Letter to the editor

“Major Money Matters” spread used questionable source for U.S. government spending data

In the March 14, 2008 issue of The Mast, I read the centerfold article titled “Major Money Matters.” In this article, writer and editor Maren Anderson discussed issues that had been brought up in the previous weeks by some keynote speakers on different ways to look at the way countries like the U.S. should spend their money.

I enjoyed the first part of the article until I read the paragraph that described our budget spending. Anderson used information in word and pie chart form from a source known as the War Resisters League.

The WRL has a Web site that shows their heavily anti-war views and beliefs in other issues that align with those of a typical anti-war supporter. The Web site is very proud of its makeshift pie chart, which they tout as the correct proportions of spending for the United States. They are so proud that they actually are selling copies of the chart for 10 cents.

When skimming through the pie charts in The Mast last week, I noticed something a little peculiar. The chart that was presented for the U.S. was actually provided by the WRL Web site. When looking at the chart one can see that it claims that the U.S. spends over 50 percent of its yearly budget on the military, while only spending a measly 2 percent on social services.

Anyone who has ever taken a finance class or has looked at the real numbers can tell you that those percentages are completely false.

Using a more reliable source to find information on our own country’s spending policy isn’t really that hard. A good Web site to find this reliable information is www.whitehouse.gov. In this Web site, the user can find the budget of the president. This is the budget information from the source that is actually creating the budget.

Now I understand that there are skeptics out there who honestly believe that if the information is coming from the government then it, too, is probably fabricated. But let’s not stray to far from the point.

If one were to look up the national budget for fiscal year 2007 as the article describes, he or she could find out the real numbers. The percentage of the budget for military defense including benefits to veterans (which really isn’t a military expense) accounts for 23 percent of spending, not the 51 percent listed in The Mast article.

A large contrast is the amount given to health care and social services. If you add healthcare, Medicare and social security, you end up with 45 percent of the spending in 2007.

The numbers show a drastic difference from the amounts given in The Mast article on March 14th. It should be part of the writer’s job to research topics like these more in depth before writing an article that appears in the centerfold of the paper. Articles like this bring down the integrity of a newspaper that prides itself on representing fair journalism.

Greg Wittreich, senior