Philadelphia. -- "How is the national debt like a cheap affair?" asked a headline in the Miami Herald years ago. The answers followed:
"It feels good -- for the moment." "Once you start, it's hard to stop." "Your children will hate you for it."
But there's also a big difference: Cheap affairs -- with celebrities, at least -- get super coverage by newspapers and TV; debt and deficits don't. A woman scorned -- Gennifer Flowers, say -- is a sensation, but sticking the next generation with $4 trillion in IOUs is just a statistic.
Not only are the statistics boring, but the news media don't even get them right! Instead, the shameless borrowers in Washington come up with grossly misleading numbers, and the Big Media pass them along.
One racket is to use multiyear figures -- even though deficits are "annual" outrages -- to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem and of half-measures against it. For example, the Clinton administration says this year's deficit will be $193 billion. Thus, balancing the budget without new taxes would require spending cuts in that amount -- or at least that's how a normal person would look at it. Doing this gradually over the next seven years, as the balanced-budget amendment would require, hardly seems Draconian.
But to make the job sound nearly impossible, President Clinton and his allies say that balancing the budget in seven years would require "$1.2 trillion" in cuts -- which the media report with a straight face. Mr. Clinton counts as a cut anything that restrains the automatic growth of the federal budget, and he counts it year after year. In other words, if you kill a $1 billion-a-year agency, that counts as a $7 billion cut because this is a seven-year plan we're talking about.
Using multiyear figures and mixing in middle-class tax cuts, Mr. Clinton has the media and the public dazed and confused. In his new budget, the president brags about "$81 billion in additional deficit reduction through the year 2000." The Wall Street Journal reported: "In all, Mr. Clinton's budget would reduce the deficit by $144 billion from projected levels over the next five years." That's wrong because $63 billion of his savings would go toward tax cuts.
An Associated Press story started out: "President Clinton's $1.61 trillion budget for next year trims the deficit . . . ." Wrong again. The Clinton budget is a "deficit-expansion" plan. By his own numbers, this budget would let the deficit increase by $4 billion next year -- and the deficit would increase again the following year by $16 billion.
Lots of budget stories shortchange the public by not saying how much total spending and total revenue will increase. Lately, many stories fail to state that Mr. Clinton's $1.6 trillion budget would increase spending by $73 billion. Mind you, a highfalutin' economist would call that number misleading because it doesn't factor in inflation. But as any "home economist" could tell you, nobody who's drowning in debt should start off by cranking a cost-of-living adjustment into his budget.
Another fundamental seldom stated clearly in stories is the revenue trend. Barring a recession, federal tax revenue is rising at about $70 billion a year. Thus the Clinton budget slightly increases the deficit because it raises spending by $73 billion while revenue is climbing by $69 billion. Given this basic info, you can bet that most Americans would tell Congress to whack spending harder than the president wants.
Even the way the media define the deficit hides its reality. The official deficit, as done by the White House and Congress, includes the annual surplus in Social Security -- which makes it look artificially low. Without that dodge, the deficit will be around $244 billion this year -- and headed past $300 billion two years from now. If news reports spelled that out, maybe the public would demand that the politicians attack this chronic problem seriously.
Douglas Pike is an editorial writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer.