September 22, 2017
Paul Krugman does a nice job dissecting the logic, or lack thereof, of Republican efforts to dismantle Obamacare. He points out that one of the games played by the Republicans is claiming that the Graham-Cassidy bill would increase Medicaid spending. It makes this claim based on the fact that nominal Medicaid spending would increase under the bill. While this is true, the bill would hugely cut spending compared with the baseline which factors in both projected increases in the number of people covered and the medical cost inflation.
It might be harder to get away with this cheap trick if papers like the New York Times used budget reporting to actually inform readers. As it is, budget reporting usually doesn’t put numbers in any context, which makes them absolutely meaningless to the vast majority of readers. This point was acknowledged a few years back by both Margaret Sullivan and David Leonhardt, who were at the time the NYT’s public editor and Washington editor.
In spite of the acknowledgment that its budget reporting does nothing to inform the vast majority of its readers, the paper has done nothing to change the practice. (Does the paper really find it hard to find reporters who know basic arithmetic?) As a result, it is much easier for Republicans to lie when they want to do something like massively cutting back Medicaid spending.
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