US Open Government Sites To Close

SEWilco writes "US government sites which promote open government are going to shut down soon due to not enough funding being directed at them."

Comments

But it's a good idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we donate? I'm serious.

Re:But it's a good idea...

[oldmeddler]

Sure thing. PM me and I'll send you my PayPal info and make sure the money gets to the right place.

Re:But it's a good idea...

[TheABomb]

Sadly, that's not a joke.

Re:But it's a good idea...

[nomadic]

That's because they only usually think taxes are too low for *other* people.

Don't know about that, the limousine liberals who right-wingers and slashdotters like to excoriate frequently are advocating for tax increases for their own tax bracket.

Bitter Irony

[SilverHatHacker]

From the article:

We need at least another $4 million just to keep USASpending.gov operating this year.

$4mil to keep a website going for one year? Think if I called them up and offered to do it for 3 they'd take it?

Re:Bitter Irony

[MoonBuggy]

$4 million? A pittance! Apparently a paid registration system costs ten times that.

Servers and hosting cost a few thousand to a few tens of thousands per year, full time developers and admins cost a less than $100k per year. All I can say is that whoever managed to walk off with the rest of the cash has got it made.

Re:Bitter Irony

[SilverHatHacker]

An investment firm is hiring mathematicians. After the first round of interviews, three hopeful recent graduates - a pure mathematician, an applied mathematician, and a graduate in mathematical finance - are asked what starting salary they are expecting. The pure mathematician: "Would $30,000 be too much?" The applied mathematician: "I think $60,000 would be OK." The math finance person: "What about $300,000?" The personnel officer is flabberghasted: "Do you know that we have a graduate in pure mathematics who is willing to do the same work for a tenth of what you are demanding!?" "Well, I thought of $135,000 for me, $135,000 for you - and $30,000 for the pure mathematician who will do the work."

Same principle applies here, I suppose.

Re:Bitter Irony

[elfprince13]

....which is what he was linking to.

Re:Bitter Irony

[Sir_Sri]

4 million dollars would pay 30-40 people. That's not a whole lot, considering all of the data that has to be collected, checked, massaged into the right format, made compliant with accessibility rules, press dealings, server support, IT support for staff, and so on. I'm not an american so I'm not all that familiar with how funding is allocated in detail, but the site seems to spend a lot of time on awards, and sub award reporting. Presumably 'awards' could be easily extracted from regular budget documents but sub awards can't? There's seems to be a lot of time devoted to analysis of the data as well (which could drive costs up a lot if you have a few PhD's in stats or econ doing the analysis), in addition to building the flash visualization stuff.

On top of all of the sort of obvious stuff I'm sure there's a lot of legal there too. You can't always just go and blab what contractors you're giving money to, or if you can you need to verify the information you're going to say about the company. There can be a big difference between a deal with a company that is myurl.net and myurl.com, and you don't want to say they got 10 million dollars when they got 1, or 100.

As with all any large outfit, the more money you spend accounting for the money you're spending, the less is available for the actually things you're trying to do. It becomes a balance between the legitimate need to know where money is going, and the equally legitimate need to not waste 50 cents on every dollar documenting where you spent the other 50 cents. It seems like most everything on this website is available elsewhere, not necessarily easily. Whether or not a few millions of dollars in data aggregation on top of billions in accounting for trillions in spending is providing good value, especially when it's not my money, is beyond me.

This Is Pointless

[mlingojones]

There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.

The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.

Re:This Is Pointless

[dkleinsc]

If you put all of the FICA taxes and T-bills owned by the Social Security Administration towards what they're supposed to be going for, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, are doing collectively just fine right now, and will continue to be more-or-less just fine for decades.

The problem is that instead the significant surpluses in FICA were used to cover up even-more-massive deficits in the general treasury. And where and when those deficits came isn't a mystery: In short, blame can be laid pretty squarely at the feet of Ronald Reagan (notice the huge inflection point between 1945 and 2010).

Basically, Reagan claimed he could cut taxes without affecting revenue. The effect of trying this was that he effectively proved that this was utter nonsense. But everybody likes paying less in taxes, so people who pointed out that it was nonsense were effectively told "Shhhh! Don't give the game away".

Re:This Is Pointless

[lennier]

three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense

Mmm, because a disease-racked, starving underclass is the perfect foundation for a stable and prosperous democratic society. But if we at least fund the military, the desperatly hungry, plague-ridden rabble with no jobs and no future will at least be well-trained in modern urban combat and the overthrow of oppressive (or just annoying) regimes.

Nothing about this bold social plan could ever possibly go wrong!

Re:This Is Pointless

[causality]

Do we need to cut anything? Think hard about where money comes from - under the fractional reserve system, banks can multiply deposits by 10. Why shouldn't govt do the same?

They are doing that. It's called inflation and it's the biggest hidden tax of them all. For those who consider this a top priority, it's also an incredibly regressive tax. That's because most wealthy people have their money tied up in appreciating assets that scale with inflation. Most everyone else has their money in bank accounts. It's hard to live within your means, slowly build wealth, and move up when the money you are saving is constantly devalued. It's one of many forces that help to limit upward mobility and ensure that those who work hard and are not currently wealthy are unlikely to become wealthy.

The economic problem is not the central problem of mankind. The advance of knowledge and innovation is. How can we encourage the natural curiosity and sense of wonder that leads to creative solutions? The mentality of "Katie bar the door" is not conducive to invention.

The problem with that is that when a nation starts going bankrupt, the majority population becomes so busy trying to do things like avoid starvation that there remains little time and energy to advance knowledge and invent new things.

What govt should do is provide a basic income (as founding father Tom Paine proposed in 1795's "Agrarian Justice") and stimulate innovation through challenges (of course private businesses such as Google, Netflix etc. can hold challenges too).

If it would work that would be nice. There are a few problems that quickly come to mind and there are likely more than that. One is that this would require a huge investment of trust in the government. Providing a realistic income to every last adult in the nation would require a government even larger and more powerful (legally and economically) than the one we have now. I look at the assholes in power and I see little more than incompetence and insatiable hunger for power. If we are going to put this much more trust in our politicians then we need better politicians.

The other problem is that very large systems based on extremely centralized micromanagement of human behavior tend not to work out. The only reason corporations can pull that off is because they are dictatorships and each member is relatively easy to eliminate and replace. Then consider that the only challenges that would receive funding are those you can get large, bureaucratic committees staffed with politicians to agree with and support. Proposals involving a scientific discipline are exceedingly unlikely to be reviewed and approved by people who actually understand the science. Then you'd still have all the usual problems of cronyism in which the politicians' buddies and supporters have an easier time getting a challenge approved.

In conclusion, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter, Alexander Hamilton held that debt is a blessing, Lincoln printed over $400 million greenbacks, and the Panic of 1837 followed Jackson's paying off the national debt.

Reagan proved that most corporations who are given generous tax breaks would rather give that money to their shareholders than the rank-and-file employees actually performing the work. Hamilton was a supporter of centralized banks and fiat currency and debt is an integral and unavoidable component of that arrangement. Lincoln's greenbacks were interest-free currency because Lincoln was wise enough to foresee the inevitable collapse of a system in which money has interest attached at the moment it is created, namely because there is never enough money in circulation to pay back the debt.

The Panice of 1837 wasn't caused by Jackson paying off the national debt. The Panic was caused by drastic inflation that happened over a length of time that was followed by sudden intense defla

Re:This Is Pointless

[AmberBlackCat]

There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense. The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.

At least Medicare and Social Security are doing something for American citizens.

Re:This Is Pointless

[riverat1]

Actually federal spending as a percentage of the GDP is not significantly different now than it has been historically. The tax burden has shifted quite a bit though. Corporations used to account for about 30% of federal income tax receipts and the wealthy used use to have a top marginal rate well over 50%. Now the burden has shifted toward the middle class. After all, Bill Clinton balanced the budget and had a surplus when he left office and that was only with an extra 4 or 5% tax on high income earners. But then we had a major commitment of our military without raising taxes to help pay for it as we have in past wars. 3/4's of the federal debt was accumulated under Republican's because all they want to do is cut taxes but they're afraid to cut the spending by a commensurate amount because they know they'd be out on their asses at the next election if they did. Cheney said "Deficits don't matter." but what the Republican's really mean is they only matter when there's a Democratic president so they can make political hay out of them.

Re:This Is Pointless

[Doc Ruby]

No, we should eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes that are currently at about $100K. People who make over $100K a year have more to spare than people making less - the cap is exactly backwards to sanity. Once the cap is gone, there'll be plenty of money for everyone to ensure nobody starves to death when we stop working at 65. Keep in mind that lots of us used to starve to death before SS. Lots of us used to starve to death.

Who needs to fund Open Government initatives

[Anonymous Coward]

When sites like WikiLeaks do that for you for free?

Less non-corporate info

[SpzToid]

Special interest groups own Washington. Consistent, open data and an informed public are usually at odds with these special interest groups. It was a milestone to get these initiatives started in the first place, but in this climate? I mean, NPR got cut, and while that might not sound like much, decent radio as we know it just DIED across most of rural America; and its the radio that often tied whole communities together.

There's a reason America has the best government money can buy.

No one should be immune to cuts. But should such information programs be killed off with nothing to replace them with? If nothing else, such websites help dispute so much of the opinionated pundit talk that Fox 'News' airs for hours and hours during Prime Time. There's those medical Death Squad panels you hear about, looking to save money by cutting medical support for old people, and then there's the facts.

More hope, more change, more broken promises

[st0rmshad0w]

Every fucking politician is a lying duplicitous scumbag, and we should be able to sue their asses when they break their promises.

Verbal contracts are binding in my state, I think campaign promises should fall under those rules.

yes, but

[turkeyfish]

this is precisely what republicanism and "shrinking the government" is all about. Of course, they are even more clever by slipping in all their favorite kickback schemes into the defense budget that no one dares touch for fear of being labeled anti-American. Its the perfect scam. No or a shrinking government lets them get away with anything they want and you and I get to pay for it in further reductions in regulations and services that may potentially save the lives of millions. Republicans are good at recognizing that millions can starve or die as long as they get their millions.

War

[0100010001010011]

$4 million is what. 20 minutes in Iraq/Afghanistan? A day in the "War on Drugs"?

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet somehow there's always funding to rain $600,000 missles down on some 3rd world nation. Oh, well. I guess they fund what matters to them.