The St. Petersburg Times on the $3 billion war

I'll add my commentary later.

clipped from www.tampabay.com [Getty Images] Suppose that, five years ago, President Bush had asked every American household to stump up $25,000 to pay for an imminent war on Iraq. How would they have responded? The Economist The $3-trillion war Bush never asked every American household to stump up $25,000 for the war. But this hefty sum is nonetheless just part of the toll the war may take on America by the time it is over, according to a new book by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and Linda Bilmes, a budget and public finance expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

The picture of President Bush ... I guess that's justified by the question posed in the editorial (planned that way?).

"The Economist"

When I first started reading the piece, that line made me wonder. Did this supposedly appear in "The Economist"? Yes, it did--but the page layout was nothing like what the Times chose for its online presentation.

In the Times, the editorial seems to pass on the information from the Stiglitz/Bilmes book without any judgment, at least as evidenced by the traditional attention-getting features of the online presentation.

It is only well into the editorial, past where many readers' interest has terminated, that one finds the Stiglitz/Bilmes thesis brought to question:

They go on to pursue the war's trail through every twist and turn of the macroeconomic labyrinth. Here, their reasoning is a bit too ingenious. They argue, for example, that the government's spending abroad prevented it from giving America a needed fiscal boost at home. Even if you believe America has suffered from a shortfall of demand in the past five years, surely the blame cannot be pinned on the Iraq war. It must lie instead with the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to maintain full employment as best it can.

Indeed, what is remarkable is how small a macroeconomic price America has paid for its adventure. Not only has the war been financed by borrowing rather than taxes, but also the borrowing has been dirt cheap. Neo-imperialists worry that America has the responsibilities of a global superpower, but an electorate unwilling to shoulder them. For better or worse, though, the combination of volunteer soldiers, hired guns and Asian creditors has lightened the load.

(The Economist)

I should have done a screen capture on the Times version before they updated the page (the original URL for the clipping no longer features the same story or layout). Nonetheless, the comparison to the version used by The Economist tells us something.

The Times' presentation is misleading on account of the headline and layout.

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