Liberals have recently taken to calling for nebulously defined “shared sacrifice.”

Shared sacrifice has been trotted out by President Obama in support of his budget.

Newly anointed DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) calls for shared sacrifice to reduce the debt.

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman also extols the virtues of shared sacrifice in solving America’s debt problem.

‘Puter’s got no problem with the notion of shared sacrifice. It means that everyone has skin in the game, an interest in moving towards a common goal. A good example of shared sacrifice is the national effort to win World War II, from voluntarily enlisting, to buying war bonds, to scrap programs. The problem with liberals is that they don’t mean “shared sacrifice.” They mean “forcible taking.”

Each of Obama, Schultz and Krugman invoke shared sacrifice in support of raising income taxes on “the rich.” Never mind that “the rich” don’t have the money to pay the national debt off, even at a 100% tax rate, we’re going to stick it to them anyway. Never mind that “the rich” likely will be defined down to include large swathes of the middle class, despite Democrat protestation otherwise. And never mind that paying taxes is not a voluntary transaction.

Why should that matter? Because implicit in the notion of sacrifice is a component of voluntariness. It’s definitional that an involuntary transaction is not a sacrifice.

Is it a sacrifice if a bum (“Odor Challenged Impoverished American”? (‘Puter prefers “Aggressive Free Range Human”)) rolls you for your wallet? Nope, it’s larceny. Note the “against your will” component of the transaction. However, if you freely give a bum $10 in lieu of buying yourself lunch, that’s a sacrifice. You’ve voluntarily given up something you want for the benefit of another.

Liberals’ viewpoint is simple: you are involuntarily obligated to fund whatever government programs liberals can dream up, whether the programs work or not, and no matter the cost. Worse, in the liberal canon, there is no commensurate obligation of the state to the taxpayer not to break him. In fact, there is no obligation of the state to the taxpayer at all. And this world view makes the smarmy, disingenuous resort to “shared sacrifice” all the more galling.

The dirty little secret liberals are trying to hide with their language charades, at least until after the 2012 elections, is that America either has to cut government decisively, which they will never stomach, or tax everyone a whole lot more. We are out of other options.

So the next time one of your liberal friends calls for shared sacrifice, call him on it. Ask him if he really means forcible taking. Then, sit back and enjoy the cognitive dissonance.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.