Please don’t say “overhaul” when you mean “cut.”

Jared Bernstein Senior Fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

I love my morning Budget Tracker update from Congressional Quarterly almost as much as I love my morning coffee. It provides that quick, efficient dive into the daily budget weeds that wonks like me crave (sorry, it’s behind a paywall).

So I was disheartened to see them fall into this trap that I’ve been pretty keyed up about of late (my bold):

Republican lawmakers made clear Wednesday that any efforts to overhaul entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare are now on the legislative back burner.

Readers are somehow required to know that “overhaul” means “cut.” This being the Budget Tracker, most readers probably know the translation, but this is not the time for squishy, ambiguous language.

I’m not sure when that time will come, but until then, people writing about these issues need to call it like it is.

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This was reposted from On the Economy.

Jared Bernstein joined the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in May 2011 as a Senior Fellow.  From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, and a member of President Obama’s economic team. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Bernstein was a senior economist and the director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Between 1995 and 1996, he held the post of deputy chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. He is the author and co-author of numerous books, including “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?” and nine editions of “The State of Working America.”

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