Steve Ballmer's New Project: Find Out How the Government Spends Your Money (theverge.com) 251
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.
Problem is true waste is hidden (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.
Re:Problem is true waste is hidden (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Aren't people on disability, well, disabled, which is why they get benefits? Because they can't work?
And in theory, shouldn't unemployed be people spending their time obtaining more optimal jobs vs. makework?
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Aren't people on disability, well, disabled, which is why they get benefits? Because they can't work?
And in theory, shouldn't unemployed be people spending their time obtaining more optimal jobs vs. makework?
Most people on disability have a form of impairment yet few have a total impairment. As long as there are elderly people who need company there is something useful to be done. Have them do it.
Regarding unemployment, a person can't spend 40 hours a week looking for work for more than a couple of weeks before local options have been exhausted. There is a huge body of evidence that getting people out of the house and staying on a routine are both very important in keeping unemployment short term. This wou
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Why not let the unemployed stay home and just enjoy life? Why should everyone suffer just cause some of us donkeys have to work to keep the wealthy in ever larger yachts and estates?
If they've exhausted local work options after a couple of weeks, what is the point of making them beat a dead horse? Would you have them commute ridiculous distances/times for menial/low-paying work? Where is the benefit to the human race there? Presumably there'd be local people who would want those jobs who wouldn't have t
Re:Problem is true waste is hidden (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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Hi! I work. I have no desire to spend extra dollars on this at all.
Aside from just sounding vindictive, it would be stupidly short-sited. Making single-mothers on welfare work makes it far more likely their kids will go to jail or end up on welfare.
Re:Problem is true waste is hidden (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.
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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.
That's why I advocate volunteering for social good, not working as an unpaid intern
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.
The middle class suffers from 2 scams: the non-working poor and the uber rich. One of the biggest scams around is the notion that if you challenge the upper end of the you should focus on the bottom (ie Republicans) and if you challenge the bottom you should instead attack the top (ie Democrats). Both need to be fixed, I'm all for doing both, but delaying one to instead say focus on the other leads to nothing getting done.
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The middle class suffers from 2 scams: the non-working poor
The only scam involved there is the right-wing demagoguery that has led you to believe that people like being poor and unemployed.
Seriously, the majority of the people blabbering about 'welfare queens' and 'moochers' haven't a fucking clue what it is like to be part of the 'non-working poor' (the time you were in college "living off only ramen noodles" does not count). People actually feel like shit due to lack of societal status. Due to the stress involved with not being able to pay bills they have a scien
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Whereas making welfare recipients show up for volunteering would definitely be a cost savings.
That would be brilliant; save costs, limit the program to people who really need it, And give people on the program continuously a hazard, to help nudge these folks to try and find another solution..
e.g. "After an initial one-time offer of 4 weeks of total welfare support. Must show a weighted total of at least 40 hours a month volunteering, actual community service with jobs performed and hours wor
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I think the cost of running an analysis that fine would eat any savings many fold over. It's like drug testing welfare recipients
Not really.... Each government department HAS to record all this data anyways; It's not like you need a special IT system for this. Someone has the data; it's just
not organized without summarizing.
I can login to my account at Amazon.com, click a button, and I see and can search my entire order history.
It should work the same way with government. I can login
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Re:Problem is true waste is hidden (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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<sarcasm>This is evil because it's such a good idea to tell our enemies what we're doing.</sarcasm>
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Indeed. Usually the enemy being the citizens.
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You have started to address the reality of the American economy. By and large, our entire economic system is built around military spending. It is almost impossible to have a real discussion about reducing military spending in any meaningful way because there are so many jobs tied up in it.
This has so many add on effects. When all you have is a military, every challenge looks like a potential conflict.
The problem is not where, it is how much (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 [pgpf.org] 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.
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Yeah, the U.S.'s wealth isn't connected to keeping the shipping lanes open, defending Korea and Japan so they won't decide to develop their own nukes, keeping W. Europe from becoming Putin's pig sty, keeping the oil from the Mid-East greasing the world economy that buys American goods, etc. Screw it all, the U.S. doesn't need all that to be fat and rich, yes?
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We could be getting amazing efficiency from our military spending and it would still be a pointless boondoggle.
You are jumping to a conclusion that may be false, however.
$600 billion sounds like a lot, but we can't tell if it's actually going to the sort of expenses within defense that we think or not.
Furthermore, it's not straightforward, because some of the US' GDP and the government's own income and state of the US economy
relates to said defense spending, and it's not strictly that defense w
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People don't use their brains, especially cheap people.
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That degree of accuracy may be more expensive. The historical $900 toilet seat, isn't because the government is buying a toilet seat for $900 retail but the $20.00 seat with overview and sign offs of higher paid people. Who look at the request determines if they get away with the $15.00 seat it will have the same benefit meeting to make sure it is on budget and every dollar is accounted for. If you are going to have a high up director needing to explain to the public why they spent an extra $5.00 then the
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reference: http://www.govexec.com/federal... [govexec.com]
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Translation:
Do you want a new stapler in the office? Go fill out this TPS report and get the signature of your supervisor. Then ask the administrator to open up a Purchase Order so they can get a quote from the supplier.
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Do you want a new stapler in the office? Go fill out this TPS report and get the signature of your supervisor.
That doesn't sound very productive. I said the expense needs to be ACCOUNTED for at an individual item level for recordkeeping,
meaning someone has to make sure the description of what item is purchased is entered into an online automated system that tracks the
accounts, not "Sent through a formal approval process involving generating paperwork and signatures". Those are two very differe
How to make your Rights illegal. (Score:3)
"...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...
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As someone who has done purchasing for the government, part of the training emphasizes accountability to the public. The whole reason there's so many signatures for approval for every penny spent with a GPC [osd.mil] is to be able to report this sort of thing when presented with a FOIA. Not to mention being able to tell Congress (through command chain) just how much money was spent and on what. There's more transparency than many realize. With that transparency comes more paperwork validating and approving every step
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Not to mention how clueless it is to put "education" spending under "secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our prosperity [sic]". It's silly enough to use the preamble for something like this (should use Article I, Section 8) but worse yet that so much of federal spending - such as education - isn't Constitutional.
For those who missed civics class or didn't have it - education is one of those things the states are supposed to handle, not the federal government. That's why there are no federal un
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That in itself would be a very interesting result and not something I can see the average american agreeing with.
Interesting? The interesting part would be finding the average American still gives a shit enough to do something about protecting the Constitution.
A lack of action against unconstitutional actions that take place every day tends to imply that The People are agreeing with it.
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That in itself would be a very interesting result and not something I can see the average american agreeing with.
Interesting? The interesting part would be finding the average American still gives a shit enough to do something about protecting the Constitution.
A lack of action against unconstitutional actions that take place every day tends to imply that The People are agreeing with it.
It's pretty difficult for the average American to "do something about protecting the Constitution", other than supporting political candidates who appear to support it; just to make it more unlikely, most politicians theses days are too busy pandering to their bases' self-interests to concern themselves with Constitutional matters. Having said that, I just wanted to point out that the categories Ballmer is tracing spending to are quotes from the Preamble, and not the legally binding parts of the Constitutio
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The voting in many recent elections would tend to indicate that the number of voters willing to vote for someone who supports the constitution is very small. If not the Constitution Party or even the Libertarian Party would be right up there with the R & D parties. These two parties make a lot of platform statements that I don't agree with - just as I don't agree with many platform statements of the R & D parties, but at least the Constitution Party wants to shrink the Federal government back to jus
Startup? (Score:2)
Will it be something like this? (Score:2)
DEFENSE! DEFENSE! DEFENSE! WELFARE! WELFARE! WELFARE! (throws chair)
Something like that, but now I have to compensate for all those caps (why yes, it is exactly like YELLING, how did you guess?) to make the lameness filter happy.
Dangerous oversimplification (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Nice to see you have little understanding of SS. It is a pay as you go system. Lately, it has been paying a bit more than what's going in. And in the near term future, it will be paying a lot more than what's going in. This has nothing to do with overhead, and if you checked, overhead on government programs is generally minimal. SS will go bankrupt because the Blue Haired are demanding more than they ever could possibly have paid in, and there isn't enough youngins to make up the difference. And now with el
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The SSA employs over 60,000 people. They aren't cheap. https://www.glassdoor.com/Sala... [glassdoor.com]
That means that it's costing somewhere around $3 billion a year (probably more) to run the program not including pensions for retired employees. And they don't produce anything. They merely add an expense to moving money around. These days, the entire system could be automated.
Medicare doesn't employ nearly as many people directly but the number of people needed by doctors and hospitals to deal with the paperwork is
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Automate the SSA? Their target clientèle is the biggest bunch of techno-incompetents in the country - old people!
And, incidentally, those people are all paying into the Social Security system themselves, so it's not all lost money. If we laid them all off, would the savings on an automated system be enough to compensate for their lost income?
There are only four programs that matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"Believing that cutting taxes will magically increase government revenues through growth makes the people saying either idiots or charlatans or both."
Example: Brownback-is-stan, a.k.a. Kansas. It was to be the Conservative Experiment to show the other states how it's done. Now it is the Conservative BasketCase to show the other states how not to do it.
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You're forgetting the other other big one: interest payments on national debt.
But even all of the "small beans" items are larger than they look... for example, the federal spending on education contributes only about 7% of the actual operating costs for a K-12 school, the majority of which is typically paid by State, County, City, and local taxes. But the feds make schools really work and jump through lots of hoops and administer tests to tick off the boxes that allows them to tap into that 7% of funding.
Re:There are only four programs that matter (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that's based on a fundamental theorem of calculus [wikipedia.org]. We know that:
If tax revenue is a continuous function of tax rate, then according to the mean value theorem there is a certain percentage between 0% and 100% at which tax revenue is maximized. Call it m%.
You can argue that we're below m% so cutting taxes won't work. But automatically classifying people as idiots or charlatans for believing decreasing tax rate can increase tax revenue just shows your lack of understanding of mathematics.
Re:There are only four programs that matter (Score:4, Insightful)
You and Laffer both have an unstated and hidden assumption, that maximizing tax revenue is a good goal. It's not; the long-term maximization of the income of Americans is a good goal.
Since much of the money that the government takes in is used to inhibit production and remove incentives to work, it's fairly safe to claim that the tax level that maximizes long-term American income is below the rate that maximizes tax revenue.
In addition, a tax rate below the maximum revenue rate increases freedom.
I included the phrase "long-term" for a specific reason. While a zero tax rate would maximize the income of Americans for the short term, the lack of a military that would come from a zero tax rate would eventually result in the end of the USA, and hence no income for Americans.
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It's not clear that the goals contradict. If government isn't productive (i.e. generating benefits to society) then the optimal (maximized tax) would theoretically be less than if the government were giving good value for the taxes received. Of course you'd have to know how to measure civil service productivity and unfortunatel
Medicare and SS are separate tax streams (Score:3)
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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Government programs are not paid for by taxes or borrowing. They are paid for by spending new money.
The purposes of tax are:
1) Create demand for the government's money.
2) Withdraw excess money from the economy.
3) Discourage undesirable economic activity (vices).
The purposes of borrowing are:
1) Control interest rates.
2) Provide banks and other wealthy entities with welfare
Idiotic nostalgia (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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You seem to have some naive nostalgia that somehow things were better prior to 1913. They weren't..
Things are better now because of technological advancement, not the growth of government.
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The thread is about 3 specific programs that are all run in an actuarially unsound way. Any insurance company would be shut down and the executives arrested for doing similar.
Please try and keep up.
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We need to roll the Federal government back to what it was prior to 1913.
First, have high child mortality rate then no need for so many public schools and have to deal with too many adults entering work force. Second, have people die an early age so Medicare and Social Security programs are moot. Someone gets disabled (lose a leg, arm, or paralyzed as result of unsafe working conditions) then dump them to unknown state hospital with no means of recuperating. Yeah, sounds great until you or a loved one are in one of those categories slated for the chute.
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First, have high child mortality rate then no need for so many public schools and have to deal with too many adults entering work force.
The high child mortality rate was high in 1913 because the live saving technologies of 2017 did not exist then.
Second, have people die an early age so Medicare and Social Security programs are moot.
Why are you saying people would die at an early age without Medicare and Social Security? If they didn't have to spend so much money in taxes/social security, and if we had a free market for healthcare, then maybe people could actually afford healthcare and they would have a hell of a lot more money in their retirement account. If I could opt out of social security and invest that money how I see
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Social Security brings in more money than it pays out. If you're counting Social Security as part of the federal budget, eliminating it makes the federal budget deficit worse. If you're not counting it as part of the Federal budget, then it is irrelevant to a discussion of the federal budget deficit.
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So roll Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, and all private insurance into a single payer system administered by the federal government (or a one time bid to corporate America). Handle the buyouts of the private portions via a stock purchase on a given day's price of the health insurance portion of every insurance company, their backing assets, liabilities - the whole works. Also reform the tort system.
Establish two or three tiers of benefit plans. Everybody chooses one regardless of age and pays its premiu
posterity, not prosperity (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Tough task (Score:2)
Getting the peoples voice back in government (Score:2)
These spending reports are needed to properly implement the peoples voice in their (the peoples) business of government. See http://3seas.org/pmwiki-gov/ [3seas.org]
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There is also this https://globalchallenges.org/e... [globalchallenges.org] of which Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are supporters of.
A yellow flag went up for me on this as "The way to become wealthy is to make people need you" - Bill Gates
But I'm registered for the competition and getting the peoples voice in the peoples business of government is the plan, and ultimately scale it to the world. But starting with the US is a big influential step.
Can we all just re-read "A Christmas Carol"? (Score:2)
Just like businesses... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
BIAS (Score:3)
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We're sort of stuck, I don't know how we go back. What should happen is about 25% of the Federal government should be cut, and our Federal income tax load cut commensurately, then state and local governments should increase taxes to bring that burden back up to where it is, + or -.
Then we have more control as voters. I have 1/(state population) of a vote over spending, vs 1/(US population) as it is now for most spending (yes, this is simplified but close enough)..
But we're so programmed as Americans to th
Guess What's Missing? (Score:2)
Ballmer Tax Dodger in Chief (Score:2)
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This project reeks of self-righteousness. I wonder what Ballmer's political affiliations are...
Let's guess. Or not.
It's data, not bumper stickers. Costs, not dreams (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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.
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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 analy
unfortunately the second part is true (Score:2)
> 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.
Th
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Got some numbers to prove your theory?
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FTFY
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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*
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I have worked with liberal organizations who are just as bad. They will lie and cheat to get their way. The problem isn't political but human. People don't want to be wrong and will cling on a hides right or wrong that fits their world view.
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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.
Not the same at all (Score:3)
> 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 grou
Re:Nobody starts a project like this (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [nymag.com]
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We already know what Ballmer's agenda is: developers!
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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 wel
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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.
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A little inflation never hurt anyone....just look at the Carter years. Them was high times!!!
Whining about taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Defense could be handled by a volunteer militia.
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For limited-access roads, tolls are the most appropriate funding mechanism, being less regressive [planetizen.com] than gas or sales taxes, and variable express tolls can permanently eliminate traffic congestion, saving us all a LOT of money on infrastructure.
City streets, because they directly benefit the property owner, should be funded by street frontage fees.
Tolls again.
Because education is the great equalizer, it should b
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"I wish things were cheaper."
Basically the gist of all those words. Yes, and?
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Bullshit. Unless they took your passport away because you are under criminal charges, you can just fly their an live. Even if your assets cannot follow you, it should be no problem. You, unlike those poor Africans, have the work ethic
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Sounds a lot like you are opting, because of incentives, not to leave the USA. If you have your passport, and it has not been flagged, you can totally just hop a plane to West Africa. Other than preventing a minor child from getting a passport, I've never heard of custody agreements affecting emigration before.
Now, they may affect whether you can bring assets with you- but that's just more incentivization.
Compare to, e.g. people in Soviet Russia, where they could not legally leave.
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You betcha. Let's let grandma come and live with you. Those meds of hers are expensive so it would be better if you fronted her the money. Come to think of it, let's get rid of NTSB, you can check those transportation vehicles you use by yourself before you get on...just to ascertain whether you'll still be alive at journey's end. Damn that government for keeping you safe! And where does the NiH get off doing all that research on diseases you'd love to have rather than the cures they are producing, the nerv
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I find your response amusing. I would love to have my grandma come live with me. She is the sweetest lady I've ever known. My whole family is Mormon so we have few health problems because we are responsible and take good care of our bodies. The amount I'll pay in taxes over a lifetime could easily cover all the things you mentioned, and I would have a surplus.
Thanks to technological innovation, clean water is really easy to get almost anywhere on earth now if you have a little capital to spend. They h
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Unmask yourself you Anonymous Coward and I will be happy to debate with you the pros/cons of the FDA, NTSB, and NIH.
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It's "secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity," not 'prosperity.'
Correct. It's also from the Preamble, which neither confers nor restricts any rights or powers. Constitutional Law begins with Article I. The Preamble is a statement of the purpose of the Constitution, but it's not legally binding.
Re: Libertardians (Score:2)