Misleading News Reporting on State Budget Gap

Why Hide the Context?

What Is Reported

I keep encountering reports of a $10 to $12 billion dollar budget deficit at the state.

This is accurate, but it is misleading.

True, buried below the headline, many reporters will tell you that this deficit is over a four-year period. That’s a bit better, though the sensationalism of the headline is a little much. Any reporter or editor has to know that readers will remember “$10B-$12B deficit” and are very unlikely to remember “four-years.”

What Isn’t Reported

But more important is what the writers leave out.

Why is there no context? Is this gap 10% of the budget? 25%? Is this going to be hard to fix? Did we really blow it when it came to projections!?

The reader is left to decide, but has been set up to conclude that the problem is big. We’ve been given is a number that certainly sounds BIG. We all know a billion is a big number.

And since no one gives us any information as to whether that number is big for a state, we are naturally led to believe we are facing some sort of fiscal calamity.

This is nonsense.

Baby Steps

Somewhat refreshingly, I heard a guest reporter on KUOW attempt to give a sense of the magnitude of the problem, pointing out that the budget is over $70B.

Which was almost useful!

Why hold a four year deficit up against one year of spending? This just make the problem look four times worse than it is.

(To be fair to this reporter, it was a talk show, and they probably just didn’t have the number on hand and the moment passed. I doubt this was intentional).

The Deficit is a Tiny Fraction of the Budget

Washington spent $71.9B last year, though I believe we may be on track to spend less this year. Budgets tend to increase, the US economy is strong, Washington has done rather well, and the Seattle area in particular is hot, despite what the conservatives will tell you.

So let’s assume we are on track to spend at least an average of $75B a year over the next four years, or $300B. If we want to be conservative, and plan on some sort of defunding from the MAGA maniacs in Washington DC., we might say $280B.

Depending on which numbers you pick, we’re talking about a projected gap of 3.3% to 4.3%.

If we had this information, we would all know that there is a significant dollar gap, but that it is quite small relative to government spending and taxing authority, and so should be relatively easy to fix.

The legislature has other challenges—fixing the school funding problem, and needed investments in childcare, clean transportation, housing and the like. I don’t mean to pretend their job is easy. They are going to have to work their butts off to get it all done.

But the notion that we have some sort of big deficit that is itself an intractable problem is false. And the obvious implication that this pretend-giant deficit is an excuse to avoid doing that hard work, is also false.