How not to talk about the budgetary process

Michelle Milhollon reports in today's Advertiser that the spending priorities of state lawmakers could make it harder to pass the up-to-$500 million in tax breaks that Republican leaders are pushing for. And where is the money going? Milhollon leads with a, well, leading example:

A historic social club, city planning efforts, a balloon festival and an animal disease lab are among the Baton Rouge area projects stuffed into the $29.6 billion state budget proposal.

Buried beneath this obviously anti-government language, there is an important story here: the battle between advocates of adequately-funded public services and, well, opponents of adequately-funded public services. Louisiana's budget surplus is going either for spending hikes, or tax cuts, or both-- and there ought to be a healthy debate over this. To her credit, Milhollon ultimately gets to an explanation of what the contested spending priorities are:

The added spending runs the gamut:
An additional $71 million to move 3,000 disabled people — including 150 with Lou Gehrig’s disease — off waiting lists for community-based health care services.
$1.8 million to ensure that state troopers are the highest-paid law enforcement in the state.
More than $42 million for charity hospitals, including funding for additional detoxification and psychiatric beds.
$40 million for public schools’ basic operations. The governor already planned to spend $430 million on pay raises for teachers, corrections officers, state workers and others.

This is, of course, fundamentally uninteresting stuff to most people. But does that make it OK for Milhollon to lead her article with the image of a "balloon festival" being "stuffed into" the budget? I laugh all the time at consultants who are constantly talking about "framing" ideological topics to shape the debate in your direction. But that really isn't the job of journalists-- and her opening paragraph plays right into people's latent fears of an ineffective, pork-laden government. The real thing I want to know from this article is, where's the $410 million of new spending that Milhollon says got added to the budget last week go? What's it buying? And my hunch is that the "balloon festival" is the tiniest slice of this money.

We all love to make fun of inefficiencies, and they're more obviously on display in the public (government) sphere than in the private, corporate sphere. But that doesn't mean the media should be beating this drum.