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Reader question: Please explain “jump off the fiscal cliff” in this passage (The case for jumping off the fiscal cliff, WashingtonPost.com, September 19, 2017): Douglas Elliott doesn’t want the United States to jump off the fiscal cliff. But he can imagine Congress reaching a point at which it may be the best of a set of very bad options. My comments: Here Mr. Elliot, a former investment banker, thinks jumping off the cliff may prove to be relatively harmless – it may even be the best option under the difficult circumstances. America’s “fiscal cliff” is a metaphor. It’s got nothing to do with rocks or anything like that. In other words, Mr. Elliot is not talking about any Americans falling off a mountain cliff and plunging into an abyss of unknown depths. Instead it’s about the steep fiscal difficulties the US government faces over the next year, i.e. with tax increases and drastic spending cuts. Fiscal, you see, is a term about a government’s taxes and budget expenditure. You’ve often heard of the term “fiscal year”, for instance and that’s about the time of the year a government calculates its earnings (through collecting taxes) and spending. Fiscal year as compared to “financial year”, which is the term companies use for their annual calculations. It’s the time of year they report their “financials”, i.e. “financial statements” of profits and losses. | 
