Dean Baker points out a pet peeve of mine: The tendency of reporters to frame economic facts in terms of absolute values versus proportions. Hearing that France's Nicholas Sarkozy wants to cut taxes by $90 billion over the next ten years would probably leave you thinking Sarkozy wanted to cut taxes by a lot. Hearing a reporter emphasize his desire to cut taxes at all, in fact, would similarly suggest substantial cuts, as the policy wouldn't be worth reporting otherwise.
But you'd be wrong. These cuts equal out to four-tenth of one percent of France's GDP. In other words, an essentially insignificant amount -- which is not what $90 billion sounds like.
I tend to make this point in terms of campaign finance, but let's put it here: The sums most individuals are accustomed to dealing with are very small. $1 million dollars is a lot of money. But when talking about federal budgets, $1 million is virtually unnoticeable. So to report economic matters in terms of absolute values is to accidentally mislead by tripping into the reader's insufficiently large sense of scale.
Similarly, it's never clear to me why reporters buy into the "X over Y years" formulation. It would be more illuminating to say Sarkozy wants to cut taxes by an average of $9 billion a year for the next decade. Lumping the whole number together -- even as you give the time frame -- offers an impression of size that's not quite correct.
