BuckeyeBlog

Ohio Auditor of State Mary Taylor points out that if state laws for local government fiscal transparency were applied to the state itself, she would have to declare the state ‘unauditable’.

It should come as no surprise that the state has exempted itself from the expectations it has of others, and so Auditor Taylor asks of the Strickland Administration:

“How will the governor know where to go fiscally if he doesn’t know where he’s been?”

We second this. And add that while it’s only a matter of managerial competence for the governor to be in the dark about the state’s fiscal condition and future, it concerns the freedom of Ohioans when the electorate cannot learn the truth of the state’s stewardship of their tax dollars.

After all, the kind of government a free people deserve is constitutional, transparent and accountable. Which is to say, a government that is ‘auditable’!

Anyone looking for evidence that our government Solons are clueless can find it in Governor Strickland’s budget. There is a series of numbers in there, nevermind what for, that constitute an index that is to be multiplied by a budget, a dollar figure, to calculate an adjustment and therefore a marginal payment from the state.

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There is a surfeit of most-important issues right now, but among them is the idea of cap and trade on pollution.

As a means of pollution control, this is actually a free market idea. It avoids command and control and sets prices. However, such a scheme depends on honestly setting prices and there is next to no chance of doing that by government.

Moreover, when one explicitly ties the price structure, not to pollution, but to social programs, then it’s no longer cap and trade at all. It’s just a tax, and the worst kind of tax at that. Once again it is the opposite of transparency, and there is zero chance it will be effective for either revenue or pollution control. (As a means of advancing the socialist cause, it will be quite effective.)

If free marketers don’t grasp this and soon, there is nothing but poverty ahead for all of us. Well, all of us except a few hundred thousand people who will have Daschle dachas and drivers. That probably sounds like a lot of people, but in a society of 300 million, suffice to say, it’s not you.

Barack Obama came into office with only one substantive achievement, the promotion of transparency and the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, with its resultant interactive database. By itself, it is impressive but only a small part of the picture. The truly important thing was its demonstration of the principle and the raising of transparency’s profile.

To get real transparency, though, you’ve got to get the basics and the fundamentals down. That means we have to have standards for facts, something that reasonable people can agree on but still have their philosophical disagreements.

So here’s a big one: “Democrats say tax cuts represent one-third of hte overall stimulus package, not a huge difference from Obama’s original goal of 40 percent. But congressional budget analysts count nearly $100 million of these measures as spending because they are credits going to people who don’t pay taxes.”
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Jerry Brito is one of the brightest thinkers in the transparency world. One of the key insights he promotes is that, in the Internet world, it is no longer the government that is the primary definer of context. Of course it never has been in a free society, but the fact is that controlling information, as “experts” necessarily do, along with data custodians, has been a block on citizen participation.

This need be true no longer with the Internet. Brito has put together a wiki, dedicated to the “stimulus,” StimulusWatch.org. This is the good stuff.

As of right now, it looks like the next big spending bill to come out of Congress won’t see the light of day until right before it’s passed, just like the trillion dollar stimulus bill. House Republican Leader John Boehner has put out a statement that I find myself agreeing with when it comes to the upcoming bill’s transparency. We should push to see the omnibus:

“If Democratic leaders plan to schedule a vote on the half-trillion dollar omnibus spending bill next week, they should post the legislation online immediately so the American people have adequate time to read the measure and understand what is in it. My colleagues in the Republican leadership and I made this request two weeks ago, and to date, our request has gone unanswered. Time is running short, and American taxpayers deserve to know how their hard-earned tax dollars will be used under this legislation.

“The fact that the Democratic Majority is planning to bring this massive spending bill to the House floor just days after Congress approved the trillion-dollar ‘stimulus’ spending plan is added proof that ‘borrow and spend’ has become Washington’s go-to strategy for funding more programs and projects that taxpayers do not need and cannot afford.”

The stimulus bill has failed on almost all counts so far when it comes to transparency tests. Still, the President is promising we’ll be able to see exactly how and where the money is spent. The administration has set up a website to track the “recovery”, which I suggest watching carefully over the next few months. Every cent deserves to be scrutinized.

Our good friend Roak Zeller discovered something interesting on the transparency front. He thought he’d read the stimulus bill (geez, where’s the money in that?) and dowloaded the pdf.

Just one problem. Can’t search it. Our transparency titans uploaded a non-text based pdf.

Oh, well. At least we can still get copies of testimony in the Ohio House of Representatives. Oh, wait. The Speaker issued a rule saying committee chairs cannot require written testimony. Hmm. I wonder what that will do for transparency? Oh, well. It’s not as if testimony has anything to do with what they’re actually doing down there.

As almost a direct follow-up to my previous post about transparency, news came out today that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has no plans to make Chicago’s stimulus wish list public. His rationale? He thinks that transparency would open the door for the newspapers and the media to rip the city’s project plans apart. Mayor Daley doesn’t seem to understand that a media watchdog effort would be a huge positive step towards making government accountable for huge spending increases. To give Central Ohio cities a little credit, their wish lists are very public, but that doesn’t mean they’re in any way prudent:

Central Ohio would be jumping with more than $1 billion in federal spending on infrastructure, energy and transit projects if area leaders have their dreams fulfilled by an economic stimulus package coming out of Washington.

That’s the combined price tag of the funding wish lists for the city of Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio State University, Central Ohio Transit Authority and communities within the 12-county area served by the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. The list includes a range of projects, from $200 million for a light rail line in Columbus to $50,000 to build sidewalks in rural Plain City.

Central Ohio could use some infrastructure improvements for sure, as could a lot of regions of the United States, but big government solutions like more revenue-draining public transit systems and useless sidewalks are hardly efficient “stimulus” projects. This is why we need transparency, so that we can weed out the bad ideas.

As you’ve hopefully seen, The Buckeye Institute now has a database online of state employees’ salaries. This is a step forward on the private front but something like this really should have been compiled by Governor Strickland’s administration a while ago. Simply put, it’s not the job of outside organizations to make government more transparent. A post at the Sunshine Review Blog touts the database and a statement by Mike Maurer of the Institute which makes the same point I make above.

Don’t think this is simply a state-level problem. As a Canadian website which promotes “visible government” notes in a new article, the Obama administration has also promised a more transparent government, specifically on the technology front. During the campaign, Obama’s website promised the following:

Making government data available online in universally accessible formats to allow citizens to make use of that data to comment, derive value, and take action in their own communities. Greater access to environmental data, for example, will help citizens learn about pollution in their communities, provide information about local conditions back to government and empower people to protect themselves.

While we all hope that President Obama takes the steps forward necessary to increase government transparency, you wouldn’t get a sense of progress by looking at the new White House website, which is actually less transparent than the website of his predecessor. Many of the media briefings we expected from day one are just now surfacing online. Transparency needs emphasized, on all levels of government.