February 27, 2017
The NYT had a front page article reporting on Donald Trump’s plan to increase military spending and to make cuts in other areas to cover the costs. The piece told readers:
“Mr. Trump will demand a budget with tens of billions of dollars in reductions to the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department, according to four senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the plan. Social safety net programs, aside from the big entitlement programs for retirees, would also be hit hard.”
It’s not clear what information the piece intended to convey by referring to “tens of billions of reductions” to the EPA and State Department. The annual budget of the EPA is just over $8 billion, so this figure presumably refers to its budget over the next ten years. Since “tens of billions” presumably means at least two, Trump apparently wants a cut in the size of the agency (which is supposed to do things like ensure that the kids in Flint aren’t getting lead in their drinking water) by at least a quarter. (The budget of the State Department for 2017 was $51 billion.)
It would be helpful if papers like the NYT expressed numbers in a context that made them meaningful to readers, almost none of whom has any idea of what the budgets of the EPA or State Department will be over the next decade. When she was the public editor at the NYT, Margaret Sullivan made exactly this point. She got then Washington editor David Leonhardt to agree. Apparently, this has not affected the NYT’s reporting on budget issues.
This piece also asserts as a matter of fact that President Obama faced “the prospect of a second Great Depression” when he took office. While many people have made this assertion, no one has explained what would have prevented Congress from passing a large stimulus at any future point if the unemployment rate did in fact soar to the double digit levels that we would associate with a depression.
This is a very strong assertion about a decade of political behavior from people who almost without exception could not even predict the winner of the 2016 election. It would be best to qualify the assertion by noting that many people claim the country faced the prospect of a second Great Depression, rather than asserting it as a matter of fact.
Comments