From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week marked the opening salvo in a war over the budget, likely to dominate the agenda of politicians and pundits for months, if not years.

The leaders of a bipartisan commission appointed by the president offer a far-reaching and controversial plan.

They go after fundamental tax reform, which would raise revenues but also make the tax code much better,

and they basically spread the cost of this plan across the entire

budget. First off, this wasn't a report from the president's bipartisan fiscal panel. That

needs 14 of its 18 members to agree, and they don't. This is just a draft opened up for debate

by its co-chairs, Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles.

So the headlines, like those in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, referring to,

The panel, are wrong. The panel ain't talking.

Meanwhile, a Christian Science Monitor headline read, quote,

A bipartisan and reality-based way to cut taxes and reduce the deficit.

Really? If only, after all, according to Congressman Eric Cantor, our government has spent

more money in the past two years than in the previous 200 combined. Actually, that's not true at all.

In fact, much of what politicians have said about our deficit in national debt is decidedly not reality-based.

Politifact.com reporter and researcher Angie Drobnik-Hollin has found no shortage of half-truths and flat-out falsehoods. Angie, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

So start with that statement by Eric Cantor, the Republican from Virginia. Here he is on the Daily Show in October. What you've seen is a crowd that has taken advantage of a crisis back in late 2008, early 2009 2009 and spent more money than this country has spent

in the last 200 years combined in the two years since.

Just how false is that statement? Could you break it down?

Well, we gave that statement our worst rating, which is Pants on Fire. We went to the

historical tables that the government produces on debt and started adding up the years.

We found the debt was quite significant for 2009 and 2010, about $7.2 trillion.

But then we started adding up the years before that, and when we added up 2008, 2007, and 2006, we had already

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