
Caveat lector
17 August 1999
Our current howler (part I): Post toasts em
Synopsis: In June, both parties said there would be a big surplus. The Post said, Not so fast.
$1 trillion added to surplus
Susan Page and Rich Miller, USA Today, 6/29/99
Budget Surplus Forecast Grows By $1 Trillion
Eric Pianin and John F. Harris, The Washington Post, 6/29/99
Believe It or Not, $1 Trillion Extra Really Is Possible
George Hager, The Washington Post, 6/29/99
Uncertain Windfall
E.J. Dionne, Jr., The Washington Post, 7/2/99
The Surplus Illusion
Editorial, The Washington Post, 7/5/99
The Trillion-Dollar Problem
Editorial, The New York Times, 7/12/99
You almost had to laugh at the headline. "$1 trillion
added to surplus," USA Today said, over its page one lead
story. The Washington Post headline added some nuance: "Budget
Surplus Forecast Grows by $1 Trillion." The stories detailed
new budget projections President Clinton had announced the previous
day, in which the OMB predicted that "the surging economy
will pump an extra $1 trillion into government coffers over the
next 15 years," in the Post's words.
There was immediate muttering from some pundits about the surreal-sounding
USA Today headline. But early writing in the nation's major papers
suggested no problems with the new budget estimates. "Believe
it or not, $1 trillion extra really is possible" was the
headline of George Hager's analysis inside the Post. Here was
Hager's nugget presentation:
HAGER (paragraph 3): A cynic might well wonder whether any
of this is real.
(4) But economists saycautiously, and with their usual caveatsthat
yes, it is.
So too, the New York Times' hopeful interior story was headlined
"Clinton sees the possibility of zero U.S. debt by 2015."
None of the major papers we cover voiced immediate concern with
the new federal budget projectionsconcern that would soon be
widely expressed throughout the national press.
But then the Washington Post, bless its heart, began talking
back to blather. It started modestly, on July 2, with a paragraph
buried in E.J. Dionne's discussion of how the large surplus should
be handled:
DIONNE: Then there's the problem that part of the surplus is
based on unrealistically low ceilings, passed in the deficit days,
on future domestic discretionary spending. That's the money that
goes to programs other than social insurance and defense: for
education, public safety, health, roads, parks and the like.
Three days later, the Post let it fly. In a detailed editorial,
"The Surplus Illusion," the Post said that the White
House and the Congress were "arguing over money that doesn't
exist" in debating how to handle the projected surplus. Here's
how the Post started out:
THE WASHINGTON POST: To make the numbers come out even when
they passed the balanced budget act in 1997, the president and
Congress promised, without ever specifying how, that in the
future a large category of federal spending would be cut by
20 percent in real terms. The promise was widely recognized at
the time to be unrealistic, not to say phonysomething that ultimately
neither would nor should be done, given the widespread devastation
it would cause. [Post's emphasis]
The Post explained that the part of the projected surplus over
which the parties were fightingthe roughly $1 trillion, over
the next ten years, that would not derive from Social Security
fundsalmost all resulted from the bogus assumptions written into
the 1997 agreement. Because those assumptions were so improbable,
the Post said, that portion of the projected surplus almost surely
would never turn up:
THE WASHINGTON POST: If a realistic assumption were used insteadif
it were assumed, for example, that in real terms the cost of operating
the government is likely to stay about the same over the next
10 yearsthe trillion dollars in non-Social Security funds...would
reduce by about three-fourths, to about $250 billion.
The Post went into some detail. But the gist of the piece was
quite simple. If one made reasonable assumptions about future
government spending, there would not likely be any serious surplusexcept
for the funds from payroll taxes that were all earmarked for Social
Security. There was no big pot of extra money to be spent or used
for tax cuts.
The Post took the lead among the papers we review in challenging
the ongoing budget discussion. Other papers followed suit. On
July 19, the New York Times said this about the projected non-Soc
Sec surplus:
THE NEW YORK TIMES: If Americans want to use that money for
tax cuts, they need to know the consequences. The surplus rests
on the assumption that Congress and the White House will carry
out previously targeted spending cuts. No one thinks that will
happen.
USA Today checked in on July 29, with an analysis piece by
Owen Ullmann, and a lead editorial. We do not think the major
press has emphasized the problems with the projected surplus nearly
enough (more on that later). But, by the time Congress began voting
on tax cut proposals in early August, careful readers knew there
were major problems with the assumptions that had produced the
projected surplus.
To that extent, press coverage of this matter has been a textbook
success, in which publications reported a major problem with official
fiscal formulations. As such, it contrasted greatly with the press
corps' dismal performance during the Medicare debate of 1995-96.
Press corps coverage of that two-year discussion was the great
press debacle of the decadea nightmare example of technical incompetence,
and craven deference to newly-won GOP power. In the current discussion,
the Post identified major problems with the official discussion
within a week's time. In the Medicare debate of 1995-96, the press
corps blundered on in conceptual chaos for the course of a solid
two years. Lingering problems with that hapless discussion have
begun to appear in the news once again.
Everything you know about that Medicare debate is almost surely
totally wrong. And a look at how the press corps broke down then
reveals important aspects of current press functioning. Why did
the mainstream Washington press corps get the surplus right, and
Medicare wrong? It was the "triumph of politics," to
reuse an old phraseas we'll see when we stroll Memory Lane.
Tomorrow: Medicare follies! For two solid years, at the Speaker's
direction, the press corps persisted in reporting two parts of
what was plainly a three-number story.
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