The weekend’s Rzeczpospolita, a serious Polish broadsheet, has a front page story headlined “How much will the Cheap State Cost?” It is a reference to the nearly-ruling party’s pre-election promise to cut costs. The paper estimates that the planned nationalisation of banks and insurers will cost 30 billion zloties, new unemployment benefits will cost 10 billion zloties and so on.* In sum, the government’s policies will cost up to 68 billion zloties.

The story is followed up in the paper’s economics supplement and there is also a piece on page two which is called “commentary” to distinguish it – nominally only – from the article on the front page. Now, how many readers know offhand the size of Poland’s budget? None? Well, that’s too bad because nowhere in the three articles on the subject of the government’s spending plans is any indication given of the relative size of the increased expenditure. Only absolute figures are given. So is 68 billion zloties a lot? Is it too much? Does it represent a 2% increase in expenditure? 10%? Maybe 25%? For all a Rzeczpospolita reader knows, it might be .0005%. In the “comment” piece Krzysztof Bie? says that the budget deficit will grow but not by how much.

This is precisely the kind of intellectual dishonesty that Dean Baker’s Economic Reporting Review has been railing against in the US media for years. Essentially, Rzeczpospolita is telling you to take them on trust. They are holding back the information that would allow readers to make an informed decision on the wisdom of the economic policies being pursued by the government of Poland: trust us: we know better.

There is an old joke about communist economic reporting: it consisted of inscrutable reports along the lines of “steel production increased by 20,000 tonnes”. Deprived of context, the figures are meaningless. Some habits die hard.

*(An aside: the unemployment benefits are for those who are unemployed through no fault of their own. The newspaper headline writers see fit to place the words “through no fault of their own” in inverted commas. Make of that what you will.)