Friday, July 11, 2014

Herald Leader selling Beshear math

In a story about Kentucky state overspending -- they call it a budget "shortfall," of course -- the Lexington Herald Leader unquestioningly prints another piece of Gov. Steve Beshear's budget propaganda as fact.

"The governor has cut $1.6 billion in state budgets since taking office in 2007," reports Herald Leader reporter Jack Brammer without attributing the questionable statement to anyone.

According to state budget documents available to anyone who bothers to look, Revised Fiscal Year 2008 state spending was $24.3 billion. Revised Fiscal Year 2014 spending $29.7 billion. And you probably aren't supposed to remember Beshear got and spent $3.4 billion in federal "stimulus" funds right in the middle of that.

We're looking at spending going up an average of almost a billion dollars a year under Beshear and almost another billion a year in one-time money blown through, but Beshear and his cronies in the media keep repeating his "budget cutting" fiction.