You know, with all the talk about the budget “cuts,” a pet peeve of mine has been exposed in blazing color. The media just flat out lies about budget cuts.
The problem with this kind of shoddy reporting — which matches both the interests of the White House, which is trying to show fiscal responsibility, and the news media, since it can be used to paint a Republican President and Congress as heartless toward the less-fortunate — is that it’s based on adjustments to projections and not real spending levels. So, to use a simple and relatively small number, if a program is now allocated $1 million and it was expected to get a four percent increase of $40,000 to $1,040,000, but the budget proposes a three percent hike to $1,030,000, that’s reported not accurately as a three percent increase (or, if inflation is running at 3.5 percent, half a percent below inflation), but ridiculously as a “25 percent cut” (4 percent to 3 percent.)
I’m so tired of them doing this, and it happens with every budget. Only in the mindset of the morons running newspapers and television news rooms can an increase be called a cut and a straight face maintained.
Read the whole thing on Newsbusters. I’m tired of writing about it. I just can’t believe this same damned thing is happening yet again. At some point could someone please call these idiots out?
[tags]budget, spending, federal budget[/tags]