Recovery.gov Not Very Transparent 222
Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is
not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are:
1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions.
2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state).
Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment.
I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115."
Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
a curious attack (Score:5, Insightful)
recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large [pie] chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions.
That's not an example.
information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov
Did someone promise it would be?
I would call [the information-exchange] a massive accomplishment
Strange title to this story, then.
Not as easy as you might think (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Uh... you know that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this really surprises me.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:1, Insightful)
anything better than a "HAHA WE STOLE YOUR TAX DOLLARS" is at the very least appreciated.
I believe that was the website for the Bush stimulus plan.
Seriously, though it looks like they are just getting started, and I'm not surprised that there isn't much up there, since I bet very little of the stimulus has been spent. The money is going to be doled out over the course of two years, and there are a number of bureaucratic hurdles to go through first, I bet.
Re:Better than nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it seems that now government officials need to have "experience" (i.e., they need to be properly trained in political corruption by former political experience). Normal people just wouldn't be able to do the job well, apparently. Stupid normal people.
Which is, I presume, why we get such smart legislation as banning talking on cell phones (without hands-free stuff) but NOT banning text messaging, etc. That one just happened to be recent in my mind. (it's a CA law)
Re:Uh... you know that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the thrust of your segment is "Look! They lied! This site is broken and will never be fixed! I can't USE IT!"
Do you think the first thing you are going to do is go ask your techie how to use the site more smoothly?
Re:Uh... you know that.. (Score:2, Insightful)
When people were freaking about that legislation being scanned PDF only, there was an ASCII .txt version on Thomas the whole time just like with every other legislation.
Ahh, Cracked's Nirvana fallacy at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Go read this [cracked.com]. Here, let me quote:
Pathetic when Cracked is out there teaching such basic lessons... *sigh*
Re:What would really be nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just saying it would be nice if the law were a little more succinct so that we could see the details of the laws getting passed.
If that were the case, they wouldn't be able to pass a Child Healthcare bill with millions allocated to impotence research... etc...
Also they wouldn't be able to create a reserve of laws that was sufficient to incriminate any citizen at any time.
Re:The whole process is not transparent (Score:5, Insightful)
The time they had? I think they had more time than they wanted you to think. When a politician says "we need to pass this bill now! we need to spend money now!" and when the bill is so long that most of the people that voted on it didn't even read it ...
I really don't see how waiting 48 hours (two days) would have killed the economy. Oh my goodness, we had to wait 48 more hours before waiting several more months before getting stimulus money.
If it wasn't bad enough that it's just spending more money than we actually have to somehow fix the problem of spending more money than we should be, on top of that it's been railroaded through Congress on the basis of a presumed crisis. I'm not saying there aren't people struggling or that the economy didn't "crash" but this is not the worst thing since the Great Depression (at least not yet, but the people saying that aren't forecasting with doubt, they're saying it IS ...) - of course, it was superficially inflated to begin with. What I am saying is that top democrats/leading democrats appear to have taken this "crisis" as an opportunity to push their agenda and "sell" it to the public using fear (including ridiculous numbers by Pelosi, who twice referred to "500 million jobs" being lost every month, etc).
Re:What would really be nice... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
"Obama is a socialist islamist from the corrupt Chicago machine (and besides his birth certificate is phony)".
He comes from the corrupt Chicago machine... you can not debate that, its fact! So I expect the same style of politics that brought us such greats as;
Rod Blagojevich
George Ryan
Richard M. Daley
and now....
Pat Quinn
Why do you think that Obama would be any different then the machine that raised him?
Re:The whole process is not transparent (Score:5, Insightful)
youre comparing a hobo's shit with a beautiful princess's shit. theyre both shit, and it doesnt matter which one dumped first.
i wish people would stop using the last administration's fuckups to excuse the current administration's fuckups.
Wow! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Better than nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
but what ever. When I think Conservative, I think back to the basics. And Obama is NOT going back to the basics.
Re:The whole process is not transparent (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! Why don't more people see that?
Better yet, cut spending! (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing that should be even more important than those, however, is cutting back spending. It's not enough to just have a balanced budget... Soviet Russia balance its budget all day long, but overall spending was so high that they sucked their citizens dry with taxes, rewarded people who didn't work at the same level as those who did, and generally stifled their economy. Your anology about tar is actually good, but it doesn't quite go far enough. Really, it should be: "The government is like tar. If it is cut back, society as a whole would run so much more smoothly."
PS - Does anyone realize that at the start of this decade, we had a two trillion dollar budget, and now it's four trillion? Does a 100% increase in ten years seem warranted? Does anything else in this country, whether it be individual incomes or corporate revenues, grow that fast? Does this seem sustainable? How many jobs have been destroyed by government (think of how many people could have been employed had that two trillion stayed in the private sector, rather than being sucked up by government)? This year alone, in a recession, several departments like "Housing and Urban Development" and the agriculture department got 45% percent budget increases. Does that seem right, when EVERYTHING else in America is scaling back? Is it sustainable?
New York's economy just shrunk by about 4%, while Washington's grew by 3%. Does that seem right? The 165 million spent by AIG on retention bonuses (note: not performance bonuses) was 1/1000 of the amount given them in the bailout. Meanwhile, congress passed the 800 billion stimulus bill, the massive Omnibus bill, and the earmark bill. Is this sustainable? Why are we nitpicking this tiny amount when trillions are being spent and squandered? Especially since both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been giving out bonuses just like this, and they were bailed out even more? Could there be any more hypocrisy on this? Of course, Fannie and Freddie are Chris Dodd and Barney Frank's favorite institutions, institutions they protected from President Bush, who believe it or not fought to reform them earlier in his second term, before anyone even knew this was all coming. What a mess we might have been spared had that actually happened, although we still would have had problems, since Bush was probably the fifth worst president on fiscal responsibility... right behind Lyndon Johnson, FDR, Jimmy Carter, and already the grandaddy of them all, Barack Obama, who's own budget projections show he will add more to the national debt in his first term than all other presidents COMBINDED. By the way, is that sustainable?
I would say, "Absolutely Not!", and that's why it is time for an immediate spending cut. And by the way Mr. President, we really do need an axe, not a scalpel.
Re:Yes they could make it much easier. (Score:3, Insightful)
They certainly don't expect YOU to read it either...
Re:Yes they could make it much easier. (Score:2, Insightful)
Tufte looks interesting.
This whole government stimulus/bailout stuff is just a multi-trillion dollar boondoggle designed to enrich the already filthy rich at the expense of the populace. Ultimately it will do more harm than good. Wait for the hyper-inflation...
Anyway, the theory (if you can even call it that) used to justify this whole scam has never been proven to work in practice. In fact, every time its been applied it has failed.
Actually it is does do one good thing, at least for those in power. It allows them a helluva lot more power.
Re:Better yet, cut spending! (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately this is largely a theoretical discussion because at the moment we have both high spending AND high debt, something that is not likely to change any time soon.
Re:The whole process is not transparent (Score:3, Insightful)
"do you have a cite for that Pelosi quote?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UR5M5teyQ0 [youtube.com]
It's also worth nothing that the Great Depression was a global problem too [wikipedia.org].
Secondly, politicians keep saying that this is going to be worse than the great depression, if it isn't already. They're saying, as you are repeating, that companies are losing jobs fast and that the unemployment rate might hit a whopping 8 or 9 percent in 2009. In 1982 the unemployment rate surpassed 10% [stlouisfed.org] and in 1932, during the great depression, the unemployment rate in the US exceeded 24% [wikipedia.org].
It's also worth reminding everyone that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said that "You never want a crisis to go to waste" [youtube.com].
Face it, politicians exaggerate at best, and lie at worst, in order to get their agendas and pet projects passed through. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I believe in empirical evidence and admittedly all I have to offer is circumstantial evidence and conjecture. But given a basic understanding of economics, world history and the fact that Obama is employing the same Wall-Street bankers [wikipedia.org] that he's vilifying to the American people and using as a scapegoat, I'm suspicious. I'm fearful that Tim Geithner (current Treasury Secretary and former President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank), Ben Bernanke [wikipedia.org] and the rest of the Wall-Street guys that Obama has surrounded himself with are intentionally advising congress and the White House on bad policy. That the actions that the US government is taking might actually be designed hyperinflate the US dollar so that in a year or two the central banks can offer us a new North American currency similar to the Euro, packaged in a nice, neat North American Union [wikipedia.org] that will make the Wall-Street Bankers richer at everyone's expense.
Did you happen to catch the Tonight Show with Jay Leno this evening ? When Leno asked Obama where the stimulus money was he said the banks are holding on to it! I tried to find you a youtube but it was only aired an hour or so ago. It should be up on Youtube shortly and you can verify.
Re:The whole process is not transparent (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the fallacy of keynesian economics to focus only on consumption.
What got us into this mess was over consumption caused by credit expansion. We don't need consumers to spend right now. We need to liquidate our debts, sell off toxic assets, allow unprofitable businesses to fail and start SAVING again. Capital comes from savings, a concept that seems foreign in short-sighted keynesian economics. People think that by saving they're hoarding and the money is sitting idle. This is false. When people save they either put it into a savings account or they invest (lend) it. The money gets used by entrepreneurs who are best at anticipating consumer demand, doing some basic accounting and employing capital into production of goods and services that people will find valuable (ie: things that will improve their lives).
People have responded to that by saying "yeah but the banks are insolvent right now!" That's true. So what will they do ? They will raise interest rates, only lending to people who stand an excellent chance of profiting from the capital and paying it back plus lots of interest. Only people who are extremely confident that borrowing with a high interest rate will still be profitable will borrow. Banks will repay their debts and eventually the market rate of interest will normalize on it's own.
By expanding credit we discourage this process. We keep interest rates down (right now they're at near 0% levels) and interest rates are an important part of human valuation. Interest stems from the fact that we value things differently at different times. The borrower values something more if he can have it in the nearer future (interest paid) and the lender is willing to forgo something in the nearer future to have more of it later (interest collected). Slashing interest rates screws with the process of investing and borrowing. It tries to take a short-cut to production by making it appear that investments are more profitable than they really are. This may create a short rise in employment rates as new start-ups with bad, unsustainable business models use borrowed money to invest in stupid ideas, but it can't last. What it is does is it creates artificial bubbles like the housing boom or the Nasdaq bubble (remember when Yahoo's stock prices valued the company at more than the entire country of New Zealand?! ... that wasn't caused by credit expansion but it's a good example of how people's valuations weren't in check) ... when you screw with people's value judgments all you do is create more suffering that is more profound later on. It's what got us into this mess in the first place.
Re:Uh... you know that.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Other sites have pointed out that publishing PDFs containing scanned versions of the hardcopy of the legislation is more about giving the appearance of being "open" while frustrating those who want to do text searches on the legislation.
Or, to be fair, it could simply be because scanned hardcopies are easily available and therefore used as a first version, since speed is deemed to be important in this project. As I recall, many organisations with the need to handle large amounts of documents do it this way - they scan letters from clients, court documents and everything else, put it in a database and runs it through OCR if deemed necessary.
I think what we need here is a slightly more balanced outlook. I know it is traditional in public discource in America to go for maximum outrage rather than trying to see if there may be a slightly less hostile way to interpret things; I don't know why - is it that you don't want to be optimistic in case you might damage your face in the process of smiling? I'm not saying that Obama is always right, but some of the noises and moves he's making are not too bad.
Re:The Fleecing of America (Score:3, Insightful)
classic propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
the obama administration is attempting to be transparent. this is hard. it involves complicated financial arrangements. such that is very easy to poke holes in how complicated arrangements are attempted to be communicated in simple ways. its frankly impossible without finding someone somewhere who complains. the only way to be accurate, is to regurgitate all the fine detail, which if course, would also be criticized as being too complicated
in other words, you can't win
meanwhile, BEFORE the obama administration, there was not any attempt to be transparent at all. so the obama administration, rather than being lauded for trying to do something hard and asked for by the public, is portrayed in negative ways by partisan hacks because it falls short of the ideal
hey, rather than kick them because you hold them to high standards, why don't you congratulate them and thank them for making such dramatic progress over all previous administrations?
as time gtoes on, if obvious and straightforward progress is not met, then jump all over their case. meanwhile, what is it, march 2009? two months time?
thank you obbama administration, and good job. ignore the usual unsatisfiable cranks