The New York Times Co. said yesterday that its third-quarter earnings fell more than half from the comparable quarter last year, days after the Times-owned Boston Globe told employees that the paper's national staff is being trimmed to save money.

...no other industrial nation’s centralized government spends less than the United States measured as a share of their economy.

Federal spending as a share of our economy in 2005 represents about 20.2 percent. ...For the decade of the 1980's, federal spending averaged 22.2 percent of GDP – a whole 2 percentage points higher than last year...

For the decade of the 1990's – the Berlin Wall falls, the economy expands – and guess what? Federal spending as a share of an expanding economy averaged 20.7 percent. A whole half a percentage point higher than last year...

When we turned into the new century, pre-September 11, 2001 spending averaged a historic low of 18.5 percent. It has been the increases in federal spending for the Global War on Terrorism that has been the most significant driver these last 5 years, not highway bills, not energy bills, nor a Medicare drug bill... As a share of GDP, defense spending has increased from 3.0 percent in 2000 to 4.0 percent last year. In other words, if it were not for this 1 percentage point increase in funding for our national security between 2000 and last year, federal spending overall would be a remarkable 19.2 percent, well below the previous two decades.

Reidl shoots back, of course, and scores some good points as well.

This point seems to recommend excluding the costs of the war on terrorism from spending analyses. But this spending did not occur in a vacuum. During World War II, lawmakers reprioritized their budgets and cut non-war spending in half—even eliminating many of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. During the Korean War, Congress cut one-fourth of all non-war spending in just one year... Rather than set priorities and offset important wartime spending, today’s lawmakers simply ask budget watchdogs to pretend that such spending is not there. If only taxpayers could also pretend that the coming IRS bills for such spending are not there either...

President Reagan inherited a bloated federal government that spent 21.7 percent of GDP, and he reduced that burden to 21.2 percent—even while fighting the Cold War and working with an often-Democratic Congress that regularly sought to increase spending further. By comparison, lawmakers in early 2001 inherited a leaner budget that, as a result of difficult decisions made by previous Congresses, had been pared down to 18.4 percent of GDP, and they promptly responded with across-the-board spending hikes that pushed spending all the way back to 20.2 percent of GDP by 2005.

Isn't it impressive that conservatives can publicly disagree with each other like this? During the debate about Social Security reform, was there any debate whatsoever among liberals?

Update... reader Brian Hart takes the gloves off:

I could care less what federal expenses are as a percentage of GDP. That is a completely irrelevant measure. The point of both taxes and government spending is to provide money for needed government services. Therefore, until proven otherwise, tax revenue and spending growth equaling the growth of the population and the growth of inflation should be the only goal of the government. I acknowledge there may be times where there are special needs that require more money, but the burden of proof is on the government to prove it. It is not the responsibility of the government to automatically grow itself at the same pace as the economy.

Based on that meaningful measure, through 2004, the government has grown 33% since 1980 and nearly 20% since Bush took office. So on a real basis, the government has grown 1/3 since 1980 and nearly 1/5 since 2001. It is an embarrasment that the "Budget Guru" for the Republican Majority Leader doesn't understand this. As Reidl pointed out, Hoagland's rebuttal doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny.

Furthermore, Hoagland is inadvertantly making the Democrats arguments on taxation for them. Since 1980, as the top tax rate has been reduced from 70% to 35%, taxes as a percentage of GDP has gone down. That is a good thing and not surprisingly taxes as a percentage of the population on a real basis have increased over 20%. That is what matters. However, Hoagland doesn't get this. Unfortunately, as Republicans leaders are apt to do, he is providing the Democrats the club for them to beat him over the head with.

...the count shows the lack of knowledge that FEMA has about the relocations and its limited oversight over the money it is committed to spend on such housing.

"FEMA still does not know any more about what it was doing last week than it was a month ago," Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said. "It is still, as far as I am concerned, an incompetent agency."

"Taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in two decades..."

"The share of all public universities' revenues deriving from state and local taxes declined to 64 percent in 2004 from 74 percent in 1991."

This story reflects the fundamental problem with reporting in the main stream media. Now, it's possible that the reporter simply doesn't understand statistics. The share of public universities; revenues deriving from state and local taxes declining is not the same thing as taxpayer support for public universities, measured per student, declining. Theoretically, it is possible that taxpayer support for public universities, per student, has doubled, but that during the same time frame, universities have gone out and raised money privately by even more.

More likely, however, the problem with this story is the way in which news is gathered and reported in the main stream media. Does anyone really think that the reporter or an editor thought "Gee, let's see what's going on with taxpayer support at public universities?". Of course not. More likely, an editor received a press release complaining about "declining taxpayer support". This news release probably contained all the figures needed by the reporter to write this story. Now, the Times, in it's natural bias in support of public universities, didn't think to question the motvation of the universities, and thus dig deeper into the story. Clearly, public universities have an incentive to measure taxpayer support by the faulty statistic of the percentage of all public universities revenues deriving from state and local taxes, as using that statistic as a benchmark means that every private dollar raised by a university implies an obligation on the government to pony up matching funds.

So, the Times, ignoring the bias of the Universities and their leaders, coupled perhaps with a ignorance of basic statistics by the reporter and the editors, puts out a misleading story. One that will never be corrected.