Obama To Launch Website For Tracking Tax Expenditures 358
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
Destined to the "ungratifying"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Destined to the "ungratifying"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who complain about "welfare mothers and mass transit" will continue to complain about whatever their leaders tell them that the "problem" is. They are not capable of realization.
Re:Will it be a Web2.0 site? (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont think this is funny. I think its appropriate. Why not? Why are your comments any more important than someone who wants an ipod museum? Did you participate in change.gov? hunbdreds of thousands did, with moderating and voting up and voting down. It brought issues forward, started discussions and got responses.
Democracy is being responsible to the people. That is a feature, not a bug.
Race & Job History (Score:0, Insightful)
So will the site include race and job history information of money recipients so we can be sure Reich gets his agenda of not giving money to people with actual skills and / or white construction workers?
Robert Reich's Blog - The Stimulus: How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers [blogspot.com]
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Destined to the "ungratifying"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Let's also not forget about those complaining about poor people in rural America finding comfort in their churches and exercising their 2nd Amendment rights.
Re:It freaks me out... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in the same boat here... well mostly. Not every politican will do everything you like. Most presidents will erode our natural rights to some extent (though some might try to strength others). I would say the warantless wiretapping is pretty damn scary.
Like all politicians, you should take everything he does with a grain of salt. Obama still has the potential to do a lot of good yet, however. I'm not saying we should over look this, but it is what it is for the time being. Maybe we all should take some time out of our bitch-fest here on /. and write some letters? Get active?
You almost didn't elect this man because... (Score:5, Insightful)
... he didn't wear a USA flag lapel pin. I can only imagine how 4 years of McCain would've been different.
This only applies (Score:1, Insightful)
To this ONE recovery act.
There will be NO listing of the CIA, FBI or NSA budgets...
Re:It freaks me out... (Score:5, Insightful)
I like this one though, hopefully it'll be as good in practice as it is in theory.
Will It Include (Score:1, Insightful)
Will it include race, gender, and job history information of recipients so we can be sure Secretary Reich's goal of keeping money out of the hands of skilled workers and white male construction workers is being met?
The Stimulus: How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers [blogspot.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Dozens of people supported the ipod museum (Score:3, Insightful)
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 big flaw in that kind of idea (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Regan was wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
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. You judge them based on how well they do their job, not based on their physical makeup.
Regan was wrong. Size doesn't matter. It is how well you do the job that matters.
Transparency? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Regan was wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No (Score:2, Insightful)
The debate isn't about size. It never was about size. "The size of government is the problem" is nothing more then a red-herring that lets our government get off the hook for doing a bad job.
The debate is, always was, and always will be about making sure the government does its job effectively. Every one of your bullet points are problems of their own. Their solution *might* be "make some aspect smaller", but their solution might be something entirely different as well. If all you say is "get rid of it", you might never actually solve the problem.
Regan basically thought the solution too all government problems is to remove them. He made mention of identifying the problems, to him the problem *was* government. This is a stupid argument--our world is to complex to believe that fixing our problems is as simple as shrinking the government. Look at the result! We let our government slack off on regulation and set us up for this recession thing we are now in.
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.
Regan's entire argument was wrong. The entire argument was an excuse and a rationalization for poorly managed government. "Make something smaller" is a solution to specific problems, not a solution to all problems. The goal is to make the government work for the people, not make it bigger or smaller. If the government works well, who cares what the size is!
Re:Transparency? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course every single earmark will be in the system. The agencies who disburse the money can't buy a box of paper clips without being able to point to a line in the budget authorizing the purchase.
The problem is in the second part: who is responsible for the earmark. True, "all spending bills have to originate in the House," but this doesn't mean much when bills can be mysteriously and anonymously altered in the reconciliation process, with earmarks nobody has ever heard of being inserted in the middle of the night before the bill comes up for a vote.
It's not just that the legislative branch has managed to muck with the Constitutional division of powers between the houses, they've developed ways of legislating and budgeting in secret. This isn't just a subversion of Constitutional divisions of power, it's a subversion of the whole rationale for representative democracy.
I've always wondered why proponents of term limits even bother. Even if we change the faces, we don't know what they're up to or who they're working for. Everything term limit proponents hope to gain by term limits can be achieved, and more, by simply requiring every public act of elected officials to be a matter of conveniently accessible public record. Until that happens we aren't electing public officials, we're electing rulers.
But this is a start. People using it will see the pork, and when they run into the stone wall trying to find out where it came from, they'll complain. Right now, they know there's stuff in there to complain about, but they can't get started because they don't know what it is.
Re:It freaks me out... (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, you can't really top this, that guy knows so well the issues he's tackling, he probably knows what's good for you better than you do on a few issues!
Careful now. I know a lot of people are still in the throes of post-inauguration orgasm afterglow, but that's really a very dangerous train of thought. NO GOVERNMENT can be trusted that they know what's better for you, than you do -- ever. Some of the most evil and destructive regimes in the history of the human civilization have suggested exactly the same thing in order to take and maintain absolute power.
Everyone needs to take a deep breath and see how things proceed over the next year or two. To suggest that this administration is fundamentally different than any of the others after only five days in office is dangerously naive.
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I hate having our troops all over the world, I hate, even more, the thought of having them deployed here at home so they can be used for domestic roadside checks and other violations of liberty. Just put them in their bases or retire them.
Re:You almost didn't elect this man because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or smart politics (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Theory (Score:4, Insightful)
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 :-)
Re:You almost didn't elect this man because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dozens of people supported the ipod museum (Score:3, Insightful)
Democracy doesn't necessarily have to mean that simple majority (50% + 1) votes is enough. US Senate needs 60 votes to be filibuster-proof, constitutional amendments require pretty steep supermajority (need to be ratified on state level too), and so on.
Looking at sibling poster's "9 people" example, what if motion passing requires 80% of the vote?
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Explain this (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:2, Insightful)
When do we get to decide [wikipedia.org] how our money is spent?
There, fixed the link for you.
Re:But he is still our ruler (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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...