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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.
And yet, there are those who actually need TEMPORARY help (such as me, a few years ago, when I had a debilitating condition that precluded work until I could get treated) that get turned down because I wasn't a slut with 8 kids or a lazy scumbag. I paid my fucking tax dollars into the system and yet, they weren't willing to help me with a medical bill and food for a month; not even food stamps.
I managed to survive, but I learned a valuable lesson: government won't help those who can't help themselves at the moment, but will be able to eventually. You have to be a true loser for them to even talk to you.
So now I claim as much as possible to avoid having my tax dollars from becoming an interest-free loan for a year, for the government to blow at their discretion. And I now vote Republican whenever I discover a true one running for office (as rare as that is these days).
He may end up "launching a website" on blogspot himself, which of course would be illegal if he was Republican.
Like the respectful leaders of other influential nations do?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
During the inauguration, I got a text message from them asking if I wanted more info about the event. Once I set "yes", I got messages about the weather, where to go in Washington dc and other local info (even though I wasn't there :-). Once it was over, I got a thankyou email from "President Barack Obama" (info@pic2009.org) thanking me for participating.
Their campaign sent out all kinds of text messages and emails, I donated to the Red Cross/Hurricane Gustav by text message thanks to them. It was pretty impressive how much they used this new-fanged inter-tube-text-messaging thing. The fact they took that technology and are now using it for "serious business" is a great sign.
In short, when was the last time you ever got an email or text message from "President George Bush" thanking you for anything?
Hahaha, as a European I find it amusing how your half-baked, badly implemented safety nets are taken as evidence that there shouldn't be any at all. And we always get flak for being wasteful socialist commies.
I had to visit a welfare office, too, at one stage. It was embarrasing but helped me get through that bad period. It's not like our system is perfect but I'm grateful and now happily pay my taxes to help others in the same position. It also helps to know that only the absolute minimum is spent on non-productive stuff like defence.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
I think it's better have the executive order and ask for an exceptions than to not have the order at all. I assume the guy is really freakin' valuable because I'm pretty sure Obama knew that asking for the exception would be politically costly to all the ideologues and partisans on both sides of the aisle.
Five seconds of goggling yielded this:
Defense Secretary Gates said at his news briefing today that he had personally vetted Lynn and found him to be the best qualified for the job and that an exception had to be made to bring him aboard.
Gates said the Obama transition recognized his Raytheon position might become an issue. "I was very impressed with his credentials; he came with the highest recommendations of a number of people that I respect a lot. And I asked that an exception be made, because I felt that he could play the read of the deputy in a better manner than anybody else that I saw. He said that the White House Counsel's office, presidential personnel and the Pentagon's General Counsel are making arrangements to get the necessary information to Levin's committee."
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
But what we really need is a version tracking and autentication system for federal legislation to complement it.
It'd work like this.
You go onto the President's budget website and discover, say, a a hundred thousand dollar grant to some local company to study the effect of interpretive dance on crop growth. Where did it come from? Well, the budget site tells you it was an earmark in the 2010 transportation bill. How did it get into that?
Well, you go to Congress's legislation site, and find that the earmark was in the final bill, but not the initial house bill. The earmark was inserted the night before the bill went to a final vote, and the digital signature belongs to an aid in Senator Blowhard's office.
Transparency isn't just publishing data. It's establishing accountability by making everything traceable.
The technology to do this isn't exotic. The system resembles the kind of version control systems that even small software development teams can install and put in place. Commercial, off the shelf document and workflow management systems that could handle this for an enterprise the size of Congress have been in existence for at least twenty years, to my personal knowledge.
It would be amazing if putting such a system in place cost would more than ten or twenty million dollars. Even if it cost a hundred million, how much money would it save, even just in the first year? Could we even put a price on how much less corrupt government would be?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How does congress manage documents now? Are they just emailing word documents around as attachments, or is there a modern-ish document management system in place? Is it homebrew, or commercial?
A quick search turned up that "they" might already be working on a solution to your problems.
FDsys
47,- euros a month for unlimited access? Is it bound to a specific route?
I live in The Netherlands and my costs far outweigh that number. For the sake of simplicity let's assume I travel the same route 5 days a week.
A yearly subscription for the train between on a route of +/- 55km would cost me 132.40,- euros a month. Because I recently graduated I received a subsidized public transit subscription which allows me to currently bring this down to about 100,- euros a month (ignoring any taxes, again for the sake of simplicity). Add to that the fact that just traveling back-and-forth between the train station with the bus (+/- 10km) costs me about 4,- euros per trip. That's 80,- euros without a subscription, I could possibly bring that down to about 60,- euros a month with a subscription.
So in a best case scenario (without the subsidized subscription) using public transit costs me roughly 2300,- euros on a yearly basis.
Back on-topic. What I'm wondering is just how much spending is included with the bill that mandates this website. I actually opened it with the intention of at least somewhat reading it, but it has a gazillion more pages than I'm willing to read right now. Starting with a bill that mandates actually reading the bills sounds like a plan to me.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
What has surprised me about the Obama campaign was how they used information technology effectively to get their message out. These people get it.
Indeed. Now that the election is over, I think it would be fun to look back at how it is we got to where we are, and thereby make wild-assed deductions about individual candidates approach to technology. From Site Operating System and Server by Candidate
FreeBSD
- Barack Obama (D) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks
- Christopher Dodd (D) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks
Linux
- Joe Biden (D) - Linux, Zope by Interlix
- John Edwards (D) - Linux, Apache by Plus Three
- Bill Richardson (D) - Linux, Zope by Interlix
- Wesley Clark (D) - Linux, Apache by Voxel Dot Net, Inc.
- Al Gore (D) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
- Jim Gilmore (R) - Linux, Apache by 1&1 Internet, Inc.
- Rudy Giuliani (R) - Linux, Apache by RackSpace
- Ron Paul (R) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
- Dennis Kucinich (D) - Linux, Apache by New Age Consulting
- Mitt Romney (R) - Linux, Apache by Rackspace
Windows
- Hillary Clinton (D) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0
- Sam Brownback (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by RackForce Hosting
- Mike Huckabee (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by LNH Inc.
- Duncun Hunter (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Individual
- John McCain (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Smartech Corporation
- Tom Tancredo (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Interland
- Fred Thompson (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by LNH Inc.
- Tommy Thompson (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Time Warner Telecom
- Chuck Hagel (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Individual
- Newt Gingrich (R) - Windows Server 2003, Microsoft-IIS/6.0 by Smartech Corporation
Not entirely certain that the above could be translated as "FreeBSD: Change We Can Believe In!", but interesting nonetheless.
On the other hand, both pmo.gov.ps and knesset.gov.il use Windows/IIS, so whatever the "Change" strategy is, it will have to be implemented by diplomatic efforts on the part the Secretary of State, perhaps in conjunction with the help of individuals with sufficient technological expertise. I hear that the ex-chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation might be available.
Even Better, how about this:
It can't be a law unless it can fit on one page, single sided, 12 point times-new-roman, double spaced.
Everyone has time to read one page of text. That's where the bullshit gets thrown into the laws, on the 600th page, in small print, under Article XVII, Section 125, subsection 43, paragraph 68. Laws should be simple. If it requires explaining, it isn't a good law, or it should be broken up into sub-laws.
~X
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