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Obama To Launch Website For Tracking Tax Expenditures
internationalflights tips news that Barack Obama, in his first weekly address as President, has mentioned plans to set up a website for tracking "how and where we spend taxpayer dollars." Details about the website, Recovery.gov, are available within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PDF). The website "shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use funds made available in this Act," and will also "provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts awarded for purposes of carrying out this Act." The site itself currently contains a placeholder until the passage of the Act.
It freaks me out how much Obama's doing right. It's almost as if I've been elected president, except he seems to waste less time on slashdot and actually gets things done.
The thought might be good. But what percentage of our taxes will be listed as "other" for the NSA, CIA, classified Defense, State and God knows what?
On the other hand, if Americans realize how much is "other", it could be an eye-opener. People will have more to complain about than welfare mothers and mass transit.
What has surprised me about the Obama campaign was how they used information technology effectively to get their message out. These people get it. This administration understands that the majority of the U.S. population has access to the internet, has become relatively informed about the issues and wants to be kept in the loop with respect to governmental decision making. Not to be partisan, but this is quite a change from the previous administration, who made few efforts to directly connect with the average voter.
I dont think this is funny. I think its appropriate. Why not? Why are your comments any more important than someone who wants an ipod museum? Did you participate in change.gov? hunbdreds of thousands did, with moderating and voting up and voting down. It brought issues forward, started discussions and got responses.
Democracy is being responsible to the people. That is a feature, not a bug.
Although congress decides where it's spent, and the people elect the senators, it doesn't necessarily mean your vote matters a lot in the decision. The current legislative process is so hopelessly bogged down that most spending bills get rubber stamped. Who has time to read through several 800 page bills a week looking for one or two lines of pork in fine print, or do research on the 50 different contractors that are being awarded the contracts? You can't really blame them directly.
I suppose the only two solutions to this problem are (1) to get more senators per state, or (2) to require senators to have a staff of 20 each, whose sole job is to review new bills and provide "cliff notes" for the senators, that catch all the little gotchas that have been hidden.
The problem is the process itself is fundamentally flawed. It was developed for a country in 1776, not 2009, and it didn't scale well enough. Back then, bills were 10 pages long and discussed single issues. Today, to get anything voted on, considering all the things that crop up as bills, they have to wrap 20 different things into one giant bloated bill, each issue of which itself is incredibly more complicated than an entire bill was in 1800. The system itself needs to be redesigned. It'll be interesting to see is Obama will attempt this. But that's what we need.
I also think part of it is the senators and their pork. Despite the modern times, they're still looking out for their individual state, and try to work in their own pork at any opportunity. So to pass an important bill, committees have to stuff in pork for important senators to get their vote, because they're being greedy. Bills that are very popular with the public get really stuffed to the gills because who wants their opponent's political ad next year to say you voted against it? We've seen several cases where a bill that seemed like common sense was having a really hard time making it through the house or senate, and if you read into it, it's because it was so incredibly porked that a lot of senators were doing the right thing, saying "no, that's completely unreasonable". If you follow those threads, they sample the senators before the actual vote, and will slowly trim out the pork until they think it will pass. Or it fails, gets thrown back to committee, where more pork negotiations take place. It seems that very little discussion takes place regarding the actual core issue of the bill. That seems to be how a lot of bills go nowadays. Gives democracy a bad name.
Several times now we've seen those "emergency spending bills" cross over into the next year because they are so incredibly over-porked. "you can't possibly say no to the bill that pays the government for next year? PORK PORK PORK!" But a few times they've held their ground and that's what we get. Absolutely disgusting.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
... he didn't wear a USA flag lapel pin. I can only imagine how 4 years of McCain would've been different.
Instead, how about just providing more time for the senators to read each bill! Why would we ever want to expand the federal government to match the bloat at the expense of the tax payer? If they want to process more bills, then they should be compiled shorter or at least broken down in sub-sections to be voted on later.
Life is not for the lazy.
You can't really blame them directly.
I can, and I do. The processes are in place because they put them there. They don't do anything about it because it serves their personal interest in maintaining power.
If a bill is so large and the schedules so grueling that you can't read and understand what's in them before the vote, then you automatically vote against them. That would have solved one of the problems with the federal (and most state) government which is that there are simply too many laws.
"Pork" is just a euphemism for corruption, and corruption is a huge problem. When you have huge sums of money you can influence, corruption will always be an issue.
You can say that those corrupt politicians are in charge only because they were voted in by an ignorant electorate. There is some truth in that, but the parties have developed a system that ensures that only those on board with the current corrupt system will ever be voted on. The FEC makes sure that anyone with even a modicum of success with a third party will be charged criminally and fined into bankruptcy. And working from within the parties to change things is very time-consuming and it's extremely difficult to make any process at all.
Obama stated in his Inauguration speech that "We need to move beyond the debate about the size of government..." Really? Seriously? I think not. The size, reach, and power of the federal government is the root cause of most of the problems.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Actually it isn't. You don't judge a book by its size, do you? You don't judge how good a computer is based on its size, do you? No.
Are you serious? You're comparing government to a book or a computer? How about when the book is so big and complicated that no one person can read and understand it? Like, for instance, the federal tax code. That's just one small part of all the laws that you are responsible for knowing and obeying.
"A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." - Goldwater (?)
The larger the government is:
Etc., etc. You can only reduce corruption by limiting the power. You only limit power by limiting size.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Of course every single earmark will be in the system. The agencies who disburse the money can't buy a box of paper clips without being able to point to a line in the budget authorizing the purchase.
The problem is in the second part: who is responsible for the earmark. True, "all spending bills have to originate in the House," but this doesn't mean much when bills can be mysteriously and anonymously altered in the reconciliation process, with earmarks nobody has ever heard of being inserted in the middle of the night before the bill comes up for a vote.
It's not just that the legislative branch has managed to muck with the Constitutional division of powers between the houses, they've developed ways of legislating and budgeting in secret. This isn't just a subversion of Constitutional divisions of power, it's a subversion of the whole rationale for representative democracy.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
But this is a start. People using it will see the pork, and when they run into the stone wall trying to find out where it came from, they'll complain. Right now, they know there's stuff in there to complain about, but they can't get started because they don't know what it is.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As much as I hate having our troops all over the world, I hate, even more, the thought of having them deployed here at home so they can be used for domestic roadside checks and other violations of liberty. Just put them in their bases or retire them.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Going after the bush-era full bore might make a lot of far-left democrats happy, but it would instantly piss off the republicans end the so-called "honeymoon". Speaking up too loudly about FISA right now would burn political capital he needs for more immediate plans (sadly).
Would you rather have him use up his political capitol on FISA, or something else? He can't do everything--he has to compromise on some things to move forward.
And if anybody though Obama was gonna go on a witch-hunt after the former administration, you will be dissapointed. He has said numerous times he wants to look forward, not backward.
Or, again, smart politics. Maybe he doesn't want to kick a fuss and burn his political capital over FISA because he figures it will be knocked down in the courts. Maybe if he did kick up a fuss, it would make it even *harder* to remove. Look at the war on drugs--the best way to fix that little problem is to shut the fuck up about it and start funding statewide initiative that chip away at it. The minute Obama starts talking about ending the drug war, the whole process will grind to a halt and become yet another wedge like "gun control" or "abortion".
Or maybe he agrees with parts of it. Who knows? Politics isn't easy.
That we can agree on. As long as we agree with that statement and balance each other out life should be good. I'll keep you from removing all regulations on the stock market, and you can keep me from regulating the hell out of the telcos (which created a huge mess).
Well, life will be fine as long as I dont call you a fat-cat corporate bastard and I you dont call me a pinko socialist hippie. For too long, *that* has been the problem in our society... we've become so divided that we cannot see that most of us agree with eachother :-)