The Budget -- More Dishonesty From the Media

President Trump and congressional leaders reached a budget deal yesterday.  If you follow this sort of thing, ask yourself how much spending increased next year compared to this year.  Most news reports scream that spending has increased $320 billion.  That's wrong. Actually, spending for the next fiscal year will rise by just less than $50 billion.  That's a huge amount, but it's much less than the number that the media is using.  So how can that be?  The answer is the media is comparing spending to the level set in the automatic sequestration bill passed in 2011.  That bill set maximum levels for defense and domestic discretionary spending.  Congress ended sequestration two years ago, but it did so on a "temporary" basis for just the following two years.  Technically, sequestration was supposed to kick back in for next year, but no one in Washington expected that it ever would.  After all, were sequestration to return, it would have cut each of defense and domestic spending by over $100 billion.  There's no way Congress or the President would want such drastic cuts in an election (or any other) year.

The point is that while spending has risen; it hasn't risen by all that much.  The less than fifty billion dollar actual increase is just over one percent of current federal spending.

So why would the media be pushing the 320 billion number?  The answer is that they want conservatives and budget hawks to be upset with the President and the Republicans for spending so much.  There's a technical basis for screaming about 320 billion, so the media is off and running.  The actual numbers don't seem to matter.  Because of sequestration, there's a technical basis for this number, but it's still mostly Fake News.  Again.