Government will sometimes offer a look at a program or proposal, with a list of supposed benefits. There may be a set of colorful photographs, and a list of nebulous but optimistic (even grand) declarations of all it will offer (growth, development, jobs, opportunity, etc.).
Toads in the press – and like cane toads, they’re multiplying — will write about these projects uncritically.
What one won’t see – until later – is an initial, estimated cost and a thorough analysis of consequent costs and benefits of the project.
A technique like this works best, if at all, only on the gullible or otherwise weak-minded.
That won’t stop officials and their press-enablers, however, from using it.
In the end, though, a discussion begins in earnest when one has a projected cost; thereafter, a community may begin assessing that estimate, and calculating otherwise inadvertently ignored (or conveniently hidden) consequences.