June 28, 2012
The Washington Post ran a classic pointless killing of trees piece on plans for transportation spending in a bill being debated in Congress. The piece told readers, among other things:
“A group co-chaired by former transportation secretaries Samuel K. Skinner and Norman Y. Mineta has estimated that an additional $134 billion to $262 billion must be spent per year through 2035 to rebuild and improve roads, rail systems and air transportation.”
Let’s see, $134 billion to $262 billion per year over the next 22 years, is that a lot or is it a little? I really doubt that even 1 percent of the readers of the Post has any idea how much money is involved here. If you added or subtracted a zero from these numbers it would probably look the same to most readers.
Suppose we put that as a share of GDP, this would be something like 0.6 to 1.2 percent of GDP over this period. (I’m assuming that these are nominal numbers, but the article doesn’t tell us and the report is horribly written so I couldn’t find the numbers upfront.) Or, the piece could have told readers that this was between 3 and 6 percent of projected federal spending over this period.
There are other ways to put these numbers in a context that would make them meaningful to Post readers, but this article just threw out budget numbers like it was a fraternity ritual. As a result it may be the industry standard for budget reporting, but it did not convey useful information to readers.
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