Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Last week Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told the reporters at her press briefing that tariffs are a tax cut. This is an absurd lie on its face. Tariffs are a tax on imports. How can a tax be a tax cut?
While I have no idea what Ms. Leavitt actually knows or believes about tariffs, the fact is that many people, possibly including her and Donald Trump, are genuinely confused about what a tariff is. This confusion is not a secret, we see evidence of it all the time in both statements by politicians and public opinion polling.
Given this confusion on the meaning of tariff is there some reason the media feel the need to use the word “tariff” as opposed to “tax on imports,” or if we want to be more concise, just “import tax?” This is not a matter of politics; it is just a decision about using terms that are much more likely to be understood by the audience.
For example, instead of telling readers about Trump’s plans to “impose tariffs” on Canada, Mexico, and China, papers could tell readers that Trump plans to raise taxes on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. This would accurately describe Trump’s plans and make it less likely anyone would have the idea these countries will be sending checks to the Treasury Department.
If the goal of reporting is to inform its audience is there any plausible reason for reporters not choosing to use “import tax” in place of tariff? Why would anyone not use a clearly defined term instead of a word that they know leads to confusion?
Putting Big Numbers in Context
The confusion on tariffs is not the only case where the media badly fail at informing their audience. When news outlets use really big numbers, and especially budget numbers, without any context, they are essentially providing no information to their audience.
I know I have harped on this point endlessly, but I have never heard a remotely plausible reason why reporters can’t put these numbers in some context. And it is important.
Poll after poll shows that people are hugely confused about where our tax dollars are going. They think that a huge share of the budget goes to items like foreign aid, welfare, or various art and cultural programs. In reality, these items are nickel and dime stuff in the whole budget.
The basis for the confusion is that people have no idea what the big numbers being tossed around mean. When people hear that we were spending $6.1 billion on PEPFAR, the program that has saved tens of millions of lives in Africa by making AIDS treatments available, they likely think this is a lot of money. Almost none of us will ever see anything close to that sum. But if they knew PEPFAR accounts for less than 0.09 percent of the federal budget, they would know that cutting off funding, as Elon Musk has done, will not matter much for the federal deficit or their taxes.
The same holds true for many of the other items that Musk and his DOGE team have counted as waste. Trump also look to be cutting or eliminating the Agency for Global America, which oversees Voice of America and other U.S. government networks broadcasting abroad. This agency gets $886 million a year from the government. That comes to just over 0.01 percent of the federal budget. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a perpetual target of the right, gets $535 million from the government, less than 0.008 percent of the total budget.
The fact that these items might be a small share of the budget doesn’t justify the spending if they are bad programs. But people should have a clear understanding of the amount of money involved and the vast majority of people do not.
Part of the reason for over-estimating the cost of these programs is clearly due to political biases. If people don’t like foreign aid or food stamps, they are likely to say that these programs are a much bigger share of the budget so that they can blame their tax bill or the deficit on them.
But there are plenty of people that support these programs who also hugely over-estimate how much we spend on them. And there are undoubtedly people who would think saving tens of millions of people in Africa from AIDS would be a good idea if they knew it cost less than 0.09 percent of the budget, but who might not like the program if they thought it took up ten cents of every tax dollar.
It’s not the media’s job to either promote or condemn various government programs, but they should see it as their job to accurately inform their audience about the size of these programs. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.
More than a decade ago I and others pushed this case with then New York Time Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. She wrote a column in which she completely agreed with this point. She also asked then Washington editor David Leonhardt about the issue. He also completely agreed that the paper should always be putting these huge budget numbers in a context that made them understandable to readers.
I spent the night celebrating, expecting that the New York Times would change its policy. Given its standing, I assumed that other news outlets would quickly follow suit and that this would be the new norm in the industry.
But nothing changed. We still got budget stories telling us about the billions, tens of billions or hundreds of billions being spent on various programs, often in pieces that didn’t even bother to tell us the number of years involved.
I can think of no good reason why putting these huge budget numbers in a context that makes them understandable to readers is not the standard practice. One reporter, with extensive experience with major news outlets, insists that reporters lack the arithmetic skills to do these simple calculations. That would be incredible if true, but is it really the case that the New York Times can’t find a budget reporter who can do fourth grade arithmetic?
Anyhow, I can’t help thinking of this issue when I see Elon Musk with his chainsaw boasting about how he eliminated a program that cost us $2 million or $3 million, or 0.00003 percent or 0.00004 of the federal budget. Whatever we think of these programs, we will not balance the budget or pay for Mr. Musk’s tax cuts by removing this nickel and dime stuff from the budget.
And when the cuts are in programs that really do make a difference, like the PEPFAR program, which has saved tens of millions of people from AIDS, it’s hard not to be angry at the media. If they had not been so incompetent and/or lazy in their reporting, more people would know that letting these people die is not going to put any money in their pockets.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
