With a nod to Dean Baker, here’s a go at today’s Gazeta Wyborcza whose front page sub-head tells us that the cost to the taxpayer of ruling party PiS’s pre-election giveaway is 18 billion zloties. In paragraph three, the insignificant detail that this is over 25 years is given. Not quite so terrifyingly expensive after all, though how many readers know offhand what Poland’s annual budget is? Is 18/25 billion a lot? The journalists tell us that PiS had planned changes in precisely the areas of the giveaway which would have lead to “gigantic savings – from 15 to 30 billion zloties” – per year? per quarter century?