 Kotlikoff's work on the relativity of fiscal language claims to show that conventional fiscal measures, including the government's deficit, are not well defined from the perspective of economic theory.According to Kotlikoff, their measurement reflects economically arbitrary fiscal labeling conventions.He argues that an "Economics labeling problem," as he calls it, has led to gross misreadings of the fiscal positions of different countries, starting with the United States, which has a relatively small debt-to-GDP ratio, but, he argues, is in worse fiscal shape than any other developed country.