Slashdot Mirror
Online Budget Database Planned by White House
prostoalex writes "The President of the United States feels Americans should be able 'to Google their tax dollars', and has signed a law that will create an online database to track federal spending. According to the Associated Press, the 'law is aimed preventing wasteful spending by opening the federal budget to greater scrutiny. The information is already available, but the Web site would make it easier for those who aren't experts on the process to see how taxpayer dollars are being spent.'"
I'll laugh if people start complaining about the tax dollars being spent on creating and maintaining the website :).
Nothing will come of this. There will be no data in the database due to either "national security" or creative accounting.
SELECT from Government.Hammers,Government.Vendors WHERE Hammers.Price > 15
:-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We need another one to track what congresspeople spend their time doing. Heard a radio story about that but can't remember who was doing it...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
But won't all the people searching this database clog the tubes?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
How much time and money will be wasted looking at how much time and money we're waisting..
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
...thousands of Slashdot readers with severe cases of Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) go into shock as the president does something they can't somehow link with the end of the world and everyone's freedoms.
Pencil - $1500
Toilet Seat - $30,000
Knowing what your government is spending your money on?
Priceless.
But seriously, there is no way the numbers will be anywhere close to being remotely accurate.
The government will never tell you where your money goes.
Sorry, but they won't.
This is not news, this is wool being pulled over your eyes.
What an amazing thing...providing a tool to the americna public (and the world) that our congress wonks could actually use. Of course they may have to learn how to operate a PC and an browser application. (First post?)
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
In an effort to cutdown wasteful spending, Congress today cut all funding for the budget tracking site that would allow ornery citizens to find how the money is spent. Senator Bridge To Nowhere said, "It is not as if these morons can stop us from spending the money. Then why waste money helping them find the wasteful spending?".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And how much will the database cost? Can I Google that?
On a side note, is Google going after GW for using "Google" as a verb?
"Senate leaders had tried to pass the bill in early August but Rep. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Sen. Robert Byrd (news, bio, voting record), D-W.Va., blocked passage by lodging secret "holds" on the bill. The bloggers tracked down those responsible for the delay and the senators let the bill advance under the pressure."
Try to clog up our legislative tubes, will ya?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Although this never really was "secret" it's about time the crew that's been in charge for six years changed direction a bit and let the American people see a little more of their government in action.
How about he veto some of the Pork Barreling that has been going on for the past 6 years instead? Oh, wait he wouldn't do that Republicans control the congress why would a Republican President veto a bill from a Republican controlled congress. AHHHHH...
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
This sounds like a really good first step. It's a pity that it's taken this long for them to get around to it though. What's really bad though is that it'll most likely take years for this to roll out. What I'd really like is a www.fia.gov that was a single site that any citizen could request and instantly recieve a copy of all FIA information that the government: federal, state, and local can legally give out to citizens. I'd actually like them to spend a few hundred million on a project like that.
Bush didn't push this, it was a broad, bipartisan coalition of Senators that pushed this through over the "secret holds" of pork-lovin' Senators from AK and VA, aided by bloggers of all stripes. Maybe he's into it too, but to give credit for this to the President when Sens. Coburn and Obama are its parents and originals is disingenuous to say the least.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
I suspect you're right. Enron made their income & expenditure information public, too. For funzies here's a story about how they evade being specific here in Dallas: Schutze rules, by the way.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I would love to have something like this in Canada. It's well known by anybody who has ever worked in government that most departments spend their remaining budget on plasma TVs, new computers, agendas (the paper kind), and other expensive or unneeded things right near the end of the fiscal year. The rational is that if you don't use up your budget, you'll get less next year, because you obviously don't need the money you aren't spending. Something like this could help cut down on this type of activity.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So we're spending money to tell people how much more money we're spending then what we're making? Reminds me of the cost (cant recall the figure, but it was a large dollar amount) of sending the letter telling people their 300% tax rebate was on its way.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You can get a lot of info from the GAO. Unfortunately, W doesn't seem to be albe to get them to spin the numbers in his favor, hence this bill.
Test 1 2 3 4
The real story here is that the Porkbusters group of bloggers are the people who kept this issue visible enough to get it passed over the efforts of Ted "series of tubes" Stevens and Robert "reformed Klansman" Byrd. I'd have thought /. would want to highlight the blogs' contribution to this event.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
and that change this fast, we're gonna need bigger tubes!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Why not just have a link to amazon.gov and a picture of the $5000 hammers etc so that you can see what your tax dollars are paying for :)
http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/view.html
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
I cannot imagine that this will be usefull in any way. I am sure that it will have some terribly obfuscated interface, be heavily redacted, and affected by the well known propensity of the current administration for prevarication...
The budget graph already does this. Why spend money when it's already out there?
Too bad this election year website will be swept under the rug and forgotten after elections...
Isn't Google on a crusade to stop people from using "Google" as a verb? I guess it is time to sue good ol' George.
And just how long will this last after the next Presidential election -- especially if the party in power changes? Can they get it too well established to take away afterwards over the next two years?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
the national deficit IS a googol....
Monstar L
Will this go online before or after astronauts set foot on Mars?
"The law calls for the Web site to go online by Jan. 1, 2008. It will list federal grants and contracts greater than $25,000, except for those classified for national security reasons."
So it doesn't contain all the budget details, but it is a good start.
For more information on the Federal budget, Google turns up this site.
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
"Planned by White House?" Please! The bill is known as the "Coburn-Obama Transparency Bill" because Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) authored it. Bush did nothing to support the bill except sign it. In fact, one could make the argument that he had no choice but to do so, since if he did not, he would've inflicted severe damage upon the Republican party come November.
They just want to put this guy out of business. Great poster.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/view.html
Imagine what happens if President Bush podcasts his speech. I guess he'll be impeached for violating Apple's trademark.
Really? Who or what agency is the responsible watchdog to guarantee the numbers are copasetic?
~psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
Finally, we can see how much money Halliburton, Diebold, and DynCorp are raking in these days.
Oh, but wait, since these are defense companies, they are exempt! Oops
Will the War in Iraq get better or worse in 2007? Vote here
things the Govt DOES NOT WANT YOU TO GOOGLE?
p.s. why is that- think about it-
EVERYTHING under these pages is NOT going to be a result when you search on google.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think you're half right. All the stuff Republicans care about (defense and pork barrel spending) will either please the people who see it (ie, pork barrel spending, ie "wow, Joe Congresscritter brought in the jobs for us this year! Let's re-elect him!") or won't be included (Defense and/or Homeland inSecurity.) The defense budget is where we need to be trimming the fat more than anywhere else, and under Clinton, we balanced the budget simply by telling the military to chill out. We spend more money on defense, both total and per capita, than any other nation in the world, including China and North Korea.
What will be painfully visible will be the stuff that Joe Sixpack doesn't "see" why we need to spend money on. Things like school lunch assistance programs, PBS and NPR ("liberal media") funding...anything that has a slightly abstract benefit to society as a whole. All that will come of this is a lot of armchair socio-accounting, where Joe Sixpack gets outraged that HE is paying for ____________. It doesn't matter that only one cent out of his income tax goes to that tiny little thing and hundreds of dollars go to military hardware...
One thing seems consistent about Republican policy: cater the lowest common denominator in regards to people's ability to understand the flow of government dollars and how it helps "them." Hence the massive farm subsidies and a national diet that revolves around corn no matter how unhealthy it is, tarriffs on imported farm goods, corn-to-ethanol programs, and absurd "homeland (in)security" spending.
Pretty soon we'll all be corn-bloated, our kids will be mired in at least two foreign wars and dumb as fence posts, and we'll have an explosion of crime and homelessness...but at least we'll have shiny new police cars every year.
Please help metamoderate.
Citizen, repeat after me:
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
For an accessible view of the budget, check out at the poster "Death and Taxes".
http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Fantastic idea. I'd personally like to know where the $507 billion since 9/11 through FY2007E was and will be spent - with breakouts by mercenary wages, secret prisons, black operations, etc. Given how forthcoming this administration isn't with everything else it is doing from NSA spying on U.S. citizens to the use of the state secrets priviledge to fend off lawsuits aimed at getting them to provide more information, this can only be posturing for the upcoming election. Check out the Secrecy Report Card 2006 for an eye-opening discussion.
Public transparency is the arch-enemy of entrenched power -- of all sorts.
...
So all that measures like this mean are that obfuscation and securing of information will move from the process and mechanics of apportioning tax money -- quietly sneaking in billions in pork, as evidenced by the efforts of Byrd and Stephens to kill this bill (read TFA) -- to their initial conception.
We've already seen this in, say, the environmental policies of the past six years. Healthy Forests; who is against those? Such a program certainly wouldn't be associated with distasteful policies like logging national forests
Instead of quieting the *passage* of wasteful bills or the awarding of ridiculous military contracts and other such theft, the process of weaselifying government spending will happen in the early stages of their conception.
Since the military and security is a sacred cow, Head-Start will be renamed the Homeland Child Protection and Institutional Defense Agency.
The military itself will show up on the budget as "1 trillion annually: FREEDOM."
The solution, of course, would be to allow citizens to annotate the entries for their fellow citizens, and to rate the contributions of their fellow citizens to allow popular opinions the visibility they deserve.
Which, despite its negligible cost, would never, ever, ever be allowed to happen. Control of information is power, and the government never gives away power to citizens unless forced.
Rather than "googling" my tax dollars I'd like to keep them. Unfortunately, GW and congress are eating my money with their jack off federal budget online even though it's already online bill. Besides what can we do about Steven's bridge to nowhere? Move to Alaska and fire him?
Sorry, but this comment isn't based on a deep reading of the article; I'm sitting in class ("Federal Income Taxation") right now.
;)
A googleable budget is a good start, but things should go a lot further: I'd like to see a paint color called Taxcolor Green (and a highlight color called Debt Red) which all things paid for by tax dollars would be painted, in proportion to the percentage of tax money used to finance them. (Debt Red would be used in a repeating pattern which conveys the amount of the national debt at the time the money was spent.)
This wouldn't upset the army too much, though the Stealth Bomber program and some others would need to file for some sort of exemption.
Anywho, that's my modest proposal for the day -- need to flesh that out a bit
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
This is the database reported on Slashdot that had bipartisan support among the Congressmembers who planned it, but was blocked by Republican Senator Ted Stevens (R-Tubes). Bloggers and other activists organizing on the Internet are getting the main credit for pushing past Stevens.
I don't give Bush much credit, because he didn't start this legislation, and the only passed bill he's ever vetoed was the one this year that would have funded more stemcell research. The White House didn't "plan" this database, it's just too embattled these days to join Stevens in stopping it. And by including the over $25K budget items "except for those classified for national security reasons" while Bush invokes "national security" to cover any questionable acts he wants to do anyway, he's got little reason to dislike it.
Since the article makes no claim that the White House planned this system, I blame prostoalex for submitting it with that headline, and/or Zonk for publishing it with that headline.
Meanwhile, if this database is populated with real data and actually remains open to anyone, including researchers who can navigate its cryptic depths to compose the truth about our budgets, we may be entering a whole new era of "pin the credit/blame on the donkey/elephant".
--
make install -not war
why can't they just post the Excel file online somewhere? Heck, there's tons of free filehosts, too!
Also, since the information is *already* technically available freely, aren't there other independent sources that could compile the information and aggregate it? Some public volunteer govt watchdog type groups or something?
Every government keeps two sets of books. One to show the public and one containing real spending.
Let's see what kind of loopholes the honest and hard working people in Washington put in to make sure they don't have to submit pork barrel project expenses or any other expenses they don't think we should really see onto that website.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I though that Ted Stevens the Senator from Alaska, "Mr. Bridge to no where" had a secret hold on this, or was that something different?
I can understand the Senator's position. Obviously if you're dipping into the pork barrel to build a 200 million dollar bridge to an island that has a population about 50 people you don't want a lot of publicity because someone is going to start wondering which land developer's are going to make a killing and how much is being paid to the Alaska Senator who pushed to have it attached it to the Transportation Equity Act.
Seems to me that at some point the government should care for the multitude of poor people and not just the few very rich. Maybe if this website really makes things transparent bridges to nowhere will get enough people pissed off that the pork barrel spending will come under control.
Nah...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Of course they were happy to approve this. It'll take effect just as the Republicans are getting relegated to "Minority Party" status, and then they can use it to sit around for the next 4 years going "I looked at this website, which a Republican President created, and found that for the last 9 years we've been paying Haliburton $500 per second in 'Consultant Fees'. For shame, Democrats, for shame!"
Really, Joe Q Public won't know that Item X was actually attached to a spending bill in 1998 and is legislated to be in there for 20 years. He'll just go in, see "Hammer - $500" and blame the current Democratic administration.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
People like a single point for credit and blame and that's the president. Notice how the economy is always ascribed to the president when in reality he has very little to do with it. Good or bad, things tend to fall on the president's shoulders. You see it here on /. all the time, when a law gets passed people don't like they talk about how "Bush passed a law" and so on. Now granted he gave the law an implicit pass by not vetoing it, but it ignores the people who actually wrote it, and who voted on it.
I've given up on correcting people on it for the most part, it is just how it goes.
Allowing transparency in government? This administration? Get serious.
Maybe since the most aggregious transgressions are safely hidden behind "national security" and conducted with off-the-book back room winks and handshakes they think they're sheilded. And anyways they can use this as political capital in the next inevitable scandal.
"We're transparent! We allowed an online budget database!"
The budget is a big book. We've seen pics of it on TV. Just put the PDF online.
Let other people make up nicer interfaces.
A four terrabyte .xls file
>I don't give Bush much credit, because he didn't start this
...
>legislation,
Oh, like Clinton and welfare reform, then. Except Bush didn't veto this three times before feeling politically compelled to sign it
In government, more transparency is always better than less transparancy. If I know that the government is claiming they spent $1500 on a pencil, I am better equipped to ask why than if I have no freaking clue what they spent $1500 on.
It also enables someone to target their questions to places where money is clearly being wasted.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There is already a very nice, pannable/zoomable diagram on federal tax dollars.
www.thebudgetgraph.com
Instead of voting for "representatives" who participate in the decision making process of where our tax priorities go, why not eliminate these middlemen and allow voting citizens to make those priorities themselves?
Yes, I know, god forbid we try to evolve our political system...
Really, how will this be of help to the common citizen. You can see the numbers, but will this information really be critical on your voting habits?
And really we all know in the end the most important information citizens will never be on a system like this--government does fear it's people hence taking more burden of proof responsibility out of the congressman's hands and placing it in your.
This just continues the "we break it, you fix it" type of government I see nowadays.
I'm all for showing where every one of my tax dollars is spent. I am even more for allowing me to choose where my tax dollars go. For example, I wouldn't put a penny towards our military efforts to expand the United States Empire, but I would give enough money to federal parks and recreation so that no one has to pay an additional fee to go to a public beach or hike in a national park.
So will we finally find the missing trillions from the pentagon budget or the billions from HUD? www.whereisthemoney.org
GWB is trying hard to remove all citizen oversight over the white house and congress. He has continually lied and mislead (in the process made B.C. look like a saint) and classified anything that could harm
him or his neo-cons (sibel edmunds comes to mind). Now he claims that he is backing a site that will expose the true level of waste by him and his followers. My guess is that most will be called classified and only the dem's waste will be exposed. After all this is the same president who helped to hide the akaska waste.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
some agencies' budgets are not published in the federal register, like the nsa or the cia. /really/ pay for thousand dollar hammers. the government can't just give the omb a budget for ten dollars and only account for one dollar. we're told those hammers cost us 1 grand a piece. in reality, they cost an inflated $20, and $980 goes to another agency.
we don't
That would be funny except that it was Congress that spearheaded this legislation. The sponsors of this bill and the ideamen behind it were Congressmen. To give the White House credit for this is insulting to the bipartisan effort by Senators Coburn, Obama, Carper, and McCain that birthed the bill. It insults the internet movement to track down and put pressure on Senators Stevens and Byrd to try to secretly hold up the bill.
This bill passed unanimously in the Senate and was passed by voice vote in the House on the day it was introduced. It has 47 Senatorial co-sponsors. To suggest that it was the work of a President that has awarded so many no-bid contracts and made efforts to block investigations into spending by contractors is an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
Bush couldn't have blocked if he'd wanted to without inviting a political bloodbath, and while there's no evidence that he opposed it, to let him take credit for it is just maddening.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
so much for http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/14/115 9243
Maybe google should send Bush a warning letter?
K
Having worked for "teh government" for a few years, I can tell you like others have that tracking spending is whatever you make the numbers. Government is so large and overrun that there's no way to acurately track spending. Especially when groups are penalized if they don't spend all the money they were given this year. (You give it to other groups and have them spend it for you on new computers, projectors, etc).
They tried doing it in our small (relative) group and used Activity Based Costing. They said we owned the group $2.45 every month for flag raising and lowering. No one ever actually paid that, it was just an attempt to track costs even though it was always rather vague.
The "government" is simply too large to accurately track spending except on a macro scale. That or just add a few zero's to your guestimate.
Which view you choose to take is semantics. Personally, I define "Federal spending" as "how do they spend the money they take from me and my employer." So I would include SS and medical programs in my view of the Federal budget. Some people like to argue that SS and medical programs give money directly back to citizens. But then you open up all sorts of arguments about direct economic effects and indirect economic effects. It's really not worth arguing about since it's highly unlikely said argument will change anyone's minds. The numbers are all there once you add the SS, medicare, and medicaid figures. Just interpret them as you please.
The Pickler strikes again!
Some of this kind of pro-Bush spin is to be expected from the ever-reliable Pickler, but this article overdoes it a bit. If I were a cynical man, I'd suggest that the fact that the actual sponsors of the bill are not mentioned by name (it's attributed only to "Senate leaders"), while the opponents of the bill are named, says all you need to know about how much the "conservative" movement (the big business interests pulling the strings of the conservative media; contrast real conservatives) likes this bill.
It's politically impossible not to support this bill, but hell if they're going to let the people (Obama, Coburn, etc.) who put them in that position get any credit for it.
I've got to say, in a community that values freedom of information, the overwhelmingly negative commentary on this story is really surprising to me. Sure, the program (if it gets implemented at all) will certainly have plenty of imperfections, but the concept of transparency and accountability in government spending is still an excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, Sens. Coburn and Obama deserve credit for introducing the idea, and yes, Bush deserves credit for supporting it. It will be the job of lawmakers and citizens to work hard to see that it's implemented in a fair and effective way, but the fact remains that this is a first step, at least.
That 90% of the responses here breeze past the good news to fall back into the same tired old rants ("The government sucks, it'll do a terrible job!" "The military sucks, that's our real problem!" "Bush sucks, he must have been forced to support that bill!") suggests, disappointingly, that people are more interested in reinforcing their prejudices than in assimilating new facts.
Instead of bitching, why not say, "Great!," give credit where it's due, and move on to making sure this does get implemented in a way that'll benefit the American people?
As the blurb indicates, this information is already public, just harder to access. What makes you think that this site will not contain the same information that's already out there? Or are you just being a political pundit?
"[The web site] will list federal grants and contracts... except for those classified for national security reasons."
With 20% of the U.S. budget earmarked for "national security" and at least another 5-10% of spending that does not show up in the budget but rather is spent through "supplementals", I rather doubt this will clarify very much how the U.S. Government is spending money. This law leaves more than enough places for people to hide spending if they want to.
This is not news...
If I had a dollar for every time this phrase comes up on Slashdot...
Seriously though, should I
1 - conclude that there is no such thing as an original news story these days?
2 - concede that there are original new stories, but not enough to keep Slashdot busy each day?
3 - realize that Slashdotters have high standards for what constitutes "news"?
-TimedArt
20% War
20% interest on past debt
20% Automotive industry subsidies (including "free" roads) and Farm subsidies.
20% general middle east nation building
20% other
Both of you are wrong. First of all, this is the government we are talking about and they never get anything right, so don't expect them to properly normalise their schema:
.DBF files to multiple network drives and some round-robin DNS tricks to direct web traffic to one of 200 VFP server PCs.
SELECT vendor, product1, product2, product3, (...productn), price1, price2, (...pricen) FROM buyerlist WHERE price1 > 15 (AND price2....)
Expect the government to award the contract to an established government contractor for several million dollars, and for said vendor to sequester itself for several years during which time it will busily develop a Visual Foxpro 6.0 application called FUSSBUDGET with an obtuse, limited web interface for the general public. Upon initial deployment the website will be Slashdotted, causing the Visual Foxpro server to explode and in turn cause several hundred thoushand dollars in damage to the data centre.
At that point the IRS will decide that maybe it would be better to have more than one PC server to handle the demand from, well, the entire US taxpayer public that's online. The clustering, replication and so forth were "outside the scope" so the contractor will demand another million dollars and spend another year trying to make Visual Foxpro 6 run in a cluster and perform replication and so on. This of course will involve a great amount of elabourate custom code and batch files to periodically copy
The whole programme will be dismantled after going overbudget by 2841% without even emerging from beta status--probably triggered by a security vulnerability in COM or a SQL injection attack by a 14 year old boy who wanted $25,000 of the federal budget allocated to "sex education" so he could have hookers "babysit" him when his parents were away.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the concept of a "federal budget database" so as to increase transparency to taxpayers...I just have little faith in the government (ANY government) in properly executing such a project.
You are not being offered any transparency at all by this measure - barely even the illusion of transparency. Those numbers are already available, and a conspicuous percentage of the budget is hidden for reasons of 'national security'.
You will never, ever, ever, ever be allowed to see where the money really goes. Ever. Which is a shame since it is yours (and mine).
So if by transparency you mean 'smoke-screen designed to appease people and distract them' then yes, this proposed database offers more transparency.
is the source of revenues. The IRS used to publish statistics called "Sources of Revenue". Citizens pay ~80% of the tax bill while corporations pick up ~20%. It just goes to show that simply because you pay for it, doesn't mean you own it...
The President of the United States has no credibility with regard to anything having
to do with the Internet. He's like the utterly clueless pointy haired boss, only
he's got a single large conical point on top of his head rather than two on the sides.
Got any actual evidence of this?
There is a HUGE amount of evidence of this behaviour, just look at every single autitor general's report released this decade--grants given out willy-nilly, expenses claimed without any documentation whatsoever, so on and so forth. Google "HRDC scandal". This sort of thing happens for two reasons:
1. Palm-greasing. Former PM Cretien was the king of palm-greasing (also google "Adscam"). Buddy/corporation awarded huge contract, next election comes around and that money from taxpayers comes back to the Liberal party for campaign contributions.
2. Nest-feathering...AKA "Have to meet budget"--this is where the term "March Madness" comes in--March is when the federal government makes up the budget for the next fiscal year. It has been a tradition forever but got even worse when the government hit the debt wall and had to reign in spending. If a department came in under budget then civil servant managers would go apesh!t because they could be the subject of budget cuts. Such managers get in trouble for going over-budget but there is no incentive to come in under-budget. Not only that--there is actually a DISincentive for being frugal. Govenrment workers are mostly unionised and have a collective agreement whereby their salaries depend on the number of staffers under them and the size of the budget they manage. If a manager in gov't can justify a budget increase, or another subordinate position, then the manager can move up a level and get a pay raise for managing a larger department. If they come in under budget and their dept gets smaller then there is NO incentive of any kind for cost cutting.
This affects lower levels of government as well, though more out of stupidity than anything. A staffer in Calgary city all wanted a desktop trinter so they wouldn't have to walk down the hall or have sensitive documents sitting in the output tray in a public area. This staffer ended up with a printer you could get at any store for about $250, but City Hall paid $5000 for it--went through a couple middlemen who marked it up and a whole lot of administration costs. This is why they call it "silly hall".
Why not just a put up a picture of a toilet and loop a flushing sound?
Half a trillion in trade deficit?
The most rapid expansion in government reach in two terms?
Constant increases in defense spending (most of which is pork)?
Which party is the proponent of fiscal responsibilty again? Because it certainly isn't the Republicans.
It would be neat if you could link each piece of spending with the name of the Congressman whose wording introduced that particular clause of the spending bill, and then somehow correlate that data back to OpenSecrets.org and then find out how much "profit" was made by each entity (tax revenue routed to a given company/industry minus lobbying dollars spent by that company/industry).
Whose lobbying dollars are the most profitable? I know mine sure aren't.
the data is already availiable and this will only make people be able to understand and access them better and easier
in germany the budget reports are public too. an independent consortium reads them and makes a list of the biggest tax wastes and the media publish this list... and you know what - its always the same, the politicians never stop wasting incredible ammounts of money, no matter if it gets public attention... these lists (although everyone is shocked every time) change NOTHING
so my guess is: this great new system won't change a thing!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
The first response by anyone critical of the Bush administration and their rampant croneyism should be "They're going to let us see how much Halliburton is raking in?". Unfortunately, this will never happen.
Firstly, this massive undertaking won't be implemented until well after Bush is out of office.
Secondly, even if another Republican gets elected in '08, there's no way anything even remotely resembling military spending or "national security" would be itemized in a meaningful manner, if it appears at all.
When (if) this thing does go online, it likely won't include any data from fiscal years prior to its release. Unless a year's budget is posted after that year ends.
.What's the 'Privacy Policy' going to be?, will they track who looks at what, instead of just what's being looked at?
Will looking at spending on drug policy enforcement put you on a DEA watch list?
If you look at anti-terrorism spending, will you have problems at airports?
This is good news! There's a larger problem, though; much of the budget is "mandatory" spending in the sense that if it's listed at all, it's more complicated than getting a single budget change to fight it. The entire welfare establishment works this way, as I understand it. Unless we do something to change the situation, the government will continue to grow despite our valiant efforts to stop the bridges-to-nowhere.
Revive the Constitution.
>> there is no way this is ever going to be used as anything but propaganda to cut Bush's least favorite programs
> Ah - so he should only look for ways to cut his favorite programs?
In other words: One extreme must be OK because the other extreme is bad.
How about a nice middle ground solution. We should look for ways to cut all programs, including programs that Bush likes, and including programs that Bush does NOT like. Whether they are his favorites or not should neither be here nor there.
Of course the original poster is right; via clever use of the classification process, this site will make no mention of Halliburton and the bridge to nowhere and will become a tool for the president to club unclassified Democratic initiatives.
Talk about some pork,... What a waste! ;-)
I think they should spend the money on creating a database of public employees that we can vote on who gets fired. Like all those lazy idiots at DMV or ineffective city planners that go 40mil above budget on every project and still get their 3% raise every year.
The Line Item Veto was actually passed, and the SCOTUS declared it unconstitutional.
But a couple of ideas that I've seen from my state(Minnesota) which work:
- Single Subject. A bill must pertain to a single subject. You can't have a bill which talks about penalties for molesting rasberry farmers, and include a provision in there to fund oil exploration in Nebraska.
- Balanced Budget. Revenue must match Expenses. Pretty simple.
This creates an honest debate. Ok, you want to cut taxes... Well, what services are we going to cut to pay for it. Or you want to fund a new program, ok, what services are you going to cut, or what taxes are you going to raise.
It's a lot more honest than the spend freely, promise lower taxes, and pass the debt onto the grandchildren method we have now.
If there was a way to constitutionally demand politicians be honest, I'd be all for it. Thus far many smart minds have tried and failed.
If you look at the URLs in robot.txt, you'll see that he's right.
Anchorage Daily News has coverage...
Thus far, the FBI has seized evidence from Ben Stevens state senate office in a bribery investigation.
Now Ben Steven is the son of Ted Stevens, who is in Congress and invented the Internet Tubes.
In the latest news it seems to have gotten worse, as part of the investigation is now dealing with bribes accepted by Ben Stevens that involved fishery legislation sponsored by Ted Stevens.
transparent scrutiny, unless it's related to "homeland security" or "the war on terror" - in which case, it's completely opaque, and asking for the info will wind you up in gitmo...
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This alone might make President George W. Bush the greatest U.S. president of modern times.
This is all Bush's fault! It's his fault I tell you!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I wouldn't be surprised if this thing will go live in January, 2009. It'll neatly document the next (Democrat) president's struggle to dig the country out of the financial mess Dubya has gotten it into.
"Online Budget Database Panned by White House"...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I'm from Brazil, and I would love if this application was open source, so it could bring more transparency to our government as well.
It's time to create a global initiative to promote open source software in public administration.
Used up all my mod points yesterday. Somebody *please* mod parent up!
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SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The government will never tell you where your money goes.
The accounting practices of the US government make the Enron scandal look like petty theft. Billions and billions of tax dollars go unaccounted for every year -- trillions to date -- yet government continues to expand in power and revenue every year, and still, only the fringe radicals question any of it!
If the US government was held to the same standards as they impose on everyone else, most of the power elite would be sitting in prison.
Almost all education spending is done on the state level, and therefore is not reflected in the federal numbers. Federal spending happens in the form of grants to schools and students, and is usually associated with specific, nation-wide initiatives.
Thankfully you've got openpolitics.ca there though. If it's an under-reported story on some dirtbag doing something sleazy in a political party, you'll probably find it fully covered there with original sources.
Doing it for the budget would be easier than that.