Facts are such inconvenient things. Especially financial facts and figures.
On Tuesday, Rebecca Shabad at the Hill composed a 34-paragraph report entitled "Washington is ready to spend." Really? When have Congress or the White House not been ready to spend? Oh, I get it. She really means that they're getting ready to spend more. How much more? Readers will search in vain for anything beyond a one-paragraph discussion of a "$51.4 billion House bill funding justice" discussing two tiny items amounting to less than $100 million. That bill represents a whopping 1-1/2 percent of the roughly $3.5 trillion in annual federal spending. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine):
Washington is ready to spend
Washington wants to spend more.
Just four years ago, the nation's rapidly expanding debt was seen as Washington's No. 1 crisis.
When House Republicans took the majority in 2011, they made it their overarching mission to rein in spending. Together with the White House, they agreed to limit spending for the next decade by the use of budget caps.
Now those spending ceilings are unpopular with members of both parties.
Pressure to break them is coming from all sides, and building.
“We’re living with just really low numbers without any wiggle room, any flexibility,” Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), one appropriations subcommittee chairwoman, told The Hill.
“Particularly in foreign operations, or defense, or some of the others, it’s really difficult.”
There are plenty of causes that members believe deserve more money.
Oh, I'll bet there are "plenty of causes." Shabad only provided sort-of specific dollar amounts relating to one tiny sliver of the federal budget:
The $51.4 billion House bill funding justice, commerce and science for fiscal 2016 creates a new $50 million community policing initiative requested by Obama, but contains only $15 million for a program that would provide law enforcement with body cameras. That’s $35 million short of the White House request for next year.
Shabad never mentioned the nation's report $18.152 trillion national debt, or the $7.5 trillion increase in the national debt since Barack Obama took office in January 2009.
She didn't tell readers that this year's projected budget deficit is of $486 billion, which would of course have led any reader with a brain to question why anyone would want to spend more. Having knowledgeable readers doesn't seem to be Rebecca Shabad's goal. And of course, she never told readers about the $635 trillion in budget deficits which will have been incurred from February 2009 until September of this year if the Congressional Budget Office's aforementioned $486 billion deficit comes to passs.
Shabad at least capsulized the problem by collecting a few choice quotes (the bolded quotes are from the article; the narrative is mine):
- Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.) believes that sequestration — an idea the White House cooked up a bluff which didn't work out, because Congress called their bluff and enacted it into law — "stands in the way of us moving toward a more perfect union." Such a union always involves spending more. There is no limit.
- "House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) said he was open to getting rid of the spending caps in exchange for cuts to mandatory spending." Perhaps that's sensible, but Democrats have never seriously proposed trimming so-called "mandatory spending" on entitlements. Even now, they want to expand them.
- House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) claims: “I would say on our side of the aisle, we would gladly do something about sequester, but we’re not going to raise taxes." Except they did just that 2-1/2 years ago, and taxes went up — and yes, they're a factor in holding back the economy.
The primary point, though, is that Rebecca Shabad showed no interest in giving readers any kind of specifics concerning the astronomical amounts involved or the horrendous annual deficits we're still seeing — and on track to see indefinitely if Washington doesn't change its ways.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
