November 06, 2010
In an article on the challenges faces Jerry Brown, California’s newly elected governor, the NYT tells readers that the state faces a $20 billion dollar budget deficit. It notes that Brown left his successor with a $1.8 billion deficit when he left office in 1982.
These numbers will be completely meaningless to almost all of the NYT’s readers since few have an idea as to how large California’s economy is today compared with 1982. The current deficit is equal to roughly 1.1 percent of $1.8 trillion California’s gross state product (GSP). By contrast, the $1.5 billion deficit in 1982 would have been equal to a bit less than 0.4 percent of California’s $390 billion GSP in that year. This means that the burden posed by California’s current deficit is almost three times as large as the burden that Brown passed on to his successor.
Reporters are supposed to have time to look this stuff up, readers don’t.
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