In his story about the Bush administration’s latest budget, the AP’s Martin Crutsinger uses a particularly annoying formulation to describe Bush’s proposal to make his tax cuts permanent:

Bush’s spending plan would make his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a cost of $1.6 trillion over 10 years. He is seeking $78 billion in savings in the government’s big health care programs — Medicare and Medicaid — over the next five years, in part by increasing premiums for higher-income Medicare recipients.

Tax cuts do not “cost” the government anything. The government obviously collects less revenue than it otherwise would (with higher economic growth mitigating the loss), but the word “cost” implies that the government is entitled to a greater share of your income, and that George W. Bush’s irresponsible tax-cutting schemes are “costing” the government this rightful share.