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.'"

Comments

How much for the website...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll laugh if people start complaining about the tax dollars being spent on creating and maintaining the website :).

The President believes?

[bricriu]

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.

Re:The President believes?

[inKubus]

Thank Goodness someone pointed this out. It was never a White House initiative, and many members of Congress had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to make it happen. For the interested, here is a link to Senator Obama's semi-regular podcast, where he outlines the bill and what he and Coburn set out to do with it.

Meanwhile, in the White House, the president and a few staffers are having lunch:

W: I can't believe we still haven't killed that guy.
Staffers: ....?
Chief of Staff: Killed who, W?
W: Obama bin Laden. He's killed Americans, and now he wants us to google the budget, I can't believe we haven't been able to git him.
Chief of Staff: SENATOR Obama and OSAMA bin Laden are not the same person.
W: Huh? (eats)

Re:Meh.

[eln]

The law is aimed to "prevent government waste," and they are only showing about $1 trillion of the budget. This means that they will be picking out programs they want to eliminate, and putting them in this database (making sure to describe them in an unflattering way) in order to drum up support for cutting them.

This is purely a political move. Unless he plans on putting every single budget item on the Internet (including every item in the Defense budget), there is no way this is ever going to be used as anything but propaganda to cut Bush's least favorite programs.

Re:Oblig ....

[Slightly Askew]

I believe you mean:

select VendorName
from Government.Vendors v inner join Government.Products p on v.VendorID=p.VendorID
inner join Government.CampainContributions c on v.VendorID=c.VendorID
where p.HammerPrice > 15 and
c.AnnualContributions < 1000000;

NO RESULTS FOUND