Yesterday, I wrote about the clearly erroneous claims made by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post with regard to the effect on employment of the reductions in spending proposed by House Republicans. Today, the New York Times is using bogus math on the same issue. In an editorial called "Out of Control in the House", the Times laments that the Republicans are promoting cuts in discretionery spending that will lead to a supposed 800,000 lost jobs. All this is due -- according to the Times -- to cutting the spending of $81 billion over the next six months.
Let's put this in context. If we assume that the Times is correct (and they are not), the worry is that 800,000 people will lose their jobs unless the federal government continues to spend money at the annual rate of $162 billion more than the GOP wants. $162 billion is enough to pay each one of these supposed 800,000 people who lose their jobs $202,500 for the year. Does that make sense to anyone? Beyond this, the source material of the Times says that cuts of this magnitude will have little or no effect on the deficit and are needless. Since the Democrats always talk about the impact of their budgets over a decade, we should do the same for these cuts. If the cuts are made and sustained for a decade, the savings will be 1.62 trillion dollars. Further, since all of that spending would be with borrowed money, there would also be enough interest paid on this spending to bring the total cost to abot $2 trillion dollars. In the world of Obama spending, that is still not enough to bring sanity back to the government spending, but it is hardly the meaningless gesture that the Times pretends it is.
The truth is that the New York Times is against any cuts in spending and will say whatever is necessary to make arguments against those cuts. It is sad that the newspaper that used to stand for truth and complete honesty now is the poster child for bias and half truths foisted on the public to support a political agenda.
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