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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-the-facts-maam dept.

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a lot of money and nothing to prove. Post-Microsoft, his biggest achievement so far has been paying $2 billion to buy the LA Clippers, but on Monday The New York Times dropped an extensive report about his next venture: a project called "USAFacts," which aggregates publicly available government data to tell you how your city, state, and federal tax dollars are spent.

Ballmer has already spent $10 million on the project and is "happy to fund the damn thing" (his personal net worth is estimated at over $22 billion, so he's good for it). He describes it as "a [Form] 10-K for government," a big searchable database that shows where tax revenue goes in and where it comes out. If you want to find out how many police officers or public school teachers the government employs in your area, you can do that; if you want to know what percentage of their salaries come from taxes paid by businesses instead of individuals, you can do that, too.

[...] USAFacts is definitely one of his good ideas. The site itself is slick and responsive and instantly informative, though it's still a beta and has rough edges. It shows real promise, and it has the potential to better inform discussion of where tax money comes from, vital to alleviating the feeling among some citizens that they pay taxes and receive nothing of worth in return. And if journalists and citizens can more easily get ahold of and interpret this data, it could itself lead to greater accountability and smarter spending, things that every politician on the face of the earth pays lip service to on the campaign trail.

But good, easily accessible data is only part of the solution to our problems. What's really in short supply now is not data, but trust—in experts, in government, in the press, and in our fellow citizens—and as good an idea as USAFacts seems to be, that's not a problem it can solve.

An imperfect solution is better than no attempt at all?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:20AM (6 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:20AM (#496718) Homepage Journal

    This is a good idea, but...I really don't believe that he will get all the information he needs. Why? Bear with me...

    First, the government should be doing this. The government as a whole, and each individual agency and department, should follow precisely the same accounting standards that they require from businesses. They say this is too much work, but it's what every business in the entire country has to do. Those accounting standards are designed to ensure clarity, not least so that the government can be sure it gets all the taxes that are due. And if it really is too much work, then consider the economic load on businesses, and simplify things.

    The real point is: the government really, really doesn't want that kind of clarity in its own accounts. Clarity makes it hard to hide pork, and general inefficiencies. What are the administrative overheads of various government departments, and how does this compare to private businesses (*) performing much the same functions? If those numbers were easily visible, if taxpayers could really see how badly their money is being spent...nope, can't have that.

    So just how is Ballmer going to get access to the detailed figures that he needs to produce really informative reports? Answer: he isn't going to get this data, because the government doesn't want him to have it.

    (*) Just one example: I read a blog written by a guy who privately manages public camping grounds [coyoteblog.com]. His business is allowed to take over public camping grounds that the government finds too expensive to run. He makes a profit charging the same fees where the government made a loss. The explanation is entirely in the overheads: he has one full-time person in the administration (himself), where the government has an army of paper shufflers.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:02AM (#496723)

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG [reuters.com]

    The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

    The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

  • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:37AM (3 children)

    by shrewdsheep (5215) on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:37AM (#496800)

    I more or less agree with you. However, I believe that there is some chance of government inefficiencies to be tackled without too much cooperation of the latter. The ins are known: taxes and fees. The outs are much more difficult to measure but some can be measured well: number of individuals in public services, infrastructure cost, etc. and efficiency can be calculated based on those. Bad performers can be called out based on those which will lead to those people pointing out their special situation. In a positive scenario new data will become available for the modeling of these factors (e.g. social/ethnic composition, geography) and will not allow the same excuse next time.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:31PM (2 children)

      by bradley13 (3053) on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:31PM (#496812) Homepage Journal

      In principle, you're right: the government could chase down and eliminate inefficiencies. But...why should it? If you've ever worked in government, you know that it is entirely under the control of Pournelle's Iron Law. The most important priority of anyone above GS-14 or so is empire building: increasing head count and budget. Eliminating inefficiency? If you show that your department or group can get by on less, someone else will get your budget. Horror! So, sadly, there is absolutely no incentive at all to become more efficient...

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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:51PM (#496852)

        "The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:57PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:57PM (#496855) Journal

        Government has no monopoly on organizational failure. I've encountered empire building in medium sized corporations. Extremely unnecessary and wasteful empire building eventually gets noticed, usually when a few deadlines pass and the empire builder has nothing to show for all those hires of incompetent relatives and friends and yes-men, and money and time. Often the entire department is eliminated.

        In one case I know of, after wasting a lot of resources recreating something the company already had, the empire builder was demoted to a low level engineer with of course a large cut in pay. He wasn't happy, but he took it. In another case, the empire builder was one of those guys who charges in without bothering to inform himself of even the most rudimentary information of who does what, just assumes everyone else is an idiot and he's going to crack down on all those lazy underlings and make them produce more, or at least that was the show he put on, even as he hired some dead wood of his own to kiss up to him. What he did then was misjudge what the underlings did, describing some of their duties in ways that made it sound like they were underworked or overpaid, you know, like saying a senior software engineer is just a low level code monkey, that kind of thing, which of course is perfect justification to lean on them to produce more, and maybe threaten to cut their pay or just fire them. When his empire was busted in under a year, he quit and stormed out, saying the company didn't appreciate him, etc.

        An empire that does a few useful things and isn't stupidly obnoxious can last much longer while hiding and sheltering a lot of useless people.

        If Ballmer's efforts bring more transparency to organizations, whether government or corporate, it's a good thing. Makes it harder to hide waste and incompetence.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:34PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:34PM (#496813) Journal

    Clarity makes it hard to hide pork, and general inefficiencies.

    The worst by far of these are unsupported future obligations. I believe the US would have been very different from about 1920 on, if the various pension (and later, health care) schemes of the federal government and of the US states had been subject to current GAAP [wikipedia.org] ("Generally Accepted Accounting Principles") and money actually set aside in budgets for the future costs of these programs as a result.

    I believe several states (for example, California, Illinois, and New York) are close to austerity measures because of many decades of irresponsible actions on their part to create enormous future costs. The next economic downturn might radically change the fiscal health of these states.