Every article on The Expenditure is signed. Each author covers a defined area and works to the same standards, and every article is reviewed by the other before it is published. Budget War comparisons are signed by The Expenditure and reviewed by both.
Alan Marsh
Covers: public finance, debt, spending, inflation, long historical series.
Alan Marsh has spent a long career in finance. Most of that career has come down to the same two tasks: working with numbers, and making them understandable to people who do not work with numbers for a living. The second one is the harder of the two, and the one he cares about.
He covers public finance, debt, spending and inflation, and works on the assumption that a figure rarely means what it appears to mean at first reading. Definitions shift, series get rebased, totals are quoted without the context that gives them a size. He checks each one against its source before using it, and publishes the adjustments alongside the results.
He would rather be late than wrong, and is unimpressed by records and all-time highs until someone has adjusted for prices, population and the size of the economy.
Nate Ellery
Covers: recent data releases, revisions, budgets in progress, figures in circulation.
Nate Ellery started reading official documents out of curiosity, long before it was his job: budgets, bulletins, reports that in theory nobody reads. He found that they almost always say something different from the summary, and everything else grew out of that habit.
He covers the figure in the present tense: recent releases, revisions, budgets still being negotiated, and the numbers that start circulating before anyone has read them in full. He opens the original document the day it comes out, not the press release that summarizes it.
He is methodical to the point of obsession with sources and quick with everything else. He corrects in public when he gets something wrong, and distrusts any figure that arrives a little too round.