The WSJ's obsession with scare quotes

As TNR's Jon Chait has noted, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has an amusing penchant for putting terms it questions in scare quotes even when doing so makes no sense.

Here's Chait on the WSJ back in 2003 (via TNR's Isaac Chotiner):

"President Bush's tax cut is running into trouble in the Senate, with opponents claiming they are worried about 'the deficit,'" it sneered in a typical offering--as if the entire idea were some liberal bogeyman.

Back in February, I flagged a similar example in a WSJ editorial on fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax: "The estimated 'cost' of this fix to the Treasury over 10 years would be some $632 billion." It's not a cost, it's a "cost"! (In this case, the use of scare quotes is correct -- the WSJ doesn't think there is any cost to cutting taxes -- but the empirical argument is wrong because cutting taxes does, in fact, reduce revenue.)

Chotiner highlighted yet another example in a recent editorial on the torture debate:

Yesterday's column on torture was particularly rich in this regard. Here is part of the first paragraph:

Now comes the latest flap over "torture" techniques during terrorist interrogations, well on their way to becoming little more than a friendly chat.

Yes, you may have to read the sentence three times because of the grammar, but this actually counts as a legitimate use of scare quotes; the editors don't think the techniques being used are torture. But then they go on to continue putting torture in quotes every time they use the word, regardless of context. So, for example:

The notion that the U.S. goes around unnecessarily "torturing" people...

C'mon guys! Even you admit that the United States is "torturing" people; you just don't think that we are torturing people. Still, it would be helpful to acknowledge that toruture does in fact exist. Or do I mean "exist"?

Here's a similar example from yesterday's editorial on the debate over Michael Mukasey's nomination to be attorney general:

Democrats welcomed Michael Mukasey as a "consensus choice" for Attorney General only weeks ago, but incredibly his confirmation is now an open question. The judge's supposed offense is that he has refused to declare "illegal" a single interrogation technique that the CIA has used on rare occasions against mass murderers.

Not illegal, "illegal"! As in the torture line, the WSJ doesn't seem to understand what scare quotes mean. Mukasey refuses to say that waterboarding is illegal. The WSJ disagrees with the notion that waterboarding is illegal, but putting the word in scare quotes makes no sense.

Comments

[David Nieporent]

Back in February, I flagged a similar example in a WSJ editorial on fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax: "The estimated 'cost' of this fix to the Treasury over 10 years would be some $632 billion." It's not a cost, it's a "cost"! (In this case, the use of scare quotes is correct -- the WSJ doesn't think there is any cost to cutting taxes -- but the empirical argument is wrong because cutting taxes does, in fact, reduce revenue.)

I think you miss the WSJ's point here. It isn't making a Laffer curve argument; it's saying that the government taking in less money than it would have in the hypothetical world where it didn't lower taxes isn't a cost.

That is, one can describe it as a "cost" only if one assumes that the natural rate of taxation of that particular type is the higher amount, rather than zero.

(For instance, nobody would argue that it's a cost if I, e.g., impose a 2% tax on the sale of luxury yachts in 2009. But if I impose a 4% tax on the sale of luxury yachts in 2008, and then a 2% tax in 2009, some people will treat that 2009 tax rate as a "cost" because I've collected lower revenues in 2009 than 2008.)

[Dan Feerst]

Excuse me liberal, when you are taking something away, like reducing taxes, you are not paying for the tax cut anymore than paying to have a grocery item removed from your shopping cart that you don't want, while in a checkout line. You will have less food when you get home, fore sure, but you will also be healthier eating less CRAP!