While David Leonhardt at the NYT shows how to do good budget reporting (see below), NPR shows how to do really bad budget reporting. Their short news segment at the top of the hour told listeners that CBO projected the cost of a Democratic proposal on student loans at $6 billion. Is this a lot of money or a little money? Well, CBO typically makes budget projections over a 10-year horizon. If this was a 10-year projection (I have no idea), then the projected annual cost is $600 million or approximately 0.02 percent of projected spending over this period. Or, put another way, it's about what we spend on the Iraq War every day.
--Dean Baker
