In thinking about our discussions on misleading science, I wanted to share with you this graph I came across today while reading about Biden’s proposed budget for 2022.

This makes it look like Biden wants to invest a ton of money into education, commerce, health and human services, and the EPA, right? Certainly things that many Democrats support.

However, what these actual bars and percentages represent is not what PROPORTION of the budget Biden wants to invest into these things– he’s not proposing that 40% of all federal discretionary spending go to education.

As the label says, it’s “2021 enacted discretionary spending budget vs. Biden’s 2022 proposal.” So, what these actually show is how much Biden wants to increase these areas COMPARED TO the current year. It doesn’t tell us anything about how much is actually being spent in each area.

For example, the 2021 “enacted budget” (so, not what Trump proposed for this year, but what actually happened for this year) for education was $73 billion, and Biden’s proposal for 2022 is $102.8 billion– the 40% increase in the chart. However, these numbers are just on a different scale than the Pentagon budget– which is a very small bar in the chart. The 2021 budget for THAT is $703.7 billion, and Biden’s proposal is $715 billion.

So, Biden’s proposed budget for military spending looks very small in the chart (1.6%), but it’s only small in relation to this year– the total amount of spending is still very high, and still 7 times higher than education spending.

So, it’s not FAKE/LIES, the chart is saying TRUE information, but it does send particular messages that obscure other facts!