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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.'"
Nothing will come of this. There will be no data in the database due to either "national security" or creative accounting.
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.
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
http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/view.html
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
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."
http://www.thebudgetgraph.com/view.html
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
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.
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
There is already a very nice, pannable/zoomable diagram on federal tax dollars.
www.thebudgetgraph.com
I assure you, a gaggle of new blogs will crop up overnight like so many toadstools after a rainstorm.
Those accounting wanks will wade through the BS and come out with a nice shiney diamond in the form of a wasteful project to show you. Then you, the voter, can put pressure on your congress creature to do something.
And it will happen across the board as each wank goes after their pet "pork" project.
Yes, I am more optimistic... I think there will be good work and good things out of a nasty process.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.