BuckeyeBlog

Good on Gongwer for some of the good stuff:

With 60,702 employees on the payroll in October, the state has shed more than 3,000 workers since Gov. Ted Strickland took office, according to recent data from the Department of Administrative Services. However, a recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau, shows an increase from about 179,000 total employees in 2002 to 190,000 in 2007 when accounting for everyone working in state affiliated institutions, including universities and colleges.

A big shout out to ATR and its 401k widget. Put whatever is left of of your meagre savings in and see what various government policies will do to your ability to provide for yourself! The rationale for their calculations is here.

It’s a pleasure to see Mike Curtin writing. He says, in general, Ohio is showing good fiscal restraint. He includes a nice gem that one might expect from the author of the Ohio Politics Almanac: That what we widely call today “House Bill 920″, by which we refer to the idea that property tax collections are fixed, so that, on average, rates are adjusted downward (or upward) as values increase (or decrease), began in 1878. That’s good stuff.

I’m not too sure about his case, though. He argues that Ohio has been “highly responsible” in managing its finances and cites several good bond ratings of various entities. (I can’t help but wonder if they’re the same rating agencies that handled all the banks and insurance companies that are electing Barack Obama?)

It’s not at all clear that relying upon citations to local tax votes is good grounds for arguing budget responsibility. We already know that people spend their own money more carefully than they do other people’s money, and given the chance to vote on their own taxes, they are slow to say yes. The real problem lies where the legislators can spend money by legerdemain, which is in the Rube Goldberg world of state and federal finance (to which Curtin does allude) and the world of court orders.

Certainly it’s true that Ohio has managed, moderately responsibly, its past two state budget cycles, one under a Republican governor and one under a Democrat governor. But before that? From 1998 to 2007 the state averaged a 6 percent annual increase in total spending, according to data in the 2007 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. Exclude the most recent year, 2007, as being the responsible period, and a zero year due to a recession, and the average increase has been more than 7 percent per year.

How about growth in Ohioans’ per capita personal income? For 1997 to 2007, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, it averages 3 percent–half the growth in state spending.

Twice the rate of state spending growth as per capita income growth? That’s not responsible. That’s irresponsible. It’s spending beyond our means.

State Auditor Mary Taylor deserves some serious kudos for this effort, which so far as I can tell, has not yet been remarked by any of the state’s news leaders: “Taylor will convene a workgroup to study the potential implementation of XBRL in Ohio. The workgroup will consist of local government officials, certified public accountants and business professionals.”

Unfortunately, anything to do with numbers, accountants, and, Lord help them, CPAs tends to induce some serious snooze-condition. But this stuff is big.

One of the keys to transparency today is the Internet, and for now the lingua franca of the Internet is XML. XBRL is an XML adaptation. Even if that’s gibberish to you, here are the two important things to know about that: (1) it’s “open” source, which means anyone, anywhere can read it and adapt it, and (2) it’s machine readable.

These two things together allow both public access and creativity. All these Internet billionaires that we read about some three to six times a year are becoming billionaires because they are finding hidden value in ways to reformat information. Opening up data in a standard, accessible format, is big, big, big.

Congratulations to Auditor Taylor for recognizing this and promoting it.

Anyone who is inclined to explore this in further detail can find more information at a site dedicated to the topic, http://www.xbrl.org/Home/.

Congratulations to Hamilton County - their transparency site is up and running.

A lot of people got their tighty-whities in a bunch simply over the thought that Ohio Workers Comp funds were being put into a rare coin fund. (We won’t get into the issues of access-buying and the rest, but the scandal started over outrage over the investment choice…)

Now the Wall Street Journal ($) reports that with stocks tanking many investors are ”seeking refuge in unusual alternatives — parking spaces, for instance, and condos in Peru. Sales of exotic livestock are up. The U.S. Mint has seen a gold-coin rush.” [My italics.]

I wanted to see how much of the multi-billion dollar Workers Comp fund was invested in AIG just to put the investment returns on rare coins into a context with one more politically acceptable alternative.

Ah, but of course the voters of Ohio still can’t easily look over the work of their elected officials. I spent 15 minutes on the BWC site, a reasonable amount of time for an ordinary citizen to have to spend in looking up how $22 billion of state assets were kept. I never came close to finding out this information despite the site’s frequent claims of greater transparency brought by the Strickland Administration’s control of this state monopoly.

If anyone more adept at BWC’s data sources has this information, please do share!

Nice story in the Dispatch following up on Ohio State University’s generous payments to its executives. Gordon Gee isn’t merely telling funny stories and wearing bow ties. He’s nearly doubling the payroll of his top executives, increasing their number and their pay.

Don’t worry, though. Sen. Bill Harris, Ashland Republican and senate president, is hot on the case: “I’m more than willing to be patient to see if Dr. Gee can reach his goal of pushing Ohio State into the Top 10 — and hopefully make it the No. 1 university in the nation.”

Rah, rah. Pretty soon Ohio State will be World Class. Probably Harris is sanguine because he figures if Joyce Beatty is worth $320,000, why, a senate president must be worth, what, half a mil?

One of Gee’s Lieutenants, Larry Lewellen, associate vice president for human resources, says not to worry, they know what they’re doing.

“We pay far less than the private market, where leaders can make multimillions of dollars,” Lewellen says.

Indeed. Ohio taxpayers would be happy to let them go do so. We hear there are lots of openings at Lehman Brothers.

There are so many dirty little secrets to polling that it’s hard to know where to start, but one of the most basic is, is there any reason to think the people being polled have any idea of what they’re talking about?

What’s the validity of a poll about, say, the cause of the space shuttle exploding? If we take a worldwide poll and it concludes that the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle, does it mean anything, other than that people don’t know what they’re saying?

The BBC has been reporting all morning in an orgiastic ecstasy of righteousness, “US-led efforts to tackle the al-Qaeda group are not regarded as successful”

Or, “US-led efforts to tackle the al-Qaeda group are not regarded as successful, an opinion poll carried out for the BBC World Service suggests.”

Under the heading, of “Terror Stalemate,” BBC reports that twice as many people (22%) think the US is winning as think al-Qaeda is winning (10%). That’s a stalemate?

On the other hand, a plurality of people think it has made al-Qaeda stronger (30%), not weaker (22%). Interesting; this seems to run in a different direction than the idea that the U.S. is winning. But what does “stronger” mean? And if it is stronger, why? Did they ask whether al-Qaeda would have been stronger had the U.S. not responded to the World Trade Center attacks? If that’s true, it’s an awfully Zen view of the world. Did they ask when the war on terror began? Did it begin with Bush, or did it begin when the towers were attacked? If it began when the towers were attacked, isn’t the idea that al-Qaeda is stronger because of the war on terror a bit different than if it began when the United States responded? Wouldn’t al-Qaeda continue to be perceived as stronger even if the US hadn’t responded? Indeed, is there a fair possibility that it would be perceived as even stronger than it is perceived now?

As between the two major themes, US winning, al-Qaeda stronger, which do you suppose the BBC chose to emphasize with its main graphic? That the US is winning? Er, maybe not.

But really, the whole thing is garbage. What they should really do is tease out ignorance. If they had the stones, the integrity or even the curiosity, they’d ask a question such as, “Do you think world Jewry is behind the war on terror?” or some such and publish that result. If the result was that 50 percent or 60 percent of the world answered yes, or 30 percent answered yes with 50 percent answering don’t know and 10 percent answering no, would that make it true? Or would it just give the lie to the whole effort and kill the story?

Probably the poll does tell us something: That the BBC has been reporting the news overly negatively against the United States and overly positively towards al-Qaeda. Other than that, though, not much. It can be summed up as garbage in, garbage out.

Ann Althouse notes that the University of Illinois does not allow employees to have political bumperstickers on their cars on campus: “Too much transparency if the faculty parking lot has rows and rows of Obama stickers.”

For folks interested in what our peers in other states are doing to promote transparency, the main page of OhioSunshine.org has the first of what we expect to be a series of periodic roundups. This week’s features include Florida’s James Madison Institute, Kentucky’s Bluegrass Institute, Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Nevada’s Policy Research Institute, and Utah’s Sutherland Institute.