Theft at the Public Till
effectively. The message seems to be: If there is a problem, government reg- ulations can fix it. That the opposite may be reality is illustrative of a media community that may simply not understand economic matters and in its illiteracy may be spinning a web of confusion for all of us. Take, for example, the past decade's news coverage of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings program to eliminate the federal deficit. In the hundreds upon hundreds of stones that ran on the subject, presidents, con- gressmen, public finance experts, and others were portrayed as saying and doing all the right things with respect to the vast and growing gap between what the federal government takes in and what it spends. They acknowl- edged the mind-boggling size of the deficit and the enormity of the prob- lem it poses. They committed themselves to eliminating the deficit. They created and applied the elaborate Gramm-Rudman-Hollings procedure to reduce the deficit to zero over a multi-year period. When the effort faltered, the stories showed officials discussing alter- natives and taking steps. To judge from the clips, in short, the deficit was a problem on its way to being solved despite difficulties. In the budgeting offices of the executive branch departments, at the Office of Management and Budget, and in scores of committees and sub- committees on the Hill, however, a different story was unfolding. In these far-flung venues, via a multistage process stretching throughout the year, hundreds of major decisions were taken to spend at levels that, in the ag- gregate, grew much faster than revenues over the 1982-1992 decade. As a result, over the period in which the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings program was supposed to be cuffing the deficit back to zero, the deficit not only didn't go away, it grew. The vast majority of these deficit-generating actions went uncovered in the media. The press rarely reports the routine, obscure, seemingly undef- initive actions by which the federal government spends $1 billion per year. Even the self-described newspaper of record, the New York Times, ignored most of the major annual authorization and appropriation votes. Moreover, of the relatively few stories that did cover the actions that built the deficit, most treated them as good news. The events were written up, not as drops
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