February 03, 2015
Actually the Post’s budget piece didn’t tell readers that. Instead it said:
“All told, Obama’s policies would add about $5.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade (compared with nearly $8 trillion under current law). Meanwhile, interest payments on the debt would climb to nearly $800 billion a year by 2025 — more than Obama proposes to spend on any program in that year other than Social Security and Medicare.”
Pretty damn scary, huh? Just think of that — adding $5.7 trillion to the debt, and interest payments that will be larger than spending on any program other than Social Security and Medicare! Sounds like we’re going to hell in a handbasket.
If the point of the story was to convey information rather than advancing its deficit cutting agenda (which seems aimed largely at Social Security and Medicare), the paper would have told readers that the interest tab projected for 2025 is 3.0 percent of GDP. Before you scream about what we are doing to our children, consider that interest payments were 3.0 percent of GDP or more every year from 1985 to 1997, except 1994 when they were 2.9 percent. (These numbers are in the same document, Table E-6). These payments were larger than spending on any program except the military and Social Security.
Unlike the NYT, the Post makes almost no effort to put the budget numbers in any context, expressing terms almost exclusively in billions and trillions which they know are meaningless to almost all their readers. It’s just another way of saying that the government spends and borrows lots of money, the sort of claim that papers are supposed to leave to the opinion pages.
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