April 14, 2014
The NYT is continuing its parody of news reporting with a piece that discusses the budget proposals of France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. It told readers:
“On Tuesday, Mr. Valls offered the most detailed summary yet of how the government intends to meet its promise to enact Really Big Number in spending cuts by 2017. He called for Really Big Number in cuts to the central government bureaucracy, Really Big Number to the national health care system and Really Big Number to local governments — an element at which many legislators on the right booed loudly, having just won control of a number of local governments. He did not specify how the remaining Really Big Number in cuts would be made.”
Okay that is not exactly what the piece said. Here’s the actual paragraph:
“On Tuesday, Mr. Valls offered the most detailed summary yet of how the government intends to meet its promise to enact $69 billion in spending cuts by 2017. He called for $26 billion in cuts to the central government bureaucracy, $13.8 billion to the national health care system and $13.8 billion to local governments — an element at which many legislators on the right booed loudly, having just won control of a number of local governments. He did not specify how the remaining $15.4 billion in cuts would be made.”
Did this provide any more information than the “Really Big Number” paragraph? The piece provides no information on how much is currently spent on these programs, nor is it even clear whether these cuts refer to a single year’s spending (presumably 2017), or some aggregate over 2015-2017. The NYT surely has some readers who are sufficiently familiar with France’s budget to make sense of the numbers in this article, but to the other 99.9 percent of readers, these numbers provided no information whatsoever.
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