True costs

Media’s DOGE reporting missing huge swaths of context

My old managing editor at the Oceanside Blade-Citizen and later North County Times, Rusty Harris, was a stickler for contextual reporting. This was particularly true when it came to the cost of public bonds, especially those on the ballot before voters.

Rusty would insist that reporters include not just the face value of bonds to be sold, but the total cost of paying them off over time. He would point out — rightly — that that number was what voters were actually deciding on, whether the issuing agency wanted to admit it or not.

The reporters’ sources at the local government agency seeking approval of the bond — a school district, water board, hospital district, etc. — would invariably push back against our reporting, claiming that for the newspaper to include such a number was to engage in trying to undermine support for the bond.

The reporters would then push back against their assignment editors, who would push back against Rusty.

Who wasn’t having any of it.

Rusty’s view was straight-forward: If state and federal law requires mortgages and car loans, and even credit cards, to disclose the full pay-off amount of those loans once interest is accounted for, then so should those seeking permission to issue loans.

I wish Rusty was here for the ongoing DOGE coverage. I have no idea whether Rusty would support or oppose the cost-cutting measures now going on in Washington, D.C., but I have a pretty good idea how he’d want it covered: With full contextual disclosure.

Given that more than a quarter of the current federal budget is comprised of new borrowing, Rusty would want to know what the borrowing costs were — and he’d demand that every supposed news article bemoaning proposed cuts to federal grants to local libraries, museums, parks, etc., point out the true cost of those grants to federal taxpayers based on the borrowing costs. (So a federal grant the local library was counting on — say for $300,000, might actually cost closer to $450,000 once the interest on it was paid alongside the principle.

Right now, most of the media completely glosses over those costs, and sticks to the affected agencies’ talking points — reporting only on how much less they are likely to receive, with no context on the real costs to the folks on the hook for them.

Namely, us.

With the national debt at record levels, and with a larger slice of the federal budget each year devoted to maintenance of the existing debt, we are leaving our children and grandchildren massive bills to pay down the road to finance not infrastructure that they will enjoy, but our day-to-day living expenses.

In decades past, public bonds for things like new freeways, university buildings, schools or hospitals — to be paid off over the next 20 to 30 years — were reasonably, logically justified as spreading the cost of these infrastructure projects across all the people who would benefit from them.

But when we’re borrowing millions, billions and now trillions of dollars per year not for infrastructure improvements, but daily operational costs, we are, in effect, asking our children to pay for our groceries. And at a higher cost than we’re actually spending, due to the interest rates.

Taking out a mortgage that will outlive you but that your children can assume and live in the house is one thing; leaving your children hundreds of thousands of credit card debt so you could dine out instead of cooking at home is quite another.

And, in practice, as individuals our debts die with us. I mean, an unpaid mortgage needs to be paid off or the house will be seized by the bank, but if you die deep in credit card debt, the bank can’t come after your heirs for that money — not once the estate is settled.

Government doesn’t work like that.

All those trillions of dollars will have be paid back. With interest.

Just so we can have longer library and museum hours in the here and now.

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