Numbers tell a story, but rarely without help.

The latest eye-catching figure was $1.6 million per day – the estimated cost to taxpayers for a National Guard deployment in Chicago.

Perhaps you first encountered that number on social media, stated as fact, or balanced against how else such a sum could be spent to improve the city. Maybe you moved along – that’s mostly what I do – but this data point provided an excellent opportunity to dig past what friends posted in search of source material.

Enter the Chicago Sun-Times, which headlined that number in a Friday report , but began to introduce useful context: the dollar amount is an estimate, based on expenses from past actual deployments as well as on a guess of 3,000 troops, another guess.

The source is the National Priorities Proje

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