Journalists hide real numbers when reporting budget spin

The Washington Examiner ^ | 3-6-14 | Scott Rasmussen

[afraidfortherepublic]

The standard media coverage of President Obama's new budget claimed the proposals will cut $600 billion in spending over the next decade.

It was just about impossible, though, to find any media story mentioning some basic numbers that belong in any story about a new federal budget. How much money is the federal government spending this year? How does that compare to what it spent last year, or expects to spend next year?

Perhaps the reason for this failure is because the real numbers don't match up with the storyline. For example, in the current year, the federal government is expected to spend $3.77 trillion. With all the spending cuts being talked about, a reasonable person might assume that spending next year will be down a bit. But it's not. In fact, the president's budget calls for spending $3.90 trillion in 2015. That's approximately $230 billion more than this year. It's not a one-year aberration either. Spending increases are projected every single year for the next decade and beyond.

It's hard to write that the president's budget is cutting spending by $600 billion while also reporting numbers showing spending going in the opposite direction.

Sadly, Washington reporters have chosen to overcome this difficulty by leaving the real numbers out of their stories. That's a huge problem. We can reasonably expect politicians to spin the numbers and hide the truth because that's what they do. However, in a free society with a free press, we should be able to count on journalists to report the facts rather than the spin. Unfortunately, we can't.

[fieldmarshaldj]

$600b in a decade, huh ? That’s nothing. We need to be cutting $1.5 trillion a YEAR to get us back to sanity.

[Flick Lives]

An ever ballooning Federal budget is called a “cut”. This is just part of the ongoing attempt by libs to live in the fantasy world where they think they can avoid reality by not acknowledging it. This can appear to work for awhile fiscally, but you eventually get an economy that goes all “Detroit”.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Journ-O-Lists kept the existence of baseline budgeting a highly classified secret from the day it was invented until Rush Limbaugh came along and blew the whistle on it twenty years ago.

[11th Commandment]

I have another one- under the sequester, discretionary spending was capped at $945B. This was the Law on October 1, 2013. Ryan and Murray got together to work out “budget priorities” under the cap and the deal was $1.0T by December 2013. Then budget was drafted and voted on in January and the budget was $1.1T.