December 16, 2018
Two commenters on my previous post on a New York Times op-ed, which asserted that one-fifth of the federal budget went to farm subsidies pointed out the error can be partly attributed to a linked article in the Washington Post. (The actual figure is less than 0.5 percent.)
That piece includes the sentence:
“At close to $1 trillion a year, the farm bill’s price tag is high.”
Incredibly, the next sentence directly contradicts this assertion correctly pointing out that:
“But the bill’s drafters used the baseline set by the Congressional Budget Office under existing spending levels of $867 billion over the next 10 years, meaning it will not increase the federal deficit from prior projections.”
Fans of arithmetic would catch that $867 billion over ten years is less than one-tenth of the $1 trillion a year claimed in the prior sentence. Unfortunately, the Post’s copy editors apparently didn’t catch this one. It is again important to note that the vast majority of this money is for nutrition programs, not farm subsidies.
Anyhow, it would be nice if the Post and Times both took their responsibility to inform the public seriously. Dishwashers and truck drivers get fired when they don’t do their jobs. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same standards of accountability for the people who write for newspapers.
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