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Steve Ballmer's New Project: Find Out How the Government Spends Your Money (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the ballmer,-ballmer,-ballmer dept.

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.

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Problem is true waste is hidden by mysidia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Problem is true waste is hidden by dinfinity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. The problem is not where, it is how much by sjbe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.