One of the clever things leftists do is take good words and pervert them to mean the exact opposite of what they normally mean. An excellent example is in an editorial from today’s Boston Globe, "When a Penny Saved Is Taxed."

The editorial uses terms such as "incentives," "saving," and "innovation" in order to make a case for huge new government expenditures under the guise of fairness:

SAVING MONEY is supposed to help Americans afford their own futures. But a new study shows that poorer, younger people are often punished for saving by kinks in the tax code and in federal program rules. To fix the problem and encourage saving at all income levels, Congress should change the rules and seek out innovations.

The editorial comes to the not-exactly-astonishing conclusion that it’s easier for wealthy people to save money than for poor people to do so:

The end result is that most people face some disincentive to save—but the system tilts in favor of the rich. . . . Fixing this system would give people a fighting chance to save.

In this way the editorial reveals the the authors’ real agenda: egalitarianism. Dressing it up in free-market lingo is no more honest than wrapping a rotting fish in a page from the Wall Street Journal.

The talk about incentives certainly sounds nice, and the editorial is correct to point out that incentives matter. Surely there are ways the tax code can be altered to encourage saving among lower-income individuals—and everybody else.

But it’s poverty, not welfare policy, that keeps assets low. A study in the Winter 2006 Journal of Human Resources found, “Consistent with other recent studies, . . . little evidence that asset limits have an effect on the amount of liquid assets that single mothers hold.”

All incentives count, and the possibility of losing one’s welfare check is not only a disincentive to saving, it’s a disincentive to staying on welfare. That was the aim of welfare reform in the first place. Welfare is supposed to be temporary help that enables people to get into the workforce. Staying on welfare will keep one poor regardless of how much the program “allows” one to save.

Incentives matter to everybody, and the huge tax increases that would be caused by a return to the old welfare system and addition of further opportunities for wealthy elderly people to hide their assets so as to get more taxpayers’ money would do infinitely more harm than good.

No amount of deceptive language will change that reality.