In a new explainer series from Vox, Yglesias downplays the importance of the debt:
Allahpundit asks how this fits within Vox’s larger mission:
Of all the current affairs they could be usefully Voxplaining to the BuzzFeed generation right now — a primer on Crimean geopolitics or Venezuela post-Chavez, a quickie take on what the Fed’s “taper” could mean to the average paycheck, etc — it’s revealing that they put out a sort of Krugman-for-kindergarteners video like this. Also revealing is how self-contained it is: There’s no hint of counterarguments, like, say, what growing interest payments on ballooning debt will do to a federal budget that’s already slowly being cannibalized by Medicare, nor is there even a hint that the issue might be more complex than this. That’s smart rhetorically, especially given the time constraints, but … complicates, shall we say, the site’s pretensions to explanation. What sort of “explanatory journalism” launches by encouraging its readers not to spend too much time thinking about a particular subject, especially one this politically salient?
Patterico thinks he found an error in the video:
Virtually everyone who follows these issues knows that the U.S. national debt is over $17 trillion. The U.S. Treasury issues daily statements on the national debt here. The latest report is that for March 25, 2014 (.pdf). It lists the closing balance for “Total Public Debt Outstanding” at $17,555,984,000,000, which is over $17.5 trillion dollars. Of that amount, $4,976,757,000,000 (almost $5 trillion) consists of “intragovernmental holdings,” and $12,579,227,000,000 (over $12.5 trillion) is “debt held by the public.” That latter number is what Yglesias is citing, as you can tell from the chart that accompanies his narration, which has a bar on a chart labeled: “Debt held by the public.”
But the debt held by the public is not the U.S. national debt.
John Aziz sides with Matt:
Yglesias is pretty clear that he’s excluding debt owed from one arm of the government to another, and only including federal debt held by the public. That is completely rational. After all, money the government owes to itself is simply money moved from one side of the government balance sheet to the other. There’s nothing dishonest or disingenuous about citing the lower figure that only includes debt held by the public, especially given that Yglesias was clear about this.
Ben Cosman covers the back and forth:
Patterico makes the point that the only people who’d recognize the difference between public and national debt are people already familiar with the subject, and thus wouldn’t need the video’s basic explanation. Anyone in need of the kind of explanatory journalism Vox is looking to provide would simply assume the two are the same, since the video seems to use them interchangeably.
Which brings up a good question: just how effective (and ideological) is Vox’s explanatory journalism going to be? In an email to Patterico, Klein wrote, “If we did have an article we’d probably spend some time explaining the difference.”
Whether or not you think the video was misleading, the fact that Klein admits an explanation deficiency on an explanatory video doesn’t look great.
The Dish 