AP Reporter Miserably Covers Record Tax Receipts, Falling Deficit

Perhaps you read this week that in April, the US Treasury reported all-time-record tax collections of $383.6 billion.

If you did, you didn't read it in the dead-trees version of the New York Times. The Old Grey Lady did not deem Thursday afternoon's news "fit to print" on Friday (requires free registration), even choosing not to carry the related Associated Press report that is the main topic of this post (even though the Time posted it online Thursday evening). A Times search on "April treasury" (not in quotes) shows no evidence of any other coverage since then, nor does Sunday's Business home page.

The Washington Post also carried that AP story and nothing else (also searching on "April Treasury," not in quotes).

So, unless you happened to read a brief report from MarketWatch (requires registration) or subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (requires subscription), odds are that anything you read or heard about April's Monthly Treasury Statement came from the aforementioned AP report, written by good old Martin Crutsinger (some previous examples of Crutsinger's demonstrated bias and ignorance are here, here, here, and here).

Crutsinger's full report is here. Before I get to his biggest oversight, here are the report's relatively minor (I'm not kidding) shortcomings:

• Readers would want to know what the old record for receipts was; it's nowhere to be found. The old record was $331.8 billion in April 2001. If it ever happened, can you imagine a sports reporter covering the end of a mythical baseball player's a 66-game hitting streak neglecting to tell readers that the old record was Joe Dimaggio's 56?
• Because Crutsinger chose not to tell us what the old record was, readers didn't get to appreciate the magnitude of the new record, which shattered the old one by 15.6%.
• Crutsinger waited until the final paragraph to note that the surplus for the month was $177.7 billion, and did not inform readers that it was the second-highest surplus ever (April 2001 had a higher surplus).
• He did not report the White House's reaction to the news until the second- and third-last paragraphs (paragraphs 13 and 14).
• "Mr. Clever" Crutsinger knew that the final paragraphs were the ones readers were least likely to get to, and the ones most likely to be cut by subscribing newspapers and other users. Sure enough, this report, and this one, edited out the direct quote from Budget Director Rob Portman; this one, as well as the report at the popular My Way site, has neither paragraph of administration reaction; and shorter reports carried by TV station sites such as this one never got to the administration's reaction or the amount of April surplus (and who at AP wrote the first paragraph at that link, which does not appear in Crutsinger's original report: "The tax man is really raking it in"?).

As I noted, those are the minor flaws. Here's the howler:

The federal budget was in surplus for four years from 1998 through 2001 as the long economic expansion helped push revenues higher. But the 2001 recession, the cost of fighting a global war on terror and the loss of revenue from President Bush's tax cuts sent the budget back into the red starting in 2002.

If Martin Crutsinger was going to blame the $125 billion in tax cuts ($73.8 billion and $51.2 billion) made in 2001 and 2002 for contributing to the deficits (and though they stimulated the economy to an extent, a case can be made that they did not increase overall revenues), he needed to explain, and of course failed to explain, why tax receipts have gone up so much in the past three years, as seen here:

Instead, Crutsinger dryly told us that "revenues" are up 11.2% so far during the current fiscal year (aside: Businesses earn "revenues," Martin; governments collect taxes and fees). He made no attempt to explain how it could possibly be that tax receipts have increased over $760 billion, and at double-digits rates for several years, while the economy has grown at a rate of just a bit over 3% during that time.

Anything, I suppose, so that Mr. Crutsinger could avoid writing these "horrible" words: "The investment-related Bush tax cuts of 2003 have caused tax collections to increase dramatically. So far this year, those cuts primarily explain why the deficit is 56% lower than it was at this time last year."

Some economists, including The Skeptical Optimist, believe that the budget will be (more correctly - is on track to be -- Ed.) in balance as early as April 2008. You have to wonder how Crutsinger will try to keep that news away from his readers if that day comes.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.