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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.'"
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
On a side note, is Google going after GW for using "Google" as a verb?
...
Not as long as he keeps pronouncing it "googular"
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
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."
...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.
GB2 has only ever vetoed one bill. He's a rubber-stamping president. (The one bill he did veto was about stem-cells and that had to do more with religion than anything else.) He doesn't deserve credit for any bill coming across his desk.
"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.
The problem with the line-item veto is it makes it so that the President can approve laws that are different than the ones Congress approved. A bill usually represents a set of compromises between the parties, so if the President line-item vetoes parts of it, he's going to end up enacting a bill that violates the compromise that was struck in Congress, and some of the people in Congress would not have voted for had they known parts of it were going to be struck out by the President. In this way, the line-item veto violates the separation of powers and vastly increases the power of the Executive. Personally, I think the Executive is way too powerful already.
On the other hand, the practice of last-minute riders and amendments on bills stinks as well. Ideally, Congress people would be prohibited from attaching amendments to bills that are not directly related to the main subject matter of that bill, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
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
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.
WHat marraige penalty? You file jointly, you get a bigger deduction. I don't see a penalty there. Oh, you want an even bigger deduction than you would have gotten alone? And why do you deserve that? Typical conservative spin- not getting a bonus deduction is now a penalty.
The actual penalty was more along these lines: A TWO income family, fileing jointly, got a smaller deduction than two independant people filing singly. About $600 less, on the standard deduction. All the "elimination of the marriage penalty" did was make the standard deduction for filing jointly exactly 2x the standard deduction for filing singly.
Of course, good luck if you're a bigamist with two wives....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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
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.
There is already a very nice, pannable/zoomable diagram on federal tax dollars.
www.thebudgetgraph.com
I think Republicans are worthless.
I like corn, though.
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.
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.