Lying with Numbers

Elizabeth Anderson over at Left2Right makes the plea for "terminological honest" in a terminologically dishonest fashion. She says (here):

Suppose you buy a $200,000 house by putting $100,000 down and taking out a loan for the remaining $100,000, to be paid off at 5.5% compound interest over the next 30 years. Would it be accurate to say that you had to pay only $100,00 for the house? Of course not. You've simply postponed payment of the $100,000 balance.

How about a trade.

For she wishes that Bush would stop talking about cutting taxes instead he should talk about "postponing" taxes, because the budget isn't balanced and those excess expenditures will have to be paid in the future. Fair enough. How about she in turn stops pretending that increasing taxes will have no effect on the economy. That if taxes are raised to meet expenditures, the economy will come dragging to a halt and we can all welcome massive recession, which will require of course more increases in taxes and before long, everything will grind to a halt. So perhaps she might consider supporting those tax cuts and call for decreased expenditures. How about that big fat 15% tax for Social Security? We work at wiping that out and it will go a long way to paying for her parties pet programs.