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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:15AM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:15AM (#496729)

    Libertarians are so weak and need so much from the state that they can't even live under a bridge without some sort of subsidy, Going Gault but only if the state pays for it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:25AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:25AM (#496731)

    I'm a communist. I believe in the ideal of from each according to ability and to each according to need. Society has decided my abilities are worthless, but I still have needs.

    While you're paying taxes so I can live because your society affords me absolutely no economic opportunity, let me check the status of my coding projects. Still worthless. Oh well. It's such a shame, I do such innovative work in software, but software is worthless.

    I'll take that money now, thanks.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:31AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:31AM (#496735)

      so you work for facebook?

      It's cold outside there's no kind of atmosphere...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:36AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:36AM (#496738)

        No I'm morally opposed to Facebook because I don't believe in advertising.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:44AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @07:44AM (#496745)

          Typical socialist, Opposed to innovation and letting people know you've "Done IT" but is fine with mass surveillance and publicly broadcasted murder

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:12AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:12AM (#496775)

      Society has decided my abilities are worthless, but I still have needs.

      Society? Hmm ... perhaps you would like to learn a (new?) skill so that "society" will no longer be your excuse? If you have no ability to learn or do anything that can be of value to anyone then you can always become a medical test subject. You have choices, comrade. Many exciting choices.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:19AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:19AM (#496778)

        To be fair most "skills" like "programing" will not be needed and neither will most of the people currently doing these "useful" things like facefark or yourtub these people will be the first against the wall and into the soylent vats when the revolution comes

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:40PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:40PM (#497049)

          I'm already a dinosaur. By the time this shit happens I will be ashes in a poor-man's viking funeral. Good luck with the world, kids. It's going to turn into a cesspool of a shithole of a memory. Don't forget to check out Disney World while you still can!

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:43PM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:43PM (#496814) Journal

      Society has decided my abilities are worthless, but I still have needs.

      Let's suppose hypothetically you were trying to be sincere here. If your needs aren't important enough to you that you would at least try to improve yourself and make yourself useful to society, then why should your needs be important to the rest of us?

      I've noticed that a lot of basic income rationalization is about how much the various parts of the world should pay me so that I don't have to do anything. I don't owe the world anything, but somehow the world owes me. My take is that basic income won't go anywhere until advocates can come up with compelling demonstrations of the benefits.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:13PM (#496910)

        I have never heard these arguments for UBI, sounds to me like you and the AC are just circle jerking with crappy arguments.

        Here are some points:

        1. UBI would remove food stamps and housing programs, reduce a massive bureaucratic system into a very simple one.
        2. Give people a minimum of financial security so they can safely pursue additional education without worrying about becoming homeless. Makes the labor market more fluid, people that lose their jobs can re-train themselves without fear of losing everything.
        3. Remove a massive amount of anxiety and fear from the general populace which will have likely side effects such as reducing crime and making more successful citizens. People will more easily escape the poverty trap, single mothers can spend more time with their kids, etc.
        4. Not a benefit but a rebuttal to the "how can it possibly be funded?" The tax brackets increase the more you earn, so at a certain level a person's UBI benefit is removed. This means that only those under a certain income level would actually receive the UBI. Lose your $150k job? UBI keeps you from starving, if you're an idiot that lost everything by over leveraging your assets or whatever.

        UBI is about making good on the concept of civilization. Lazy freeloaders won't really last more than they already do, and I dare say they will actually decrease in number. Right now a lot of people abuse welfare programs because they think they are being clever, outsmarting "the system", or whatever bullshit. Since the country is so corrupt, the politicians and lobbyists are stealing money from everyone, why not get in on the action? Blech. But UBI would strip all those programs away, sorry assholes.

        I'm not a fan of the possible dystopian future where people are given their crappy living space and crappy food, and only the elite "employables" get to have nice stuff. That is a problem with automation, when there simply aren't enough jobs to go around how do we keep society from devolving into even more massive inequality? That problem is coming regardless of UBI or any other attempts to push it back.