One thing is certain. Absent Congressional action, the country faces more than half a trillion dollars in tax increases and spending cuts next year. Workers would have less take-home pay. Financial markets might panic. Eventually, the country could fall back into a recession.

Many politicians and pundits in Washington are terrified of it, and President Obama and Congressional leaders met Friday to publicly kick off a series of negotiations to avoid it. But that does not mean that anyone can quite agree on what to call it.

Indeed, in Washington, vigorous semantic debate has sprung up alongside the heated policy debate. And a thousand tortured metaphors have bloomed.

The left-of-center Economic Policy Institute here has termed it the “fiscal obstacle course.” The commentator Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has described it as weights in a runner’s backpack.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has poetically advised that getting past the cliff may result in a sky dive, a bungee jump or a hard stop. The conservative economist Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the business school at Columbia University, likened it to a rocky shore where he used to summer in Maine.

The MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes got angry, taking to Twitter to complain “#itsnotacliff #itsnotacliff #itsnotacliff.” Peter Suderman of the libertarian magazine Reason got silly, ruminating, “Fiscal Clifford the Big Red Dog.” The Columbia Journalism Review got defeatist, calling it the “fiscal whatchamacallit.”

It is worrying Washington, and evidently driving its pundits mad. But what is wrong with the plain old name “fiscal cliff”? And where did it come from, anyway?

Early this year, staff members on Capitol Hill became concerned about the immensely overstuffed slate of issues facing the lame-duck Congress, including the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and a patch to prevent millions of families from the alternative minimum tax. There is also the Medicare “doc fix,” which blocks cuts to doctor reimbursement rates; extending emergency benefits for the long-term unemployed; the mandatory across-the-board spending cuts set for Jan. 1; and the country’s hitting the debt ceiling.

Worse, all those things would happen nearly at once. Staff members termed it the “debtpocalypse,” or “debtmageddon.”

But the drier “fiscal cliff” has become the common nomenclature, popularized by no less an authority than Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. At the end of February, in testimony to Congress, Mr. Bernanke warned that under current law, “there’s going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases” in 2013.

“I hope that Congress will look at that and figure out ways to achieve the same long-run fiscal improvement without having it all happen at one date,” he added.

The name stuck. But the term does not quite capture the particular brand of economic catastrophe that some say could be coming this winter, leaving analysts and journalists reaching for a more apt metaphor.

For one, the term makes it sound as if the country’s debts will explode come January.

“Our national debt increases about $3 million every minute,” Scott Davis, the chief executive of UPS, said in a statement this month, for instance, urging politicians to avert the cliff. “Our leadership needs to adapt to the economic realities, take a disciplined approach, and most importantly, ACT.”

But failure to avoid the automatic tax increases and spending cuts would give the United States an austerity crisis, not a debt crisis. Indeed, the simplest way for Washington to tackle its deficits and debts would be to do absolutely nothing.

Were that to happen, all kinds of changes that legislators normally try to avoid — including but not limited to raising taxes on the poor, cutting pay for doctors and slashing the defense budget — would happen automatically. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the country’s deficit would fall to about 1 percent of economic output in the fiscal year 2015 from more than 7 percent in the fiscal year 2012.

But an economy growing at a tepid 2 percent annual rate could not stomach such large tax increases and spending cuts without eventually falling into a recession, economists predict. The austerity budget would sting hard.

That leads to the second problem with the cliff metaphor. It makes it sound as if falling off it implies a certain grisly death — or, in economic terms, a recession. But analysts say that is not quite right.

Chad Stone of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for instance, has argued that the cliff is more of a slope. Its powerful effects would be felt gradually and cumulatively, not immediately. You would slide down, not fall off. Moreover, Congress could undo much of the damage. Meaning even if you slid down, you could climb back up.

Moreover, the “cliff” is in fact no monolith, instead composed of dozens of separate policy changes with different potentials to disrupt the economy— hence the Economic Policy Institute’s decision to call it an “obstacle course.”

Whatever it is called, analysts agree that it would hardly be pretty, to torture the metaphor once more.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/us/fiscal-cliff-slope-debtpocalypse-it-means-austerity.html?partner=rss&emc=rss