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Wouldn't it be, yunno, honest to just say “increasing taxes”? Of course it would. But The Associated Press, The Sacramento Bee and The San Francisco Chronicle are among the news outlets where the benign-sounding “revenue” euphemism has turned up in budget stories describing what are in fact tax-hike proposals.

What's going on here? My best guess is that this reflects the California media establishment's impatience with what it sees as childish and stupid public opposition to tax hikes.

What makes this odd, though, is that many of these same journos do fantastic work exposing the state's dysfunction. Halper's April scoop on the massive fraud in the In-Home Supportive Services program is a perfect example.

But even though stories like this are legion, many journos still somehow buy the public employee union myth that the state beast must be fed with ever-higher taxes. They repeat uncritically the canard that the problem with California is the obstacles to higher taxes — not the fact that one of the nation's most heavily taxed states can't make ends meet.

And they litter their stories with absurdities like calling government spending “investments” and describing tax increases as “revenue solutions.”

Great. Just great.



