AP Can't Add, Strib Can't Fact-Check

I saw what I thought was a cool chart in the Strib this morning. It was a single bar chart -- basically the same as a pie chart, but arranged in a bar instead of a circle. It showed the breakdown of the federal government, and made it clear how hopeless it probably is to make cuts:

• $658 billion for Social Security (can't cut that)
• $595 billion for Defense (could cut, but it hasn't happened much in the past)
• $461 billion for Medicare (can't cut)
• $451 billion interest (I imagine that can't be cut, and it will only get worse)
• $201 billion Medicaid (can't cut, I don't think)
• $85 billion Veterans (unpopular to cut)
• $41 billion Homeland Security (not likely to cut)
• $18 billion FDIC (paid as insurance from the banks, can't cut now for sure)
• $.4 billion other (everything else... agriculture, education, interior, transportation, housing, foreign aid, state...)

The chart is credited to Associated Press. It says it's based on FY08 numbers.

I was affected for a brief moment, and then I thought... wait a minute. Four-tenths of a billion dollars is $400 million, right? Are they saying that the whole rest of the federal budget is only $400 million? Am I reading that right?

The site federalbudget.com has a nice chart that shows FY08 as well, and it comes out quite a bit different. Agriculture, for instance, is shown to have almost $90 billion of its own; transportation and education about $60 billion; and so on.

A pie chart on the Wikipedia, based on 2008 budget documents from the Government Printing Office, shows that about 75% of the budget is made up of the seven items called out in the AP chart, leaving about 25% for the "other" programs. (Oddly, the AP chart didn't include spending on unemployment, welfare and other entitlement-based programs -- that's $324 billion all by itself.)

So what's the deal with the AP chart? At first I couldn't find it online anywhere, but with a little more persistence it turned up on apnews.myway.com. So I guess they haven't realized how incorrect it is.

It's weird, because the AP subhead says "Defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid make up nearly 60 percent of the nearly $3 trillion federal budget" -- and that's accurate. But then in the bar chart they depict those four items as accounting for 76 percent of the total bar graph ($1915B of $2510B). It's as if they just forgot about the rest of the government.

Perhaps they intentionally left out the other spending areas, but that would be completely misleading. And it seems doubtful, since the asterisked footnote specifically says that Other includes education, transportation, housing, foreign aid, etc.

No, I think this was a total "mind fart," as some folks I know would say. Somebody didn't get their nap and the chart paid the price.