The Post headline told us that the Senate passed a "huge" farm bill yesterday. The first sentence tells us that the tab is $286 billion. Is everyone really scared yet? Okay, now for the trivia question. How long a period is covered by this $286 billion is spending? And, for the really nerdy among you, what share of federal spending is going to this bill? You won't find the answer to either of these items in the Post article. The answer to question #1 is 5 years. In other words, the Senate is not proposing to spend $286 billion on this "huge" farm bill this year, but rather over the next five years. That comes to $57.2 billion a year. Is this a big deal? Well, it's equal to about 1.5 percent of projected spending over this period. It comes to about $190 per person per year. It is really incredible that the Post could publish an article about a multi-year spending bill that never tells its readers how many years are covered. This is inexcusable. Did the reporter think that all the Post's readers have been following the debate so closely that they knew the bill covered five years? Or, did the reporter think that this is an unimportant piece of information? It would also help to put the $286 billion in some context. Just printing a huge number like this is a meaningless fraternity ritual. Reading that a bill costs $286 billion over 5 years means nothing to anyone except for a small number of budget wonks. $286 billion is a really big number. It is also a really big number if you add a zero or take away a zero. I have talked to many reporters and editors about writing large budget numbers without any context and not one has ever tried to tell me that the typical reader (even the well-educated ones) can attach any meaning to such big numbers. So why does the media keep doing this sort of budget reporting? It is well-documented that the public is very poorly informed about the budget. A large portion of the public think that small items like welfare and foreign aid constitute the bulk of the budget. Or, they believe that if we eliminated pork barrel spending, like the famous bridge to nowhere, we could balance the budget and cut everyone's taxes. Of course this is not true, but the problem is not that the public is stupid. The problem is that the media does a horrible job reporting on the budget and they refuse to change even when there are simple and obvious ways to do better reporting. When you read horrible news articles like this piece on the farm bill, it is difficult not to take pleasure in the trend of declining newspaper readership. If we no longer had newspapers to give us "news" like this, it would be no loss.
--Dean Baker
