New York Times on the Budget

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2011/04/new-york-times-on-the-budget

The New York Times has a news article that runs under the headline "Republican Budget Hard-Liners Get Support from Tea Party." It begins, "As House Republican leaders worked to cobble together a spending plan for this year that can win bipartisan support, their more conservative members made increasingly clear on Thursday that they consider a proposed $33 billion budget cut to be insufficient."

There's a reference to a "demand for $61 billion in cuts for the current fiscal year." And the article reports that "Tea Party activists from around the country warned that they would not accept less than a $100 billion cut from this year's budget." But nowhere in the article, which found room to mention the color of one protester's earmuffs (blue) and the presence of "a few Code Pink protesters protesting military intervention in Libya," is included the size of the federal budget out of which these cuts are proposed. For the record, it's $3.8 trillion. It's almost as though the Times doesn't want to include the number because it will make it harder to portray those who want to cut $61 billion out of $3.8 trillion — a reduction of about 1.6% — as "Hard-Liners."

by Ira Stoll  |  Apr 1, 2011 at 10:03 am Related Topics:  Government Spending, Politics, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list