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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.
The number $X spent on defense obscures the fact about how each defense dollar is spent.
It may be that with an increase in efficiency, and reduction in labor force, you could reduce $X in defense by 75%, and still have just as effective a defense program, with no material sacrifice other than removing deadweight, or eliminating financial mismanagements or abuses by bureaucrats.
What the American people need is drill-down financial transparency down to the Per-Employee, Per-Contract, and Per-Product level.
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.
"...The nonpartisan site traces $5.4 trillion in government spending under four categories derived from language in the US Constitution...
Well, that's certainly one way to upgrade the status of the Constitution from ignored to illegal.
Can't imagine this kind of prodding into the spending habits of our not-so-transparent government will go over well...
We already know what Ballmer's agenda is: developers!
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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.
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.
The preamble states, "secure the blessings of the liberty to ourselves and our posterity." Meaning our children.
The website has it correct. The summary does not, and apparently isn't thinking of the children.
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.
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.
> I wonder what Ballmer's political affiliations are...
Ballmer has donated roughly equally to Republicans and Democrats - he doesn't seem to politically passionate either way. He's more of analyst than an advocate, a numbers guy. I don't follow Ballmer closely, but from what I've seen I'd posit he doesn't hate Obama or hate Bush, the opaqueness of the entire federal bureaucracy bugs him. I could be wrong though.
One can draw some conclusions from the nature of the project - though different readers will draw different conclusions. The project will compile thousands of pages of data - hard numbers compiled from government sources. It's compiling data, not bumper sticker slogans. If you think the data, reality, supports certain political positions, you can conclude that compiling the data and making it more readily available will support those positions.
Personally, it seems *to me* that some of the lofty ideals that liberals tend to focus on are best advocated in an inspirational medium such as music (ie "Imagine" by John Lennon), while the more pragmatic issues of costs etc that conservatives tend to focus on are seen more in the numbers. I'm not saying either is right or wrong, better or worse. Both are needed, I think - it's worthwhile to "Imagine there's no countries ... Imagine no possessions ... No need for greed or hunger". After imagining for a while, it is then time to look at how much we need to spend on which programs to reduce hunger in the US vs how much we should budget for international aid, etc.
This project reeks of self-righteousness. I wonder what Ballmer's political affiliations are...
Although an equal opportunity giver to both parties, he did work for George W.'s 2004 reelection campaign.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/political-leanings-of-silicon-valley.html
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.
Agenda 1. Wants to show government waste.
Agenda 2. Wants to show government effectiveness.
Let's face it government services can do a lot of good but there are some that are not effective so we are insting a lot of money for projects with little gain, but sound good. But today success of a grant is mostly do to how well the organization markets themselves without cold hard numbers their wate will go unnoticed because actions are small enough and not on a political radar for personal digging.
However if a well run but politically pressured org who does a lot of good can point the numbers and show their benefits even if not popular.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's all nice and stuff that Steve Ballmer wants to do this. However, the government really should be doing this itself. Government accounting should meet the same standards as business accounting. Why? Because it is just as important, if not more so. Furthermore, all accounts should be fully public. Why? Because it's our money the government is spending.
For the poster who said that this is too much work: This is what every business in the country has to do. If it's too complicated, the government could consider simplifying things. But the government wants clarity in business accounts, for tax purposes. And we - the citizens - want clarity in seeing how the government spends our taxes. Sauce. Goose. Gander.
Won't happen, of course, because it would become much more difficult to hide pork. Ballmer's idea isn't going to work, because he will be unable to get the information that really counts.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
We pay 12.5% of our income to SS and Medicare. If those are pulling funds from income tax to pay for them then that's an issue.
What people what reduced is income tax.
You can't conflate SS, Medicare taxes with income tax.
There are very distinct things. And as such you have to talk about the programs they fund separately.
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The political bias is evident in the structure shown in Ballmer's chart. Problems include categories NOT specified by the Constitution, and the claims that certain goals fall under certain categories. People who think that federal funding (and thus control) of education promotes liberty, are sadly mistaken.
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I don't think your generalizations are helpful. I can fire back that conservatives generally think all government social welfare spending is a giant fraud supporting lazy people while liberals dig into solid numbers about poverty, illnesses, crime rates, workplace injuries, and so forth.
The real problem there, if there is one core problem, is that "Conservative does detailed analysis of Iowa state Department of Human Services budget and makes the following 542 findings" and "Liberal does detailed analysis of Vermont state Department of Corrections and makes the following 384 findings" isn't going to attract attention ( much less improve advertising revenue ) like raging about lazy poor people or bleeding-heart liberals or raging about greedy business owners or racist conservatives.
Holy Smokestacks Batman! My Grandma died last year. You think it was the zionists? I know Lincoln was assassinated, but Jackson? I thought he died of Tuberculosis and Heart Failure? And from being 78 years old.
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.
Liberal organizations are generally working for the common good.
Liberal organizations generally have good intentions.
That is not the same as working for the common good.
> Liberal organizations generally have good intentions.
> That is not the same as working for the common good.
Absolutely. Or at least 99.9% of liberals generally have good intentions. Once in a while, the leaders of advocacy organizations get so passionate about trying to beat the other team and such that they temporarily forget the good intentions.
For me, the #1 issue on which there is a huge difference between liberals' good intentions is their focus on race and generally dividing people into groups, which is then the basis for their condescending form of racism. They sincerely believe that they are doing my daughter a service by insisting that she be given extra points in any competitive situation college admission criteria, federal hiring preferences, SBA loans, etc because she's black and female. What my daughter hears when she looks at college admissions is "black people like you aren't smart enough to compete on your merits, so we have to give you some extra points". The SBA is effectively telling her "we know you black people aren't capable of preparing a solid business plan, so we'll give you done extra make-up points." Fuck you! My daughter's IQ and test scores are well above those of the people making those rules. She's smarter and more capable than the liberals who take pity on her. They mean well, but "taking pity on her", "giving her a little extra help" is nothing but a condescending form of racism. Because this condescending racism is endorsed by our country's schools, government, and other institutions, it has a certain amount of credibility. People take it seriously, as though my daughter's complexion really DOES indicate she's less intelligent or less capable. That makes it more damaging than those KKK idiots who at least ADMIT they are racist, and therefore their opinions should obviously be ignored.