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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.
Can we post comments, click on a little thumbs up/down button, have logins where we set up a profile and can choose what picture displays next to our comments (anime schoolgirl, picture of our cat, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, etc.), connect to our friends (OMG can you believe they won't be funding our ipod museum WTF!!!), blog about what we think about how our money was spent on researching the impact improving a bridge will have on the local sewer rat population...
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
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.
Heh. Where do you nutcases come from, anyway?
Fox News: Will manufacture enemies for food and viewers.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
The government should tell us nothing otherwise the terrorists might get a hold of something valuable and use it to plot an attack against a flag lapel pin factory or something else that will compromise our patriotism and freedom!
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.
PORK PORK PORK!
The Swedish Chef Goes to Washington.
From what I see on C-SPAN, Congress often resembles an episode of The Muppet Show.
I didn't vote for the man but I agree with everything he's done so far.
Now if he can just get Universal Health Care going, and bring home our troops from ALL the nations where they are deployed, and redeploy them along our boarders to curtail drug traffic and illegal immigration I would be even more happy.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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.
But the man kept hitting the "thumbs down" on each proposal. What kind of democracy is it when a dozen people on the internet support the ipod museum and all their suggestions get buried to the ground? I mean, why should any comment get buried?
Hopefully Obama will dedicate 24 billion to eliminating all software bugs everywhere. Those fat cats on wall street have let the bug problem carry on far to long. We need a bug-bailout *and* an ipod museum in every major city (Chicago, New York and Quahog, RI).
But seriously. If the Obama administration manages to pull off a successful, community oriented website during his presidency, I'll be very, very impressed. The moderation challenges alone will be a huge issue. How do you create a platform where
a) Your right to voice your opinion is protected by the constitution.
b) The website should be open to all
c) You want to create *some* kind of community, and to do so means sorting the wheat from the chaff.
d) People will post redundant crap
e) People will cry foul the second your bury their inane "ipod museum" idea.
f) A controversial issue might easily generate thousands of comments.
I tell you where I'd start, personally. I'd break the site into multiple sites organized by agency and topic. That way if you are interested in transit, the website you follow will not get "polluted" by people interested in energy policy.
It *has* to be separate websites, not just sections. The easiest way to kill a community website is to open it up to topics that don't fit with the original ones (like when Digg or Kuro5hin added politics...). With the topics divided by domain, it will keep the heat down by removing the urge to drag off-topic flames into a post. Merged, somebody might inject some nugget about gun control into their argument against solar cars and derail the whole thread.
Bottom line, if they can pull off a series of good, participatory websites hosted by Uncle Sam, my hats off to them.
A lot of those line items in a bill don't apply to you or your state. How would you feel if your senator added a line for funding light rail in your region and it was voted down by some jackass who doesn't live in your state? After all, didn't they get their stupid Elvis Museum funded last year? Why should their state get a grant and then have our project get overruled based on the will of random internet users.
Letting random internet users vote on each line item would change the power balance in government. It would let a non representative sample of people influence the government "outside" the house or senate. On the surface, the idea of letting internet users "vote" on bills sounds good, but there would be a lot of unintended consequences. You'd have to re-balance a lot of how government operates before you let people vote digg-style on legislation.
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.
The government needs to make sure that they post actual data in a portable format like XML. The EPA publishes emissions data http://camddataandmaps.epa.gov/gdm/ in portable XML formats for scientist and the public to use the data as they need. For example, http://www.govtrack.us/ uses publicly published data to deliver a complete service. Having the data available as a feed or a series of published data files instead of some static website enables everyone else to see the details and deliver meaningful content.
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
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?
Because some idiots thinks buses is a good idea? Personally I hate them, less so for long trips though. But within a city or as commute transport they suck balls, slower than a bike or more expensive than a car...
I am an extensive mass transport system user who, every day, benefits from a multi-modal network that involves bus, suburban train and subway system. I use it to not only cover a 40km trip to work each day but also on my off time. In order to gain access to the local mass transport network I need to pay 47 euros for a montly pass. That is 47 euros for unlimited access to multiple modes of transportation. That ends up costing right under 600 euros a year.
Where exactly can you purchase a car for 600 euros a year? Are you able to run a car for a year with 600 euros worth of gasoline/diesel? Can you even maintain a car (insurance, maintenance, etc...) with 600 euros a year? No, you can't.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Let's see if it lists every single earmark and who is responsible for it. That crap accounts for more than 20% of the waste and could be 40%. Then we will know who to target for defeat in the next election.
All spending bills have to originate in the House. Seems that we need to just vote against every incumbent for the next 5 or 6 elections.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
http://www.downsizedc.org/
"Read the Bills Act" (what I like to call "RTFB Act"): the bill must be read aloud before a full quorum in both the House and the Senate. In addition, 7 days must pass between when a change was made to the bill, and when they can vote on it. Furthermore, the full text of the bill must be made available to the public at least 7 days before a vote, and Congress must give notice on when they will be voting for that bill.
"One Subject at a Time Act": Self explanatory. Each bill can not address more than one subject at a time.
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
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.
Look at the result! We let our government slack off on regulation and set us up for this recession thing we are now in.
That's a myth. There was no significant market deregulation in the last 20 years. Rather, regulation was a major cause of the problem. Check out "Community Reinvestment Act".
Obama says "figure out what is wrong, and solve that". If a government program sucks, kill it. If it is a good program but badly managed, fix the management. If it is a good program and well managed, reward it.
I hope he's really going to follow through on that. It would be wonderful to see. I don't think there is a government program that was eliminated any time in at least the last 50 years. The prevailing wisdom is that once a program is created, it's permanent, and impossible to kill. If he could at least reduce the harmful effects of counter-productive policies like marijuana prohibition and ethanol import tariffs I'll be impressed.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
We should just limit bills to 10 pages. If it can't be said in 10 pages, it needs to be broken up into smaller chunks.
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.
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
"Senators Kennedy and Kerry haven't helped Massachusetts much at all, if at all."
That's really not true. a good deal of money is funneled into Massachusetts through the Federal government for all sorts of wacky things, and it certainly isn't because this state lacks money to for things itself (we have the second highest per capita income along with a relatively high tax rate... which I love saying just because it frustrates right-wingers trying to justify how that makes sense without blowing their own theories completely out of the water) or we have such an enormous population. It's because they actually do what Senators are supposed to do, and represent the interests of their state. A very valid criticism of Senators who refuse to, for example, use the ear-mark system, is that by doing so they aren't solving any problems but rather harming their state... Arizona is actually suffering for the fact that McCain thinks ear-marks are evil, which means he's doing his job of representing and pursuing Arizona's best interests very poorly.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
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 :-)
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.
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
sig?
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.
I understand the sentiment, and totally agree with the idea of simplifying the laws. However this is too far of a swing in the opposite direction. The current systems makes it too easy to hide all kinds of pork and loopholes. But if we do an aboutface you are going to leave way too much open to interpretation, which could be just as bad or even worse in some cases.
Simple laws leave massive loopholes, which is why laws are complex - legalise is a form of programming, where you don't want obvious bugs.
Because some idiots thinks buses is a good idea? Personally I hate them, less so for long trips though. But within a city or as commute transport they suck balls, slower than a bike or more expensive than a car...
I am an extensive mass transport system user who, every day, benefits from a multi-modal network that involves bus, suburban train and subway system. I use it to not only cover a 40km trip to work each day but also on my off time. In order to gain access to the local mass transport network I need to pay 47 euros for a montly pass. That is 47 euros for unlimited access to multiple modes of transportation. That ends up costing right under 600 euros a year.
Where exactly can you purchase a car for 600 euros a year? Are you able to run a car for a year with 600 euros worth of gasoline/diesel? Can you even maintain a car (insurance, maintenance, etc...) with 600 euros a year? No, you can't.
Remember that the 47 Euros you pay is only your outright cost. The government heavily subsidizes public transportation with your tax dollars.
You need to also consider that in the US, we don't have as developed a system of public transportation and people travel much further to work than in Europe (especially in the midwest). In these situations public transit can cost more than in Europe and also can 2-3 times longer than driving. When you have 4 hours of time at home, you don't always want to add an extra 2 hours to your commute with public transit.
Techincally, a "tax expenditure" is when the government forgoes revenue on something in order to protect or promote it (ex. the 501(c)(3) tax exemption is a tax expenditure on charitable activities). See this definition: Tax Expenditure
The federal government "spends" vast amounts of money by specially exempting certain things from taxation. (This is not to be confused with the stuff government doesn't have a right to tax to begin with.)
Boom Shanka
When do we get to decide how our money is spent?
There, fixed the link for you.
"It was developed for a country in 1776, not 2009, and it didn't scale well enough."
Although I agree with this to some degree, that's not the entire problem. Part of the problem is that we have completely turned our backs on the part of the 1776 plan that made government scalable: states' rights and extended autonomy. The Federal Government should have been a small lean organization that did nothing more than what it was allowed to by the Constitution. That's not how things have worked out because instead of thinking of themselves as the glue between the states, they imagined themselves as the rulers and it all went downhill from there.
I dunno how to solve this mess though. The US government has been telling people they need it to pass more laws in order to be a prosperous society. It's a joke. We continue to erode everything that was core to the system though. It doesn't really matter anyway: so long as the average man is either fat and happy, or not on the brink of desperation yet still too afraid to do anything corruption will grow until the common man is literally faced with consequences so bad he has no choice but to fight back.
We can barely get out people out to vote and when they do vote... well, just look at this presidential election. The average voter supports either of the major parties for reasons as arbitrary as the reasons they cheer for any given sports team and act accordingly.
Can you imagine how cool it would be if they used an interactive zoomable pie chart like this one that shows inflation.
You'd start with every government department visible, you could then zoom in to any spending program and see how it was made up, area being proportional to cost.
If recovery.gov don't do it, someone should.
Hi, I admin the list in question and just saw this. The list is a default installation of Mailman, and I have no idea why it would give that error. If you write to contact(at)metagovernment(dot)org, I will subscribe you manually.
Also, if you could forward that error message to the above address, I can try to debug (but again, it is a default install as provided by a standard Cpanel host).
The 17th amendment is what really fucked things up IMO:
The selection of delegates to the Constitutional Convention established the precedent that states could choose Federal officials at a higher level than direct election. Originally, each Senator was to be elected by his state legislature to represent his state, providing one of the many necessary American governmental checks and balances. The delegates to the Convention also expected a Senator elected by his state's legislature would be able to concentrate on the governmental business at hand without direct, immediate pressure from the populace of his state, also aided by a longer term (six years) than the one afforded to members of the House of Representatives (two years).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Historical_background
Before this, Senators were accountable to the state's legislature. The State legislature represented the people more directly than a national Senator, so if someone in the U.S. Senate wasn't listening to the desires of the people they could get recalled very quickly.
Now it's down to popular vote, and the Senate seems to just be incumbent after incumbent, nothing ever really changing...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)