Buzz Flash

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Ben Cohen

It's the high season for budget debates in Washington DC , and this means big numbers are flying around like the lids of ice cream containers at the old Ben and Jerry's factory in Burlington , where we used to throw them at each other.

But unlike pints of ice cream, which we can all get our minds and mouths around, most of us have no clue what it means when pundits slam or praise something like President George Bush's proposal to spend $640 billion on defense this year.

It's a perennial problem. When the folks in Washington start talking about how much such-and-such program will cost, they might as well be speaking another language from the public's point of view.

The journalism establishment in Washington seems to collectively shrug at this disconnect between numbers and reality. How else to explain the fact that they do little about it?

What, you might ask, could reporters do?

The DC media are supposed to translate Washingtonese into everyday language. But for some reason, when it comes to budget numbers, reporters most often either forget or refuse to make them understandable.

To do better, reporters wouldn't have to spend hours figuring out how many times a string of dollar bills wraps around the Earth. No, there's an easier and more effective way.

Simply express big budget numbers as a percentage of the federal budget. For example, when a reporter is describing President Bush's proposal to spend $640 billion on defense, he or she should also state that defense spending is 59% of the federal discretionary budget, which is the amount Congress votes to spend each year.

Similarly, if the $8 billion Environmental Protection Agency budget is in the news, reporters should write that it's less than 1% of discretionary spending.

It's so important for citizens to understand these figures that, when an article about a spending bill is presented, journalists should go a step further and include a pie chart, depicting the discretionary budget, with the slices labeled.

This would require just minutes of journalists' time. The Center for Economic and Policy Research even has a handy online calculator to allow reporters to quickly compare any sized spending proposal to the total discretionary budget.

You might argue that if journalists were to present these kinds of comparisons, they would be injecting bias in their stories. After all, when you state the percentage of spending going to education (6%) on Monday, for example, and the percentage going to the Pentagon (59%) the next day, are you implying that the education budget is too small?

I don't think so, because inherent in every spending decision is a choice about priorities. And the comparative percentages reflect the facts about the choices we're making. There's no way citizens are going to understand the government's priorities if they're in the dark about how the cost of one program stacks up against the entire budget.

In my work as political activist since leaving the ice cream business, I've spent a lot of time studying polls on federal budget issues. I've worked with Republican and Democratic pollsters to get an objective handle on the people's budget priorities.

It turns out people's views on federal spending change dramatically if they are given comparative information about it - as opposed to just raw numbers. The raw numbers don't mean much to the majority of us.

That's no big surprise, of course, but what surprises me is the fact that despite this, journalists regularly report the cost of federal programs and other figures without putting them in any context.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Ben Cohen is Co-founder of Ben and Jerry's and President of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities ( www.sensiblepriorities.org [1]).