LAT not good with figures

Last month, in an editorial, the LAT said that 60 million Americans live on $7 a day. Their source was a left-wing Canadian website. It's source was an even less reliable World Socialist Website, which got the assertion from a 2006 NYT piece by David Cay Johnston, who can't now explain how he derived the statistic. The point of mentioning this is that it proves the LAT does not check the reliability of its sources.

Today, the LAT argues that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will cost $3 trillion. Further, the LAT suggests that the economy would be in the tank already if it were not for the pump-priming effect of military spending since 2003. This, of course, is not more reliable than the $7 a day was.