Bozell Column: The Media's Budget Fantasy Land
Jaws dropped across the nation's capital at the audacious
annihilation of the truth on the front page of the February 15
Washington Post. The top headline read "Obama budget makes deep cuts,
cautious trades." It's another day at the Post, where every day is an
April Fool's joke.
Reporter Lori Montgomery didn't exactly say "deep cuts" in her
first sentence. She explained that Obama's budget proposal for Fiscal
Year 2012 made "surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs." But two
paragraphs later, the reporter admitted "the president's offer to
freeze funding for domestic programs would produce minimal savings in
the short term." That doesn't match the "deep cuts" headline in large,
bold type - because there are none.
Post readers could look at the Fiscal 2012 budget outline right
under the headline. Projected spending: $3.7 trillion. Expected tax
revenue is $2.6 trillion. The expected deficit is $1.1 trillion, "down"
from the estimated Fiscal 2011 deficit of $1.6 trillion. What about the
"deep cuts" for 2012? Obama's policies actually add $11 billion to the
deficit. Any deficit reduction would only come from economic growth and
the end of "stimulus" projects.
All this is dizzying when near the end of the Reagan presidency, the entire budget in Fiscal Year 1988 was $1.06 trillion, less than the red ink from Obama's pen.
But the headlines were selling Obama as a "deep cutter." The Post's
free tabloid Express carried this weird, blaring headline: "Burned by
the Budget: Obama's $3.7T fiscal blueprint would spread the pain to
just about every American." The Boston Globe identified "Deep Cuts,
Chance of Gains for State in Obama Budget."The Fort Worth Star-Telegram
was also favorable: "Obama Plan Aims to Rein In Deficits."
On National Public Radio, reporter Mara Liasson relayed that Obama
said his budget freezes "would bring domestic spending down to a
50-year low as a share of GDP." She then quoted Obama saying "this
share of spending" is going to be "lower than it was under the last
three administrations. And it will be lower than it was under Ronald
Reagan."
Let that sink in: Obama, more fiscally conservative than Ronald Reagan.
Liasson then added: "Mr. Obama said his budget did that by cutting
that hearty perennial, waste, fraud and abuse, but also by making deep,
painful cuts in important programs."
Once again, this is absolutely false. There are not "deep, painful
cuts" in Obama's domestic spending. Media outlets like NPR are letting
the White House isolate one small fraction of the budget -
"discretionary domestic non-defense spending" - and then letting them
claim that it's going down, but only as a percentage of the (growing)
gross domestic product.
Surely, NPR knows that in his first two years, Obama exploded
domestic spending with his failed "stimulus" plan. The idea that they
can now let him paint himself as Mr. Deep Cuts shows how they lack
elementary mathematics or political-science skills. The alternative is
they know what they're doing, making them projectors of dishonest
journalism.
Every American who voted last fall for fiscal sanity should now
take his placards and pitchforks to the offices of the national
newspapers and the studios of the national TV and radio networks. The
American people should demand that every news story on the federal
spending debate deal with the entire $3.7 trillion budget, not just
isolated fractions.
When you change your outlook from Fiscal 2012 to the next decade,
it's even more shocking. ABC reporter Jake Tapper was atypically
blunt: "President Obama later today will propose a 10-year budget plan
that would increase the national debt by $7.2 trillion over 10 years -
$1.1 trillion less than if it weren't implemented."
In other words, the best this president can do is oversee bankruptcy.
One major reason we're in this fiscal morass is our national media.
Forget any real cuts. For decades now, any attempt to even try to trim increases in growth in entitlements like Medicare have been trashed by the media as "draconian cuts."
Our top reporters have spent the last two years letting Barack
Obama spew the insanity that he could add millions of uninsured people
to the goverment's health-insurance programs and simultaneously cut the
deficit. Now they're calling him responsible for "deep cuts." They
truly live in a parallel universe.
