Another regular frustration is when they say how much a proposed bill will cost but fail to say over how many years. It took me a long time to understand that b

Another regular frustration is when they say how much a proposed bill will cost but fail to say over how many years. It took me a long time to understand that because spending bills for new indefinite programs are are rarely passed with a bipartisan 60-vote majority in the senate (the last one was the ACA (which was a actually party line vote), and before that Medicare part D in the first Bush administration), they are passed through reconciliation and the rules limit that to a 10 year spending commitment. It still wouldn’t be that hard to include “over 10 years”, or in 2023 for yearly budget increases like military spending. Instead they regularly say “this bill will cost $X” and a casual reader has little context in terms of what it would add to the yearly budget in % terms.