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Steve Ballmer's New Project: Find Out How the Government Spends Your Money (theverge.com)
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn't satisfied with owning the Los Angeles Clippers and teaching at Stanford and USC. On Tuesday, the billionaire announced USAFacts, his new startup that aims to improve political discourse by making government financial data easier to access. A small "army" of economists, professors and other professionals will be looking into and publishing data structured similarly to the 10-K filings companies issue each year -- expenses, revenues and key metrics pulled from dozens of government data sources and compiled into a single massive collection of tables. From a report on The Verge: The nonpartisan site traces $5.4 trillion in government spending under four categories derived from language in the US Constitution. Defense spending, for example, is categorized under the header "provide for the common defense," while education spending is under "secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity." Spending allocation and revenue sources are each mapped out in blue and pink graphics, with detailed breakdowns along federal, state and local lines. Users can also search for specific datasets, such as airport revenue or crime rates, and the site includes a report of "risk factors" that could inhibit economic growth. The New York Times has the story on how this startup came to be.
I think the cost of running an analysis that fine would eat any savings many fold over. It's like drug testing welfare recipients... it might sound like a good idea but you'll waste more money than you'll save.
This is a really dangerous oversimplification. What they should be looking at is the overhead costs associated with government spending. Supposedly, Social Security is a "third rail" of politics. Usually, if a politician talks about reforming it or fixing it, they're toast because the voters have been lead to believe that every dollar that goes into Social Security comes back out. It simply can't work that way. There are too many people employed by the Social Security Administration. Every single one of them gets a salary and a pension. They all need a physical place to work. Ergo, that all costs money. A LOT of money. Same thing for Medicare. Both of these entitlement programs represent the bulk of government spending.
Also, whenever some pundit screams bloody murder about "cuts" to either of these programs, the are flat out lying to you. Nothing ever gets cut. That's how baseline budgeting works. What they're really talking about is reductions to proposed INCREASES in spending over and above previous baselines.
There are generals who've stated it bluntly: the military budget needs depend on what you want to do. If you just want to have a defensive capability, then a fraction of the current budget is enough. If you want full scale dominance then the current budget is not enough.
That the military and intelligence budget is not transparent is true enough. there are a lot of shadowy constructions that have been setup specifically to allow secret funding of projects(typically projects that change names often). Only I wonder if that should be the main focus. The main problem may be in plain sight. If you just look at the current organisation, there is a huge military budget, and part of it is spread around to many states, so that a lot of people benefit. In effect a lot of politicians support military projects because they hope to benefit.
It leads to an arms race that fuels itself. Politicians are in favor of modernizing nukes because it means jobs. Politicians don't want a less wasteful budget. It would only mean they get less of it.
The only government spending that really matters is Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security. Those together account for about 3/4 of the federal budget. Any discussion of federal spending that doesn't involve those four programs is pointless and/or grandstanding. Stuff like NASA and education are almost rounding errors in comparison to those four programs.
That's also why anyone who talks about cutting taxes without also talking about cutting either Medicare or Defense is completely full of shit because we don't pay enough in taxes to cover those programs today. We certainly can't afford to cut taxes when last year we borrowed $600 billion to cover the $600 billion defense department budget. Cutting taxes without cutting Medicare or Defense is simply handing the bill to your children which makes the people doing it assholes. Believing that cutting taxes will magically increase government revenues through growth makes the people saying either idiots or charlatans or both.
Stop taxing us.
If you want to stop being taxed then explain to me how you plan to fund roads, bridges, education, police, firemen, defense, schools, medical care, etc. You planning to fund those things yourself voluntarily? How do you plan to get others to help out? I've never heard someone whining about taxes with a good answer for this but maybe you can be the first.
Let us be free to spend our money how we see fit, rather than forcibly confiscating it and wasting it.
First prove how society wouldn't fall apart by eliminating taxes.
It is very easy to waste other people's money. Governments excel at this.
If you think governments are so good at wasting your money go ahead and move somewhere where you won't be taxed. There are countries where this happens or where it happens very little. I assure you that you won't find living there to be very pleasant however. Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society.
I think the cost of running an analysis that fine would eat any savings many fold over. It's like drug testing welfare recipients... it might sound like a good idea but you'll waste more money than you'll save.
Whereas making welfare recipients show up for volunteering would definitely be a cost savings. Even if it cost money I don't know many working people who wouldn't fork over another $20 just to make everyone else have to get up in the morning too. I'd apply this to disability and unemployment also. The best part is that with unemployment, and to a lesser degree disability, you would have all the workers that you need to run the program. Don't show up, don't get your free money.
The number $X spent on defense obscures the fact about how each defense dollar is spent.
It doesn't really matter how each defense dollar is spent. The problem isn't what specifically we are spending it on but the fact that we are spending too much of it on defense in total. We have a $600 billion defense department budget as of 2016. That is more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined. We could be getting amazing efficiency from our military spending and it would still be a pointless boondoggle. Our military is really just an inefficient jobs program. The money could be put to far better use as research dollars or to fixing our education system, or repairing/building our infrastructure. Instead we have the sort of military that a paranoid banana republic might build at vast cost. Are you aware that we borrowed almost exactly the ENTIRE defense department budget last year? We are like the guy who buys a Ferrari and then wonders why he's having trouble paying the rent.
We should literally know how much our government is spending on each tool, supply, or service being requisitioned, and what is included with each tool, supply, or service.
Let's stipulate that that was somehow magically possible. (it isn't) What exactly would you do with that information? Are you going to go argue that a secretary at NASA was being extravagant when she requisitioned a stapler? Beyond a certain point the cost of maintaining that information is greater than the value you get from maintaining it.
I'm an accountant and one of the principles of accounting is that you don't bother tracking something if the cost of tracking it is greater than the value gained from doing the tracking. Your proposal would waste an unbelievably vast amount of money on the overhead required to keep track of every paper clip. Far more money than you could possibly save by doing so. FAR more. For big ticket items, sure there should be reasonable transparency. But thinking that you can keep track of everything in fine grained detail and get actual positive value out of doing so is just naively unrealistic. It provably cannot be done.
The following socialist programs should be eliminated completely: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We need to roll the Federal government back to what it was prior to 1913.
There is a saying that you shouldn't tear down a wall until you completely understand why it was built in the first place. We have those programs because they address problems that were not being adequately handled before those programs were created. You seem to have some naive nostalgia that somehow things were better prior to 1913. They weren't.. You are demonstrating that you are either a troll or an idiot for suggesting otherwise. You are suggesting eliminating health care and financial security for millions of our most vulnerable citizens, mostly the elderly and poor.
> Even if it cost money I don't know many working people who wouldn't fork over another $20 just to make everyone else have to get up in the morning too.
Running an economy on emotions is a stupid thing to do.
"Old man yells at systemd"
You're suggesting a mild form of slavery.
Note that forcing people to volunteer negates the meaning of 'volunteer'. It also prevents them from finding an actual job and removes all market elements from the labor involved. See the US prison labor system to see what that leads to.
Even if it cost money I don't know many working people who wouldn't fork over another $20 just to make everyone else have to get up in the morning too
You need to get to know people who aren't so spiteful that they would want to pay to ruin other people's lives just because they don't like theirs. Because that is what you are suggesting.
Don't show up, don't get your free money.
So it is not free money.
Listen, I get that you want the world to be a fair place. I suggest however you direct your efforts away from the weakest people in society to those who use their affluence to game the entire system to make it as skewed towards them as best they can. While you are devising 'solutions' for 'lazy' welfare recipients, billionaires and lobbyists are laughing all the way to the(ir) bank.
Well, given the wealth disparity, the scheme the rightists are using is definitely working much better.
Now the very wealthy own virtually everything and almost everyone from the far left to the far right are scrambling for crumbs.
Yay for the very poor right! Y'all won! *sigh*
Only I can judge you.