The Delaware Libertarian treats Princeton prof/Nobel economist/media whore Paul Krugman like a pinata in a recent post ("Shooting fish in a barrel," Waldo sniffed, always one to cavil).
There was, however, one clanger amid the fisking:
Nah, the fact that PBS reports that interest on the Federal debt is now
... more than the combined budgets of Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Interior, Justice, and the federal courts combined ...
Why those examples? How do those two thoughts come together in a comparison?
The only reason I can come up with is that somebody in Lehrerland wanted to find something the federal debt interest was bigger than, and they cherry-picked a series of relatively small federal departments whose budgets- happily- add up to less than the interest on the federal debt.
Thirty-odd years ago I wrote an article on the movie Heaven's Gate, then a legend in the making for its bloated budget. I remember going through The World Almanac looking for a country with a GDP less than the movie's tab. I found one eventually- a Pacific island chain, seems like it was.
Much to my delight, the line got picked up by a number of media outlets.
The comparison, itself, remained meaningless. It was truly an an apples and oranges thing. It was interesting and memorable but really didn't illuminate anything.
If one took the News Hour quote and subbed in other agencies- Defense, Treasury, HHS- you'd get the opposite: combined operating budgets way more than the interest on the national debt.
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