May 14, 2012
That is what readers of an AP article on the impact of budget cuts stemming from last year’s agreement must be wondering. The first sentence of the piece told readers that:
“Moving to protect the military from a crippling wave of budget cuts next year, a key House committee voted Monday to cut instead food aid, health care and social services like Meals on Wheels.”
The piece would have been more informative if it had avoided editorializing by including the word “crippling.” That assessment is obviously a judgement call on which there is considerable disagreement. Even with the cuts put in place, the government would still be spending well above 4.0 percent of GDP on the military. By contrast, it was spending just 3.0 percent of GDP in 2000, so current spending is more than one-third higher relative to the size of our economy.
It also would be useful if the budget numbers in this piece were expressed as a share of GDP and/or the total budget over the relevant horizon. The vast majority of readers have no ability to assess the importance of items like $80 billion in savings on federal employee pensions over the course of a decade. (This is approximately 0.2 percent of projected spending.)
[Thanks to Randy Schutt for passing this one along.]
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