rob peter to pay paul
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.15 in modern English
28
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
4
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To use resources that legitimately belong to or are needed by one party in order to satisfy a legitimate need of another party, especially within the same organization or group; to solve a problem in a way that makes another problem worse, producing no net gain.
Example Sentences
- "[I]t would be robbing Peter to pay Paul, for the government to pay a stamp-duty to itself."
- "1865, Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, Chapter VIII. "The Highland Light", page 140. Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape it gives to another,—robs Peter to pay Paul."
- "OMB decided that a large part of the money would come from other health programs for poor women and children. That penny-pinching tactic sparked an outcry. […] Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri denounced the plan as pitting "one city's babies against another city's babies." Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, who chairs the National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, said it amounted to "robbing Peter to pay Paul.""
- "[…] and so levelling up is not a jam-spreading operation, it’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul, it[']s not zero sum it’s win win for the whole United Kingdom and so here is the plan for levelling up."
Etymology
Unknown. Sometimes claimed to refer to Church taxes paid to Westminster Abbey (originally called Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster) that were sent to repair St. Paul's Cathedral in the mid 1500s, though records exist of the phrase since about 1450.