From Fresh Air, from WHYY, on NPR
'We're Broke': Empty Bank Accounts, Empty Meaning?
By Geoff Nunberg
The word "economics" comes from the Greek word for "home," and originally referred to the art of household management. It hasn't meant that for some centuries, of course. But people are still drawn to describing the affairs of government in homey terms. Take "we're broke," which Republican governors and legislators have made their mantra to justify cuts in government programs and services — and none so insistently as John Boehner, who has been pleading the B-word for years, long before the B-word was cool.
That claim that "we're broke" puts some people in a lather. A recent New York Times editorial called it "obfuscating nonsense." No states are going to go bankrupt, it said, and a country with a big deficit is no more broke than a family with a college loan. E.J. Dionne called it a "phony metaphor." And a Bloomberg article observed that you can't call a country broke when investors all over the world are lining up to lend it money for less than a 1 percent return....