the indefensible. The result, says Orwell, is that political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Indeed, government officials and members of the establishment media frequently use terminology in ways that obfuscate, confuse, and distort what's really going on. Consider the great debate over the sequester from earlier this year, when we were warned about sweeping massive and draconian cuts to government spending that would presumably have devastating effects on the economy. If you looked at the numbers, the federal budget that was proposed under sequestration was not one penny, did not have one penny less of government spending than the previous year's budget. Indeed, even under the sequester, total government spending increased. It simply increased by a lower rate than how much it had increased the previous year. So in the parlance of Washington, D.C., a spending cut is a reduction in the rate of increase in spending. Likewise, consider the distress the problems were supposedly having because of the government shutdown. As of Monday of this week, we're told government shut down because Congress and the president could not reach an agreement over a budget deal. What does it normally mean for something to shut down? It means to stop operating. Is that what's happened? Well, of course not. We've heard a lot in the last couple of days about around 800,000 federal government workers being put on furlough. That sounds like a lot. That sounds like a massive scaling back of government activity. But look at the numbers. Today there are about 2.8 million federal civilian employees in the United States. So 800,000 is what, about 30% of that? If you include full-time military personnel, that's another 1.5 million. So the number of workers furloughed, this 800,000, represents around 18% of the total federal government workforce. And by the way, that's not including federal contractors, private citizens who perform services for civilian and military government. If we included them, and of course there are many, many thousands of contractors, the furloughs would represent even a smaller percentage of the government workforce. Now, imagine that the government announced, the president warned us, and the media complained that if we can't reach a budget deal by midnight, the federal government will have to reduce its employment by around 15%. Oh my goodness, people would run into a panic, wouldn't they? No, of course not. Most people would say, reduce the government workforce by 15%. That sounds like a pretty good idea. So of course they invent the term shutdown, which everyone knows what shutdown means in ordinary language, but the government tries to pretend that what's currently going on is something like what we would all understand as a shutdown in the real world. This is scare tactics, pure and simple. This is a great example of the government and the media using words in ways that are virtually the opposite of what they actually mean to try to achieve some political objective. And just as a footnote, this dispute between the president and Congress, according to the media, is about Republican attempts to defund Obamacare. But in fact, what the Republicans have proposed is not to reduce government spending on Obamacare by even one penny, but simply to repeal certain parts of the law, the so-called individual mandate, to make some other minor changes to implementation. However you want to describe the Republican opposition to Obamacare, it certainly is not to eliminate funding for the law, which is what the word defunding seems to mean. So when we talk about spending cuts, when we talk about shutting down government or defunding a particular program, we should not allow the media to use language in ways that defines the debate the way the media wants and the way the government wants. If we're going to have a serious conversation about the economy, about markets, about government spending, we need to insist on using language in its ordinary sense. The government has not shut down, the government has no intention of shutting down, and it's inconceivable that in today's political climate, the government could even scale back just a little bit, let alone shut down. So let's start using language the way it should be used, and we can have a little bit more clarity when we talk about important economic issues.