(Note: “The Power of the Jump” is a semi-regular feature of this site, documenting examples of the Los Angeles Dog Trainer’s use of its back pages to hide things it doesn’t want you to see.)

Today I cut the amount of time I spent blogging. Yesterday I blogged 2 hours, and today I blogged for only 3 hours. My wife prefers to call this reduction an “increase” because it’s more time than I blogged yesterday. But I had planned to blog even more than that . . . So I say it’s a “cut.”

If that last paragraph confused you (as it did my wife), I have the perfect person to explain it to you: Evan Halper, author of a front-page story in today’s Dog Trainer titled Teachers Support Gov.’s Plan to Cut Schools by $2 Billion.

The first sentence of the article reads:

With the support of California’s largest teacher’s union, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to propose cutting at least $2 billion in education spending when he presents his first state budget Friday.

The story continues to refer repeatedly to the “cuts,” and sets forth reactions from various people to the “cuts” and what they will mean for California’s schools. The story explains that teachers’ unions agreed to the temporary “cuts” in return for “Schwarzenegger’s pledge not to tinker with Proposition 98″ (which guarantees that California public schools receive increased funding from the state every year).

Very late in the story, well after the jump, the Dog Trainer lets us all in on a little secret about these “cuts.” Just between you, me, and the two other people who follow a story to page A15, education spending in California is going to increase to the tune of about $1.5 billion (with a “b”). I love the sly way the paper discloses this fact:

The administration prefers to not define the reduction in education spending as a “cut” because schools would get at least as much as they got this year. The cuts would instead come from payment increases guaranteed to accommodate enrollment growth, inflation and the cost of meeting new mandates required by the state.

Instead of getting a $3.5-billion increase owed them this year as a result of Proposition 98 and other laws, schools would get [an increase of] $1.5 billion or less.

The Dog Trainer’s use of the terms “reduction” and “cut” to refer to an increase in spending of several hundred million dollars is Orwellian. Moreover, the use of these words amounts to an objective assertion that Arnold’s (correct) rejection of the term “cut” is false. It is as if the paper were to say “Although the light was red, Schwarzenegger claimed that the red light was really green.” (Moreover, the paper’s omission of the three words in brackets — which I added — leaves open the interpretation that schools are getting $1.5 billion total, rather than an increase of $1.5 billion.)

In a post titled Is a $2 billion increase a cut? Dan Weintraub says that the amount of the proposed increase is more like $2 billion, instead of $1.5 billion. If Weintraub is right, the Dog Trainer understates the increase by about $500 million. (What’s a few hundred million dollars between friends?) Weintraub then observes:

That would be enough to cover enrollment growth and increases in the cost of living. Most people would consider that an increase in funding. But because the guv will not give the schools all that they expected, some will say this is a cut.

However, Weintraub does not say that the Dog Trainer is among those using this partisan semantic sleight-of-hand, which (as Weintraub correctly observes) runs counter to what “most people” would think. That is, if they were informed of all the relevant facts on the front page.