Both the NYT and Post came through with some genuinely awful budget pieces today. The articles committed not only the common sin of printing large budget numbers without placing them in any context, they also failed to give readers any sense of the time periods involved. For example, the NYT article refers to a provision that would spend $4 billion to clean up abandoned coal mines. Is this a single year appropriation? Presumably not, since that would be more than half of what the country spends on Head Start in year. Of course, if the time period is, say 10 years, then the impact of this proposed expenditure is one-tenth as large. The Post refers to a series of tax breaks that have a cost of $50 billion. Is this for one year or many? I'm sure that there are people out there who know the answer to this question, but I don't and I doubt very many Post readers do either. These folks do budget reporting as their day job. It shouldn't be too much to ask that they take the time to write budget numbers in a way that makes them meaningful to their readers. As it is, these numbers basically provide no information whatsoever to readers.
--Dean Baker
